Voice Control

Personalization, retail bots and social media will play key roles in a new store concept from Kipling North America.

The maker of lightweight luggage and other accessories will unveil its first interactive store format on May 20, at Disney Springs, Walt Disney World Resort, Orlando, Florida.

The new store is designed to offer customers a unique and personalized shopping experience, with array of inventive “activations” offered throughout the space. It will be in the Town Center part of Disney Springs.

Consumers know the perfect gift when they find it, and 1-800-Flowers.com is trying to make the search a little easier.

The specialty gift retailer is offering a beta of “GWYN” (Gifts When You Need), an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered intuitive shopping experience across its brands. GWYN is based on the Fluid Expert Personal Shopper (XPS) software platform, which in turn is supported by IBM Watson.

The retail industry has reached a point of progress with robotics where it is not enough to look at how robots will drive business transformation, but at how they are already doing so.
 
Following are three key retail areas where robots have already begun to make their presence felt:
 
Fulfillment and Distribution

1-800-Flowers.com is partnering with Amazon.com to make the digital ordering process even easier.

The specialty floral gift retailer will allow customers to place orders using the Amazon Alexa voice-activated artificial intelligence platform via the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot and Tap smart home devices and Fire TV streaming media player. 1-800-Flowers shoppers will be able to give Alexa basic ordering instructions, and the retailer will then process the order and arrange delivery.

Amazon Prime members looking to quickly reorder goods have an expanded assortment at their fingertips.

Amazon.com has been slowly but surely building the capabilities of its interactive Echo voice-activated consumer device. According to Re/code, integrating Echo with the Alexa artificial intelligence platform to allow the ordering of new commodity items is only a step toward the final goal. Namely, full-scale, Echo-based access to Amazon’s entire inventory. [Re/code]

Oak Brook, Ill. -- Inland Real Estate Investment Corp. has been named a finalist of this year’s InformationWeek Elite 100, a list of the top business technology innovators in the U.S. Inland Investments has also been selected as a finalist for a Business Innovator award in the category of Cloud Services.

Although mobile payment is still very much an emerging technology, the next stage of its evolution is occurring. The introduction of Apple Pay is September 2014 could be said to be mobile payment’s introduction as a mainstream technology, and the landscape has been steadily shifting since then.

Here are three key ways mobile payment is changing before the industry’s eyes.

Although mobile payment is still very much an emerging technology, the next stage of its evolution is occurring. The introduction of Apple Pay is September 2014 could be said to be mobile payment’s introduction as a mainstream technology, and the landscape has been steadily shifting since then.

Here are three key ways mobile payment is changing before the industry’s eyes.

Authentication

Following a successful pilot of authenticating mobile transactions with facial photos and fingerprint biometrics in 2015, MasterCard is bringing the new technology mainstream.

Dubbed “selfie pay” and initially tested with employees of First Tech Federal Union in summer and fall 2015, the solution is delivered via a special MasterCard app that lets customers take a photo each time they make an online purchase. They are required to blink during the photo to prove it is being taken live.