Top 10 Beyond Brick and Click

TOP 10 BEYOND BRICK AND CLICK

BUSINESS

Issue 07 Autumn 2018

08

Kostas Koukoravas Founder & CEO Intelistyle

Translating Unmatched Retail Experiences into Reality An insight on luxury brand’s cracking brick walls and needing a digital upli P.24

Saving in a world of fric onless payments P.48

The challenges of ecommerce and where things are headed P.66

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EDITOR’S CORNER

I

t is increasingly evident that the brick and mortar industry is evolving at a rapid scale, not dying. The physical retail landscape is continuously shifting to meet the ever-changing demands of the customers. Retailers are leveraging the potential of digitization to their advantage in order to offer a seamless and engaging experience for customers across different trading channels. The offline industry is swiftly merging with the online world to expand and provide the most unique experiences for customers. There is a notable drive amongst retailers, both physical and virtual, to increase productivity, ameliorate in-store experiences, and to grab hold and retain the best staff for a new digitallyinfluenced world of shopping. Retail solution providers are further stretching the boundaries of innovation by integrating disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality to widen the scope of opportunities. Beyond Exclamation understands this amalgamation between brick and click and the persistent approach of providers to go beyond the same and has thereby come up with an issue titled “Top 10 Beyond Brick and Click.”

Featuring as the Cover Story is Intelistyle, which is an Artificial Intelligence powered fashion stylist that is focused on helping people get inspired with outfits of their own clothes and offers suggestions for new ones.

Aside from this, this issue also features eZee, a leading hospitality technology provider which runs technology awareness campaigns for the industry; magia.ai, which is the first AI company to power proactive consumer selling with retail bots; Mind Trace, an innovative firm which has pioneered neuromarketing with its patented technology; Penser Analytics, a company that provides a real-time decision support system and an advanced analytics and tracking platform; Planckly, which offers all shops on the high street (including big issue sellers, buskers, and charities) to join as a onestop platform and make it a lot easier for the users to enjoy a similar experience at every store; and Stowga, which is the world’s largest warehouse database, whose warehousing on demand opens the way to fundamentally transform the supply chain and optimizes the logistics process to meet customer expectations.

Editor in Chief CHRISTINE [editor@beyondexclamation.com]

Managing Editor JACK [jack@beyondexclamation.com]

Art Director VIJAYKUMAR [design@beyondexclamation.com]

Graphic Artist NICK [nick@beyondexclamation.com]

Project Manager JENNIFER [jennifer@beyondexclamation.com]

Development Manager JUSTIN [info@beyondexclamation.com]

Also make sure to scroll through some of the most in-depth and insightful articles by leading individuals within the industry.

CONNECT!

Jack London www.beyondexclamation.com BeyondExclamation @BeyondEx Beyond Exclamation beyondexclamation

In addition to our print magazine, we also provide relevant industry news and updates, as well as some thoughtprovoking articles and blogs on our website. Make sure to follow the same as we at Beyond Exclamation are looking forward to interact with our readers. Let’s connect on the web!

What’s Inside...

Business Boulevard

B E O N 08

Cover Story on how unmatched retail experiences were translated into reality

Omniscient Voyage

42

How a bottle of wine sparked a pioneering idea

48

Saving in a world of frictionless payments

Excellence Causeway

18 A technologically innovative company running awareness campaigns

24 An insight on luxury brand’s cracking brick walls and needing a digital uplift

Newsmakers Locale

54 An out of the box payment system

Younick Corner

Y D

30 Story of a company that made Neuromarketing easy

36 The journey of a company with the world’s largest warehouse database

Definitive Destination

60 Decoding analytics in Sherlock style

66 The challenges of ecommerce and where things are headed

Kostas Koukoravas Founder & CEO Intelistyle

Translating Unmatched Retail Experiences into Reality

Michael Michelis Co-founder Intelistyle

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ay too often we’d open up our wardrobe full of clothes, and yet end up feeling nothing to wear. And this feeling can be backed up with a proven research stating that 1 out of every 3 items in everyone’s wardrobe is never worn.

Kostas Koukoravas, the Founder of Intelistyle, was no exception to this feeling. He used to wake up in the morning with a wardrobe full of clothes, yet uninspired to wear any single one of them. With the thought of solving a simple question of “Does this look right on me?” Kostas started Intelistyle – An AI-powered fashion stylist.

Enabling People to Purchase Sustainably Launched in December 2016 with a very focused goal, Intelistyle was incepted to help people get inspired with outfits of their own clothes.

From the very first day of the company’s foundation, the team has iterated based on the invaluable feedback from its vast array of users. The company started by building an experience; an experience that allowed people to see outfits using their own clothes and then moved on to create an ecommerce experience, allowing users to discover new clothes that match what they own. Helping them make more sustainable purchases.

According to a study, 3 out of every

4 people prefer to buy more sustainably. However, if we look at the actual buying cycle, an entirely different picture can be seen.

People buy primarily driven by the price factor. Intelistyle’s goal is to help people buy more sustainably, making purchases that complement their existing wardrobe. Kostas recalls, “We found that our users wanted to use inspiration from our AI stylist to edit and create their own outfits and plan ahead what they are wearing. They also approach the question of “what do I wear today” based on weather and the occasion that they’re attending.

This is exactly what we’ve made possible.”

A Team Driven by Productivity Kostas had started Intelistyle after finding the available styling options unsuitable for his busy lifestyle. He believed that advice and suggestions through blogs and magazines were too generic and required tons of time and effort to compile into a wardrobe strategy.

Speaking to a stylist was an expensive option, and having never done it beforehand, he wasn’t sure from where to begin. This prompted him to look for a better way of finding styling options.

Having already worked with a few other people up until that point, Kostas found most of them to lack the requisite commitment, desire or time to do what needs to be done to make a startup successful. During a cofounder dating and speed

pitching event, Kostas met Michael Michelis and they instantly clicked.

Michael’s vision, commitment to building a startup and his unlimited ability to learn and evolve made him stand apart and Kostas took notice. Since then, the two cofounders of Intelistyle, have been inseparable, from the initial launch st to doing 15 releases during the 1 year, from winning various awards, grants, and recognition to getting accepted into Techstars; the duo has taken their collective vision forward, together.

But Intelistyle is more than just about its founders. After winning the grant from innovate in the UK, the innovation agency of UK government, the company managed to bring some amazing people onboard. “Rogan, our machine learning scientist from UCL was absolutely key in making this a success. It very quickly became obvious that A.I. on its own and technical skill wasn’t enough. So, we brought Sophie into the team, who previously launched her own fashion brand stocked in topshop and featured in Vogue. Sophie works with our machine learning team to constantly improve the quality of the recommendations by bringing styling expertise into the team and coaching the A.I. in the right direction,” Kostas asserts while speaking about his team.

The Unmatched Process The AI of Intelistyle analyzes the latest fashion photography and

learns how to combine clothes using the choices of high street stylists, so as to always keep up with the trends. “We analyze hundreds of different style parameters and part of the magic here is that we don’t define what those are.” The AI learns what it should look out for on its own, based on the choices of top stylists.

At the moment, it reaches a whopping 80% accuracy when competing against human stylists.

However, style is something personal. The way that someone wears a pair of jeans might be entirely different from how someone else does.

their body type and the platform ensures that the recommendations are further tailored to their individual needs. Additionally, when recommending outfits, the AI-based fashion stylist also takes into account occasions and relevant weather conditions.

“We’ve built our AI so that it learns users’ preferences as they interact with the app and personalizes the entire e-commerce experience to what they like and the combinations that they chose to wear. We don’t box in users to a particular style. We are all individuals and our unique styles might be a combination of different style elements. In a similar way, Spotify creates a completely unique personalized playlist for us based on our past choices, we aim to curate a unique selection of clothes and outfits that is personal to every one of us,” exclaims Kostas.

The Future and Beyond!

Intelistyle’s vision is to disrupt retail experiences worldwide and revolutionize the way people discover fashion through the use of AI. The company envisages a shopping experience where your personal AI stylist truly knows you, always acts in your best interest and remains there to support you during and after your shopping experience.

Intelistyle tailors its recommendations according to the user’s skin tone, hair, and eye color, making its recommendations relevant to them. Users can also provide more information about

Herein, users have the ability to either take a photo of their own clothes or choose from its huge catalog of clothes for items that look similar to what they own.

Users can then get instant outfit recommendations for clothes in their own wardrobe or new clothe suggestions which they should buy.

“We believe that customer service (i.e. styling) for your clothes can be a lifelong added value service that extends beyond the typical transactional basis that we see in the current retail world. Our goal is to personalize the entire ecommerce experience by building the "Spotify of Fashion" – a service that seamlessly blends new styling trends with everyone’s unique

personality, personal characteristics, and works for every occasion in their diary.”

The company will continue to explore how it can blur the boundary between the offline and the online world and reduce the friction in customers’ styling and buying decisions. The customers will have the ability to take their ‘fashion profile’ with them online or across different retail stores and instantly receive a personalized experience on the shop floor or the fitting room, or even in their own wardrobe at home, thereby blending the online with the physical world seamlessly.

And on the other hand, Augmented Reality will be a key part of the experience that will reduce the friction of buying online. “Being able to visualize an entire outfit on you is an exciting way to explore styles and become more daring.”

“We also plan to work closely with the styling and influencer community to help them amplify their efforts by being their “styling alter ego,” allowing them to cater and monetize a much larger user base,” adds Kostas.

