The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2022

by | Oct 4, 2022 | Uncategorized

Here we go again: Virtual reality, now called “the metaverse,” will be a thing. So will the smart home.

Each year, I look ahead at what’s new in consumer technology to guide you through what you might expect to buy — and what will most likely be a fad.

Many of the same “trends” appear again and again because, to put it simply, technology takes a long time to mature before most of us actually want to buy it. That applies this year as well. Some trends for 2022 that tech companies are pushing are things you have heard of before.

A chief example is virtual reality, the technology that involves wearing goofy-looking headgear and swinging around controllers to play 3-D games. That is expected to be front and center again this year, remarketed by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other techies as “the metaverse.”

Another buzzy category will be the so-called smart home, the technology to control home appliances by shouting voice commands at a speaker or tapping a button on a smartphone. The truth is, the tech industry has tried to push this kind of technology into our homes for more than a decade. This year, these products may finally begin to feel practical to own.

Another recurring technology on this list is digital health gear that tracks our fitness and helps us diagnose possible ailments. And automakers, which have long talked about electric cars, are beginning to accelerate their plans to meet a nationwide goal to phase out production of gas-powered cars by 2030.

Here are four tech trends that will invade our lives this year.

1. Welcome to the metaverse.

For more than a decade, technologists have dreamed of an era when our virtual lives play as important a role as our physical realities. In theory, we would spend lots of time interacting with our friends and colleagues in virtual space, and as a result we would spend money there, too, on outfits and objects for our digital avatars.

“We’re in a world where people several times per day send out an image reflecting themselves,” said Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist who has written extensively about the metaverse. “The next phase takes that visual representation and dimensionalizes it. You go into an environment and express yourself through an avatar.”

That sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. But throughout Year 2 of the pandemic, a critical mass of factors came together to make the metaverse more realistic, Mr. Ball said.

For one, the technology got better. Last year, Facebook announced that it had renamed itself Meta after shipping 10 million units of its virtual-reality headset, the Quest 2, which was a milestone.

For another, many of us were willing to splurge on our digital selves. Hordes of investors bought NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, which are one-of-a-kind digital objects purchased with cryptocurrency. Eminem and other investors invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to join a virtual yacht club.

There’s more to come this year. Apple plans to unveil its version of a virtual reality headset, which will look like a pair of ski goggles and, for computing power, rely on a separate computing device that is worn elsewhere on the body. Apple declined to comment.

Google has also developed virtual reality products for years, and Microsoft has offered a virtual reality headset for businesses and government agencies.

The metaverse could still turn out to be a fad, depending on what products emerge and who buys them. Carolina Milanesi, a consumer technology analyst for the consulting firm Creative Strategies, said she worried that it could become a reflection of the privileged few who can afford to treat their digital selves.

“The boating market is dominated by white upper-class middle-aged men,” she said. “Will we just transfer all of that into the metaverse?”

2. The smart home.

Over the last few years, smart home products like internet-connected thermostats, door locks and robotic vacuum cleaners made major progress. The devices became affordable and worked reliably with digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Apple’s Siri.

Yet the smart home, for the most part, has remained chaotic. Many smart home products didn’t work well with other technology. Some door locks, for example, worked only with Apple phones and not Androids; some thermostats were controlled by talking to Google Assistant and not to Siri.

The lack of compatibility has created long-term issues. An Apple-compatible lock isn’t useful for the family member or future tenant who prefers Android. It would also be more convenient one day if our home devices could actually talk to one another, like a washing machine telling a dryer that a large load was ready to be dried.

This year, the tech industry’s biggest rivals — Apple, Samsung, Google and Amazon — are playing nice to make the smart home more practical. They plan to release and update home technology to work with Matter, a new standard that enables smart home devices to talk to one another regardless of the virtual assistant or phone brand. More than 100 smart home products are expected to adhere to the standard.

“We’re all speaking a common language built on already proven technologies,” said Samantha Osborne, a vice president of marketing for SmartThings, the home automation company owned by Samsung.

This means that later this year, when you shop for a product like an automated door lock, look for a label indicating that the device is compatible with Matter. Then, in the future, your smart alarm clock may be able to tell your smart lights to turn on when you wake up.

3. Connected health.

Fitness gadgets like the Apple Watch and Fitbit, which help us track our movements and heart rate, keep getting more popular. So tech companies are experimenting this year with smaller wearable devices that gather more intimate data about our health.

Oura, a health tech company, recently introduced a new model of its Oura Ring, which is embedded with sensors that track metrics including body temperature to accurately predict menstruation cycles. This week at CES, a tech trade show in Las Vegas, Movano, another health tech start-up, unveiled a similar ring that stitches together data about your heart rate, temperature and other measures to inform a wearer about potential chronic illnesses.

Medical experts have long warned about the potential consequences of health tech. Without proper context, the data could potentially be used to misdiagnose illnesses and turn people into hypochondriacs. But if the widely sold-out Covid rapid test kits are any measure, more of us appear ready to be proactive in monitoring our health.

 4. Electric cars.

Last year, President Biden announced an ambitious goal: Half of all vehicles sold in the United States would be electric rather than gas-powered by 2030.

