For online retailers, creating an unmatched customer experience is not only a top priority -- it is also a business imperative. They must make sure the items customers want to order are in stock, and that the orders are packaged correctly and shipped quickly, and delivered to the appropriate address. Focusing solely on these necessities tends to be a shortsighted way of viewing the process, however. Oftentimes, when online retailers see that an order has been delivered to the customer's front door, the order is complete in their minds. [More...]

We are now living in a time when customer expectations are changing particularly fast, and retailers that can't keep up get left behind. A consumer who enjoys the online shopping experience at an e-store automatically begins to expect the same level of service from every virtual point of sale. Thus, the expectation loop is born, and the only thing for retailers to do to get ahead of the curve is to innovate, innovate and innovate. Emerging 3D technologies are a force poised to drive the revolution in the online shopping experience. [More...]

The subject of this week's Linux Picks and Pans is a representative of a less well-known computing platform that coexists with Linux as an open source operating system. If you thought that the Linux kernel was the only open source engine for a free OS, think again. The Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, shares many of the same features that make Linux OSes viable alternatives to proprietary computing platforms. GhostBSD is a user-friendly Linux-like desktop operating system based on TrueOS, which is based on FreeBSD's development branch. [More...]

Microsoft announced a number of artificial intelligence, mixed reality and customer insights tools for Microsoft Dynamics 365 at its Microsoft Business Forward event in Paris. There is "a lot of hype around AI and MR, but these are real applications delivering value to customers today" noted Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research. "Microsoft's advantage is its decades of investment in R&D across its portfolio, which it's bringing to bear on its business applications portfolio." [More...]