According to a report by Bloomberg, Microsoft is increasingly positioning itself as the cloud vendor of choice for retailers seeking to avoid Amazon, as well as more generalized software vendors.
The software giant has been rolling out a number of cloud tools and services designed specifically for the retail market. Microsoft has had tremendous success in this market, as many retailers want to avoid relying on software made by their primary competitor, Amazon.
“A key part of our offering is that we partner and we don’t compete,” Shelley Bransten, Corporate Vice President, Global Retail & Consumer Goods, told Bloomberg.
One such feature that has come from that partnership is one that allows Teams users to use their phones as walkie-talkies for in-store communication. Microsoft is quick to point out, however, that features such as this one have value far beyond the retail environment.
The end result of this focus has been some large, high-profile defections from competing products to Microsoft. Ikea, for example, has already moved 70,000 employees from Slack to Teams and “plans to have the rest of its 165,000-person workforce on Office 365 cloud software and Teams by the end of spring.”
As Bloomberg points out, Microsoft’s stature in this market is turning heads. CEO Satya Nadella is scheduled to speak at the National Retail Federation’s annual show next week, “underscoring how significant the industry is to Amazon’s biggest cloud competitors.”
Walmart has just announced the first of its kind technology aimed at speeding up online grocery orders.
The Alphabot system was created specifically for Walmart by Alert Innovation and is set to help Walmart launch its first pilot program in their Salem, New Hampshire supercenter.
Alphabot is designed as a high-speed automation system that significantly speeds up the process of collecting and preparing an online grocery order. The systems uses autonomous carts to retrieve the items and send them to workstations where associates “pick, assemble and deliver orders to the customers,” as well as check the final order for accuracy.
As part of the Salem store’s re-grand opening, “a 20,000-square-foot extension connected to the store houses the new system and will serve as a dedicated grocery pickup point with drive-thru lanes for customers. When completed, automated mobile carts will retrieve ordered items – stored warehouse-style in this new space – then deliver them to our associates at one of four pick stations.”
According to the company, “the vast majority of grocery products we offer in-store will be fulfilled through this system, though our personal shoppers will still handpick produce and other fresh items.”
Walmart plans to have Alphabot running by the end of the year and hopes to roll it out across the U.S.
It was bound to happen. With the success of Impossible Burger, Impossible Foods has moved on to the next logical meat replacement products: Impossible Sausage and Impossible Pork.
According to Business Insider, “Impossible Foods will be testing its first sausage product at 139 Burger King restaurants at the end of the month, located in Savannah, Georgia; Lansing, Michigan; Springfield, Illinois; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Montgomery, Alabama. Those restaurants will be getting the Impossible Croissan’wich, a sandwich that consists of egg, cheese, and Impossible Sausage on a toasted croissant.”
Although not yet available, the company’s Impossible Pork is designed to be used in any recipe that calls for ground pork. Like Impossible Burger, the new product is made using heme, the protein that gives the patties their meat-like look and texture.
Rachel Konrad, Impossible Foods chief communications officer told Business Insider the heme in Impossible Pork has been tweaked to make it more consistent with pork’s texture. Konrad also said Impossible Pork will likely show up in restaurants before it hits grocery shelves, just like Impossible Burgerbefore it.
The company is working on steaks, and may branch into fish and poultry. If the company is as successful as it has been with beef, it may well convert far more people to the plant-based food.
Amazon has teamed up with ExxonMobile to give drivers the option of using Alexa to pay for fuel, according to CNN Business.
The new feature should be available at 11,500 Exxon and Mobil gas stations beginning in April. According to CNN, “customers using Alexa to pay for gas will be asked to confirm the station location and the pump number. Transactions will then be processed using Amazon Pay with payment information stored in their Amazon account.”
Integrating Alexa with gas station purchases has benefits for everyone involved. ExxonMobile sees it as a way to differentiate their stations, adding a level of convenience that just might bring in more drivers.
“Paying for fuel from the comfort of your car is an innovative way to really wow consumers,” said ExxonMobil’s consumer marketing manager Devin Miller.