In response, major automakers are hyping their electric cars, including at CES this week. On Tuesday, Ford Motor announced plans to increase production of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck. Later this week, General Motors plans to unveil a battery-powered version of its Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. Other carmakers, like Mercedes-Benz, have shared plans for electric cars to be released in coming years.

While there’s lots of marketing hype around electric cars, those of us looking for battery-powered vehicles this year will probably still gravitate toward Tesla, Ms. Milanesi said. That’s because we have yet to see widespread deployment of solar power and charging stations for electric cars, especially in more rural areas. Tesla has a head start because it has been rolling out charging stations for years, she said.

“There’s so much from an infrastructure perspective that needs to happen,” she said. “So it’s a lot of talk, but I don’t know how much of a reality.”

 

Source :    www.nytimes.com

The $2 Billion Emoji: Hugging Face Wants To Be Launchpad For A Machine Learning Revolution

by | Sep 23, 2022 | Uncategorized

hen Hugging Face first announced itself to the world five years ago, it came in the form of an iPhone chatbot app for bored teenagers. It shared selfies of its computer-generated face, cracked jokes and gossiped about its crush on Siri. It hardly made any money.

The viral moment came in 2018—not among teens, but developers. The founders of Hugging Face had begun to share bits of the app’s underlying code online for free. Almost immediately, researchers from some of the biggest tech names in the business, including Google and Microsoft, began using it for AI applications. Today, the chatbot has long since disappeared from the App Store, but Hugging Face has become the central depot for ready-to-use machine-learning models, the starting point from which more than 10,000 organizations have created AI-powered tools for their businesses.

Hugging Face announced Monday, in conjunction with its debut appearance on Forbes’ AI 50 list, that it raised a $100 million round of venture financing, valuing the company at $2 billion. Top-tier venture capital firms Coatue and Sequoia won slots as new backers in the hotly contested Series C, joining A.Capital Ventures, Addition Capital and lead investor Lux Capital as major stakeholders in the Brooklyn-based startup.

“Machine learning is becoming the new way to build technology, replacing software,” says Clément Delangue, cofounder and CEO of Hugging Face, which is named after the emoji that looks like a smiling face with jazz hands. “The old school of building technology was writing a million lines of code. Machine learning is starting to do that, but much better and much faster.”

Speaking from his home in Miami, where he moved during the pandemic (weather, not web3, he explains), Delangue, 33, says he believes that what GitHub is for software, Hugging Face has become for machine learning. That’s a confident comparison, considering the widespread popularity of GitHub, which is used by more than 70 million developers to share and collaborate on code and was last recorded making $300 million in revenue at the time of its $7.5 billion sale to Microsoft in 2018. Hugging Face, by contrast, generated less than $10 million last year, according to three people familiar with its finances. Delangue declines to comment on the number, but he and investors think that machine learning is already becoming the single most important technology of the 2020s, and that Hugging Face can eventually make billions in revenue with its own army of AI-minded developers.

“The companies you would assume are competitors on first blush—whether it’s Google or Amazon or Facebook—almost all of them are proponents,” says Lux Capital’s Brandon Reeves, who first invested in Hugging Face in 2019. “It really feels like this Switzerland-like piece of real estate in the ecosystem.”

“I don’t really see a world where machine learning becomes the default way to build technology and where Hugging Face is the No. 1 platform for this, and we don’t manage to generate several billion dollars in revenue.”

Growing up in La Bassée, a small town of 6,000 in the north of France, Delangue recalls an idle childhood until he got his first computer at age 12. By 17, he’d become one of the top French merchants on eBay, selling ATVs and dirt bikes he imported from China and stockpiled in his father’s garden equipment shop. That prowess impressed eBay, which offered him an internship once he began college at ESCP Business School in Paris. Representing the company at an e-commerce trade show, Delangue was accosted by another attendee who trashed eBay’s recent acquisition of a barcode-scanning app—barcodes, the man said, would soon be obsolete because of advances in AI.

The man turned out to be a cofounder of Moodstocks, a startup making image-recognition software using machine learning. “With a very small team, they were managing to do stuff on par with what Google was doing with 100 times more people,” he says (years later, the company was acquired by Google). Impressed by the nimbleness of startups, Delangue never looked back. He declined eBay’s offer to extend his internship so that he could spend his free time at Moodstocks. After graduating in 2012, he turned down a job from Google to run his own startup. Delangue’s idea for a collaborative note-taking app didn’t go far, but in the tight-knit European startup scene he met Julien Chaumond, a fellow entrepreneur building a collaborative ebook reader. The pair riffed on their mutual interest in open technology and talked about starting a company together.

That time came in 2016, after both their companies had ground to a halt. A third cofounder was recruited in Thomas Wolf, a college friend of Chaumond’s who had gone on to receive a Ph.D. in physics and written research papers on machine learning. For the business idea, they settled on “open-domain conversational AI”—in other words, a chatbot that could understand any kind of conversation topic—because they felt it was the most difficult problem in technology they had the expertise to tackle at the time, Delangue says. “There’s this dream we all have to speak with an AI about everything, like you see in sci-fi.”

