Black Friday is fast approaching, which means it’s time again to look at how the retail landscape is changing.For brick-and-mortar stores, Thanksgiving weekend is still huge, but it’s increasingly losing relevance. According to the National Retail Federation, in-store foot traffic has fallen from 147 million in 2012 to 102 million in 2015, as more and more retailers start their promotions ear...

Color Binoculars, a new mobile app from Microsoft Garage, helps colorblind ‘see’ the world the way others do.In most cases of colorblindness, people can actually see colors, but they have difficulty telling some of them apart. While there are corrective glasses that help enhance contrast, they cost several hundred dollars. That's why two Microsoft software engineers developed Color Binoculars...

The rise of social media over the past decade has not only changed the way people communicate, it has undoubtedly also had an impact on how they shop, be it online or at a boutique around the corner. Before making a purchase, consumers now have the chance to scroll through thousands of product photos on Instagram or Pinterest, look for promotions on a retailer’s Facebook page or scroll through...

So swiping isn’t just good for your love life, it’s a great hygienic habit too! That sentence didn’t make sense, right? The Swipe door handle disinfectant takes the fun element from Tinder and makes it a healthy practice. The product fits on cylindrical door handles and simply slides from left to right and back. Each swipe coats the door handle with a layer of disinfectant, eliminating all g...

Today, retailers almost universally recognize that digital has reshaped customer behavior and shopping forever. So why are so many traditional brick-and-mortar retailers still so far behind at creating the digital experiences that customers really want?This, the 2016 version of Deloitte’s New digital divide report, deepens our exploration of the growing gap between the digital experiences that...

There have been nearly 30 M&A deals by large media corporates in 2016 year-to-date.[click to enlarge]This year has seen a series of moves that further consolidate the media landscape. Verizon is close to acquiring Yahoo, the creation of Group Nine Media came out of the merger of 4 distinct digital media companies, and NBC acquired DreamWorks Animation for approximately $3.8B.Media giants ha...

Touch screens are on the way out; piezoelectric gesture control is on the way in.Today, we control our electronic world by touch—we tap, we swipe, we pinch and zoom. The touch interface went from being a novelty back in 2007, when Apple first brought it to the iPhone, to a ubiquitous feature in less than a decade. It is so commonplace that toddlers declare nontouch displays broken when the scr...

Gatorade Amplify aims to serve up personalized playlists to pump you up.Gatorade Amplify is a brand integration with Spotify that creates a personalized soundtrack based on the type of workout you want using data analysis of your music preferences.WHY WE CARE: This is a unique collaboration in that it's pretty on-brand for Gatorade—working out makes you sweat, non?—and takes the same type of...

Fleetlights are streetlights that travel with you.If you get off the train from work late at night and have to walk or bike down dark streets, a U.K. insurance company wants you to be able to call up a small fleet of drones to accompany you—acting as lights that fly with you to illuminate your path home.Fleetlights, a prototype service, is designed to be summoned with a mobile app, and uses so...