The Journey and Evolution Back when Intelistyle started out on its journey of building its Artificial Intelligence platform, the company used the latest academic research from 2017 and 2018. But soon enough, Kostas & Co. found

that the quality of the results was nowhere near good enough to create a commercially viable product. “We developed the state of the art further with a blend of models and bespoke datasets to build a unique proprietary technology. In addition, the blend of human and AI elements in that approach really makes a huge difference in the quality of the results, which currently outperform the academic state of the art.”

One of the unique selling points of Intelistyle is its ability to do all these with user-generated photography. While that might sound obvious, there is an enormous amount of complexity when working with user photography, due to the varying backgrounds, lighting conditions, cloth distortions, and different angles. However, Intelistyle’s innovations aren’t limited in terms of quality and flexibility of the recommendations. “We take into account the entire user experience.

Off course, as some competitors do, we offer the option to generate “complete the look” recommendations for the retailer’s entire product catalog in an automated fashion, as opposed to manually creating outfits for a product catalog with e.g. 100k items. However, we go a step further. The real value comes when personalization comes into play.

Users can see how a particular product that they’re considering buying, matches with items in their

wardrobe. Retailer homepage and search results can now show recommendations that are right for the user’s body type, skin tone, hair, and eye color as well as a personal sense of style. Email promotions or ad retargeting can be a lot more relevant - as opposed to saying “here’s 20% of shoes”, we can now say that “here’s 20% of shoes that match that dress you own”, or show “new dresses that will flatter your natural skin tone,” explains Kostas.

Intelistyle is trialing with retailers by creating a distinctive in-store retail experience. With the retail world shifting online more and more, the focus for brick and mortar retails is a shift to create a unique added value experiences. Imagine a scenario wherein a user walks into a store, and can take a photo of what they’re wearing or wanting to buy and can instantly receive recommendations from the in-stock items. This is what Intelistyle aims to do and is what sets the company apart. Translating imagination into reality. www.intelistyle.co.uk

Technologically Innovative

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Aeijaz Sodawala CEO eZee Technosys Pvt. Ltd.

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he current disruptions in the hospitality industry majorly revolve around the industry being aware of the benefits of technology in growing their business. The industry currently involves the struggle of business owners to go for the ideal technology. On the contrary, machine learning, artificial intelligence and smart technologies are taking over the industry like a raging storm.

Many of the advanced businesses are welcoming chat bots, customer service through robots, and a lot more. As the competition is increasing day-by-day, it becomes challenging for the industry to stay ahead in the market. Attracting guests has become difficult and focusing on online reviews has become important. Technology, which was previously a luxury has now become a necessity. Setting an example for the industry is a leading hospitality technology provider – eZee which is running technology awareness campaigns for the industry by organizing on-ground events in several cities of India, as well as other countries like Bahrain and Nepal. The company is familiarizing the industry with the role of technology in their business growth and encouraging them to give it a try.

A revolution that started through cutting edge technology The story of eZee’s innovation sets about from 2005, when the founders decided to bring in a revolution in hospitality industry through cutting edge technology, making it easy for the hospitality industry to get in pace with tech savvy world. The result

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was the foundation of eZee Technosys Pvt. Ltd. and kick-start development & launch of eZee FrontDesk – desktop based Property Management System. Eventually the team behind eZee went to develop a complete range of integrated hospitality solutions that caters to all big and small requirements of hotels and restaurants. This includes, a cloud based property management system (PMS), Booking Engine, Channel Manager, restaurant PointOf-Sale software, Online Hotel Reputation Management Software; along with digital restaurant menu, online feedback collection system, mobile app builder as well as custom website designing for hoteliers. Over the time, an attention was given to the importance of partners to cover vast geography globally, which resulted in eZee expanding its network through channel partners.

Today, the company caters to the needs of all kinds of accommodation providers viz. hotels, resorts, serviced and boutique apartments, hostels, B&Bs, guesthouses, inns, motels, lodges as well as chain hotels; besides providing restaurant management solutions to cafes, restaurants, bars, bistros, bakeries, and such likes. eZee has 10000 users spread across more than 160 countries, which has been further solidified by its vast network of 200+ channel partners. Beginning the team with just the two founders and a small office, eZee now holds a strong infrastructure. Being a customercentric organization since the inception, eZee’s major focus lies on providing top-notch service and experience to its users through technology, 24x7 live support, easy

on-boarding and implementation, and product training.

Currently, eZee helps hotels focus on increasing their direct as well as channel bookings through booking engine and simplified inventory distribution. The company is enabling them to handle their operations on-the-go through its complete hotel management mobile app. One of its recent launches of Critique – online reputation management software will be helping hoteliers touch a neglected aspect of hotel management, online reviews.

Also, the new cloud-based POS is helping hundreds of F&B businesses manage their operations right from their tablets, from anywhere, at any time. Affordable pricing, 24x7 live technical support, unlimited free product training and 100% implementation and on-boarding are some of its prime benefits over competitors, to facilitate the industry in adopting the technology without much hassle.