Hugging Face began as a personalized, Tamagotchi-like friend powered by a form of AI known as natural language processing (NLP). To train the chatbot’s natural language capabilities, the team also built an underlying library to house various machine-learning models—for example, one to detect the emotions behind a text message and another to be able to generate a coherent response—and the many datasets for understanding different kinds of conversational topics, like sports or classroom gossip. Harking back to the founders’ values for open collaboration, they released free pieces of the library as an open-source project on GitHub. The company participated in a bot-specific accelerator program run by the New York-based startup studio Betaworks and raised seed funding from venture capitalists as well as NBA star Kevin Durant. But two years in, their chatbot hadn’t made much money and was losing its hold on the attention spans of its young users.

Around the same time, researchers at Google and OpenAI announced the development of “transformers,” a new type of NLP model that demolished the reading comprehension abilities of both humans and the best AI incumbent at the time. By 2019, Google was powering its search results using this model. Hugging Face’s open-source library appeared at the perfect time for organizations that wanted to harness these NLP breakthroughs but didn’t have the same machinery as Google to build them from scratch. It became a near-instant hit as the machine-learning community converged around it as the central base for deploying transformer models. “We released things without thinking too much about it and the community blew up, as a surprise even to us,” Delangue says.

Reeves, the Lux investor, first met Delangue at a coffee shop in downtown San Francisco on a Friday near the end of 2019. Scared to miss out on a chance to invest, he offered a term sheet the following Monday at an $80 million valuation. “For 90% of the companies I’ve invested in, I’ve known them for many weeks or months or years,” he says. “I don’t think any have come over a weekend.” Since Delangue accepted Lux’s check, usage has continued to skyrocket. The developer community has built more than 100,000 machine learning models on Hugging Face, enabling others in turn to use those pretrained models for their own AI projects instead of having to build models from scratch. On GitHub, Hugging Face has accumulated “stars”—a vanity metric measuring the popularity of an open-source project—at a faster pace than the projects behind Confluent (annual revenue of $388 million), Databricks (more than $800 million) and MongoDB ($874 million).

Although funding rounds for companies with similar stature were plentiful in 2021, the growth-stage venture capital market has since slowed to a near halt. Hugging Face’s latest financing then indicates a more rarified vote of investor confidence, but some in the data startup ecosystem have privately expressed curiosity about how Delangue can grow Hugging Face’s revenue enough to validate its hefty valuation. Delangue thinks that if enough free users get hooked on Hugging Face, the money will follow in time from some of the companies that employ the users. “Given how valuable machine learning is and how mainstream it’s becoming, usage is deferred revenue,” Delangue says. “I don’t really see a world where machine learning becomes the default way to build technology and where Hugging Face is the No. 1 platform for this, and we don’t manage to generate several billion dollars in revenue.”

 

Hugging Face only started to offer paid features last year and counts more than 1,000 companies as customers, according to Delangue, including Intel and his former stomping ground eBay. Pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Roche pay for enterprise-grade security features, while Bloomberg uses Hugging Face to build new natural language products on top its existing infrastructure. Microsoft is not a customer, but prominently uses Hugging Face as the basis to train its Bing search engine to better understand natural language queries.

“They prioritized adoption over monetization, which I think was correct,” says Sequoia partner Pat Grady, one of the new investors. “They saw that transformer-based models working their way outside of NLP and saw a chance to be the GitHub not just for NLP, but for every domain of machine learning.” Indeed, over the course of the last year, Hugging Face has started to become a hub for machine learning models for a variety of uses, such as computer vision to train image recognition in self-driving cars and recommender systems to help pharmaceutical companies predict the effectiveness of new drug therapies.

If his assumptions of machine learning supremacy are wrong, Delangue says Hugging Face is close to breakeven and has all $40 million from its previous fundraise still in the bank to reorient. “One of my personal learnings as an entrepreneur is to not think too much strategically with a big business plan of ten years, but more to experiment and follow the validation of the community and what they’re telling you,” he says. If the vision pans out, Reeves thinks the prize could be a $50 billion or $100 billion market capitalization on the stock market. It’s no wonder that Delangue says he’s turned down multiple “meaningful acquisition offers” and won’t sell his business, like GitHub did to Microsoft.

“We want to be the first company to go public with an emoji, rather than a three-letter ticker,” he says with an emoji-like smile. “We have to start doing some lobbying to the Nasdaq to make sure it can happen.”

 

Source : www.forbes.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Top 10 Tech Trends In 2022 Everyone Must Be Ready For Now

by | Sep 15, 2022 | Uncategorized

As a futurist, every year, I look ahead and predict the key tech trends that will shape the next few months. There are so many innovations and breakthroughs happening right now, and I can’t wait to see how they help to transform business and society in 2022.

Let’s take a look at my list of key tech trends that everyone should be ready for, starting today.

1: Computing Power

Computing power will continue to explode in 2022. We now have considerably better cloud infrastructure, and many businesses are re-platforming to the cloud.

We are also seeing a push towards better networks – 5G is being rolled out, and 6G is on the horizon. That means even more power in our phones, in our cars, and in our wearable devices.

2: Smarter Devices

Growing computer power is enabling us to create smarter devices. We now have intelligent televisions, autonomous cars, and more intelligent robots that can work alongside humans to complete more tasks.

In 2022, we’ll see continued momentum for this smart device explosion, including the introduction of intelligent home robots.

