In our December issue last year, we already provided hints where IoT is heading this year in Asia Pacific when we presented Hitachi Vantara’s insightful predictions. Summarily, both Hubert Yoshida and Russell Skingsley believe the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms will dominate enterprise IT strategies in 2018. At the same time, both CTOs of Hitachi Vantara made clear that they seek to collaborate with customers and ecosystem players to innovate and create new value for business stakeholders, customers and society at large.

Qualtrics, the leader in experience management, announced a global partnership with Kantar TNS, one of the world’s largest research agencies, to help organizations put customers at the heart of their business.

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, announced that QUOINE, one of the fastest growing innovators in the world of cryptocurrency, has made an additional investment with Salesforce to grow and scale its business globally.

PwC examined in a new report the impacts of three overlapping waves of automation - the algorithm, augmentation and autonomy wave. The research analyzed the tasks and skills involved in the jobs of over 200,000 workers across 29 countries in order to assess the potential impact of automation on workers in different industry sectors and of different genders, ages and education levels.

The days when a company just had to set up an appropriate social media page to automatically be pushed forward by the hype are definitely a thing of the past. The demands on marketing and communication managers have simply changed dramatically over the past ten years. With the event of social media, its networking power and user-generated content, marketing activities need to be strategically orchestrated for proper human resources planning, time- and cost management.

The recent Adobe Digital Trends Report 2018 revealed that 42% of marketing decision makers in international companies already rely on self-learning algorithms in their company or plan to do so over the next twelve months - be it for data analysis (51%), email marketing (26%) or programmatic advertising (22%).

Attention spans are short, and they’re getting shorter. Consumers today are bombarded with editorial, commercial and social messages through more devices and sources than ever. As a video platform we’re acutely aware of the challenges brands face when trying to engage consumers, and are especially conscious of the damage that irrelevant messages can do - to both brands and publishers.

Forty years on from the phrase ‘glass ceiling’ being used to define thwarted careers and ambitions - especially for women - ACCA is calling for business leaders to show real and measurable progress on diversity and social mobility issues, as it marks International Women’s Day 2018.

Ad Verification is a real-time technical process which verifies the inventory quality and visibility of advertising impressions. In the fight against fraud and the lack of transparency and viewability, advertisers and agencies can use Ad Verification to protect their brand image, besides boosting their campaign performance by streamlining media investment.

A global survey of 730 IT professionals, conducted by Longitude, revealed that a small group of forward-thinking businesses has reached cloud maturity with on average of 70% or more of their applications operating in the cloud. Oracle and Intel partnered with Longitude Research for the study that surveyed C-level and senior IT executives from companies that had an annual revenue of $1 billion or more, coming from 13 countries.

A new study from Juniper Research has found that global retailer spending on AI will reach $7.3 billion per annum by 2022, up from an estimated $2 billion in 2018, as retailers target new avenues to increase personalization of the customer experience.

As millennial consumers continue to reject traditional advertising but listening more to recommendations from beauty experts on social media, influencer marketing has started to become one of the main new drivers of customer acquisition for beauty brands around the world.

The good old moving picture, aka video, is a popular tool for all companies that have something to show or to explain, making it interesting for marketing. Besides the fact that almost 90% of Internet users between the ages of 14 and 29 watch videos online every week, meaning that the most potent buyer group is undoubtedly video affine. Much of the consumption time of online videos is by no means attributable to new-modern social phenomena, such as binge-watching on large series and film platforms, but company’s advertising videos are often as well consumed on social media channels. In addition, the increased use of the internet via smartphone is boosting the need for new video marketing measures. If you manage to get into the microcosm of a potential buyer, advertising on video content can actually be lucrative.

The smartphone, our little personal all-rounder and companion in all situations, is extremely important to us not only to search for information - be it finding the nearest bank, the departure time of a train or supporting decision making. In such so-called "micro-moments" companies can offer their help to users as well, if their service or product is sought after, because such useful advertising offers will not be seen as a distraction. In the end, it gives companies a chance to connect with consumers at the very moment their attention to communication is the highest. How that works and what exactly Micro Moments are, I want to explain in the following: