The office is certainly the meeting place where personal exchange allows projects to progress faster than working alone in one’s own four walls. After all, it is the culture and the mood that promote creative cooperation, innovative ideas, and effective decisions. In other words, innovation needs personal encounters and face-to-face time. Hence, an office infrastructure should be in place that supports this, explaining the trend towards activity-based working right now, which means providing the most suitable work environment for every requirement.

Digital commerce is becoming an essential part of the new economy and the digital customer journey more important due to COVID-19. Particularly the retail sector has undergone a major change and been catapulted more than expected into the e-commerce world. In future, this will be accompanied by the challenges of mastering the latest technologies and unleashing the creativity of digital retail to use them in the individual customer journey. Hyper-personalization and micro-moment techniques are therefore considered top priorities for brands in the future of digital commerce.

The software giant, Microsoft, presents with Microsoft Mesh an application that is supposed to replace video conferences with holo-conferences, where virtual conversation partners appear in life-size. However, the potential range of applications is much broader.

Singapore has a long-standing love affair with shopping. Many of the country’s malls built in the 1970s and 80s were pioneering in their day, and today the island state has more malls per square mile than any other country in the world. Recent years have seen a dramatic shift from in-person shopping to online retail with giants such as Shopee and Lazada becoming household names and COVID-19 lockdowns sending more people to the Internet for their purchases. However, a new report notes that while shoppers are moving increasingly online, many remain unhappy with the level of customer service they receive there.

The sudden and wide-scale transformation to remote and hybrid working changed the digital landscape overnight and introduced heightened risks and new challenges. Well-established procedures were quickly rewritten, best practices rethought, and policies stretched to breaking point.

Always offering customers exactly the product they want—ideally at the exact moment when they want it—is what every company is dreaming of.

As organizations adapt to the new normal, it is important to reflect on what drives the increasing risk of insider threats and how the situation is worsened with more employees working from home than ever before, using new applications and tools, and relying on cloud apps.

Dr. Tong Wen, Huawei Fellow and CTO of Huawei Wireless, emphasized in his keynote speech at the 5G Advanced Summit that 5G must continuously evolve to build an engine of all-industry digitalization so as to satisfy the fast-growing consumer connections and diverse industrial applications.

Limelight Networks, a leading provider of content delivery network (CDN) and edge cloud services, has launched EdgeFunctions, a new serverless compute service which allows developers to tap into the power of the company’s global network and gives them the flexibility to deploy and run their own code.

“The events of 2020 have exposed just how critical trust is for consumers and businesses alike. Organizations had to trust their employees to work from home, and consumers had to trust businesses with their information. As a society, we had to trust each other to make the right decisions around health and safety, trust the scientific community to create life-saving vaccines, and trust the government to support us during a time of global economic uncertainty and political upheaval”, Okta explains in its State of Digital Trust report.

One of IDC’s recent report, titled ‘Empathy During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Becoming an Empathetic Enterprise in the Next Normal’, details how the most digitally mature organizations adapted quicker to challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. IDC highlights what organizations must focus on to become empathetic organizations – using technology to provide empathy at scale in areas of customer conversation, customer journey, customer experience, and customer satisfaction.

What would you say if you could have 100 percent ownership over your data and you can decide who you give access to? How about if you would be compensated for others accessing your data for their advertisements? Is this ideal world even realistic from a user's point of view?

Service Cloud Voice, a new product that will modernize the contact center by embedding telephony inside Salesforce Service Cloud has been launched earlier this year. Service Cloud Voice unifies phone, digital channels, and CRM data in real-time in one centralized console and can be regarded as the contact center of the future — intelligent, unified, and fast.

Obviously, companies whose management has technological competence can cope better with the corona crisis, as a variety of studies prove. When asked what must-haves for future managers are indispensable, four skills emerged as being crucial: decision-makers should have strategic thinking, leadership qualities, be competent in handling technologies, and understand the market and customers.