Furniture giant, IKEA, is looking to court gamers and people living in cramped spaces with a new wave of robotic furniture and niche e-sport accessories. The Swedish furniture and home accessory giant has always been known for its clean modern aesthetics, but for customers in Hong Kong and Japan that modern style will also be functionally futuristic. Rognan, as the company has dubbed it, is a robotic storage unit that can move from side-to-side using a remote touch pad and is able to dispense space-consuming furniture on-demand, including a couch, a bed, and a desk. IKEA's new robot storage unit is designed to help people maximize space in urban apartments -- many of which are not known for their ample room Aside from adding a bit of sci-fi flare to one's apartment, the unit, which was developed in partnership with furniture startup Ori Living, is actually designed to solve a problem in many urban apartments -- space, or the lack thereof. 'More and more people are living and moving into cities where approximately an extra 1.5 million people join the urban population every week,' said IKEA. 'With Rognan as a robotic furniture solution for small space living, people will be able to turn small spaces into smart spaces that have all the comfort and convenience of a home.'

Your smartphone is an ideal shopping tool -- always with you and armed with a rear camera that captures things you might want to buy. Now imagine its front camera looking back at you, judging your reaction to what you're seeing and taking your smile as a cue to urge you to make a purchase. That's the innovation behind NexTech's latest "sentiment-based technology solution" for its Try-It-On retail augmented reality platform, thanks to AI provided by Microsoft Azure. If it sounds a little creepy, that's probably because AI is learning to do what human salespeople have done for generations: gauge a customer's sentiment and capitalize on it to make a sale. The difference is that NexTech is making facial recognition and analysis possible within retailers' augmented reality apps and websites, rather than limiting it to physical stores.

One of the most significant sources of income in retail banking comes from lending, but that does not come without risk and time-consuming activities. In traditional retail banking specific processes need to be followed to make sure new business is acquired at acceptable risks levels set by each organization. Starting with the Financial Services Representative, passing to the underwriter, and ending in retail operations, all stakeholders play a critical role in getting a new deal mitigating risks. AI – Artificial Intelligence – could help not only to streamline this process but also to help gather crucial information in case no historical credit information is found. AI can highly increase successful lending in sales and from a credit management perspective by correlating a number of different indicators from account transactions, bill payments regularity, the average time between deposits and withdraws, variance and trend on month-end balances, along with behaviour from good or defaulted credit clients.

EZeeBUY Smartphone Application: The EZeeBUY app with artificial intelligence will help consumers through a one-touch buy now experience by simply taking a picture of the desired product with your smartphone camera and the EZeeBUY app. The EZeeBUY app will be fully integrated with social media and enable EZeeBUY customers to share all their buying experiences on social media with their friends, followers or as an influencer; creating millions of social media engagements that will accelerate rapid and viral adoption of the EZeeBUY app. More… Global Social Media and Lifestyle Commerce Platform: Connecting retailers, brand manufacturers and consumers in every country with a modern social media and lifestyle commerce platform driven by artificial intelligence for a new digital buying experience for the modern digital shopper. More… Global Precision Brand Advertising Platform: The global precision brand advertising platform driven by artificial intelligence will enable retailers and brand manufacturers in every country to offer personalized products and services for EZeeBUY customers that match their personality and unique lifestyle. More… Global Family Shared Wishlist Platform: The global family shared wishlist platform driven by artificial intelligence, enables grandparents, aunts, uncles, spouses, parents, and children to share and buy desired products with their EZeeBUY app.

High accuracy localisation technologies exist but are prohibitively expensive to deploy for large indoor spaces such as warehouses, factories, and supermarkets to track assets and people. However, these technologies can be used to lend their highly accurate localisation capabilities to low-cost, commodity, and less-accurate technologies. In this paper, we bridge this link by proposing a technology-agnostic calibration framework based on artificial intelligence to assist such low-cost technologies through highly accurate localisation systems. A single-layer neural network is used to calibrate less accurate technology using more accurate one such as BLE using UWB and UWB using a professional motion tracking system. On a real indoor testbed, we demonstrate an increase in accuracy of approximately 70% for BLE and 50% for UWB. Not only the proposed approach requires a very short measurement campaign, the low complexity of the single-layer neural network also makes it ideal for deployment on constrained devices typically for localisation purposes.

EZeeBUY introduces the next platform revolution, driven by artificial intelligence, to disrupt the global $27 trillion retail industry by enabling retailers and brand manufacturers, in every country, to remain competitive while attracting and retaining the modern digital shopper. The platform revolution proved enormously successful for Uber and EZeeBUY aims to do the same for the retail industry.

Retail is a fast-moving sector, and success in the industry means keeping up with technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of them, and evidence shows it's the future of retail. Retailers often feel understandably reluctant to give emerging technologies a try unless they feel extremely confident in the eventual payoff. Capgemini Research Institute took an in-depth look at AI's impact on retail, and the comprehensive study revealed numerous exciting things. And they focus on customer-facing applications in nearly three-fourths of cases.

When the Amazon Prime Day deals roll into town in July, it's a no-brainer that the Amazon Echo Dot will get a big discount like it does every year. The thing is, it'll be nowhere near as good as this one - and it ends at 9am tomorrow. This is a UK-only deal, but we've rounded up the latest top deals in the US over on our Memorial Day sales page. UK readers, be sure to check out the Bank Holiday sales this weekend too. We're expecting Prime Day to bring the Echo Dot down to £29.99 as per usual, or £24.99 at the very best if Google aggressively price cuts the Google Home Mini as the search giant can't help but wind Amazon up any chance it gets with its line of rival smart speakers.

Offline retail is here to stay," says founder of in-store experiential service. Retail tech startup RealTell is launching its flagship product "Realtell Retail" for fashion and lifestyle brands. "Offline retail is here to stay," said Ashish Mittal, chief mentor at Turning Ideas Ventures (which incubated RealTell) "and this startup helps retailers, primarily the fashion and apparel brands, to drive footfall and increase basket size by gamifying the offline shopping experience." The company was started by two young college entrepreneurs from Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) Delhi University, Sanyam Gupta and Shivendra Misra. In a statement, the company said its kiosk solutions will help shoppers to discover new combo prices for the fashion and other retails products every day, based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, driving footfall to stores and turning the buying experience into a game. Press materials released by the brand observed that while online retailers have detailed information about shoppers – because every click can be tracked – offline retail stores lose out on valuable shopper insights due to the lack of proper infrastructure and technology. With its patented technology, RealTell Retail gamifies the shopping experience by letting shoppers discover a dynamic price for products of their choice. "Imagine walking into a store, scanning your items at a kiosk and saving money at each visit," said Misra. "What's exciting is that the prices and the offers change every day.

The AWS DeepRacer League is the world's first global autonomous racing league. There are races at 21 AWS Summits globally and select Amazon events, as well as monthly virtual races happening online and open for racing. No matter where you are in the world or your skill level, you can join the league. Get a chance to win AWS DeepRacer cars and the top prize of an all-expenses-paid trip to re:Invent 2019, to compete in the AWS DeepRacer Championship Cup. The competition is heating up as the Summit Circuit hit the halfway mark in Sweden this week.