Constantly evolving to meet the everevolving demands of the industry eZee is constantly evolving with the progressive demands of the industry.

Since its focus lies in providing ultimate user experience, the company is continually looking for avenues to introduce breakthroughs in the market.

Following are the breakaway services eZee is providing in the hospitality bracket: ·

Regionally compliant technology: The company is open to develop or alter its

solutions as per the local statutory requirements and regulations. Until now, the team has developed regional compliance for IRD Nepal, GST India and Malaysia, Green Tax in Maldives, Government Statistical Reports for Panama and Iceland, ROP integration for Oman, VAT compliance for UAE, and several more. ·

·

Seamlessly integrated solutions: All of its solutions are completely integrated with each other, making eZee one of the very few companies in the market to provide a complete package of hospitality technology. Hotels and restaurants do not need to go through any hassles of multiple databases or vendors, as they get everything under one roof with eZee. 350+ third-party integrations: eZee’s solutions are integrated with more than 350 third-party hardware and software like Keycard Door lock, PABX call accounting, Financial accounting, Payment gateways, OTAs, SMS gateways, cash drawers, finger print readers, passport scanners and many more. These integrations streamline the day-to-day operations of our users. Besides, the company is also open to integrate with such local third-party hardware and software.

Apart from this, eZee is constantly upgrading itself with the latest technology, providing affordable solutions and reliable OTA connectivity, which makes it one of the widely accepted company across the industry.

A vision that started in college The founders, Vipul Kapoor & Hitesh Patel were classmates during their masters. Both of them had a vision to provide something commendable to the industry. Beginning from a small office in Surat, they started with a concept of on-premise hotel PMS, learning from thorough research and development, testing and failures. Establishing eZee from a city like Surat was backed by a dream to create a company where the IT industry can gather and work together to develop something exemplary. Today, they’re giving opportunities to more than 200 team members to build

their careers and grow exponentially; and serving their customers and partners without any hindrance. They decided to be a bootstrapped company so that they can focus on their products, processes and services in order to stay competitive in the industry against other funded players who’re majorly focused on customer acquisition through discounts.

An example of how presence of mind and grasping power can help you achieve your dream The company’s CEO, Aeijaz Sodawala joined eZee as a support executive around 10 years ago. His grasping power and presence of mind have been a great asset for him in reaching at this position today. Taking initiatives, getting involved in overall operations and going to its root-cause and solve a problem has always been its forte.

He played a principal part in setting up eZee’s regional office in Malaysia, and making it a success. As a CEO of the company, Aeijaz looks after structuring team to limited tasks, creating many new leaders, expanding the team and moving forward with optimum resource utilization and understanding the future needs of the industry with thorough foresightedness and planning the future plans and company objectives accordingly.

Moreover, Aeijaz is not just following the mob, but he is doing things that truly affect the vision of company.

“If the world has to expect from us, we will keep creating amazing solutions for our customers and opportunities for our team. We can see that artificial intelligence, machine language and block chain are taking over as one of the upcoming technologies in the industry. Using these technologies and constant innovations in our solutions to bring breakthroughs in the industry is a part of our growth plan for the upcoming years,” says Aeijaz on the company’s future prospect. www.ezeetechnosys.com

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Luxury Brands’ Cracking Brick Walls Need a Digital Uplift.

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Andreas Skorski Founder & CEO THE LIST

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or too long, luxury brands have been observing digital disruption from their elevated safety zone — or so they thought.

Fearing that the online sphere could hurt their exclusivity, they clung to their brick-and-mortar model and embraced digital much too cautiously. But their comfort zone is being swept from under their feet.

Luxe labels’ glossy shops have been losing their lustre. Footfall dropped by 20 percent in early 2016, according to Move Now Commercial Brokers, a Germany-based firm that gives real estate advice to high-end retailers. And in China, most luxury brands shut down stores last year, with Maserati’s Beijing showroom, 20 Hugo Boss stores and five Gucci locations among the casualties.

Dwindling Chinese and Russian demand, low consumer confidence in Europe and the U.S. and tectonic shifts in consumer behaviour are making it impossible for luxury brands to go on resting on their laurels. Since 2014, the sector has been growing at a much slower pace, described by Bain as the “new normal”.

Amid such a state of flux, it makes more sense than ever for luxury brands to turn to digital for salvation.

Brokerage firm Sanfor C. Bernstein predicts that web sales of luxury goods will grow twice as quickly as the overall luxury market by 2019.

Yet Chanel continues to sell only its perfume and skincare ranges on its online shop. Prada resisted selling on Net-a-porter’s European platform until earlier this month. And only 36 percent of prestige watches and jewelry brands in the U.S. have an ecommerce channel, compared to 76 percent of more affordable labels, according to a report by business intelligence firm L2.

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The unrealized growth potential of online channels for high-end retail is massive. But to unlock it, luxury brands have to realize once and for all that today’s affluent consumers are a whole new breed, with needs and priorities that the in-store-only shopping model is out of pace with.