3: Quantum Computing

The trend of quantum computing — the processing of information that is represented by special quantum states – enables machines to handle information in a fundamentally different way from traditional computers. Quantum computing will potentially give us computing power that is a trillion times more powerful than what we get from today’s advanced supercomputers.

I predict that in 2022, quantum computers could fundamentally change how we approach problems like logistics, portfolio management, and drug innovations.

4: Datafication

Data is a key enabler for all of these trends. All of the digitization in our world today means we have enormous amounts of data available, and data has now become the number one business asset for every organization. We can use data to better understand our customers, research key trends, and get insight into what’s working inside our organizations.

5: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Organizations and researchers are now using all their data and computing power to provide advanced AI capabilities to the world.

One of the key trends in the AI world is machine vision. We now have computers that can see and recognize objects on a video or photograph. Language processing is also making big advances, so machines can understand our voices and speak back to us.

Low-code or no-code will also be a huge trend this year. We will be able to build our AI using drag-and-drop graphical interfaces, so we can develop extraordinary applications without being limited by our coding skills.

6: Extended Reality

We now have more augmented reality (AR) capabilities on our devices (particularly our phones and tablets), and we’re seeing an even bigger push toward virtual reality (VR). In 2022, we’ll see new, lighter, more portable VR devices, so instead of having clunky headsets that require WiFi connections, we will have devices that are more like glasses that connect to our phones and give us superior VR experiences on the go.

These extended reality advances pave the way for incredible experiences in the metaverse, a persistent, shared virtual world that users can access through different devices and platforms.

7: Digital Trust

Blockchain technology, distributed ledgers, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are transforming our world, and we will continue to see advances in this technology in 2022. These innovations go beyond Bitcoin to things like smart contracts that allow us to verify ownership with NFTs. This year, we will see more companies and individuals enhancing physical objects with blockchain technology and tokens.

8: 3D Printing

We can now make things with 3D printing that we would never have dreamed of a decade ago. In 2022, we’ll see transformations in manufacturing and beyond, from 3D printing technological innovations, including mass-produced customized pieces, concrete for houses, printed food, metal, and composite materials.

9: Genomics

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to two scientists, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, for their work developing a method for genome editing. Genomics, gene editing, and synthetic biology are a top trend of 2022 because these advancements can help us modify crops, cure and eradicate diseases, develop new vaccines like the COVID-19 shot, and other medical and biological breakthroughs.

Nanotechnology will also allow us to give materials new attributes by manipulating them on a subatomic level, so we can create things like bendable screens, better batteries, water-repellent, self-cleaning fabrics, and even self-repairing paint this year.

10: New Energy Solutions

The last hugely important trend is new energy solutions. As we tackle climate change, we’ll see continued advances in the batteries we use in our cars, as well as innovations in nuclear power and green hydrogen. These new trends will allow us to power our ships, our planes, our trains and generate energy for the general public.

 

Source :     www.forbes.com

Ecommerce Trends That Are Powering Online Retail Forward

by | Jun 16, 2022 | Uncategorized

The ecommerce industry is always changing and this year has been no different. More than ever, merchants are creating and/or improving their ecommerce businesses to meet customers where they are. While it may seem like everything in ecommerce is evolving, we narrowed it down to the biggest trends that will affect businesses in the coming months and years.

14 Ecommerce Trends Leading the Way

We spoke with leaders in the industry about the changes this year and they had a lot to share. So, let’s explore the biggest ecommerce trends and see where things are headed.
  1. AR enhances the reality of online shopping.
  2. There will be a growing volume of voice search.
  3. AI helps shops learn about shoppers.
  4. On-site personalization uses those insights to create individualized experiences.
  5. Big data plays a big part in creating personalized experiences.
  6. Chatbots improve the shopping experience.
  7. Mobile shopping is still on the move.
  8. More ways to pay.
  9. Headless and API-driven ecommerce allow continued innovation.
  10. Customers respond to video.
  11. Subscriptions keep customers coming back.
  12. Sustainability is becoming more important.
  13. Businesses should optimize digital strategy for conversion.
  14. B2B is growing…and changing.

1. Augmented reality enhances the reality of online shopping.

Augmented reality (AR) has been a complete game changer for ecommerce. With this type of technology, shoppers can truly see the item they’re shopping for, which helps them make a buying decision. AR really changes the shopping experience in specific industries, such as fashion and home decor because the customer can get a better feel for the item without seeing it in-person.
In 2019, Gartner predicted that 100 million consumers will shop using AR by 2020, so it will be interesting to see how that shakes out next year.
Michael Prusich, Director of Business Development at 1Digital Agency, agrees with this prediction:
“Polls have shown some really powerful numbers in regards to AR too: 35% of people say that they would be shopping online more if they could virtually try on a product before buying it, and 22% would be less likely to visit a brick-and-mortar store if AR was available via their favorite ecommerce store. AR grants a person with the ability to not just see a 3D model of a product but lets a user see how it looks if they were actually wearing it. Some products and industries lend themself better to traditional shopping methods, but AR is going to shake things up sooner than later.”
Tessa Wuertz, Director of Marketing & Partnerships, efelle.com, also sees the potential for even smaller to midmarket businesses joining the trend:
“We are expecting a lot more businesses to utilize AR for their products and businesses — so much so that it will become more standard in ecommerce and social media platforms. We’re seeing it put to use with larger companies, but I think we’re soon going to start seeing it become mainstream for businesses of all sizes.”

