Business Intelligence (BI)

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.

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.

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.

Nashville, Tenn. – Cognitive computing provider Digital Reasoning has released Synthesys 3.9, the latest release of its machine learning platform for analyzing human language data at scale. Synthesys 3.9 provides capabilities to detect key risk and performance indicators in human communication and automatically connect and aggregate information based on those indicators.

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:

Adidas has enlisted marketing technology company Unruly for its latest #predatorinstinct campaign, and as part of the partnership is piloting Unruly’s new In-Feed format. The new format adapts to the look and feel of a Web page in real time across the Open Web.

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.”