Here are three key expectations of the modern luxury buyer that can only be fulfilled through solid digital strategies.

No Time to Waste Today’s constantly connected, tech-savvy and socialmedia-empowered consumers want the freedom to discover and purchase products whenever, wherever and however they want.

Radical innovators such as Uber, with its on-demand rides, and Amazon, with its 1-Click payments and ultra-fast delivery options, have been raising the levels of convenience that buyers take for granted. And luxury brands will have no other option than to follow suit.

Until now, Burberry has stood out as one of the few industry players daring to reimagine the traditional supply chain. Its strong digital push and bold move to make its catwalk collections instantly available online and offline give a glimpse into the future of high-end retail.

Fast and seamless payment, pick-up, delivery and returns systems — possibly operated by drones and Artificial Intelligence technologies — will eventually become the bare minimum.

Yes, refashioning supply and distribution require — apart from courage and imagination — sizeable IT and logistics budgets. But these investments are lower and less risky than the

fixed costs of the old brick-andmortar model, which are not only prohibitively high but also make companies extremely vulnerable to regional downturns.

In an industry that makes highvalue goods in very low qualities, many labels won’t have the necessary scale to bring ecommerce in-house, but that’s no excuse to lag behind. They can outsource their online channels to multi-brand platforms. Market research firm Technavio found that multi-brand retailers have been better than single brands at providing services such as free shipping and easy returns, and will be the drivers of luxury e-tailing growth from now until 2019.

The Lifestyle Experience More than ever, consumers are thirsty for unique, shareable experiences. To keep them hooked, their path to purchase must be filled with meaningful moments. As sales continue to shift online, physical stores will increasingly become spaces for branded experiences rather than points of purchase. The Marc Jacobs café in Milan and The Polo Bar by Ralph Lauren in New York are preludes to this convergence between retail and leisure.

Just like physical stores, ecommerce platforms will also have

to move beyond pure sales.

Through rich content, good curation and creative interaction, online channels can magnetize consumers who are on a constant lookout for inspiration and trends.

Tiffany & Co created a Snapchat filter that allows users to try on their diamond rings through the app, and Valentino often takes Snapchat viewers on virtual tours of its showrooms around the world.

Now that Pokemon Go has brought augmented reality into the mainstream, the commercial possibilities for digitally-enabled experiences seem endless.

Multi-brand and multi-product platforms have an even better chance of becoming hubs of inspiration because they can appeal to different aspects of a consumer’s identity. A man who has a thing for luxury watches is more likely to become engaged with a platform that also speaks to his interest in art and vintage furniture, than to a mono-brand watch website.

Data-driven Personalization The need for personalized and exclusive goods and services has always been and will always continue to characterize wealthy consumers.

commoditizing effect of the web, digital — done right — has the power to not only replicate but even to enhance the industry’s targeted, exclusive offerings.

The success of online capsule collections, such as Gucci’s 18piece handbag line on Net-a-Porter, has proven that wealthy consumers can still feel the rush of acquiring hard-to-get items even if all they have to do is click for it.

The fear of not giving customers personalized treatment is equally misplaced. With the wealth of data generated by digital channels, it’s easier than ever to tailor products and the entire brand experience to users’ personal preferences. Online luxury retailer THE LIST discovered, through data, that men made up 40 percent of their customer base, and then adjusted their offerings accordingly.

Disruptors in other industries have already leveraged data mining, social media interaction and logistics technologies to tear down cracked systems and build new ones. Just like Airbnb and Uber, the future winners in the luxury retail space will be those who are guided by the unfulfilled needs of today’s consumers, not by their old success formulas.

Although luxury brands have traditionally feared the

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Neuromarketing Made Easy

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Dr. Adjmal Sarwary Co-founder & CEO Mind Trace

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ost companies speculate that building brand awareness is more like an art than science. But recent studies suggest that global brands utilize both strategies to make choices which, in turn, fascinate their customers on a logical as well as in an emotional level. Advancement in neuroscience marketing has developed a new way of providing – the insights on the way brain responds to certain stimuli – to the brands. Whilst neuroscience concentrates more on the brain’s behavior, neuromarketing focuses at how businesses can acclimate their brand awareness strategies to sway customers on a psychological level.

One firm which has pioneered neuromarketing with its patented technology is Mind Trace. Mind Trace is an online platform offering content experience testing. Mind Trace helps clients optimize their advertisements or websites by measuring what their audience sees, feels, and what excites them while viewing clients’ content.

The ease at which Mind Trace operates is simply great On Mind Trace’s platform, clients simply create a new experiment with the content they want to test.

This experiment can then be accessed via a link that the clients sends out to their testers. In case the clients don’t have any testers, Mind Trace can send it out to its testers. These testers then click on

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the link and within their browser they receive some instructions and are then asked to provide access to their webcam. After they do, a quick calibration starts and they view the content of that experiment. At the end, they receive a thank you and that’s it.

