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Blink and you'll miss it! Benetton's previous store in one of the four coveted corners of Oxford Circus has been converted to a Microsoft store. However, despite being one of the largest companies in the world, it seems the marketing department at Microsoft failed at persuading the London administration about the need for a huge flag or a neon sign, or whatever to advertise the store. If you walk in the three other corners of Oxford Circus you can be excused for not noticing there is a Microsoft store in the fourth corner. Can you spot the Windows store? The...

Unless you have been hidden in a non-wifi enabled bunker over the last five years you will know about the proliferation of pop-up stores during peak business or for marketing purposes. However, you may not have heard of the pop-up warehouse. Turns out 3PL providers such as PFSWeb provide this opportunity for merchants to keep up and in som cases even improve delivery times to key areas during peak trading. Super exciting development in the crowded 3PL space. Check out PFSWeb website for more informaiton

#Vcommerce #AugmentedReality #ArtificialIntelligence Our next in-deth retail technology sector report will look at developments in "immersive retail". Due to its young age, immersive retail is a diffuse concept overlapping several different well-defined technologies, including Holograms, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, Smartphones, Headsets, 3D Television sets, and much more. What is common is that innovation in the immersive retail space accelerated following the launch of smartphones in 2007. The ecosystem of software that has to emerge for immersive retail to work as ideally as we think it should (watch this space for a definition) are pentiful. For retailers to create...

Amazing new algorithm from Japanese company Datagrid. We are currently working on a new report on V-commerce... Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. However, the stuff from Datagrid blew our minds and appears to be more of alternative reality than anything else. We have reached out to Datagrid for more information on how they pick the clothes etc in the imagery (e.g. are the clothes real if none of the people are?). If you want to follow our work in VR/AR and V-commerce, please sign up to our infrequent email newsletter.

Carrefour recently credited its use of Blockchain technology with an increase in sales of a number of its products - Reuters, June 3, 2019. However, STIQ understands that the hyperledger technology (not strictly a Blockchain apparently) is fully operated by Carrefour. This would mean that they have full control over the information that is added to the ledger which kind of defies the point of using Blockchain technology in the first place. This may be unintential from Carrefour but, goes to the core of trust in the supply chain, i.e. can a grocery retailer be certain that information added in...