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Spotify has launched Spotify for Podcasters following a year-long beta involving more than 100,000 podcasts from 167 countries. Spotify for Podcasters is a discovery and analytics dashboard designed to let podcasters track performance through data such as episode retention charts, aggregate demograp...

What's the big deal, I thought? Last week Salesforce announced it was paying in the range of $1.35 billion for ClickSoftware, a private field service automation and workforce management company. At first, I attributed it to a slow summer news cycle when many people in the industry are off trout fish...

New personal identification and authentication technologies have the potential to transform the way entertainment services are delivered, accessed and experienced. These technologies offer a high level of security, often incorporating biometrics such as voice, fingerprint, iris or retinal features, ...

Startups in the U.S. fail at a rate of 90 percent largely due to cash flow problems and the lack of a market need for a product or service. In fact, not even half of startups make it to their fourth year. It's also noteworthy that 65 percent of startup owners admitted to not being fully confident ab...

The modern world is becoming more difficult every year for e-commerce marketers. Audiences are harder than ever to reach as mistrust of traditional marketing tactics continues to increase. Banner ads are dying with the rise of ad blockers -- and proven lead generation methods like pop-ups and inters...

These days, what business isn't pushing to become more customer-centric? And for good reason --88 percent of businesses view customer experience as a competitive differentiator. A customer-centric culture is a source of long-term strategic competitive advantage. Culture is the one aspect of a busine...

Amazon, Google and Apple have suspended contractor review of consumer recordings following disclosures that the devices are nearly always listening and have captured personal, business and other delicate human interactions. Consumers using smart speakers and digital assistant apps from Amazon and Go...

Video traffic is expected to make up 82 percent of all Internet traffic by 2022. This spike coincides with the increased production and distribution of videos throughout every industry. With this in mind, it is important to remember that the value of video marketing for brands is as old as video its...

The road to e-commerce business success is hardly a straight and narrow one. Every step in a business lifecycle -- from launch and growth to scale and maturity -- is fraught with peaks, valleys, bumps, hazards and roadblocks. Your plan and reality are usually very different! When reflecting on how c...

E-commerce has exploded since Amazon and eBay were founded in 1995. Today, e-commerce is part of everyday life. By 2023, retail e-commerce sales in the U.S. are projected to surpass $735 billion. Even industries like food, healthcare and banking, which previously were dominated by offline transactio...

I have been warning about online companies invading our privacy for years. Some very large companies now are under scrutiny by the U.S. government. As the pressure increases, Amazon seems to have come up with a creative solution. It has been offering to pay users $10 for permission to track them. In...

Oracle just published some commissioned research that gives us insights into both CRM generally and the times we live in. A study of more than 1,100 people across several generations found the following: Almost half of consumers have blacklisted a brand as the result of a bad experience; more than o...

Marketing professionals play a big role in helping businesses succeed by building brand loyalty. Recent studies have shown that over the last 19 years the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds to eight seconds. Sure, four seconds less doesn't sound like much, but for marketers, thi...

Congratulations! You've succeeded in driving online traffic to your product page. So why aren't customers actually clicking 'Add to Cart'? Making successful e-commerce conversions, or transforming your website's visitors into actual paying customers, isn't an easy feat. Expertise on doing it well an...