Mind Trace collects all the data through the webcam, eye tracking, emotion tracking, and heart rate features. The processing and results are then compiled on its system. As soon as everything is finished, the customer is notified of their results.

The observation made the foundation It all started during Dr. Adjmal Sarwary’s PhD time at the Donders Institute for Brain Research. There, Adjmal noticed that quite a few marketing people were running around the institute. That was quite surprising for Adjmal and the first thing he did was to ask ‘What are you doing here?’ The answer came pretty quick: ‘we want to know what people really think about our content.’ By content they were referring to advertisement videos, billboards, posters, etc. However, the way they were going about it was to use an fMRI ‘brain scanner’.

If you had studied neuroscience for a while it would be very clear that the way they wanted to use the machines is not really how they work. “For me personally, this was still interesting though, as I was getting some input from the outside world that was not just my science bubble. Plus, from their perspective this is a valid and important question to ask,” Adjmal shares.

Adjmal and Dr. Ivar Clemens, the co-founders of Mind Trace, thought of a much simpler way to collect this type of information, rather than to use a super expensive piece of hardware, which is tied to one single location, and can only be used in series. And Mind Trace was hence born.

An appealing service that distinguishes Mind Trace The service offered by Mind Trace is appealing to quite a few different industries. However, there is one overarching trend that seems to be emerging, which is that companies seem to be tired of the ‘same old’ approach of research, namely surveys and traditional focus groups. Adjmal believes that techniques to do market research for example have not changed much for a long time. On the other hand, companies do see massive advances in AI or web technologies in general. To them, this is a strong contrast. The benefits that set Mind Trace apart from most of its competitors is that clients get a much more detailed view of what the audience experiences. Simply put, with Mind Trace there is no ‘guessing game’ left to play. It is great to know how a person feels about the content they see. But if you don’t know what they actually looked at, you don’t know what led to that emotion. The same applies the other way around. Mind Trace completes the puzzle of insights to start real optimization.

The biggest advantage that cloud offers to Mind Trace is

parallelization and accessibility, irrespective of the location. “It allows us to offer our service to many clients at the same time, no matter where they are. The same holds for collecting data, that our clients need.

They can simply send out an access link, which their participants can use to access an experiment.

Everything will be taken care of within the browser and multiple people can participate at the same time, no matter where they are. This creates a massive boost in convenience and speed of getting data and turn that into insights,” Adjmal adds.

The frontrunner’s contribution to the industry As the CEO of Mind Trace, Adjmal’s biggest contribution to the company is that his focus lies on continuous learning. His training has been focused on scientific approaches, technical designing, and analysis. That knowledge does not have much to do with how things go in the business world if you think about sales or marketing. However, that is the part where the training comes in handy as it helps you approach these topics by breaking them down

systematically. This is, according to Adjmal, his biggest contribution in addition to being able to link multiple facets of topics and industries together that MindTrace can then capitalize on.

Challenges and solutions while going ahead The biggest challenge for Mind Trace is to convince people that technology can do what they say it can. To many, it still sounds like science fiction rather than science fact. The Mind Trace team noticed that the best way to approach this is not by being more rational or by referencing to a mountain of research papers, but simply by showing it. And the biggest advantage is that they can use their own tool to optimize this.

Going ahead, the company’s vision is to make its technology available to as many people as possible.

More importantly, they don’t just want to focus on one industry but on many different ones. That is the power of their fundamental techniques, and that will be the driving factor of Mind Trace going into the future. www.mind-trace.com

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Search, Compare, & Book

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Charlie Pool CEO Stowga

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or years there has been a recurring question concerning how retailers can meet today’s demand for instant gratification and production innovation, without incurring the untenable business cost. From same day delivery to low-risk business expansion, every aspect of the retail model requires flexibility and agility. While every other aspect of the logistics model is agile and responsive, retailers are, in the main, still constrained by five, ten, even 15 year warehouse leases.

The inflexibility of warehouse deals becomes ever starker given the incredible flexibility achieved through every other part of an intelligently optimised supply chain. Retailers are able to respond incredibly quickly to changes in exchange rates, demand and market opportunity by shifting suppliers and adapting logistics routes – yet the warehouse operations are still fixed. The result can be huge swathes of expensive, empty space; or business opportunities that cannot be grasped due to a limitation of available space.

This inflexibility within warehousing is also in clear contrast to the flexible business models adopted across other areas of commercial and residential property. From short shop leases, including pop-ups, to ‘pay by the desk’ office space, or even Airbnb, the way organisations and

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individuals can utilise property has changed, radically. Surely it is time to apply similar thinking to the warehouse market.

