Artificial Intelligence

Redwood City, Calif. - YottaMark Inc. has enhanced its ShopWell food nutrition app with weekly healthy eating advice from registered dietitians, personalized to the user's dietary goals. In response to member feedback, the ShopWell scoring algorithm has also been enhanced to include support for shoppers with vegetarian and vegan diets, and individuals trying to avoid corn.  

Cambridge, U.K. -- Grafton Shopping Centre, Cambridge, is hoping to dazzle shoppers with a “virtual” employee who greets customers when they enter the mall. The shopping center is using the Tensator Virtual Assistant, innovative technology which projects a life-like image of a person.

The display interacts with customers, answering common questions and promoting mall offers. This is the very first use of the technology in a United Kingdom shopping mall.

New York -- Sainsbury’s has entered into a unique arrangement that closes the loop on food recycling. Its store in Cannock, Staffordshire, England, has come off the country’s national power grid for day-to-day electricity consumption and is running on power generated solely from food waste from Sainsbury’s supermarkets across the United Kingdom.

The new power supply was built in partnership with waste recycling company Biffa, and uses Biffa’s advanced anaerobic digestion (AD) facilities and a unique power link up.  

Redwood City, Calif. -- Oracle Corp. announced it is opening a cloud development center in Seattle, its first such center outside of California. The company, which plans to hire about 100 engineers to start, said it chose Seattle to take advantage of the “deep expertise” in cloud computing available in the city’s rapidly growing technical community.

Boston – Revenue optimization services provider Extraprise is rebranding as QuickPivot and launching a new real-time, cross-channel marketing platform to support lifecycle marketing. The new QuickPivot platform enables marketers to derive customer insight, listen to brand interactions and then adapt campaigns with highly optimized messages and offers to create seamless buying experiences.

Foster City, Calif. – Visa Inc. is introducing Visa Digital Solutions, a comprehensive suite of offerings that facilitate secure payments across a broad range of Internet-connected devices and wearables.

Visa Digital Solutions fall into two main categories of supporting new payment models and protecting consumers and supporting innovation.

By Tyler Roye, Co-founder and CEO, eGifter

Macy’s has announced a series of new initiatives in its multi-year strategic program to enhance environmental sustainability. They are consistent with the company’s sustainability principles first adopted in 2008 and implemented with increasing intensity during the past six years.

Results through 2013 include a 38% reduction in the company’s electricity usage since 2002 and a 95% adoption rate of recycled or certified paper used in the company’s marketing materials.