After Edward Snowden leaked that the National Security Agency (NSA) used backdoor channels to gain access to smartphones, webcams, and traffic cameras, people have become paranoid that the government is watching through our devices. The rise of sticky notes and cover slides attached to webcams is a testament to that fact. (Never mind the hackers […]
While “Retail Apocalypse” would no doubt make a great sequel to the iconic movie “Apocalypse Now” – with Martin Sheen reprising his role as Capt. Willard, trying to navigate his way through the dangerous modern day Mekong of the American mall – the term actually refers to the collapse of brick-and-mortar stores. More than 100 […]
For the last few years, we’ve been hearing about the retail apocalypse, though we would characterize it more as a retail extinction event. The difference being that until a couple of months ago, the demise of many brick-and-mortar businesses was a long, drawn-out affair. No more. COVID-19 has caused a true retail apocalypse – goodbye, […]
There is a term that we often use at Nanalyze to describe how our online activities leave behind a breadcrumb trail that companies use to track our behavior: data exhaust. It refers not only to every mouse click or swipe left on our devices but where we go and when, not to mention every social […]
Shoplifting comes in many shapes and forms, from the broke pre-teen who is about to learn a valuable life lesson to a sophisticated gang of criminals that brazenly robs stores right in front of security cameras. In whatever form it ends up taking, shoplifting is when someone takes something from a store without paying for it – […]
Earlier this year, autonomous retail store Amazon Go opened to much fanfare, which just goes to show you how much we love buying it. Every organization on the planet—even the 24-hour Elon Musk show known as Futurism—covered the event as if it were a visit by the pope. Headlines declared that the store of the […]
There was an article published by the Scientific American earlier this year titled Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?, and it’s probably worth a read if you have 45 minutes (yes, it’s that long). We gave up about halfway through when we came across the following specimen which CB Insights affectionately refers to as “bad data viz”: […]
Since most people do their grocery shopping at normal hours during the day, they don’t see the overnight stockers that come out late at night and work until the sun comes up. They’re distinguishable by the box knives they carry around in their aprons, the scar tissue all over their hands from being cut by said […]
From the outside looking in, shopping hasn’t changed all that much in the past decade. Sure, it’s more common now to find a brick-and-mortar synced efficiently with its online presence (Target is great at this). But those still seem to be the exception to the rule. Behind the scenes, however, it’s a very different story. […]
What do high-energy physics and retail supply chains have in common? The heck if we know. But a German company called Blue Yonder, founded by a scientist who worked at Europe’s giant particle laboratory CERN, is using big data and artificial intelligence to help retailers optimize inventory and product pricing in impressive ways. About Blue […]