Business Intelligence (BI)

Moscow - PlayDisplay, a provider of emotional engagement solutions, is releasing SpaceAR, an augmented realty platform that enables the creation of realistic objects of various sizes and whole virtual worlds. Powered by PlayDisplay’s proprietary technology, the solution makes virtual environment obey the laws of physics and interact with the audience in a realistic way.

Silver Hill, N.J. - Technology company Edgagement, LLC has released a cloud-based mobile training platform that creates product knowledge forums and modules for informing sales associates. Edgagement measures and scores a selling partner's product knowledge, and delivers actionable responses based on those engagements.

New York - SmartFocus has acquired beacon technology specialist TagPoints and social media analytics provider Content Savvy as part of its strategy to develop the U.K.'s first omnichannel digital marketing system. Its platform now offers customer engagement and analytics capabilities across all media channels, so clients can gain deeper insight into consumer behavior.

E-commerce as a segment of the total retail market is growing at 30% per year and will reach $2 trillion in sales in 2015, according to e-commerce platform Bigcommerce.

Based on research conducted across its more than 55,000 clients, and combined with third-party research from Sagence, Bigcommerce’s Democratization of E-commerce Report also predicts that the U.S. small and medium business ecommerce market will exceed $100 billion in total sales in 2015.

La-Z-Boy has appointed Aaron Thomas Brown as VP, strategy and analytics, a newly created position. Brown will report to Kurt Darrow, La-Z-Boy's chairman, president and CEO, and will spearhead strategic planning across the enterprise.

IBM and Apple announced a strategic partnership earlier this year that promises to transform enterprise mobility through a new class of business apps. The companies plan to leverage their respective strengths in technology, business intelligence and user experience to create solutions that address some of the retail industry’s most pressing challenges. To better understand what that means, Retailing Today spoke with Jill Puleri, VP and global retail industry leader for IBM Global Business Services.

California's drought disrupted 99 Cents Only Stores’ ability to continually stock “right-priced” produce, which affected the company’s overall financial results for the second quarter. But despite the challenges, same-store sales in the quarter were positive.

The company's net sales for the quarter increased $25.1 million to $458.2 million, compared to $433.1 million in the prior-year quarter. Same-store sales increased 0.1%, calculated on a comparable 13-week period of the prior year.

By Jon May, Nuspire Networks

The year 2013 was a wake-up call for retailers with regards to national data breaches, with frequency jumping 62% from 2012 to 2013. Eight chart-topping breaches exposed information totaling just over 10 million people last year, as opposed to one single breach of that size the year before.

Statistics show the fall-out from a breach extend far beyond financial repercussions, (plan for $11k per affected customer per breach). Here are the scary statistics:

New York – Almost all retailers consider Big Data to be important, according to a new survey from Accenture Analytics. When asked how important is Big Data to their organization, 94% of retail executives answered “important,” 58% responded “extremely important,” and 36% responded “important.”

San Jose, Calif. – Retail performance has continued to improve throughout 2014. According to the RetailNext Composite Index analyzing more than 15 million shopping trips across specialty and larger format retail stores within the U.S., the Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) rising for the fourth month is a positive sign for retailers going into fall season, and is reflected in uptick in conversion and sales per store of .4% and 4.2%, respectively.