2. There will be a growing volume of voice search.

Not only do more people own smart speakers, but they also rely on voice assistants to complete daily tasks. Loop Ventures forecasts that 75% of U.S. households will own a smart speaker by 2025.
As more homes adopt smart speakers, more consumers will utilize voice search to shop online, order food and organize their lives. The rise of voice search creates an opportunity for ecommerce businesses in terms of keywords and content.
David Zimmerman, Director of eCommerce Solutions, Kensium, included “more involvement of voice-enabled solutions in the commerce space with Amazon Alexa and Google Home” high on his list of 2020 trends to keep an eye on.

3. AI helps shops learn about shoppers.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning make it possible for the customer to have automated, personalized shopping experiences. AI is continuously collecting data on how a customer shops, when they buy purchases and what they’re looking for in a product or a service. It’s a piece of technology that really can’t be replicated in-store.
Ron Smith, Editor in Chief, The Digital Outdoor, emphasizes how the complexity of AI and the ability to make it more human is also increasingly important:
“People want to know that brands care about them, and AI will be programmed accordingly. We have currently seen the opposite behavior on social media, where AIs learn from humans’ more negative remarks, but it’s highly likely that consumers will crave the impact. If bots can learn how to form sentences to convey an emotion, companies can soon teach them to offer comfort and products based on customers’ moods.”

4. On-site personalization uses those insights to create individualized experiences.

Buyers of all sorts — including B2C and B2B — are looking for personalized, custom shopping experiences online. The data collected from AI is what makes it possible for a buyer to get personalized product recommendations and detailed customer service.
Implementing personalized experiences on-site or in marketing efforts has been shown to have a strong effect on revenue, with one study finding it had a 25% revenue lift for retailers scaling advanced personalization capabilities.
For further context, this accounted for 19% of participating companies while retailers that were “building basic personalization capabilities” achieved “a revenue lift of 10% or more; the retailers in this tier account for 40% of the participating companies.
Kaleigh Moore, freelance writer and ecommerce specialist, sees AI-powered personalization becoming increasingly relevant in 2020:
“As brands harness and leverage more data, they’ll be able to create incredibly relevant experiences for shoppers that feel tailor-made.”

5. Big data plays a role in creating personalized experiences.

Today, many consumers are more aware that ecommerce sites are collecting personal data, which puts them at risk. Because of this, experts have mixed feelings about the benefits of big data and how it affects the personalized shopping experience.
Luis Catter, Conversion Rate Optimization Expert at Kensium Solutions, has his own predictions for how personalization will continue to evolve alongside data concerns:
“As the tech giants continue to expand and bring more services in-house, personalization will eventually make its way to the internet of things. In addition to seeing suggestions on search engines or shopping platforms, we’ll also see them on our thermostats and our doorbell cameras. However, with some of the legislation being enacted, we’ll be able to opt out of it. This will create an interesting dichotomy — people who have ultra-personalized experiences and those who do not. This will have interesting impacts on how we as marketers are able to reach new users.”

6. Chatbots improve shopping experiences.

Chatbots interact with online shoppers much like an in-store sales associate would do. Today’s shopper wants to be able to find and buy a product in just a few clicks, and if they can’t, they get frustrated. This is where a chatbot can step in and save the sale.
Experts predict that 80% of businesses will be using chatbots in 2020.
Shane Barker, Founder and CEO of ecommerce thought leadership blog shanebarker.com/blog posits:
“Chatbots are all the rage today for customer support. However, I think they’ll drastically change the way people shop online. They’ll become one of the most important marketing tools. In the retail space, self-checkout kiosks will probably become the norm and in-store marketing will increase.”
Duran Inci, CEO of Optimum7, sees chatbots becoming increasingly personalized to improve the customer experience:
“The same way chatbots are becoming more intuitive, so do I think that personal shopping assistant bots online will become more prevalent, using previous data to help anticipate new products that you’ll like. Similar to Amazon’s suggestions for similar products.”

7. Mobile shopping is still on the move.

Mobile shopping allows customers to make purchases from anywhere, which is vital in today’s world. However, if your ecommerce site isn’t responsive on mobile or through web apps, you’ll be missing out on big opportunities. Shoppers who are mobile users want the added convenience, plus the ability to pay digitally.
In 2019, Statista estimated that by the end of 2021, 73% of ecommerce sales will take place on a mobile device.
Corey Dubeau, VP of Marketing at Northern Commerce, is one of many who see “improved quality and more mobile payment integrations” to be a harbinger of change in 2020.

8. More ways to pay.

Customers have individual needs when it comes to payment methods, but they might cancel a potential sale if they can’t pay how they want on an ecommerce website. Offering a wide variety of ways to pay is a good way to increase conversion rates on mobile devices. Plus, if customers can save their payment information on your site, they’ll be able to checkout even faster the next time they make a purchase.
Joe Chilson, Head Writer and Account Manager, 1Digital Agency sees centralization of payments also making strides in 2020:
“Think about how easy it would be to buy a product on any website if, at checkout, you could simply give them an ID unique to you. This unique ID would be for a centralized wallet service that would securely store all your payment info, shipping and billing addresses, preferences, etc. Companies like Apple and PayPal have taken shots at this in the past, but I think it could become more normalized.”

