Of the three shopping days this weekend, Cyber Monday is arguably the most chatbot-friendly due to the digital nature of the day. "We're seeing a continued excitement for interacting with AI products, like chatbots, through the heavy holiday promotion of tech products with built-in AI, like Amazon's Echo and Alexa and Google's new Home," said Andrew Seay, director of mobile experience at Vibes. But as for exactly how chatbots played a role in the shopping experience and number of sales, experts say it's only up from here. "Chatbots will be giving Santa some help this holiday season for a few boys and girls on the digital nice list, but they are unlikely to give retailers the needle-moving sales boost they're looking for," said Jake Bennett, CTO at POP. "Chatbots are just too new, and there are too many logistical hurdles for widespread adoption in 2016." Bennett said that, on the one hand, chatbots provide an ideal platform for an interactive holiday gift guide -- quite literally guiding customers to certain products.

It's that time of year again when Mary Meeker, the great seer of the internet once again releases her annual Internet Trends 2016 report. If by chance you don't know who Ms. Meeker is she is a partner in the VC firm Kliener Perkins and is acclaimed by Forbes to be the 77th most powerful woman in the world. She started issuing these reports in 1995 at Morgan Stanley and was and is still widely regarded as a guru of the internet. Say what you will, and she is a bit of controversial character, she gathers and analyzes voluminous amounts of data and has a well deserved track record for spotting big picture trends before they are widely recognized. You should be following her.

The price for video game consoles actually went up by about 0.5 percent between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, according to Adobe. But tablets, televisions, toys and pet care supplies all saw price drops of between 12 and 21.5 percent. Monday's sales represent a 12.1 percent increase over last year's figures, surpassing expectations. Ebay beat out Amazon for the top-selling retailer of the day, followed by Macy's, Walmart, H&M, Target, Nordstrom, Kohl's, Home Depot and Gap. Liza Landsman, chief marketing officer at Jet.com, an online retailer acquired by Walmart earlier this year, believes the November election can help explain the spike in sales. "The U.S. election dominated the news cycle and the time people spent online, and a lot of what we are seeing online is a condensing of that demand into a shorter time period," she told Reuters.

If you made a purchase online during Cyber Monday: Congratulations, you were part of history. According to an analysis of visitors to retail sites conducted by Adobe, Cyber Monday 2016 was the biggest online shopping day ever. A record-setting $3.39 billion dollars was spent on Monday--a 10.2 percent increase from the amount spent in 2015. Though the holiday for online shoppers saw a significant bump from the year prior, it only narrowly surpassed this year's Black Friday in online sales. The analysis from Adobe is based on aggregated and anonymous data collected from more than 23 billion visits to retail websites.

With machine-learning technology, retailers can address the common--and costly--problem of having too much or too little fresh food in stock. Fresh food, already a fiercely competitive arena in grocery retail, is becoming an even more crowded battleground. Discounters, convenience-store chains, and online players are recognizing the power of fresh-food categories to drive store visits, basket size, and customer loyalty. With fresh products accounting for up to 40 percent of grocers' revenue and one-third of cost of goods sold, getting fresh-food retailing right is more important than ever.1 1.Raphael Buck and Arnaud Minvielle, "A fresh take on food retailing," Perspectives on retail and consumer goods, Winter 2013/14. Fresh food is perishable, demand is highly variable, and lead times are often uncertain.

This timely text/reference describes the development and implementation of large-scale distributed processing systems using open source tools and technologies such as Hadoop, Scalding and Spark. Comprehensive in scope, the book presents state-of-the-art material on building high performance distributed computing systems, providing practical guidance and best practices as well as describing theoretical software frameworks. Fulfilling the need for both introductory material for undergraduate students of computer science and detailed discussions for software engineering professionals, this book will aid a broad audience to understand the esoteric aspects of practical high performance computing through its use of solved problems, research case studies and working source code. Srinivasa is Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology (MSRIT), Bangalore, India. His other publications include the Springer title Soft Computing for Data Mining Applications.

High street retailers could be a thing of the past by 2050 as virtual reality takes over the way we shop, experts predict. The only time we can expect to be asked "Are you being served?" is when interacting with an artificially intelligent app. The kind of department store epitomised by Grace Brothers in the 1970s sitcom of that name is likely to be consigned to history by the middle of the century. Instead people will make all their purchases from home, trying on clothes in virtual reality changing rooms and getting advice from AI (artificial intelligence) shop assistants that know exactly how to cater for their tastes. Online deliveries dropped into the back garden by flying robot drones will become a part of every day life.

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