Archive

Instagram's Stories feature, which launched one year ago, has achieved widespread engagement among businesses that want to raise their brand awareness and expand their e-commerce penetration, the company said. The tool, launched in August 2016, allows users to create digital slide shows out of photo...

McDonald's has begun testing new mobile ordering and payment functionality at 29 of its restaurants in Monterey and Salinas, California. It will expand the pilot to another 51 restaurants in Spokane, Washington, on March 20. The company will run multiple pilots to gather customer feedback, work out ...

Hundreds, if not thousands, of Twitter users, many of them high-profile, were hacked Tuesday by someone who appeared to support Turkey in its diplomatic row with the Netherlands. Their accounts displayed a Swastika -- reversed to face to the right -- as well as the Turkish flag and hashtags to the N...

Snap, the company formerly known as "Snapchat," on Saturday announced sunglasses that take videos through a built-in camera in the frame -- bringing to mind Google's controversial Glass product. Snap's Spectacles let users take 10-second videos by tapping a button on the top left-hand corner of th...

Lots of CRM vendors talk about personalization, but their idea of how to do it leaves much to be desired. They address personalization very late, using a just-in-time approach to accessing customer data to support a sales or service encounter in the moment. This certainly is important, and it achiev...

As I see it, there are four basic capabilities, or attributes, needed to build better customer loyalty. I learned about them from two McKinsey researchers. Those attributes, according to David C. Edelman and Marc Singer -- and I agree -- are the following: automation, proactive personalization, cont...

A U.S. District Court judge last week sentenced Matthew Keys to two years in prison after he was found guilty of conspiring with the hacker group Anonymous to break into the Los Angeles Times' website and modify a news story. Keys had been site administrator for KTXL Fox 40, which was owned by Tribu...

Amazon last week announced that it had increased to more than 100 the number of Dash buttons Prime users can install in their homes to replenish supplies of common household goods. Dash buttons, which essentially are free for Amazon Prime members, are connected devices that link to a customer's acco...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and members of his leadership team, speaking to developers Wednesday at the Build 2016 conference, introduced their vision to infuse human speech and machine learning into the company's consumer and enterprise businesses, positioning Microsoft as a major player in the clo...

Apple will launch an iPhone with a 4-inch display and support for Apple Pay in early 2016, according to a research note from an analyst with a good track record of predicting Apple products. The new iPhone model will have an A9 processor -- the same processor found in the latest iPhone models -- and...

Lost somewhere in the pile that is a current research project is an article on customer loyalty that says that more than half of customers who recently exhibited loyal behavior toward a vendor said they'd switch to another vendor in an instant. The question prompting this answer is whether these cus...

What's more important when it comes to an Internet connection -- quality and reliability, or speed? This is a question I'm pondering as I sip a latte at Starbucks. I have come to the conclusion that while speed is sexy and sells, quality and reliability are more important. See if you agree. Like cou...

The wearable technology marketplace is already in place and growing. Now, enter the Apple Watch. Although it will speed up growth, this new space will be very different from the iPhone and iPad markets. Large companies like Google, Samsung and Sony, and smaller companies like FitBit and others have ...

People get sick, and back in the Middle Ages they would use leeches and razors to bleed them until they got better. The practice didn't work that well -- yet if we look at what we do to sick divisions and companies, it is effectively the same thing. We cut investments, freeze salaries, make layoffs,...