9. Headless and API-driven ecommerce allow continued innovation.

Headless commerce is a solution that allows an online store’s ecommerce platform to be completely decoupled from the frontend presentation layer.
More ecommerce businesses are adopting headless because of its flexibility on the backend, plus the added SEO, content marketing and digital experience capabilities.
LARQ Ecommerce Architect Antonio Kaleb explains: “With headless, we get more control over our content and customer journey through checkout. We had a multi-region need that was solved for with the headless BigCommerce solution, allowing us to combine all of our stores into one single domain, for which we have developed additional features.”

10. Customers respond to video.

Video proved to be a great way to engage customers in 2019, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Creating videos for your website is a great way to instantly grab and engage a customer and inform them about your product or service.
Ron Smith, Editor in Chief, The Digital Outdoor considers how video can be used to help educate customers:
“I see the use of podcasting and short video content to augment the opportunity for buyers to learn about how an ecommerce brand’s products and services provide the solution to the opportunity, challenge or problem a buyer is looking to answer. With these two forms of content development comes the technology to micro track a viewer’s engagement…”
Shane Barker further emphasizes the importance:
“The importance of videos can’t be understated. Videos can help you explain and showcase your products better than images ever can. You should consider adding videos of your products in your ecommerce store.”

11. Subscriptions keep customers coming back.

There are subscriptions of all sorts these days and their convenience is attractive for consumers. For companies, subscription services create a way to plan for inventory and sales that are already locked in.
David Zimmerman, Director of eCommerce Solutions, Kensium still predicts that “more companies will offer subscription services or monthly payment options for larger purchases” in the coming year.

12. Sustainability is becoming more important.

Consumers and businesses alike are becoming more aware of the environment. Because of this, consumers are being more conscious about where they shop and the impact it has on the environment and related effects.
One survey found that 50% of respondents wanted more sustainability in the fashion industry, and 75% wanted to see less packaging.
Many businesses are finding ways to be more eco-friendly by going paperless when possible, using biodegradable packaging, and using recyclable supplies.

13. Businesses should optimize digital strategy for conversion.

Getting potential customers to your site is one task but getting them to convert is another. In 2020, businesses are looking to improve their conversion rates by optimizing their product pages. Multi-channel selling is also another way to get conversions, whether through Facebook advertising or shopping ads on Google.
Scott Ginsberg, Head of Content, Metric Digital adds:
“More and more brands are competing for the same eyes. Facebook’s algorithm rewards video and motion-based creative that are more likely to hook your audience quickly. And customers are also more demanding, impatient and curious than ever before. Make sure you understand the ins and outs of Performance Ad Creative that doesn’t only look cool, but also drives conversions. Using those channels intelligently is the best way to make sure your brand will be uniquely positioned to stand out in the continually changing digital marketing landscape.”

14. B2B is growing…and changing.

If you were ever worried that B2B would go out of style, fear not. Global retail ecommerce sales for B2B are expected to reach $1.1 trillion in 2021, according to data from Statista.
Forrester predicts that by 2020 almost half of all adults will be Millennials, which also means an increase in Millennial B2B buyers. Both of these audiences want to be able to easily research their needs and related products without conversing with salespeople.
B2B ecommerce brands are working to meet these needs. Connie Wong, Marketing Manager, Silk Software, talks about this transition:
“The days of orders needing to be placed through fax order forms or phone calls only are shrinking. More and more businesses are beginning to see the value in servicing their customers online. By automating these tasks through their ecommerce site, teams are moving away from spending the bulk of their time on processing order entries from email spreadsheets or hard copy forms. Instead, they are shifting their focus towards what matters most: engaging with customers, providing them with an excellent customer experience, and establishing ongoing client relationships.”

Weighing Your Options: Deciding if a Trend Makes Sense for Your Business

Not every trend is worth jumping on, but which one deserves your time and effort? While some will provide a huge value-add, others might be out of touch with your particular audience or might be too costly to implement for your business to maintain a reasonable ROI.
Knowing what trends will be a good fit for you will often come down to knowing your own customers, vertical, and competitors backwards and forwards. There’s several things you can do to evaluate industry trends and make the right move for your B2B.

1. Keep track of industry influencers and publications.

Follow blogs and related news in the industry so you can stay on top of what’s happening. Start by finding influencers and publications related to your industry specifically, and then branch out into other markets to get the whole picture.

2. Absorb up-to-date industry research and trends reports.

Every industry changes at some point or another, and staying up to date via reports and data can show you where things are headed. The numbers in these reports often come from original research you can trust, instead of just following the popular word-on-the-street. Plus, when you’re regularly aware of what’s happening in your industry, you’ll grow a sense of what trends are worth the effort and what ones can wait.

3. Make the most of digital tools and analytics to assess your customers’ behavior.

Use customer data to evaluate if a trend is right for you. What do the numbers show? Many trends might work for other businesses, but you know your customers best. Consider utilizing more than one data gathering tool so you can see customer trends from different sources. Use these numbers to see the overall trends in your business. Would adopting a new trend interrupt your customer behavior?

