WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Dynamic pricing isn’t just for travel companies or e-commerce giants, and it doesn’t necessarily require ultrasophisticated software that changes every product’s price multiple times a day.

Companies should explore seven specific drivers to assess where the value lies in cloud. As companies assess the opportunities enabled by cloud, a detailed review of the sources of value can pinpoint where they need to focus their attention, people, and resources. Across the three dimensions, seven drivers of value can collectively generate more than $1 trillion in value.

A comprehensive survey designed to surface consumer comfort levels with new and emerging technologies.

A ranking of the largest and fastest-growing consumer-facing marketplace startups and private companies. From food delivery to outdoor travel, the Marketplace 100 reflects the imprint of a year like no other. The Marketplace 100 is based on data from Bloomberg Second Measure, a consumer data analytics company that analyzes billions of purchases to track real-time consumer behavior and relative sales across over 5,200 merchants. The startups and private companies on the Marketplace 100 are then ranked using a common industry metric, Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), which is extrapolated from the total dollars consumers are spending against each company.

Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. 20 trillion dollars of retail, brands, TV and advertising is being overturned, and software is remaking everything from cars to pharma. Meanwhile, China has more smartphone users than Europe and the USA combined, and India is close behind - technology and innovation will be much more widely spread. For that and lots of other reason, tech is becoming a regulated industry, but if we step over the slogans, what does that actually mean? Tech is entering its second 50 years.

Welcome to the 2020 edition of the marketing technology landscape. Yes, it grew once again, by 13.6%, up to a total of 8,000 martech solutions. That's after 615 from the 2019 landscape went away, either consolidated with another martech company or simply gone defunct. If you were predicting consolidation, an 8.7% churn rate from one year to the next is pretty significant attrition to support that narrative.

As remote work increases access management tool adoption, and security controls shift to identity, the ability to secure access with AM strategies aligned with continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment is paramount. Cost optimization for IT spending (e.g., AM) will also increase during 2021.

This list is covering major Topics around the global economic and technical Digital Transformation, such as: Digital Marketing/SEO, Social Media Marketing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Ethics, IoT (Internet of Things), IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things), Algorithms, Neural Networks, Autonomous Vehicles, Digital Health, Cloud, Smart Cities, Automation, Robotics, Robots/Bots/Chatbots, Future of Work, Data Science, Big Data, Analytics, Fintech, Insurtech, DevOps, Edtech, Cyber Security…

The ranking here is in fact not important, the important things are the ideas, knowledge, and insights shared by the experts and influencers there.

Large enterprises needing to pivot quickly and push innovation to the edges may be encumbered by heavy management and control structures. However, internal talent marketplaces have the potential to change that. They establish trust through feedback mechanisms. They allow for worker-led innovation and help workers take full control of their careers. They enable much better and more granular tracking of the skills, competencies, knowledge and interest of individual workers. This, in turn, will give enterprises a much better view of their workforce and improve workforce planning. Internal talent marketplaces will help bring about leaner, more agile and more adaptable organizations.

The mind-bending bigness of Neuralink’s mission, combined with the labyrinth of impossible complexity that is the human brain, made this the hardest set of concepts yet to fully wrap my head around—but it also made it the most exhilarating when, with enough time spent zoomed on both ends, it all finally clicked. I feel like I took a time machine to the future, and I’m here to tell you that it’s even weirder than we expect.

The current reshaping of the customer engagement center (CEC) market is characteristic of the consolidation of the customer service technology market. Customer service and support organizations must deliver consistent, effortless, intelligent and personalized customer service to their customers. The ability to orchestrate customer requests with assisted service, as well as with self-service, is one of the four pillars of great customer service within a leading customer service and support operation.

Complimentary copy of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) and find out why Freshworks is the only company recognized as a Visionary.

The future travel experience will be personalised, delivering seamless and safe services that are high value, low touch and consumer-centric, thanks to an accelerated digital transformation post-pandemic. These new advances in technology will usher in a new era of automation, requiring upskilling for employees to provide greater levels of high-quality service. Tracking climate impact across consumers, brands and destinations will be critical for building resilience, agility and speed to combat future risks and accelerate the green transition.
This white paper outlines a vision for how consumers will book and experience travel in 2040, exploring how technology and the need for sustainability could change the travel experience over the next 20 years. In particular, this analysis will focus on the future of travel — exploring what online travel agents, urban mobility, air travel and hotels will look like.

Integration, Speed To Insights, And Real-Time Decisioning Matter Most For Orchestration

Vendors that take a technology-agnostic approach to integration can deliver insights at speed across all permutations of journeys. They also have a proven track record in real-time decisioning across a wide variety of systems and can help companies drive business results and CX differentiation.

There are two ways you can talk about newspapers. You can talk about the ‘fourth estate’, and newspapers’ role in culture, politics, governance, the exchange of ideas and civil society. But you can also talk about newspapers as a specialised light manufacturing industry, that aggregated attention to sell advertising. There’s a common line about Google and Facebook that ‘if you’re not paying, you’re the product’, but this is pretty much what newspapers did: if you read old accounts for, say the New York Times Company, you can see that they were giving the product away at close to cost and making the money from selling your attention.

Which technology trends are most likely to impact your business in the coming years? Trends are waypoints to help anticipate future states in a world where uncertainty looms. The Future Today Institute's annual Tech Trends Report asks you to examine your assumptions, cherished beliefs and expectations for the future using a bolder, more holistic perspective. In the 13th edition of our Tech Trends Report, we forecast the key technology trends that will redefine businesses in the coming years. More importantly, we offer strategic analysis and guidance on those trends and further explore them in future scenarios to help you understand their implications on your organization and industry.

If this all seems like it’s cobbled together, that’s because it is. I’m currently going through the process of setting this stack up for my local deli and I can attest to how frustratingly high-touch and difficult it is. But if the dine-in experience means filling four tops with mannequins and separating diners with plexi glass and shower curtains, restaurants better start preparing for a world where takeout is the new dine in no matter how steep the learning curve.

The Technology Radar is an opinionated guide to technology frontiers. Read the latest here.

A recap of the Top 100 fastest growing & declining categories in March 2020 vs. March 2019

Presentations by Benedict Evans: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, The End of the Beginning and Mobile is Eating the world.

‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ looks at what it means that 4bn people have a smartphone; we connected everyone, and now we wonder what the Next Big Thing is, but meanwhile, connecting everyone means we connected all the problems. Tech is becoming a regulated industry, but we don’t really know what that will

The internet has changed the way we work, interact and learn with others across the world. How many people in the world are online, and how has this changed over time? Explore global and country-level data on internet access and technology.

The MarTech marketplaces that RSG covers continue to evolve rapidly and have become more complex (with more overlaps!) this year. The Customer Data Platform (CDP) market is no different - with new vendors, more investment, emerging niches, and evolving use cases.

We are in the midst of an open source renaissance. But how do you turn an open source project into a business? a16z's Peter Levine and Jennifer Li cover the complete go-to-market from community management to enterprise sales.

The growing cyber skills shortage drives security organizations to look for ways to mitigate the pain and danger that short-staffed security teams can experience. In its report, Security Organization Dynamics, Gartner outlines this ongoing challenge and notes how, “Persistent security skills shortages have forced security leaders to explore new ways of obtaining and managing security capabilities.”

Gartner points out that hiring may not be the only option for filling the gap, cautioning that, “Few, if any, enterprises can afford to perform all security functions in-house. Consider selective outsourcing of functions, especially those that are operationalized or ad hoc.”