Russia’s attempts to ban access to the Telegram messaging service threaten to drag U.S. tech giants including Alphabet and Amazon into the war with founder Pavel Durov as he turns to proxy servers to bypass the blocking measures.
Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor has already blocked 18 Google (GOOGL, -1.40%) and Amazon (AMZN, -2.38%) sub-networks that Telegram used to avoid restrictions, the watchdog’s head Alexander Zharov told the Izvestia...
Facebook Acquires ID Verification Startup Confirm.io
(Reuters) — Facebook Inc is buying a software firm that specializes in authenticating government-issued identification cards, the two companies said on Tuesday, a step that may help the social media company learn more about the people who buy ads on its network.
U.S. lawmakers have expressed alarm at Facebook’s limited ability to know who is buying advertisements, including election-related ads, on the world’s largest social network.
Boston-based Confirm Inc, which is...
Target Takes a Page Out of Wal-Mart’s Acquisition Playbook
Target has for the past few months been reinvesting in itself, rolling out its own private-label brands and keeping especially quiet on the acquisition front, with rival Wal-Mart on a buying spree. Until now.
Target announced plans on Monday to acquire Grand Junction, a San-Francisco based transportation technology company whose software manages retailers' local deliveries. This partnership will allow Target to send packages to guests faster and more efficiently, according to Target's chief supply...
The Rise of the UX Gold Rush
UX design is one of the most in-demand disciplines but hasn’t always been the hot topic it is today. The term was created in the 90’s when psychologist Don Norman joined Apple. Norman wanted a term that covered all aspects of a person’s interaction with a device: physical, technical, and psychological. Soon, other industry leaders like IBM and Facebook put design-thinking front and center; and as studies began...
IoT: Customer Experience Leading the Way
I certainly have a biased perspective, having spent the past 27 years of my career working as a contact center industry analyst, but I believe that the Internet of Things (IoT) will find much of its early success improving the customer experience.
I had the opportunity to hear a joint presentation by Dimension Data and Bosch at the Genesys G-Force event in Miami, Fla., in October 2016, and one...
What is UX and How Can it Help My Business?
UX design is one of those topics you can’t ignore as a marketer because it has deep roots in everything you do for an online brand. It’s something you and everyone in your team must understand, even if you’re not experts in the field. So what exactly is UX and why is it important to every business?
This is the question we’ll be answering today so there’s no more confusion about...
Snapchat is losing twice as much money as it did last year
Snap reported its earnings for the first time since becoming a public company in March of this year. Its daily active user count clicked up to 166 million, a 5 percent increase over last quarter, up 36 percent from this time a year ago. That puts it behind Instagram Stories, a competitor launched by Facebook that copied heavily from Snapchat and has already passed 200 million users. It also means...
6 Mistakes Your Ecommerce Store Must Avoid
Ecommerce marketers have four basic objectives. To start, they must bring new visitors to their store. Next is to convert more of these visitors into customers. Then they must look at ways to increase the average revenue earned per customer session. Finally, they must create incentives for these customers to return for future purchases.
Apart from bringing new visitors to your store, the rest of the marketing objectives are all directly influenced...
Why UX is pivotal to the future of SEO
Search engines are advancing at the fastest rate we’ve seen in many years thanks to machine learning. These advances have allowed the search engines to focus on providing the most relevant results, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of user experience (UX).
At the end of the day, what is good for the consumer is good for organic search performance — especially if we consider how machine...
Ready or Not – Healthcare Consumers Want a Mobile Patient Experience
Most people don’t look forward to doctors’ visits. As kids, we dreaded the needles and the medicine. As adults, we dread the time off work, the commute to the doctor’s office, and worst of all, the wait. So it’s no surprise that modern healthcare consumers are eager to bypass all that. Accustomed to getting everything from banking services to entertainment on demand, they are ready to approach their healthcare...