Stowga is the World’s Warehousing Marketplace, the most transparent platform to buy and sell warehouse space and services. Effectively, Stowga is a non-asset based ‘match-maker’, matching companies with available warehouse capacity with those that need additional capacity without committing to long-term fixed overheads. It’s sort of an extension of the 3PL storage model, but without being constrained to a 3PLs warehouse assets.

In addition, it also provides a chance to embrace new market opportunities and trial new ideas with minimal investment and minimal risk.

Making customers rethink how they build supply chains Charlie Pool, the CEO of the company, founded Stowga after a career at JPMorgan where he was the first hire for a new commodities business focused on project finance, derivatives, and principal investments. The business grew to a team of over 350 globally with offices all around the world in just three years. After working on several technology investments for JPMorgan, Charlie began investing in startups before leaving finance to work for a startup, a P2P lending platform called Trillion Fund where

he was the Chief Commercial Officer.

It was whilst advising an asset management firm that had a panEuropean industrial real estate fund that the idea for Stowga came about. Charlie founded Stowga in 2016 with the goal of revolutionizing supply chains by focusing on the weakest link in the chain: warehouses. Stowga is now the leading on-demand warehouse marketplace. By creating a liquid warehouse marketplace, the speed and simplicity – with which Stowga allows customers to search, compare, and book warehouses – is allowing customers to completely rethink how they build supply chains.

Helping companies make the most of their warehousing assets It’s been two years since Stowga’s foundation and it has already raised $2.5m in seed funding. The company has been publicly recognized several times, winning the WIRED Retail Startup showcase in 2017, as well as the DP World Supply Chain Disruptor award in 2018. But what makes Stowga a success is the connection that it has enabled thus far or how it has helped KFC end the great chicken crisis in the UK. Stowga has helped Nichols, a drinks company, expand their distribution network from 3 large distribution centres to 14 smaller regional sites, that’s 100% flexible.

This got them closer to their customers, reduced delivery times, reduced driver and fuel costs, and reduced fuel emissions. This is important when companies are competing more and more on delivery times to meet customer expectations.

Stowga has also been a huge cost and time saving option for both pi-top (Computer Science and STEAM learning tools using Raspberry Pi) and Diamond Logistics (a 3PL), taking the process of identifying, contacting, and signing new customers from 16 to 2 weeks - and has enabled both parties to grow jointly through this perfect match.

Disrupting the industry with an innovative platform The warehouse, the brick and mortar cornerstone of the supply chain is being disrupted. The ‘sharing economy’ is here, with the rise of flexible warehousing with Stowga. Due to the growth of ecommerce, the need for warehouses is growing: every $1bn spent online requires an additional 750,000 sq. ft. of warehouse space – with an existing 500 million sqft of industrial space in the UK alone.

“In the UK, the average length of an industrial warehouse lease is just under 7 years, representing a significant commitment in a world of flexible, agile supply chains. Everyone thinks the industrial market is supply constrained. It isn’t. There is hidden enormous spare capacity in the system, and it’s accessible through Stowga,” says Charlie.

The average under-utilized space by a warehouse is ~25% across the year. And there are already over 4,000 warehouses available on the Stowga marketplace, from small family run businesses to industry giants including CBRE and Asda (a Walmart company) along with new ones that are being added every day. That equates to millions of free sqft that could be used.

“We’re in a multi-billion market that is in need of a change. Every actor (retailers, real estate, and startups) recognizes this and the question really is who will set up as a market leader first and lead in key territories. We’ve built a fantastic team of brilliant talents, all working closely together to build a fantastic product that answers the market need while being sustainable in the long term.” Charlie concludes. www.stowga.com

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Invisible Selling at its Best

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Sam Vasisht CMO magia.ai

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e have seen countless cases of groundbreaking ideas being discussed or being born at usual places and later turning out to be a game-changer. But, there haven’t been many cases where the ideas are discussed at unusual places and goes on to make it big.

Going up against this statement as the perfect example is magia.ai – the first AI company to power proactive consumer selling with retail bots – the story of which had started over a bottle of wine.

The founders were talking about how they had all been sold wine at some point but how the wines somehow did not live up to the recommendation of the wine sales person. The problem that they found was that they were often sold products by sales people that didn’t know about them nor the product they are selling.

The answer to this problem had to be technical, as all of them were Silicon Valley techies with more than a dozen successful startups collectively under their belts. And there it stood – the idea of creating a digital sales assistant that knew everything about a domain and its products; knew how people preferred to shop; could explain why a particular product is good for them; address any and every concerns that might pop-up; and basically sell like a passionate sales person would, only if one were to be found!

Since, this started with a bottle of wine, they figured they’d start with a name. Therefore, their first product was named Virtual Sommelier, representing the virtual version of a wine steward.

Even before Virtual Sommelier would be launched, the founders knew that it was probably the best wine search and

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wine shopping tool on the market.