Alexa integration could also improve security. There have been a number of serious cybercrime attacks targeting fuel stations recently, with anyone who has used a credit card to purchase gas at risk. Just as using Apple Pay is safer than using a debit or credit card, using Alexa to pay for fuel adds another layer of separation between cards and the cyber criminals who want to steal them.
KRCR News is reporting that California has opened the doors to driverless delivery vehicles, provided they receive a permit from the DMV.
According to the report, “the Office of Administrative Law approved revised regulations on Monday that will allow companies with a DMV permit to operate autonomous delivery vehicles weighing less than 10,001 pounds.”
Permits will be issued for autonomous vehicles both with and without a backup safety driver. Driverless delivery vehicles will have to follow the same guidelines and standards as autonomous passenger vehicles. The DMV is expected to begin approving applications within 30 days.
The change in regulation is a welcome win for the autonomous vehicle market. If the tests and deployments are successful in California, it will be hard for critics to make valid arguments against their safety and practicality in other jurisdictions.
According to The Hill, Facebook has admitted to senators that it ignores users’ settings and continues to track their location in order to profit off of that information.
Senators Christopher Coons (D-Del.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) had questioned how the social media giant handled location tracking, specifically whether it continued to track individuals even if they turned location tracking off. In reply to the senators’ request, Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer, Rob Sherman, indicated that the company continues to use other means at its disposal to track users, regardless of their location sharing settings.
“When location services is off, Facebook may still understand people’s locations using information people share through their activities on Facebook or through IP addresses and other network connections they use,” Sherman wrote.
Sherman went on to add that as people use Facebook, they often leave indicators of their activities, such as checking in at a restaurant, location-tagging a photo or appearing in a friend’s photo, all of which the company uses to continue tracking them. In addition, the company uses this indirect tracking information to keep providing targeted ads based on that location data, even if location tracking is turned off on their phone.
Needless to say, the senators were not pleased with this admission and had strong words regarding the company’s behavior.
“Facebook claims that users are in control of their own privacy, but in reality, users aren’t even given an option to stop Facebook from collecting and monetizing their location information,” Coons said. “The American people deserve to know how tech companies use their data, and I will continue working to find solutions to protect Americans’ sensitive information.”
“There is no opting out. No control over your personal information,” Hawley tweeted. “That’s Big Tech. And that’s why Congress needs to take action.”
Microsoft announced a major upgrade to the Windows search bar, giving users the ability to search using an image.
The feature is designed to work with screenshots. “Simply click the Bing Visual Search button in the bottom right corner and snip any part of your screen to search the web using the image,” according to the post.
Bing has had camera-based searches since 2017, but this new upgrade is designed to make it faster and easier for someone to find images similar to what they’re already looking at onscreen.
“We found people also wanted to search with screenshots, so we brought searching with screen snips to the Windows search bar,” says Nektarios Ioannides, Bing Image Search lead.
The feature recognizes clothes, furniture, animals, flowers, landmarks, celebrities and even text within images. There is also an API available so developers can incorporate the feature in their own apps.
The feature is rolling out to U.S. customers first, with International markets to follow and requires Windows 10 May 2019 Update or newer.
High fuel prices aren’t the only thing travelers need to worry about at the pump. Visa has issued a warning that anyone who has pumped gas may have had their credit card information stolen.
Visa has been tracking three different types of attacks “targeting merchant point-of-sale (POS) systems that were likely carried out by sophisticated cybercrime groups. Two of the attacks targeted the POS systems of North American fuel dispenser merchants.” At least two of the attacks also appear to have been carried out by a group known as FIN8.
The cyber criminals gained access to the target’s network and then installed malware that specifically harvested credit card information. In at least one of the attacks, the “threat actors compromised the merchant via a phishing email sent to an employee. The email contained a malicious link that, when clicked, installed a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) on the merchant network and granted the threat actors network access. The actors then conducted reconnaissance of the corporate network, and obtained and utilized credentials to move laterally into the POS environment.”
In the second type of attack, magnetic swipe cards were targeted, although chip-based cards were not.
Ultimately, Visa concludes by expressing concern that cyber criminals are increasingly targeting brick-and-mortar businesses, and fuel stations in particular, with relatively sophisticated attacks. These attacks are much more involved than simply skimming credit card information via pay-at-the-pump terminals. Visa recommends fuel stations moved to chip readers as soon as possible to increase security.
