Artificial Intelligence

By Ajay Joshi, [email protected]

San Jose, Calif. -- Retail clinics and big-name medical centers are poised for dramatic expansion, according to two well-known speakers at the American Telemedicine Association's annual meeting in San Jose this week.

Hoffman Estates, Ill. -- Sears Holdings announced the launch of a wholly owned subsidiary called MetaScale, that will provide data-management services.

Sears sees the venture as a natural expansion of the resources it has spent to build the infrastructure it needs to manage data for its more than 4,000 Sears and Kmart stores nationwide.

Armonk, N.Y. -- IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Vivisimo, a leading provider of federated discovery and navigation software that helps organizations access and analyze big data across the enterprise. Vivisimo is a privately held company based in Pittsburgh. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Washington, D.C. -- The National Retail Federation on Thursday urged the Federal Trade Commission to move cautiously in establishing regulations for mobile payments, and said any rules that are adopted should parallel those for the underlying form of payment and not be specific to the technology.

Landfill operators got some bad news this week when Walmart said it prevented 81% of waste generated by U.S. stores from going to landfills. That nugget is just one example of the progress Walmart has made on its broad sustainability agenda and was among numerous others contained in the company’s 5th annual Global Responsibility Report released this week.

Much was made this week of the nomination of Google executive Marissa Mayer to the Walmart board and for good reason. She will add a new layer of depth and expertise to Walmart’s board, but she won’t be the only digital darling on the board.

Chicago -- Supermarket retailer Giant Eagle said Thursday it has completed a rollout of Galleria's Promotional Display Optimization solution that allows the grocer to generate thousands of store-specific display plans on a daily basis.

"We were already developing end-cap planograms, but Galleria enabled us to complete the process more efficiently," said Dan Schnorr, senior director of retail space planning, Giant Eagle.