NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Jan 12, 2017) - Cloverleaf, a retail technology company for the modern brick-and-mortar marketer and merchandiser, today announced shelfPoint, the industry's first dynamic shelf solution with built-in emotional artificial intelligence (Emotion AI) capabilities. With shelfPoint, brands and retailers can now capture customer engagement and sentiment data at the moment of purchase decision -- something previously unavailable in physical retail stores. Despite the rise of online shopping in recent years, Forrester1 predicts that 88% of purchases in 2017 will still be made in physical stores. Yet, retailers lack the in-the-moment tools necessary to captivate shoppers and gain insights that lead to sales uplift. While advancements in e-commerce analytics have upleveled marketers' understanding of consumer behaviors, brands and retailers still have little-to-no insight as to what happens in-store.

MasterCard wants to use your face to help fend off fraudsters. Using a new system called MasterCard Identity Check -- or, colloquially, "selfie pay" -- the credit card company will use biometric methods like face recognition and fingerprint scans to better secure online shopping. Right now, Mastercard offers a feature that financial institutions can enable that lets customers set up a password for online payments to help prevent fraud. The new system will use the same principle, but instead of relying on a password that could be forgotten or stolen, it uses your face or fingerprint. Consumers will go through all the normal steps of filling out credit card information when making an online purchase, but this feature adds another step: The website will send a notification through an app on customers' smartphones that asks them to verify their identity.

Back in 2007, even before the iPhone was launched, giving us a powerful computer in our pockets or handbags, I started outlining a vision for Web 3.0. Tim Berners-Lee, a father of the World Wide Web, talks about the "Semantic Web," a way that computers employ the meaning of words -- not just pattern matching -- along with logical rules to connect independent nuggets of data and so create more context for information. The formula that makes the most sense to me is this: Web 3.0 results from combining content, commerce, community and context, with personalization and vertical search. Or, to put it in a handy phrase: Web 3.0 (4C P VS). Web 1.0 was all about driving online commerce and trying to find "anything" in the tangled jungle of the Web.

Online retailer Amazon (AMZN) is embracing its inner tech geek with the introduction of two new technology products, hoping to further capitalize on its surprisingly popular home-based voice-controlled Echo product that has been dubbed, Alexa. In this March 2, 2016 photo, David Limp, Amazon Senior Vice President of Devices, center, speaks behind an Amazon Echo in San Francisco. Amazon.com is introducing two devices, the Amazon Tap and Echo Dot, that are designed to amplify the role that its voice-controlled assistant Alexa plays in people's homes and lives. Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version incorrectly identified Amazon's Fire Phone. SAN FRANCISCO -- The Amazon Echo is turning out to be a sleeper hit.

NEW YORK -- This year you can purchase a bit more of the sci-fi future. Hoverboards aren't quite what the name implies, but there's bona fide virtual reality, a droid you should be looking for and a basketball that improves your free throw, all one shopping-click away. These tech gadgets make the pocket-sized computer that talks to you and dials your friends seem quaint. But don't worry, there are plenty of smartphones on sale, too. Sphero's new $150 BB-8 droid is expected to be one of the hottest Star Wars gifts this holiday season.

There are eyes on you, behind the bright lights and mirrored panels. Pick up a boot and a camera will make sure you don't slip it into your bag. Cross the threshold into a department store and there is a tacit understanding that you will be watched, but new technology is leading retailers to grow a different set of peepers – eyes less focused on shoplifting and more interested in your age, sex, size, head, shoulders, knees and toes. A few months ago, IT firm Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) put out a report that claimed around 30% of retailers use facial recognition technology to track customers in-store. It is technology that can identify people by analysing and comparing facial features from a database.

This fall, customers cruising the aisles of Lowe's home improvement stores in the San Francisco Bay Area may see a new type of employee taking inventory and assisting shoppers. You won't find a nametag on this worker, but you won't confuse it with other employees, either. The new kid in town is the LoweBot, an autonomous retail service robot that scans and audits store inventory on the floor. It uses voice recognition to identify products for customers and lead them to the right shelf -- in multiple languages. The retailer is deploying LoweBots at 11 of its Bay Area stores over a seven-month period using NAVii robots made by Fellow Robots, following a successful two-year pilot program of a first-generation robot called OSHbot that was tested at one of Lowe's Orchard Supply Hardware stores.

Shopping online from the comfort of your desk chair is certainly easier than traveling to a store and lugging home heavy bags. But for all its effortlessness, online shopping falls short when it comes to finding something you weren't looking for but would like to buy. Recommendation systems, such as those built by Amazon, try to uncover these gems, but many fall short of appropriately catering to an individual shopper. Now a Seattle-based startup called Cleverset thinks it has the secret to the next-generation recommendation system: a type of computer modeling found mainly in artificial-intelligence research labs. Cleverset's system weighs the importance of the relationship among individual shoppers, their behavior on the site, the behavior of similar shoppers, and external factors such as seasons, holidays, and events like the Super Bowl.

The mobile phone has long ceased being a simple two-way communication device: today's handheld is a mini personal computer, complete with multimedia players, maps, and Web browsers. Now researchers at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) want to push the phone farther. They have developed software that turns a phone into a thoughtful personal assistant, one that helps people find fun things to do. The software, called Magitti, uses a combination of cues–including the time of day, a person's location, her past behaviors, and even her text messages–to infer her interests. It then shows a helpful list of suggestions, including concerts, movies, bookstores, and restaurants.

Most of us only dream about a robot that will pick up pizza boxes and assemble furniture, but Andrew Ng, an assistant computer science professor at Stanford, is building one. Leader of the STair -- or Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot -- project, Ng, 30, believes every home eventually will have one. There are four concrete challenges: to have the robot able to clean up after a dinner party, clear the table, load the dishwasher; be able to fetch items from around the office or home; to assemble an Ikea bookshelf; and to give a tour of this research lab. Within a decade we would like to develop the technology. A year ago I said 15 years.