In the past few years, some tech companies have grown to huge proportions. These are companies that many people use every single day. The biggest tech companies are so huge that they were responsible for 68% of US GDP growth in 2018. Just the Facebook owned sites, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, made up 26% of all social media internet traffic and 16% of online messaging, respectively. Nearly all Americans conduct searches on Google-owned platforms, whether it be using Google’s search engine or even or YouTube. Many people have asked whether these sites have grown “too big to fail.”
1890’s Sherman Antitrust Act outlawed monopolies and cartels to encourage economic growth and competition. It was prompted by exorbitant prices and lack of competition when monopolies got to big. Standard Oil owned the lion’s share of oil production and sales, while U.S. Steel was in the same position for steel manufacturing and sales. Though antitrust and anti-monopoly laws have existed in the U.S. for over a century, ensuring that markets can’t be totally controlled as they were when the laws were created, some are starting to apply those laws to today’s tech giants.
The 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act amended prior legislation to add clear definitions and regulations and placed the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) in charge of enforcing these laws. More recently, in 1998 Microsoft began offering a free web browser with its expanding software bundle, and its chief competitor, Netscape, soon collapsed. This sparked the DOJ to file charges alleging monopolistic acts, and the result was that Microsoft had to be split into two companies, Windows operating system and Office software suite. Many believe that the government’s case paved the way for new companies like Google and Facebook. Antitrust laws empower regulators to stop mergers that reduce competition, yet big tech companies have no trouble and little push-back on acquisitions of smaller companies.
A market share of at least 50% is required is needed before the courts can declare a monopoly, and the big tech companies are just a hair below that 50% marker. Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google make up an astounding 43% of all internet traffic around the world, Apple owns 41% of all smartphones and 46% on all smartwatches, and Amazon has 49% of all eCommerce sales.
That said, the dollar market share and the human market share paint two totally different pictures. In the US, 7 out of every 10 people have a Facebook account, 2 in 3 have bought something off of Amazon, and over 90% of Americans normally use Google Search as their main search engine. Big tech has the majority of all sales and especially all internet traffic. Because of this, many customers, consumers, competitors, and economists are calling for big tech to be broken up from its massive proportions and subsequent power. Find out how big tech might be broken up and how that will maintain the good experiences we already have while competition can still get a foothold here.
Google has brought Incognito Mode to Google Maps for iOS, according to an announcement on the company’s website.
According to the blog post, when Google Maps is in Incognito Mode, “the places you search for or navigate to won’t be saved to your Google Account and you won’t see personalized features within Maps, like restaurant recommendations based on dining spots you’ve been to previously. Using Incognito mode on your phone will not update your Location History, so the places you go won’t be saved to your Timeline.”
Google has been working to address concerns about how it handles users’ private data, unveiling new ways for customers to interact with their data and manage what is stored. Incognito Mode is another step in the right direction, allowing individuals to keep their travels private.
Earlier this year, Apple unveiled the Apple Card, a credit card issued in partnership with Goldman Sachs. Today, the company took the next logical step, announcing that Apple Card can now be used to purchase an iPhone interest-free for 24 months.
According to Apple’s website, “just choose your new iPhone and then select Apple Card Monthly Installments as your payment option in the Apple Store app or online at apple.com. If you don’t have Apple Card, you can easily apply when you check out on your iPhone. Or you can visit an Apple Store and a Specialist can help you purchase an iPhone with Apple Card Monthly Installments. You can also apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone before you go shopping for your next iPhone.”
The iPhone’s purchase price will be decided into 24 monthly payments, paid via Apple Card Monthly Installments. The Monthly Installments can be monitored and maintained in the Wallet app.
The new option is similar to that offered by many carriers, with the cost of the phone split into interest-free payments across 24 months. One advantage of using the Apple Card, however, is that the purchase earns 3 percent Daily Cash. Apple makes a point of highlighting that users don’t have to wait the full two years to get the Daily Cash. Instead, it is immediately added to Wallet.
This promotion is just the latest example of why tech companies are increasingly moving into the finance market, and the integration benefits that come from doing so.
TripAdvisor has announced the acquisition of SinglePlatform from its parent company, Endurance International Group.