4. Get feedback from your customers.

Don’t be afraid to ask current customers what they need. Getting feedback from current customers can give you insight into trends, and you can create more specific plans for the future. You never know, a customer might even suggest an idea you hadn’t thought of yet.

5. Observe your competitors.

Take a look at your competitors. Did they jump on a specific trend? If so, how did it work for them? Of course, you don’t have to do everything your competition is doing, but being aware is another way to measure a trend.

Conclusion

Okay, so there’s a lot of new things happening in ecommerce. Technology and people are always evolving, and since ecommerce brings it all together, we are always going to be looking toward the future. One thing is for sure, is that it’s never too late to jump right in, learn something new, and evaluate if it’s right for your business. For now, consumers are in the driver’s seats and ecommerce businesses will be customizing the journey ahead for them.

Google Takes Yet Another Run at E-Commerce-and Amazon

by | Jun 9, 2022 | Uncategorized

Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan recently had an issue with his rose bushes. His wife took a photo of the plants on her phone, uploaded the image to Google, identified the culprit and followed a link for a fungicide. Then she bought it.
A seamless transaction that didn’t involve typing into a search bar, it was a real-life test of sorts for Raghavan’s strategic vision. A senior vice president responsible for most of Google’s largest services—search, maps, advertising and more—the 61-year-old executive is determined to crack e-commerce, a market projected to hit $2.27 trillion in 2025 that the Alphabet Inc. division has tried and failed to figure out many times before.
In the past, Google has tried emulating Amazon.com Inc.’s online retail and delivery services, with little luck. Now, under Raghavan, the search giant is positioning itself as a kind of anti-Amazon, a free marketplace for merchants and Amazon rivals that’s designed to get consumers more comfortable shopping with Google.
Earlier this month, at Google’s I/O software conference, Raghavan and his deputies demonstrated new features they hope will achieve that end, including one that lets visitors use photos to search for nearby retail products or find any item in the physical world with the click of a camera. And on Tuesday, the company unveiled a feature that lets people go from merchant listings on Google search to their checkout pages in one click. Raghavan hopes the various initiatives will persuade millions of people to click buy, prompting sellers to purchase many more Google ads.
For Amazon, which built a booming business by essentially renting its digital real estate to small sellers, the risk is that Google could give those brands a pathway to thriving outside its marketplace. That in turn could force the Seattle-based company to more aggressively court sellers with discounts on fees, advertising or logistics services.
Still, Amazon remains a formidable rival, and Google confronts daunting challenges. Its renewed push into e-commerce coincides with a slowdown in online shopping as consumers revert to their pre-pandemic habits. Amazon and EBay Inc. both recently reported slowing growth and weak profit outlooks. Moreover, Google has always sought to make its technology fade into the background. Turning the site into a shopping destination risks wrecking the experience and alienating visitors. Ahead of the I/O presentation, Raghavan took pains to say shopping on Google would be “super smooth.” If the concept works as advertised, he said, shoppers won’t have to think: “‘Am I doing a search? Am I on Amazon or Google?
Raghavan is the first Google executive to oversee the technical operations behind both search and the ads division since Sundar Pichai did in 2014, shortly before he became CEO. Raghavan  is also one of the company’s best compensated executives, pulling down $28.6 million last year in salary and stock grants. As such, he has the clout to set an ambitious e-commerce strategy and, at least theoretically, get people who traditionally operated in silos to collaborate instead.
Those who have worked with Raghavan point to his technical mastery and operational shrewdness—an unusual combination of attributes at a company that has so often coasted on its inventions and profits. “Google is violently allergic to strategic thinking,” said Sam Ramji, a former executive who worked with Raghavan on Google’s cloud products. “He’s the man who brought strategy to Google.” Adds Martha Welsh, Google’s director of commerce strategy: “He really takes a holistic view of the business.”
Since Raghavan’s promotion in mid-2020, he has torn up Google’s e-commerce playbook, scrapping the fees the company levied for online purchases and shuttering the delivery service. He has tried poaching merchants irritated with Amazon, reshuffled the leadership ranks, and overhauled Google’s payments operations by dropping its banking plans and narrowing the focus. He even tasked his search division with catering to people making heady commercial decisions, like buying a home or picking a college.
“He’s willing to make bold moves,” said Bill Ready, Google’s president of commerce, who joined in 2020 as one of Raghavan’s top deputies.
Boldness is required. While Google’s advertising operation continues to print money, the model is under siege from regulators and privacy clampdowns, including Apple’s ban on targeted marketing messages. Due in part to these headwinds, the growth rate of the ad business is destined to slow, and Google isn’t the only one jumping into e-commerce to goose revenue; Meta Platforms Inc. and TikTok are as well.
Meanwhile, even as Google tries to build an online shopping destination to complement its ad business, Amazon has done the inverse: created a robust advertising operation on top of its enormous online bazaar. Google’s success is hard to gauge because it doesn’t break out e-commerce sales or retail ads. Amazon’s is easy to see; its ads business posted 23% growth in the first quarter. “That seems to be working way better for Amazon than it is for Google,” said Mike Ryan, a portfolio strategist for Smarter Ecommerce GmbH.
Raghavan has tied Google’s main revenue and profit drivers—search and ads—more tightly to its e-commerce efforts than ever before. That’s all put more pressure on him to deliver on his strategy.
Shopping Express
