Artificial Intelligence

Target Corp.’s Bullseye blog has posted a Q&A with the company’s new chief information officer, Mike McNamara. The British native arrived at Target in February 2015, after 15 years with Tesco PLC.

Here is the Bullseye Q&A with McNamara:

New York -- Construction has just started on Facebook’s new data center, but the massive facility already has its own Facebook page.

The world’s largest social network announced that construction has started on its fifth data center, which will be powered by wind. The new center is located in Fort Worth, Texas, and joins Facebook’s four existing data hubs in Oregon, Iowa, North Carolina, and Sweden.

A harried mother in the baking aisle can’t find lemongrass spice. A teenager in the junior department can’t decide which T-shirt to buy. A family in sporting goods is disappointed that the tent for their camping trip appears to be out of stock.

Bangalore, India – Image is important, and that extends to mobile commerce. Indian e-commerce platform Flipkart is recognizing the importance of image for its mobile shoppers by rolling out image search on its mobile app, using ViSenze technology for visual search and image recognition.

The newly introduced image search allows users to upload photos of fashion items and find similar products in terms of color, pattern or style inside the Flipkart merchandise database. This eliminates keyword searches, simplifying the search process.

An expanded relationship between IBM and Adobe promises to give retail marketers new dynamic personalization powers to increase sales.

Adobe announced an integration with IBM WebSphere Commerce that the companies believe give marketers the ability to create and deliver powerful experiences across all digital channels.

The explosive growth of device connectivity, wireless technology, cloud computing and advanced analytics has driven the Internet of Things (IoT) from vision to reality. Devices with embedded sensors are enabling advanced, automated communications for retail businesses and customers. These connected devices are driving deeper engagement, providing new experiences and opportunities, creating new revenue opportunities and enabling better business insight.

A recently launched gifting Web site with a familiar sounding name promises to make it better to receive than give a gift.

The recently launched Web site GiftStarter – not Kickstarter – claims to be reinventing the gifting business so that family members, friends and co-workers are able to co-mingle individual budgets to offer recipients a more substantial gift.

Saks Fifth Avenue reduces energy costs with LED retrofit

It’s often said that companies must spend money to make money, and this is true of investments in energy efficiency.