SinglePlatform works with restaurants to help them publish and manage their menus online, as well as other pertinent information, such as their hours of operation and contact information. The service has become increasingly important to restaurants, given that “93 percent of diners check menus online before choosing a place to eat.”
“We are obsessed with making restaurateurs’ jobs easier and more successful, and our acquisition of SinglePlatform is an important step in offering them a place to conveniently manage their entire online presence across the web from TripAdvisor,” said Bertrand Jelensperger, senior vice president, TripAdvisor Restaurants. “We look forward to bringing SinglePlatform’s technology and know-how to a truly global audience to help millions of restaurant owners and managers unlock more digital opportunities.”
“We could not be more excited to join forces with TripAdvisor,” said Josh Glantz, senior vice president and general manager, SinglePlatform. “SinglePlatform’s strength in the United States combined with TripAdvisor’s global reach and advertising platform for restaurants perfectly positions our combined team to offer more solutions for owner-operators and multi-location brands everywhere to reach consumers at the moment they are looking for dining options.”
The combination of TripAdvisor and SinglePlatform is a logical one, as TripAdvisor is one of the platforms SinglePlatform publishes information to. Meanwhile, TripAdvisor has been working to expand its services and value to the restaurant industry and the new acquisition will help it make significant strides in that direction.
“Better late than never” goes the old saying. Of course, well over a decade late may be pushing it a bit. Craigslist doesn’t appear to have gotten the memo, however, as they have finally released an official iOS app—a full 11 years after the App Store debuted.
Craigslist Categories
Despite being late to the game, the app is #5 in the Shopping category at the time of writing, providing a small demonstration of the staying power of the classifieds site. The app offers all the basic functionality one would expect, including the ability to view ads, search items, post items for sale and manage an account.
The app offers several main categories, such as Community, For Sale, Gigs, Housing, Jobs, Resumes and Services, with each one having additional subcategories.
The Android version has not been officially released yet, but there is a beta version available.
Dave Rubin used his show today to announce the launch of his new venture, Locals.com, “subscription-based communities that give power to creators, not platforms.”
“Today, is a big day. We’ve got some announcements and some major stuff cooking,” Rubin said to introduce his venture. “This is basically going to be a live stream that will culminate a year of my life that I really haven’t been talking about, that I’ve been kind of teasing about for the last year.
“But on top of doing this show, and touring, and going to colleges, and standup, and writing a book—somehow I managed to squeeze that in, in the last year or two—I also started a tech company…to solve as many of the problems that are humanly possible that we all know are sort of the biggest problems of the day.”
Rubin said he wasn’t talking about political problems, cultural problems or just social problems—he was talking about all of them at once, especially in the context of tech often making them worse.
Using his own show as an example, Rubin talked about the high-quality production they routinely release on YouTube—one rivaling a television studio production. In spite of that, it’s extremely difficult to engage with subscribers. De-boosting, de-ranking and shadow-banning are just a few of the words used to describe how tech companies manipulate viewership and subscriber bases.
Another concern Rubin talked about was tech companies being the gatekeepers of free speech. When there are large, monolithic platforms, there have to be one-size-fits-all rules about what can and cannot be said. Unfortunately, that often leaves room for abuses on all sides.
The goal of Locals.com is to avoid all of those challenges by creating smaller communities, each with their own rules and guidelines their members must follow. Therefore, for his own community, he has set very open guidelines, only banning things that violate the law or constitute ‘schmucky, troll-like’ behavior. Rubin likened it to inviting people to his home. While he is a firm believer in free speech, that doesn’t mean he wants everyone and anyone coming into his family’s home and saying whatever they want with no regard for him or his family. Having smaller communities, rather than monolithic platforms, gives community leaders and creators that ability to define the atmosphere for their own community.
Rubin also highlighted the collaborative nature of Locals.com, where different communities can join together and cooperate on their feeds, essentially creating networks of like-minded communities. This, in turn, gives creators the ability to more quickly grow their subscribers and reach.
Locals.com already has some big-name creators onboard, with Rubin promising more information and reveals in the coming weeks. If his plan is as successful as it has the potential to be, Locals.com could well be one of the most successful and revolutionary ways for creators to finally control their own destiny.