Google’s last big e-commerce push involved going at Amazon head-on. In 2013, Google launched Shopping Express, a delivery service with a nifty app and a promise to ship many items on the same day. Google had huge retail partners on board, including Target Corp. and Walgreens, and planned an annual subscription model a la Amazon Prime. Back then, when quick e-commerce delivery was a novelty, Google’s service looked like a natural Amazon contender.
But it never was. Shopping Express expanded to a few cities outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, but had little appeal for consumers. Google’s “Shopping” site, accessible as a tab on its homepage, aggregated listings from online retailers with paid ads at the top, but attracted relatively few visitors compared with the main search page. Former Google employees say managerial indecision and an unwillingness to invest heavily in the margin-thin business undercut the strategy. Then in 2015, Europe hit Google with a massive anti-monopoly suit that argued the search engine unfairly promoted its own shopping service over others. That forced the company to spin off the European business and move more cautiously.
Google brought in consultants from BCG to assess a specific e-commerce strategy, but didn’t follow the firm’s recommendations. The company shortened the delivery service’s name (to just Express) and revamped it to center on its digital voice-assistant, another Amazon competitor. That effort fizzled, too. “For the past 15 years, Google has been trying to figure out commerce,” said Rick Watson, the head of RMW Commerce Consulting. “And they’ve never really executed.”
In early 2020, Google reset its strategy. Management recruited Ready from PayPal to lead the commerce unit and realigned the search, payments and maps divisions to work more closely with his. To run that entire portfolio, Google picked Raghavan, a veteran of its enterprise division who was put in charge of ads in 2018.
Retail Leads the Online Ads Blitz
Google’s e-commerce strategy banks on getting retailers to buy more ads
Before joining Google in 2012, Raghavan spent years at tech research labs and in academia, where he became an expert on web search technologies just as they began taking off. He speaks five languages and still carries himself more like a professor than a senior executive. While discussing Google’s decision to emulate the visual, rapid-fire features of TikTok, he said, “It behooves us to also start thinking about those paradigms.” He once requested classical music to accompany his entrance onstage at an event before a staffer interceded.
“He’s always surprised when he gets more responsibility,” said Jayshree Ullal, a longtime friend who runs Arista Networks Inc. “You can never tell he’s a high-powered number-two executive at Google.”
Still, Raghavan made his e-commerce ambitions clear during the first year in his new role. Google, he told colleagues, should think of users being on “journeys”—not simply coming to Google.com for information but to research and, hopefully, buy something.
He and Ready quickly decided to pull the plug on Express. They dropped the commission Google took for sales on its properties and the fees it charged merchants to list items on its shopping site, a signal to the industry that it wanted to be an open marketplace, not a competitor. “We’re not trying to put boxes on doorsteps,” Ready explained. “What we’re trying to solve is the information part of the problem.”
By that, Ready meant making it easier for consumers to find desired products, deals or brands—even those that haven’t bought an ad. Search results now identify identify discounts and loyalty programs, while new widgets list the shipping costs and hidden fees on specific purchases.  Google cut deals with Shopify Inc., Block Inc. and other commerce companies to make it more compelling for businesses to sell on Google properties.
Those features are designed for buying products like sneakers and cooking pans. But the company is also experimenting with items that aren’t on most e-commerce sites—helping consumers buy NFTs via image search or research such big-ticket purchases as real estate. The company has noticed that searchers in the market for a home, college or car will often return to Google more than 60 times with similar queries before making a decision. The idea is to customize the search experiences for these use cases in ways Google hasn’t before.
Google has already done that with certain categories, creating unique features for people searching for jobs or hotels. Companies like Yelp and the online travel industry have complained that these changes buried their sites and forced them to buy more ads to get clicks. Google’s search team has been quietly working on adding more topics. Under the project, codenamed Mercury, the search team has ceded to the advertising group such areas as “shopping, real estate, mortgages, etc,” according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg. The authors of the document prioritized boosting traffic for merchants and creating “oh wow moments!” that would lure searchers back to Google.com and, eventually, a purchase. Google declined to comment on the project, but executives have said the ads division doesn’t influence unpaid search results.
Raghavan said the company has no plans to rival real estate brokers like Redfin. And, so far, Google has resisted using the search history of repeat visitors to tailor results. That’s largely to avoid violating people’s sense of privacy, he explained. “Can you, in these situations, offer the user more support in a long-running journey, without in any way creeping them out?” Raghavan said his teams were still exploring if they could.
Some in Silicon Valley have blasted Google for filling search results with too many ads. Raghavan said increased demand from advertisers during the pandemic probably drove the recent uptick in advertising, and he expects it to cool off amid easing restrictions on travel and events.
Early Success
There are signs that Raghavan’s strategy is starting to pay off. Earlier this year, Google revealed that e-commerce advertising was a leading contributor to a 43% bump to search revenue in 2021. Google also said last year that over a billion people shop on its properties every day, though it hasn’t updated the figure. In the fall, Morgan Stanley research showed that consumers were using Google and YouTube to research products and price-shop more often than they used Amazon, EBay or Walmart. In April, the bank reported that 59% of survey respondents who are Amazon Prime members said they started researching products on Google, up from 50% in the fall.
Surce : www.bloomberg.com