Nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and six months since our initial consumer sentiment survey in emerging markets, consumers’ behavioral patterns are starting to take shape. People are adapting, and while the dust is yet to settle, we already see early signals of a new reality.The following trends give every indication of being permanent shifts, with significant implications for companies...

Autonomous machines proved their worth in hospitals, offices, and on city streets.[A robot, developed by Asimov Robotics to spread awareness about the coronavirus, holds a tray with face masks and sanitizer.]As the coronavirus emergency exploded into a full-blown pandemic in early 2020, forcing countless businesses to shutter, robot-making companies found themselves in an unusual situation: Man...

When the pandemic struck, air travel ground to a halt as people felt unsafe flying and borders were restricted. In the U.S. alone, the four largest airlines lost $10 billion in the second quarter. To stop the bleeding, some airlines are now coming up with creative ideas to generate revenue. Singapore Airlines, which experienced a 99.5% drop in passengers during its first quarter, is turning two...

Microsoft launched a new computer vision service it claims can generate image captions that are, in some cases, more accurate than human-written descriptions. [Image captioning results on nocaps. B: A baseline without adding VIVO pretraining. V: With VIVOpretraining. Red text represents novel objects. The bounding box color is brighter when the similarity is higher.]The company calls the servic...

As brands try to address the pandemic, consumers are becoming increasingly frustrated by messaging that doesn't feel authentic. Every time you open up your laptop, scroll through social media or flip through the TV channels, you’re bound to come across something about Covid-19. But when it comes to advertising, recent data shows, consumers are fed up and want a reprieve.Real Talk Insights cond...

Company disrupts the anti-aging category with clean clinical solutions that welcome millennials into the space with an innovative perspective on embracing skin at every age.TULA Skincare, the leading clean clinical skincare brand powered by probiotics and superfoods, today announced the launch of its new 'Ageless' product franchise, as the Company continues its record-setting growth, to help di...

The 'Auvis' digital stethoscope has been designed by Lara Laddey of the Muthesius Kunsthochschule Kiel University as a health monitoring solution that will offer healthcare providers with a better way to track for problems. The device works by being positioned onto the skin around joints and will go to work utilizing advanced sensors to detect for sounds being emitted by joints. This could help...

KALEA is a fully automatic kitchen composter, which unites a natural composting process with an unique and smart technology.Using a compost heap is a great way of putting food waste to use, but that waste can take several weeks or longer to become compost – in the meantime, it may stink or attract pests. The indoor Kalea device, on the other hand, is claimed to produce compost in just two days...

Depending on where you are in the world, we are eight to 10 months deep into a global pandemic without an end in sight.When lockdowns were rapidly implemented worldwide in March, the prevailing sentiment was that an economic downturn was coming. Naturally, the thinking went, this would impact venture funding and the IPO markets.That has happened, but not as negatively or in the way many expecte...