Around the world, social media is giving consumers far greater visibility into supply chain processes and problems. For better or worse, manufacturing locations and labour conditions, warehouses, warehouse systems, packing processes, logistics partners and their delivery drivers have increasingly become associated with a retailer’s brand image.
The World Bank has taken its first steps into the sharing economy, made famous in America by companies such as Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. In the case of the World Bank, it seeks to use the sharing economy to ease crippling traffic in the Philippines under a program it has dubbed the “Open Traffic Initiative.”
The increasing use of the internet in recent years has caught the fancy of consumers and producers, in commodities, services, and leisure activities. The wide prevalence of wireless internet access and the portability of devices such as smartphones and tablets have increased access and diffusion of related services and products as possibly no other technology in history.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made net neutrality the law of the land and pledged to enforce it when it issued its “open Internet order” 13 months ago. That ruling barred Internet service providers (ISPs) from discriminating against certain types of traffic or creating pay-to-play fast lanes.
The focus of debates about social media is increasingly about the risks involved with its use. This is particularly true when it comes to large companies. Combined with the use of smartphones, social media is, for many, blurring the lines between work and private life in ways that are legally complex and difficult to control.
The social media transformation has accelerated to the point where companies need to find the balance between allowing freedom of expression on one hand, and exercising some control on the other.
Another day, another round of disappointing results for Twitter. The past six months have been turbulent for the social media platform. In its latest round of quarterly results, it reported a net loss of US$90m for the last three months of 2015. Its share price has dropped to US$14.98 – the lowest level since its IPO almost two years ago.
Barack Obama’s surprising support for net neutrality could help boost internet startup innovation, causing the online market to more than double in value by 2020.
Obama said earlier this week that the Federal Communications Commission should reclassify the internet as a Title II utility. Such a move would prohibit broadband providers from distinguishing between different types of data services, and restricting or slowing down access for some services over others.
Cheap and open access to the internet is one of the main equalising tools of our generation. Unfortunately, considerably fewer women have access to the internet than men, especially in the developing world.
Women and girls lag behind men in internet access in many parts of the world, causing them to miss out on the economic and social benefits of being online, according to a study by Intel published in January.
How do companies measure the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign? Here’s a tip: if the answers to that contain the words “halo effect” or “influences”, the results are probably BS.
The digital landscape has evolved. Virtually every business today understands how important social media is to a brand, as well as how difficult it is to measure the effectiveness and success of an online campaign.
The web is ubiquitous. Everywhere we go, it comes with us.
But we don’t often wrap our heads around just how big the web really is. How many people are using it, how many videos are viewed each day, just how big the mobile explosion really is, how much data is out there and being consumed every day.
The number of Internet users worldwide crossed 2 billion this year, almost twice what it was 5 years ago. More countries are going online, and there is no stoppage of growth in the foreseeable future.
