Digital commerce is becoming an essential part of the new economy and the digital customer journey more important due to COVID-19. Particularly the retail sector has undergone a major change and been catapulted more than expected into the e-commerce world. In future, this will be accompanied by the challenges of mastering the latest technologies and unleashing the creativity of digital retail to use them in the individual customer journey. Hyper-personalization and micro-moment techniques are therefore considered top priorities for brands in the future of digital commerce.

Every year, brand abuse and product piracy result in losses of billions in e-commerce. The start-up Sentryc wants to change this by using AI to scan the Internet and remove plagiarism almost automatically.

The young technology company, founded in 2019 and headquartered in Berlin, offers companies a unique digital solution with its proprietary brand protection software that can be used to detect and stop product piracy and brand abuse on online marketplaces. The expert provides customers with a cloud solution that searches websites for products, identifies and documents potential counterfeits, to then report them automatically for deletion.

There are always new predictions on the Internet about what the future of marketing will look like and particularly often it is being forecasted that in 2020, which means this year, half of all online searches should be carried out with a voice assistant. However, such forecasts are problematic since Google and other providers of voice assistants do not reveal any meaningful usage figures or statistics on the proportion of voice searches. Hence, the actual percentage of voice searches cannot be clearly determined. In addition, one would have to differentiate between what is considered a search and what is a voice control of a device. Anyway, in the end, the question remains: “How relevant is voice search for online marketing - really?

For more than a decade, Google is building products to help people transform the way they work. “Now, work itself is transforming in unprecedented ways”, Javier Soltero, VP and GM, Google Workspace states in his blog. “Amidst this transformation, time is more fragmented—split between work and personal responsibilities—and human connections are more difficult than ever to establish and maintain”, he explains.

A new study from Juniper Research has found that the value of transactions processed by smart checkout technologies, where the fixed checkout process is replaced by a frictionless model, will reach $387 billion in 2025, up from just $2 billion in 2020.

Singapore has a long-standing love affair with shopping. Many of the country’s malls built in the 1970s and 80s were pioneering in their day, and today the island state has more malls per square mile than any other country in the world. Recent years have seen a dramatic shift from in-person shopping to online retail with giants such as Shopee and Lazada becoming household names and COVID-19 lockdowns sending more people to the Internet for their purchases. However, a new report notes that while shoppers are moving increasingly online, many remain unhappy with the level of customer service they receive there.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Marketing Automation (MA) are two advanced tools that allow marketers to automate and optimize tasks across the whole marketing spectrum.

MOGUL.sg, a property technology start-up, just announced the launch of Singapore's first-ever 3D Virtual Property Expo and provides us with a glimpse into what we can expect to see emerging in today’s experience economy. The virtual expo will take place from 15 to 17 October 2020 and be hosted on the MOGUL.sg platform, featuring Singapore Land Authority (SLA)'s OneMap3D, with the aim to assist home buyers with their property search and decision-making process.

I was watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix earlier this month and highly recommend it. The quintessence of the film is that today’s technology that connects us also monetizes us - or even controls us – with frightening consequences.  Although we are aware of that already – and in general the fact that nothing is for free on the internet - we still do not want to face the truth.

Following a conversation and transcribing it precisely is one of the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence (AI) research. For the first time now, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have succeeded in developing a computer system that outperforms humans in recognizing such spontaneously spoken language with minimum latency, as reported on the Internet platform ArXiv.org.

The debate over who should oversee shaping digital customer experiences is as old as the internet. With the rise of headless technology, it has just reached a turning point again. Since the 2000s, online trading steadily gained traction - initially in the B2C and later also in the B2B sector. With the rapidly growing number of websites, systems were needed to efficiently manage all kind of information and data, heralding the birth of the first generation of web content management and e-commerce platforms. However, just after a few years, it reached its limits, because the control of these systems was entirely with the IT department. Marketers and merchandisers had to make a request to the developers every time they wanted to edit or create new web content, which was inefficient and unsatisfactory for both parties.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and marketing automation (MA) are two advanced tools that allow marketers to optimize tasks across the whole marketing spectrum.

Recurring work processes have always been both a curse and a blessing in modern marketing. The good old (M)ad Men from Madison Avenue earned quite well with it and were able to keep their “sovereign knowledge” non-transparent in analogue times. Today, nobody accepts paying hourly rates beyond good and bad for repetitive work processes without great intellectual or creative ability. This so-called ‘monkey work’ has become a commodity and the automation of such routine work a factor in future competitiveness.

Reply, specializing in the development and implementation of solutions based on new communication channels and digital media, opened the second Reply center after the AREA 360 in Milan in late 2019. The Immersive Experience Area in Munich is mainly based on the experience of Infinity Reply, that are committed to Extended Reality solutions for companies, and Triplesense Reply, which specializes in the creation of digital experiences.