A solid data strategy is essential in creating compelling personal experiences, and brands need to jump on the trend.Marketers are awash in all different types of data, but often have a hard time making heads or tails of what to do with it. And in an increasingly personalized world, consumers expect their customer experiences to be customized—and that’s where an effective data strategy comes...

China remains firmly in the lead on our Electric Vehicle Index. But other pockets of growing public- and private-sector commitment to these vehicles have emerged.Last year, for the first time, global sales of new electric vehicles (EVs)1 passed a million units (Exhibit 1), according to McKinsey’s Electric Vehicle Index (see sidebar, “What is the Electric Vehicle Index?”). Under the current g...

Any decent photoshopper can trick a non-digital native into believing something fake is real. in niko photographisme’s photo series, ‘the robot next door,’ the opposite has been achieved. the magic in these photographs is that they look like CGI; they look fake. they’re not. These obviously aren’t ‘real’ cyborgs. the images were retouched. we’re so used to seeing CGI fantasy rigamarole...

ingerPing currently recognizes 22 different hand gestures.We've already heard about gloves and cameras that could be used to translate hand gestures (such as American Sign Language) into text or spoken words. What might be simpler, though, is a system consisting of just a ring and a wristband – which has been created.Known as FingerPing, the proof-of-concept setup was developed by a Georgia Te...

Annual salaries for data scientists and machine learning engineers vary significantly across the world. Based on a 2017 Kaggle survey of data professionals, countries with the highest paid data scientists and machine learning engineers (in USD) were: US ($120K), Australia ($111K), Israel ($88K), Canada ($81K) and Germany ($80K). Countries with the lowest annual salaries were: Brazil ($35K), Pol...

When Amazon introduced the Amazon Echo in 2014, many people thought that the smart speaker was intended to help the company sell even more stuff online by providing another convenient way for consumers to place an order. And while the Echo, and the entire line of Alexa-enabled devices that followed, can only be described as a runaway success for Amazon, this is the one aspect where it has proba...

Flagship store in Seattle is offering much more than coffee, with a stylish cocktail bar and an underlying layer of technology.Starbucks is enhancing the customer experience with an infusion of tech at its experiential outpost. Starbucks Reserve SODO, which opened two and a half months ago, is the first of its kind, fittingly located on the ground floor of the company’s global headquarters in...

For most established grocers, private-label products are a big component of revenue—but not as big as they could be. And because these products are offered in addition to a huge range of branded goods, they create complexity at each step of the supply chain. We believe established grocers need to rethink their strategy for private-label products. By developing true retailer brands that can com...

The primary function of being a mobile phone is… well, to be a phone! However, integrated into the smartphones of today is a plethora of secondary functions that distract us from our daily lives and social situations.The Moto Zen reduces the abundance of features on a smartphone down to just the two most important functions, communication and photography. Each side of the device is devoted to...