Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

AT&T Inc. has walked away from a deal to sell smartphones made by Chinese electronics giant Huawei Technologies Co., according to people familiar with the matter.

As we embark on 2018, I asked others in the industry to answer the question: “When you first started in the industry, what was the most amazing device/application/program/at the time?”

Retail has been falling in the U.S. But across the Pacific Ocean, there are many retail innovations in Asia ranging from product display to payments to logistics. Here’s how the store of the future is being rethought in China, South Korea, Japan and India.

 

CHINA
Unmanned stores: Staffless stores like EasyGo and BingoBox are an emerging phenomenon in China.
Super-fast food delivery services: Platforms like Meituan and Baidu Waimai can usually deliver food to consumers in around 10 minutes, and allow them to track their delivery on mobile. Seamless and Grubhub would be considered “too slow” by Chinese standards.
Mobile bike-sharing: Two startups, Mobike and Ofo, offer station-free bike sharing services in cities like Beijing and Shanghai.
Facial recognition payment: Alibaba-owned fintech company Ant Financial tested a facial recognition payment service called “smile to pay” with KFC in China this September.

 

SOUTH KOREA
3D shopping assistants: Physical stores like iClothing use three-dimensional scanners to scan shoppers’ bodies and create a 3D avatar of them. Then, visitors can go to the physical store and virtually try on clothes with the avatar, skipping the fitting room.

 

JAPAN
Smart vending machines: These machines take a picture of shoppers and recommend drink choices to them based on their gender and age. Then, customers make their choice using a digital screen.

 

INDIA
E-wallets: India has more diverse mobile payments than China, where Alipay and WeChat Pay dominate. Paytm, Oxigen, MobiKwik and PayUMoney are among the major mobile payment services in India.

The post E-wallets, unmanned stores and more: How retailers are innovating in Asia appeared first on Digiday.

ABC says all the pieces are in place for its upcoming firefighter-themed spinoff of one of its biggest hit shows, except for one of the most important ones: a title for the drama. Two months before the Shonda Rhimes-produced Grey’s Anatomy spinoff debuts on ABC, the network is still settling on the best name for…

Oprah Winfrey’s speech after accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award dominated conversation on Facebook and Twitter during the 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards Sunday night. At the time of this post, the video of the speech, shared via the Golden Globes Facebook Watch page, had been viewed nearly 24 million times and shared over 400,000…

After serving 10 years as GroupM’s U.K. CEO, Nick Theakstone is being repositioned to the newly created role of global chief investment officer at the WPP-owned media investment management company. Theakstone will be succeeded in his previous position by Tom George, who most recently was chairman for MEC’s U.K. and Northern Europe division and its…

Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris is back in commercial directing mode for investment company Wealthsimple, turning the camera on Hollywood creators Aubrey Plaza, Alex Karpovsky, Brian Tyree Henry and Mark Duplass to capture them talking about their money smarts or, more to the point, their complete cluelessness on the topic. Plaza, a frequent advertising, TV and…

Jimmy Kimmel is returning to host this year’s Oscars on March 4, and he knows the memory of the debacle that capped last year’s ceremony–in which La La Land, not actual winner Moonlight, was incorrectly dubbed Best Picture–will loom large in the minds of viewers. “If it happens again, literally everyone who works at ABC…

AdExchanger |

Dan Salmon will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 17-18, 2018, at the Grand Hyatt New York. As 2018 kicks off, markets are wary of ad-driven stocks – unless your name is Alphabet, Facebook or Amazon. But there remains immense value in companies enabling addressable audiences, according to Dan Salmon, equity research analyst for… Continue reading »

The post For Ad-Hungry Companies, Was 2017 A Growth Experience Or The New Normal? appeared first on AdExchanger.

Emerging technology is about to drive the U.S. consumer technology industry to $351 billion in retail sales this year, 4% higher than last year, according to new industry research. As a kickoff to
the opening of every annual CES mega-event in Las Vegas, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) lays out its semi-annual research showing what the market looks like for the next year, and this year
appears to be a blockbuster in the making. One of the hot growth areas is smart speakers.