Polte has announced its Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud is now available on the AWS Marketplace. Polte is a Cloud Location over Cellular (C-LoC) provider, offering a patented Location-as-a-Service (LaaS) solution as an alternative to traditional GPS.
According to the company website, “the Polte Cloud provides seamless indoor and outdoor coverage leveraging cloud computing and existing 4G and 5G cellular networks. No need to deploy thousands of Bluetooth beacons, hundreds of Wi-Fi access points, or launch more GPS/GNSS satellites – Polte uses global IoT mobile networks, which already reach 99% of the population.”
Not only is the Polte Location API available on the AWS Marketplace, but the company has also been invited to demo its API at AWS re:Invent 2019.
“Polte’s Cloud Software enhances Amazon’s ecosystem with an easy to use, secure and affordable geolocation offering,” said Ed Chao, Polte chief executive officer. “Polte delivers simply better location, and we are creating new and different opportunities never thought possible. If you make things, sell things or own things, Polte locates all those things.”
“Polte’s disruptive C-LoC technology is a software-only solution that makes it simple for developers to add indoor and outdoor location capability to their IoT applications for supply chain, asset and inventory management. Polte-enabled IoT devices listen to 4G and 5G cellular networks, the tracker sends the data via the open Polte Location API to the Polte Location Engine. The Polte Location Engine uses patented algorithms to determine and provide location data with building, block, neighborhood and city granularity. Polte’s simple implementation process allows developers and programmers to easily access Polte’s API after programming an AT command in an embedded module.
“Polte’s positioning technology can be integrated for use in a variety of industries, including aerospace, appliances, automotive, energy, food & beverage, government, healthcare, hospitality, industrial, manufacturing, retail, smart buildings, smart cities, and transportation-as-a-service for supply chain, asset, and inventory management. Whether tracking containers, pallets, machines, or components, Polte makes finding them easy, affordable and secure.”
According to CNBC, analysts at J.P. Morgan believe Apple could be switching up its iPhone release schedule, releasing new models twice a year instead of once.
Since 2011, Apple has traditionally released iPhones either in September or October. As the market has become increasingly more competitive, however, an entire year between major releases has allowed competitors to leapfrog the iPhone’s features.
In a note to investors, J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee cites supply chain checks as the basis for their prediction.
“Based on our supply chain checks, we are expecting a strategic change in the launch cadence with the release of two new iPhone models in 1H21 followed by another two in 2H21, which will serve to smooth seasonality around the launch.”
In the short-term, the analysts also believe there will be a total of four iPhones released in 2020, instead of the normal three. Even more significant, they believe that all four of the devices next year will have both OLED screens and 5G support, according to Chatterjee’s note.
“The 2H20 lineup will include all OLED phones, with screen sizes of 5.4″ (one model), 6.1″ (two), and 6.7″ (one), broadening the screen size range from 5.8″ to 6.5″ in 2019. We expect the two higher end models (one 6.1″, one 6.7″) to include mmWave support, triple camera and World facing 3D sensing, while the lower-end models (one 6.1″, one 5.4″) will include support for only sub-6 GHz and dual camera (no World-facing 3D sensing).”
J.P. Morgan has raised its 12-month price target for Apple to $296 from $290.
Reuters is reporting that German logistics company DHL is planning on debuting an all-electric delivery van in the United States next year.
DHL will debut the Work L delivery van through its electric vehicle subsidiary StreetScooter beginning Spring 2020. The company will initially use the van in two U.S. markets, one on each coast, with full deployment coming in 2022 or 2023.
According to the Centre for Alternative Technology, cities around the world are working to significantly reduce emissions, with “cities such as Oslo, Antwerp, Melbourne and Copenhagen have risen to this bigger ambition and are pushing for 100 per cent greenhouse gas reductions by at least 2050.”
Companies such as DHL, Amazon and others are working to reduce their impact when making deliveries, especially when considering that the transportation industry was responsible for 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010.
DHL already has a significant head start in this arena, thanks to StreetScooter. According an interview with Ulrich Stuhec, StreetScooter’s chief technology officer, StreetScooter has “the most experience on the road while others are still working on their first prototypes.”
