Google, Inc.

Walnut Creek, Calif.  - In a webinar on June 27,  analysts from RSR Research presented insights gleaned from numerous retail IT-focused events they attended this past spring. Their findings focused on five key areas: next generation POS/store/commerce engine, buy side of omnichannel, user experience, high performance computing and cloud.

SAINT LOUIS — Aisle411, developer of a mobile in-store navigation platform for retail stores, has bolstered its advisory board with some Google muscle. Don Dodge’s appointment helps to round out the company's executive management team.

Kansas City, Mo. – Hallmark Cards has named Claire Hughes Johnson, VP at Google, to its board of directors. Johnson, who has been with Google since 2004, currently runs its Google Offers mobile-to-store business and also has led global online sales and the new products and solutions teams, as well as teams responsible for Gmail, Google Wallet and Google Apps. Before Google, Johnson’s experience includes serving as a management consultant.

Many socioeconomic pundits have bemoaned the trend in modern education and childrearing toward creating an artificially level playing field where everyone gets a participant ribbon for everything they do, regardless of how much effort they put in or how good (or bad) the results are.

Menlo Park, Calif. -- Facebook on Thursday announced the launch of a video feature for its photo-sharing app, Instagram. The new feature, which allows users to share video clips lasting up to 15 seconds, is seen as a direct shot at Twitter, which acquired short video start-up Vine last year.

Similar to photos, the Instagram videos will show up on a user's profile and will be available immediately on both Apple’s iOs platform and Google’s Android devices.

CHICAGO, Ill. — Mercent, a leading technology company that enables retailers to reach and convert more shoppers online, has signed a strategic partnership with Shop.com, the e-commerce arm of Market America. 

This latest partnership expands Mercent’s portfolio of online shopping destinations supported by its SaaS platform and offers leading retailers the ability to market and sell to millions of consumers on the Shop.com third-party marketplace.

NEW YORK — Sociomantic Labs, digital advertising solutions provider for e-commerce marketers, has hired Charles Pitzer as the company’s VP of sales for North America.  

Pitzer has more than 25 years of sales experience, 14 of which have been concentrated in media with a focus on online advertising. He joins Sociomantic from Criteo. Previously Pitzer held positions at Specific Media, Advertising.com and IDG Communications.

AUSTIN, Texas — RetailMeNot.com, a U.S.-based digital coupon website, has upgraded its free Android coupons app to include location-based offers for thousands of retail locations at hundreds of general shopping malls nationwide.

As of this writing, the first of hundreds of new gTLDs — the suffixes to the right of the dot in domain names — have begun to be approved for release on the Internet. In an international move that hasn’t been widely publicized in the U.S., ICANN has been sifting through some 2,000 applications for new domain name suffixes, alternatives to the dozen or so we’ve all become familiar with, such as .com, .net and .gov.

AUSTIN, Texas — Tabbedout has teamed up with Google to offer Google Wallet as a payment source in the Tabbedout app for Android. Consumers will now have the opportunity to pay from their smartphones, using their Google accounts, at thousands of Tabbedout locations.