Artificial Intelligence

Aurora, Col.  -- Walgreens has expanded its renewable energy initiative to Colorado. Clean-energy provider SolarCity announced it will implement solar systems at 22 Walgreens stores across 14 different cities in Colorado in the coming months, with the first installation completed in Aurora.

Walmart held an invite only media event at the San Bruno, Calif. headquarters of its global e-commerce subsidiary and several things were clear as news reports trickled out from the event.

For starters, Walmart is in full blown experimentation mode and probing many different aspects of how to serve digitally empowered customers even as customers are still figuring out how they want to be served.

Imagine a store with a back staff of robots, where items appear, almost magically, in the fitting room. A store where customers pay for their purchases in their dressing rooms, without interacting with a single salesperson. You can stop imagining … check out Hointer, an apparel (mostly men’s jeans) shop in Seattle.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Ebay is projecting its revenue will grow by 50% over the next three years as it develops successful strategies to maintain itself as a commerce leader.

In a company-held meeting for the financial community, Ebay said it intends to drive strong continued growth in its core Marketplaces, PayPal and GSI Commerce businesses. At the same time, the company is focused on leveraging its global mobile commerce leadership and other commerce technologies to enable new experiences for consumers and retailers.

By Jason Taylor, Ph.D., [email protected]

Woonsocket, R.I. -- CVS/pharmacy announced Monday the launch of a first-of-its-kind interactive iPad app, delivering a virtual 3-D digital drugstore experience for Apple iPad users.

With the new app, CVS customers can explore a virtual 3-D CVS/pharmacy and access services from the pharmacy, ExtraCare, photo center and MinuteClinic, as well as browse departments to shop.

Toronto -- Canadian Tire has opened a digital development lab in Communitech, a start-up incubator that is home to some 100 startups and small businesses along with such “strategics” partner companies as Google Inc. and Intel Corp.
 
Communitech supports tech companies at all stages of their growth and development in the commercialization of innovative technologies.

BOSTON — PYMNTS.com, a news website serving the payments industry, released its list of winners for the 2013 PYMNTS Innovator Awards. Winners were chosen across sixteen categories by a panel of judges with deep and practical expertise in payments and payments innovation. The top finalists in each category were given an award at the PYMNTS.com Innovator Awards Dinner held this year on March 21 at Annenberg Hall on the Harvard University Campus as part of The Innovation Project. B.J.