Work went mobile over the past month, and you were as likely to find me in the field as online, so I’m here to drop a few links and updates. One of the big stops in September was Salesforce’s 2024 Dreamforce conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. As always, Salesforce maximized their use of the … Read moreThis year’s Dreamforce in San Francisco and EnvisionB2B in Chicago
To say Digital Commerce 360 has been keeping me busy this year would be a massive understatement. We have already shipped a fresh edition of the annual Ecommerce Conversion Report for 2024, along with a handful of others big ones. I made two stops at eTail West in Palm Springs and Shoptalk in Las Vegas. … Read moreLatest work in 2024
My team at Digital Commerce 360 has been hard at work the past two months putting out some big reports on the state of American ecommerce and the most-used ecommerce platforms among the top names in online retail. We also began rolling out new video shorts to complement the reporting and research. Here’s one about … Read moreMost recent retail and ecommerce coverage
First off, in case you missed the news on my social channels, I stepped into a new role at the end of November at Digital Commerce 360 as Director of Editorial, Retail. It’s been a light-speed past few weeks getting into the flow with the outstanding team of journalists and researchers there. If you don’t … Read moreLatest work and links
After recording the fifth episode of “The AI Artifacts Podcast” on Tuesday, my co-host Sarah Luger and I knew that the fluid situation surrounding Sam Altman’s firing and subsequent pressure to reinstate him as CEO at OpenAI was likely to remain in flux the following day. What we didn’t know was that a deal to … Read moreWhat Satya Nadella gained for Microsoft after Sam Altman’s return to OpenAI
My “AI Artifacts Podcast” co-host and I were wrapping up our news discussion for this week’s episode when we saw breaking news that OpenAI’s board had just fired Sam Altman as CEO, naming Mira Murati (its CTO and a former podcast guest of ours) as the company’s new interim CEO. All of the news arrived … Read moreWhat Sam Altman’s firing at OpenAI means for its (and AI’s) future
Microsoft’s newly closed acquisition of Activision Blizzard isn’t just the software giant’s biggest deal ever. At a cost of $68.7 billion, it’s also the most expensive video game industry acquisition of all time. After the companies first announced their intent in January 2022, regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the U.S., the European … Read moreThe reason Microsoft made Activision Blizzard its largest acquisition ever
The past decade saw a boom in fact-checking organizations across the internet, according to annual census results from the Duke Reporters’ Lab. The momentum seems to have trailed off in the 2020s, however, with the total number of active organizations dedicated to fact-checks staying roughly the same since 2021. The group counted 417 fact-checkers when … Read moreWhat may be behind slumping growth for internet fact-checking
Public and private markets put valuations through intense valuation adjustments over the past two years, leading the volume of IPOs for unicorn companies valued at $1 billion or more to fall off a cliff. Tech company unicorns took an extended hiatus from IPO’ing altogether. This week, that dry spell is likely to change, with both … Read moreWhy Instacart and Klaviyo are set to test unicorn IPOs for tech this week
It’s no big secret that generative AI is resource-intensive. In fact, making a query with AI can cost “at least four or five times more computing per search” compared to traditional searches, according to Martin Bouchard, co-founder of Canada-based data center company QScale, who shared the calculation in a February article at Wired. That extra … Read moreHow much water AI is going to drink