Artificial Intelligence

SEATTLE - Amazon.com  has added a new feature, called ‘Make an Offer,’ that allows customers to negotiate lower prices on thousands of items. The new pricing feature allows customers to offer to buy items at even lower prices. If agreed upon, customers can then purchase the items at a savings from the listed price.   

By Alex Romanov, iSign Media   The holiday season is a time of family, food, and frenzied shopping. Consumers are bombarded by messages, promotions, discounts, and offers, and retailers have to be smart about how they reach out to their customers. Email blasts or paper coupons just won’t cut it. In this mobile-obsessed era, proximity marketing is a powerful way to break through the noise and bring shoppers into your store.   

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona - JDA Software announced the creation of JDA Labs – a research and development group assembled to drive game-changing innovation.   This global team, headquartered in Montreal, will innovate new and existing products and deliver patents, best practices and entirely new products to the market. JDA Labs currently  is driving research and innovation around three key areas: data science, user experience and product innovation.  

If you talk to retail industry stakeholders about their business priorities for 2015, you will likely hear about their continued focus on omnichannel. But the overall environment is starting to feel different than in years past. Words like “transformation” and “action” are being used to recap the 2014 business landscape. We’re moving past defining omnichannel and now focusing on implementation.

Adam Kujawa, head of Malware Intelligence at Malwarebytes Labs, research arm of the anti-malware company: “It looks like the payment systems for (Bebe’s) U.S. stores were attacked, meaning that most likely they were all using the same software/hardware that had the same vulnerability. Unfortunately, without additional technical explanations, exactly what was vulnerable on those systems will remain a secret and we can only hope that the same vulnerability isn’t going to be used against another retailer.”

  San Francisco – Although email is at the point it’s often considered a “legacy” technology, a slight majority of consumers still prefer it for holiday communication from retailers. According to a new consumer survey from Salesforce, 53% of respondents said that email is their preferred communication channel during the holidays.  

Brand-building expert and consultant Denise Lee Yohn has released her annual outlook for the year,  “Brands to Watch in 2015.”