In Amsterdam, Vienna and Germany, “roughly 10,000 of the 12,000 StreetScooter electric vehicles on the road make DHL deliveries.”
StreetScooter estimates their vehicles already save roughly 36,000 metric tons of CO2 per year, per truck.
“People are going to really give a hard look at cloud security,” says Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan. “At the end of the day, it also says when you have something of this scale why not use some artificial intelligence or something that could have spotted this. Actually what was done was pretty blatant. It was 30 gigabytes of data moving to unusual storage locations. So there were a lot of ways that something like an AI system could have detected this and also prevented it from becoming an issue.”
People Are Going To Really Give a Hard Look At Cloud Security
There is so much positive momentum around cloud and so many benefits that I don’t anticipate seeing a pendulum swing back to on-prem data centers (because of the Capital One cyber hack). What I do think it means is people are going to really give a hard look at cloud security. This attack was a result of a vulnerability known as a configuration error in a Web Application Firewall that was specific to Capital One. What it does show is these configuration errors are actually really very commonplace. They’re commonplace in on-prem data centers and in cloud.
This does highlight a few things. It does highlight insider threats, someone who had some insider knowledge. It also highlights supply chain level security. At the end of the day, it also says when you have something of this scale why not use some artificial intelligence or something that could have spotted this. Actually what was done was pretty blatant. It was 30 gigabytes of data moving to unusual storage locations. So there were a lot of ways that something like an AI system could have detected this and also prevented it from becoming an issue.
Capital One Attack Was Human Error
Configuration errors are basically a human error. Somebody somewhere made a human error, a mistake. We have to expect that humans are fallible and we’re going to see those type of errors. What’s so strange about this one is how public the disclosure was by the attacker on Twitter and GitHub and other places. That was what made it so unusual but also meant that the investigation moved very quickly. It seems like there’s been quite a bit of transparency as well.
It’s interesting timing because we’re actually going into Back Hat and DEF CON, which is often known as a summer camp for hackers. There will be literally tens of thousands of people in Las Vegas next week. All of this is going to change the conversation. We’re going to see a lot about cloud security, about 5G security, about encryption and decrypting data, and of course, the evolution towards AI-based attacks.
What’s interesting is that people want to kind of say let’s make sure we prevent the kind of attacks we saw in 2016 (regarding the election). The reality is the way the cybersecurity industry works the attackers keep moving on. They keep changing what’s called threat vectors. I do think we’ll see plenty of threats for 2020 but they may not look anything like the ones we saw in 2016.
People Are Going To Give a Hard Look At Cloud Security – Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan
There’s no doubt that virtual assistants and AI-based voice services are one of the next big things in the technology industry. Long the stuff of science fiction, voice-based computing represents the next leap in computer interface and usability paradigms. As a result, virtually all the major players are pushing ahead with development.
It should come as no surprise that Amazon, one of the biggest players in the voice-enabled market, has announced the Voice Interoperability Initiative. The initiative is an effort to standardize how voice-enabled products work and “is built around a shared belief that voice services should work seamlessly alongside one another on a single device, and that voice-enabled products should be designed to support multiple simultaneous wake words.”
Already, more than 30 companies have signed on to the initiative, including the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce, Logitech, Qualcomm, Libre, Intel, Spotify and others.
“Multiple simultaneous wake words provide the best option for customers,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “Utterance by utterance, customers can choose which voice service will best support a particular interaction. It’s exciting to see these companies come together in pursuit of that vision.”
While the initiative’s goals look good on paper, there are some challenges. Notably, the idea of having multiple voice services working on a single device may not fly with some of Amazon’s competitors. Indeed, Apple, Google and Samsung are noticeably absent from the initiative.
In the case of Apple, given their strong pro-privacy stance, it’s unlikely they will want to put Siri on hardware made by a competitor. Similarly, Google may be hesitant to give up the control that comes with their Google Home hardware.
Whatever the outcome, one thing is clear: Voice-enabled services is shaping up to be another technological battleground between some of the biggest names in the industry.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says that Salesforce is now entering the fourth stage of computing, the pursuit of Single Source of Truth. The official name is Customer 360 Truth and it is a new set of capabilities that allow companies to connect, authenticate and govern customer data and identity across Salesforce. The goal is to provide a complete view and deeper understanding of every customer so that companies can deliver extremely personalized customer experiences.
Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce, discusses Customer 360 Truth at their annual Dreamforce conference with Jim Cramer of CNBC:
Single Source of Truth – A Computer Science Holy Grail
360 Truth is another amazing thing that we’re introducing here (at Dreamforce 2019) that has been the holy grail of computing. It’s what we call SSOT, the single source of truth. We’ve had three amazing waves of computing. They are stems of record, systems of engagement, and systems of intelligence including AI. We’re now entering the fourth stage of computing. It’s the pursuit of Single Source of Truth, and we’ve built that into our platform.
This is a computer science holy grail that we’ve been trying to put together for a long time. Now because we acquired MuleSoft and because we acquired Tableau we are closer to providing for our customers the Single Source of Truth for their customer information.
Enables Companies To Build a Single Source of Truth
The company describes Customer 360 Truth as a new set of data and identity services that enable companies to build a single source of truth across all of their customer relationships. They say it connects data from across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more to create a single, universal Salesforce ID for each customer.
All of a customer’s previous interactions and shared preferences are brought together to create a complete view so companies can better serve and even predict their needs, whether addressing a customer service problem, creating a personalized marketing journey, predicting the best sales opportunities or surfacing product recommendations.
Salesforce Launches Single Souce of Truth | Benioff: A Computer Science Holy Grail
From the Salesforce Press Release:
The Holy Grail of CRM: A Single Source of Truth
Nearly 70 percent of customers say they expect connected experiences in which their preferences are known across touchpoints. However, organizational and technical complexity often gets in the way of meeting these expectations. Companies have legacy infrastructure and data silos, leading to fragmented data and fragile integrations between systems. Inconsistent methods for accessing, reconciling and activating customer data make it challenging for companies to deliver connected experiences across these systems. As a result, companies often have multiple usernames, email addresses, or purchase histories for the very same customer across different systems, and managing a customer’s consent and contact preferences across the business becomes harder as new data regulations come into play.
Having a source of truth—a single, trusted place that brings together all the customer data needed to deliver amazing experiences—has been the holy grail of CRM. Today Salesforce is delivering it.
Deliver a Trusted, Personalized Customer Relationship With Customer 360 Truth
Customer 360 Truth enhances data management across Salesforce apps and other systems, and provides instant access to consistent, reconciled customer data. Services include:
Customer 360 Data Manager: Delivers the ability to access, connect and resolve a customer’s data across Salesforce and other systems, using a canonical data model and a universal Salesforce ID that represents each customer. With a click-based user interface for app and data management, admins can easily establish trusted connections between data sources to prepare, match, reconcile and update the customer profile. The reconciled profile across apps enables employees to pull up relevant data at the time of need from any connected system, such as when a service agent may need to pull a list of past purchases from an order system to better assist in solving a problem.
Salesforce Identity for Customers: Removes friction from the login experience and enables a single, authenticated and secure relationship between a customer and all of a company’s websites, e-commerce stores, mobile apps and connected products. Instead of having separate logins and profiles that lead to disconnected experiences, customers now have one login across all of a company’s digital properties. Identity for Customers also elevates trust and compliance with a simple to use two-factor authentication. And it allows companies to obtain valuable customer insights with the ability to analyze engagement and usage with identity reporting and analytics.
Customer 360 Audiences: Builds unified customer profiles across known data such as email addresses and first party IDs and unknown data such as website visits and device IDs. It then creates customer segments and marketing engagement journeys from those profiles and delivers AI-powered insights, like lifetime value and likelihood to churn. Customer 360 Audiences goes beyond traditional customer data platform (CDP) capabilities and extends the power of CRM to connect customer interactions across various touchpoints — for example, a customer who was redirected from an email campaign onto the website through a service interaction — and make the profile data available in real-time to optimize the experience.
Privacy and Data Governance: Enables companies to collect and respect customer data use and privacy preferences, as well as apply data classification labels to all data in Salesforce. Companies can easily understand what types of data they have, what uses of data customers have approved and how best to interact with them. These capabilities can help customers address obligations from regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), with respect to data governance and customer consent.
