Right after you've given thanks for friends and family, and eaten an excessive amount of food, it's time for that other holiday: Black Friday. As fashionable as it is to say you're not interested and would rather do something else, it's hard not at least be mildly curious if there are some good deals to be found. If so, make sure you grab your smartphone and get it ready for all the shopping madness. You'll want to tap into the best shopping apps and some Google services to survive this day. Here's a brief guide that will help you find deals you didn't know you needed and navigate through the chaos so you don't spend all day in a fruitless chase.

'Data is not about insights, it's about generating money,' says Rubikloud's chief product officer Ever since the financial crash of 2008, businesses around the world have struggled to grow at the same levels they once enjoyed – but big data and machine learning could help turn things around, and help companies reconnect with customers. "The reality now is this plateaued, zero-growth type of world, where you're in the 0.5-1 per cent [range]," Ayoub said, speaking at WIRED Retail 2016. There's a lot of companies that do more small scale retail that are seeing enormous amounts of growth but in general, this is the kind of climate we're living in." Ayoub isn't concerned so much with why this is happening, but rather how retailers are reacting to the change. One way businesses have tried to keep their costs down is by consolidating, then leveraging greater purchasing power to buy stock at lower prices. "Big fish buy big fish, then bigger fish buy them," said Ayoub. "That allows them to pressure vendors to push down prices.

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Chatbots can help secure purchases but also ship packages. Just in time for the holidays, UPS has launched a beta version of its chatbot that will mimic human conversations to help users find shipping locations, learn shipping rates and track packages. Available through Facebook Messenger, Skype and Amazon, UPS' release said it is different from the UPS website or mobile app in that users can use brief phrases like "shipping rates" and receive a voice response. "We see chatbots becoming an important communication channel for our customers over the next few years, and we're setting the stage for the incorporation of artificial intelligence throughout our customer-facing technologies," Stuart Marcus, UPS vice president of customer technology marketing, said in a release. Investing in a chatbot is likely useful for UPS' functionality, especially at times of high volume, such as the holiday rush.

During Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2016, consumers should watch out for scams that come through spam, insecure public networks and apps that might seem legitimate but could be taking over your phones and computers, experts say. Here are a dozen steps you can take to avoid becoming a victim. This story, "12 tips for safer Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping" was originally published by Network World. Tim Greene covers security and keeps an eye on Microsoft for Network World.

A common application of Fuzzy.ai is in powering custom recommendation engines. For many companies, generic solutions don't offer enough flexibility (or require too much work manually setting up links between all of the different products in the catalog), and building a custom recommendation engine from scratch requires way too much time and effort. To show how easily it can be done, we've put together an open source Product Recommendation plugin for Drupal Commerce stores that lets anyone spin up their own product recommendation engine with Fuzzy.ai. When a user is looking at a product page on an online store, the goal of this recommendation agent is to identify the other products in the catalog that might be relevant. The Fuzzy.ai API uses those rules to provide recommendations.

Just ask any retail worker about working during the holiday season: Often, they'll have horror stories about the days after Thanksgiving. It's no wonder that during these stressful times, employees of large retail stores don't often get the attention or help they need when they're so focused on serving customers. For this reason, the worker center Our Walmart released an Android app last Monday with the aim of providing commonly asked questions to Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. employees that sent the discount retailer into a tizzy. It was an innovative app that worked too well, said the app's engineer Jason Van Anden, developer and president of Quadrant 2, to Forbes. "Our Walmart had reached out this past April and I was amazing a the sheer number of non-unionized employees," Van Anden told Forbes.

It's the holiday season, which means it's time for retailers to bombard you with sales, special offers, and other attempts to sell you things. For many people, the Black Friday-to-Christmas shopping rush will lead to Amazon. It makes sense: The e-commerce giant sells a whole lot of products and makes it very easy to buy them. Many times, those products are less expensive than they are elsewhere. Though most people seem to be satisfied with the Amazon shopping experience, certain aspects of it can still be misleading.

John Charles Thomas was born in Akron, Ohio and attended Ellet High School. He graduated from Case Western Reserve University majoring in psychology and minoring in mathematics and drama. He received a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Michigan. His dissertation compared human performance in a problem solving task to that of an early AI system called "The General Problem Solver." After graduate school, Dr. Thomas managed a research project on the psychology of aging at Harvard Medical School.

Using a system built in house, Ocado is in the process of eliminating manual review and sorting of the more than 2,000 daily customer service emails it receives. British web grocer Ocado Group Plc. receives about 2,000 customer service emails a day on average. That number can easily double or triple during the holiday season or when other issues come up such as bad weather that may delay a customer's order, says Dan Nelson, head of data for Ocado, No. 23 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Europe 500. Nelson says the problem until recently is that retailer, which sells solely online and was launched in 2000, used to task its customer service staff with going through and sorting each email that came in. "A lot of customer service reps' time was spent filtering emails," Nelson says.