SuccessfulWorkplace

It’s official. Apple’s recently and quietly released new iBeacon tech has been deployed as ShopBeacon by shopkick. First a little about shopkick…it is an app that offers customers “kicks” that translate to points for performing the act of browsing for information on a retailer. The customer can redeem kicks for gift cards for allowing the […]

My local Safeway isn’t what I would call a very modern store. And the employees are either high school kids bagging groceries and collecting carts or middle-aged cashiers, bakers and butchers. It was a big step forward a few years ago when I could sign for my credit card purchase on an electronic device. I […]

If you are a customer or a brand, you know that there’s enormous change coming in the world of loyalty marketing. Customers are generating information about their preferences and behaviors at a remarkable speed, thanks to smartphones, better websites, and changing shopping and buying patterns. It’s becoming a customer-driven world, making that data ever more […]

You can’t build a mansion around an outhouse and you can’t build real-time customer engagement by putting an email and campaign management tool on top of a CRM database. It doesn’t work like that. The business of interacting with prospects and customers is a real-time game that requires the ability sense and respond in ways […]

So the fabled Mary Meeker powerpoint tome hit the internet at the D11 conference this week and if you have the patience to wade through the stats the messages are pretty clear: it’s a wearable, shareable future for mankind. But there’s a shift in how people are willing to share now. Share it. Delete it. […]

Real-time marketing is all the rage, though as TIBCO Loyalty Lab’s David Rosen is quick to point out, brands really need to be focused on right time marketing. “The speed and reaction of marketing needs to be relevant when the consumer is discovering, shopping or sharing,” he said. Brands need to act with relevance and […]

In an interesting piece yesterday, GigaOM reported that Netflix has an architecture built around timelines. This struck home for a guy who spends a great deal of time talking to people skeptical about the need for zero latency, real-time systems. The truth is that some things have to go at the highest speeds and others […]

I had a great chance this week to catch up with a friend from Venture Beat about my thoughts on what’s revolutionizing our world in this moment. While that’s a broad question, the answer is very specific: The patterns for how people buy and sell are shifting very rapidly. Buying and selling touches everything that we […]

The ability to catch the consumer’s eye has become far more than flashy neon and holiday sales. As consumption becomes more digital and discerning, targeted offers to calculated demographics become so 2012. Getting and holding the consumer’s attention is now about engaging at the time and method of the consumer’s choice. Likewise, creating brand loyalists […]

Organizations are collecting more and more data every single minute of every day. It’s no secret that Facebook, for example, processes 2.5 billion pieces of content and over 500 terabytes of data each day, pulling in 2.7 billion Likes and 300 million photos per diem. Facebook also scans a whopping 105 terabytes of data each half […]

This week it was announced that a collaboration between Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology created software that predicts future events using a combination of archived news material from the New York Times, real-time data and information from a variety of web sources like Wikipedia. In their research paper they focused on predicting disease outbreaks, riots and […]

In an excellent post on Wired, David Gelernter makes the argument that we’re approaching The End of the Web, Search and Computer as We Know It. In what sounds like a science-fiction statement, Gelernter says that, “The space-based web we currently have will be gradually replaced by a time-based worldstream.” We have evidence of what […]

The following is a guest post by Hardik Davé, a Palo Alto based technology executive who has spent over 15 years working in both hardware and software Sales, Marketing & Business Development roles within Enterprise & Startup environments. In his spare time, he is an independent music artist who is well versed with navigating the […]

Many made predictions as 2013 kicked off, but one caught my eye. Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick called this new year the Year of Digital Business. As Fenwick points out, there has been a communications evolution that has many retailers scrambling to find ways to get closer to their customers with innovative new technology to beat the […]