Introducing the Cloud Information Model
Salesforce Customer 360 Truth is powered by the Cloud Information Model (CIM), an open source data model that standardizes data interoperability across cloud applications. The publication of CIM is enabled by MuleSoft’s open source modeling technology, providing multiple file formats to make it easy to adopt CIM with varying applications. By easily integrating data in the cloud, developers can build new products that deliver connected and personalized customer experiences. CIM reduces the complexities of integrating data across cloud applications by providing standardized data interoperability guidelines to connect point-of-sale systems, digital marketing platforms, contact centers, CRM systems and more. Developers no longer need to spend months creating custom code. Instead, they can adopt and extend the CIM within days to create data lakes, generate analytics, train machine learning models, build a single view of the customer and more.
Unleash the Power of Customer 360 Truth with MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
Customer 360 Truth allows companies to connect siloed customer data sources to a single source of truth, across Salesforce apps or third-party data using MuleSoft. With MuleSoft Anypoint Platform™, organizations can easily build APIs that connect any application, data, or device to Customer 360 in an application network, creating a truly complete customer view.
At Dreamforce, MuleSoft also announced new innovations and learning modules, empowering anyone to become an Integration Trailblazer and create connected customer experiences.
Comments on the News
“Having a complete view of the customer is not a new idea, but it has been difficult to achieve. Companies have siloed data; disconnected apps; a complex, patchwork of sometimes incompatible services; and no way to connect it all,” said Patrick Stokes, EVP, Platform Shared Services, Salesforce. “Customer 360 Truth overcomes those challenges, creating a single source of truth that is the foundation for delivering smart, personalized customer experiences across every touchpoint.”
“In order to truly succeed with delivering a great customer experience, you have to adopt an agile platform that fosters growth and supports constant innovation,” said Rick Fuson, President and Chief Operating Officer, Pacers Sports & Entertainment. “With the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, Pacers Sports & Entertainment has real-time visibility into all aspects of our business and can operate more efficiently across channels, increase per customer loyalty and drive innovation across the organization.”
“Connecting customer data and managing consent is more important than ever in light of changing customer expectations and increasing regulations,” said Alan Webber, Program Vice President for Digital Strategy and Customer Experience, IDC. “As a result, companies are prioritizing data unification in ways that will lead to more loyal and valuable customer relationships. Salesforce Customer 360 Truth will help companies break down data silos and deliver the experiences customers expect.”
Salesforce Customer 360
Customer 360 Truth is part of the Salesforce Customer 360, which includes industry-leading apps spanning sales, service, marketing and commerce, and across every customer touchpoint. The Customer 360 Platform is an underlying set of services and APIs including AI, blockchain, mobile, security, voice and other capabilities that allow companies to connect every customer, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation. Salesforce will power more than two trillion B2B and B2C transactions this year for more than 150,000 companies and millions of Trailblazers—those individuals and their organizations who are using Salesforce to drive innovation, grow their careers and transform their businesses.
MacRumors is reporting that the next iPhone is likely to come with a RAM upgrade, coming in at 6GB.
According to the rumors site, “Barclays analyst Blayne Curtis and his associates recently traveled to Asia to meet with manufacturers within Apple’s supply chain, and…they shared their expectations for 2020 iPhones based on information they gathered.”
One of the biggest takeaways was the amount of RAM the new models are expected to have. While the base iPhone 12 is believed to maintain 4GB, the two Pro models are both expected to have 6GB. The extra RAM is useful primarily for multitasking, increasing the number of applications and their contents that can be held in memory.
For example, many users have experienced the frustration of trying to fill out a website form in Safari, only to have all their work cleared out because they switched to another app and then back to Safari, prompting the browser to reload the page. This is a classic example of iOS running out of RAM and clearing a program’s contents as a result. With more RAM available, iOS can switch back and forth between apps without refreshing them and clearing their contents.
The iPad made a similar leap with the 2018 Pro models. The lower-end units all had 4GB of RAM, while the 1TB model had 6GB, to help it better meet the needs of the creative professionals it was aimed at.
With Apple similarly positioning the iPhone Pro models for creatives and professionals, it’s not surprising the high-end models are making the same transition.
