Amazon was the first to introduce a voice-powered assistant housed in a speaker, but Google wasn't far behind with Google Home. Now the search giant is giving its device the ability to buy products with nothing more than a voice command, just like Amazon. For Google, the aim is to make it easy to order everyday products from its Google Home speaker in an effort to engrain the device into people's daily routines--and take aim at one of the defining features of Amazon devices like the Echo and Dot, powered by the company's Alexa voice assistant. Google Home purchases will be available through retailers participating in Google Express, the company's same-day and overnight delivery shopping service--though some areas will only have two- or three-day shipping options available to them. Google currently counts companies like Costco, Whole Foods Market, Walgreens, PetSmart and Bed Bath and Beyond as partners and has more than 50 other national and locally retailers on board.

Facial recognition technology is something that most of us take for granted. We've casually noticed that our smartphones now organize photos by people, or that Facebook somehow always knows the right friends to tag. But until recently, most people haven't realized that this technology is less of a "cool trick" and will actually significantly shape the way we do business in the next five to ten years. The technology is already being tested out in many different industries for vastly different purposes. For example, security scanners at the airport use it to allow e-passport holders to clear customs more easily; as facial recognition improves, Customs and Border Protection will be able to weed out travelers with fake passports more easily.

Amazon's Echo and its Alexa virtual assistant had a big head start before Google debuted Home, but the company has regularly announced new features to try and make up ground. Today, Google revealed a big addition and will it close to home for Amazon: shopping. You can now use Google Assistant on the company's connected smart speaker to order goods from its Express shopping service. This means that you can order food, medicine, pet supplies and more from stores like Whole Foods, Costco, Walgreens, PetSmart and Bed, Bath & Beyond. Currently, Google Express shopping offers access to over 50 retailers for same-day delivery in 12 states.

Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa can now schedule your events on Microsoft's Outlook.com as well as Google Calendar. The update, available as of Wednesday, was made to Alexa's start screen and was first reported by tech news site The Verge. An Amazon (amzn) spokesperson confirmed that the update went live Wednesday. What this means is that users can set Outlook as the default calendar for Alexa and associated devices (such as the Amazon Echo or Echo Dot) using the Alexa app. Once that's done, users can check or add new events via voice commands, such as: "Alexa, what's on my calendar today?" or "Alexa, am I free tomorrow night?"

From artificial intelligence to virtual reality, emerging technologies are rewriting the retail playbook at a rapid pace, suggests J. Walter Thompson Intelligence in a new report called Frontier(less) Retail. Launched in collaboration with WWD, the report explores the idea that brands and retailers are increasingly putting innovation at the core of their strategies. This relates to everything from digital integration through to the more future-looking technologies helping to shift their businesses forward. Rebecca Minkoff has boosted sales with smart mirrors in dressing rooms, it notes, while Kate Spade has had a hit with Everpurse, a smartphone-charging handbag. It also attributes the success of Under Armour in part to its positioning as a tech-forward brand, and references Topshop's new incubator program, Top Pitch, as a clever bid to achieve the same at a time when its young consumer base is more likely to spend on smartphones than splurge on streetwear. Within all this, however, it is keeping abreast of change that is proving one of the industry's biggest challenges.

Artificial Intelligence is the next big thing in tech, however it's already all around us; from the news you see on social media, to Alexa and Siri. It wasn't going to be long until retailers sunk their teeth into this new tool and trend. Retailers have been following the same steps in recent years, with enhanced websites being made more user friendly and attractive, to easier access to payment methods and now they're focusing on AI. The retailers that aren't getting on board with this from the on-set, will be playing catch-up over the next few years, that's for sure! According to Gartner, by 2020, 85 percent of customer interactions in retail will be managed by AI.

In 2016, an estimated 400 million people interacted with IBM's Watson: The artificial intelligence platform now processes data to assist in everything from oncology treatments to NBA draft picks. In the past year, dozens of companies, including GM, Japan Airlines, Hilton, and Pfizer, have launched initiatives using IBM's intelligence. Watson owes its ubiquity to the dozens of new AI tools, including emotional analysis and image recognition, that it offers developers. "Our mission is to let people own their own AI," says David Kenny, general manager of IBM Watson. Retail outlets such as Macy's and the Mall of America are employing Watson's language-processing tools to help shoppers navigate their stores.

The songs are organized in a monopoly in the long run. This "winner-takes-all" phenomena, a list or matrix form, giving different visibilities to the various although optimal from an efficiency standpoint, is songs, as is typically the case in online advertisement, typically considered undesirable.. online stores, or physical retail stores (e.g., (Craswell et al. This paper proposes a novel strategy that aims at addressing 2008; Lim, Rodrigues, and Zhang 2004)). Each song was the three problems identified by Salganik, Dodds, also associated with a popularity signal (e.g., (Engstrom and and Watts (2006) simultaneously: unpredictability, inefficiencies, Forsell 2014; Viglia, Furlan, and Ladrón-de Guevara 2014)), and inequalities. The strategy is a randomized segmentation i.e., the number of downloads of the song by earlier market protocol and is simple to deploy in online settings.

With an increasing number of paid writers posting fake reviews to promote or demote some target entities through Internet, review spammer detection has become a crucial and challenging task. In this paper, we propose a three-phase method to address the problem of identifying review spammer groups and individual spammers, who get paid for posting fake comments. We evaluate the effectiveness and performance of the approach on a real-life online shopping review dataset from amazon.com. The experimental result shows that our model achieved comparable or better performance than previous work on spammer detection.

Thank you for subscribing to the monthly THINK Marketing newsletter. Plenty of food for thought on the future of retail at NRF 2017, so much so that in the face of all the technology on show, Retail Reflections Founder and IBM Futurist, Andrew Busby, poses the fundamental question: Why retail? It seems everywhere we turn, we see the twin forces of consumer expectation and unrelenting pace and influence of technology are having a profound effect upon traditional retail business models. In the last 100 years, retail has hardly changed. If Harry Selfridge walked into his eponymous store in London today, he would, I'm sure, recognise the department store he opened in 1909.