Virtual Sommelier had signed customers before the founders even had a demonstrable prototype. They are now in the process of launching with one of the world’s largest wine and spirits retail chain across hundreds of its global stores.

knowledge base, which is built for each domain. magia does not simply boast a generic knowledge base that knows everything there is to know about a product domain (e.g., wine, cars, TVs, wearables), but instead, it is also agile in how it can retrieve information from it randomly.

Transforming shoppers’ journey into linear fashion The retail industry is going through a tremendous transformation as a result of advancing technology. Today, the notion that technology will assist people – both online and in physical stores – to be more informed and get better assistance has been well established. It has become a common knowledge that machines can in many cases help amplify the shoppers’ experience better than a human sales person might do, which some people refer to as the autonomous mode of shopping.

The second pillar is the retail-specific natural language understanding or NLU that is optimized for the retail sector. In their NLU, queries like “wine to go with steak” is the same as “TV to go with PS4”. In other words, magia’s NLU is trained for the retail world, independent of a product domain.

Accordingly, the NLU also knows that the “wine with steak” is not the same thing as “TV with Roku.”

Stretching this concept further, magia has taken a very unique approach by creating an intelligent virtual sales assistance that people can intuitively interact with. It would be similar to any other competent human sales assistant, who is thoroughly knowledgeable about the product and holds the ability to understand the shopper at a personal level. Unlike other companies that are building virtual assistants by taking a very simple decision-tree type of approach, the technology of magia has developed a virtual assistant with advanced logic and reasoning, natural language understanding, information retrieval and other techniques. The result? The journey of shoppers is turning into a linear fashion which earlier didn’t quite happen.

Three pillars, collectively doing wonders The technology of magia has three main pillars. The first being the

The third pillar is what the team calls as to be the “brain” where much of the intelligent selling resides. Scenarios such as the shoppers meandering journey, resolving conflicting constraints, maintaining or discarding contexts intelligently, etc. are handled by the brain. And of course, these three pillars are tightly integrated as they all need to interact very closely for everything to come together.

The unison of discipline, perseverance, and patience The challenges magia has faced are somewhat similar to other startups, i.e. essentially crossing the barrier of getting their first initial commercial deals. magia is always striving to constantly push the envelope in getting from a very good to a yet better solution; balancing resources between current opportunities and longer term roadmap considerations.

The biggest challenge, however, has always been creating market awareness. Retailers are not exactly on the cutting-edge of technology.

How does the team make them aware of what is possible with magia and at the same time motivate them to move quickly? A modulated approach, wherein every progress is a building block to the next one and to the next one. At some point it reaches a tipping point where they then hit the proverbial hockey stick curve. This takes discipline, perseverance and patience, and the magia team has got all of it to its name.

An industry leader utilizing all of his experience Sam Vasisht, the Co-founder of magia is responsible for establishing the company’s strategy and marketing. magia is his third company in building virtual assistants.

The first virtual assistant he launched was back in 2012, when Apple’s Siri started to gain traction in the market.

Nonetheless, Sam’s virtual assistant was far more advanced and created quite a buzz, albeit it was only for video. “I’ve brought a relatively long span of experience in virtual assistants and AI to magia as a result. The learning of prior companies is invaluable as we navigate this space. For one, there is a lot of customer skepticism as most other products on the market do not perform. We have to overcome that from a customer education standpoint. Second, I have learnt that creating a simple solution, even if it an elegant one is pointless if it does not really solve consumer problems.

Consumers are very astute in what they choose to adopt. We focus a lot on solving real problems rather than just giving consumers a new shiny thing,” shares Sam. Having launched a lot of hi-tech products across nascent industries over the past 15 years, Sam has learnt to balance the art of getting fast market attraction early in the life of a startup while at the same time building a bridge for the mainstream market to catch up. He believes that most startups fail either because they only get early traction or they’re in the waiting mode for the mainstream market to catch up, and as a result of which they die on the vine. “I have been involved with startups at all stages, including exits of some late stage startups that were on death’s door.

I’ve seen how these companies got to that fragile state, and how it could have been avoided. These are all the things one tries to avoid when you’re starting with a clean slate, and experience is the best teacher,” he further adds.

needing assistance from her 20-something grandson. They want to create an opportunity where a new parent can buy a car seat for their infant and feel completely confident and unconcerned about whether it is the right seat or not. “We envision a future where the notion of ‘buyer’s remorse’ does not exist. Primarily, we envision a future where in addition to always buying the right product, buying anything is a breeze, no matter how complex the product and how uninformed the shopper is about it,” Sam concludes. www.magia.ai

A bright future for shoppers and retailers Going ahead, the team at magia envisions a future scenario where a fresh graduate can select his or her first car confidently within minutes without needing to know anything about cars. Additionally, magia wants to create a future where a grandmother can buy her first laptop without

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Saving in a world of Frictionless Payments Why we need technology to protect humans from themselves (‌and other technology)

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Elvis Wong Founder Innovate Financial Health

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T

he Pain of Paying I remember that back in university, I would always make sure to bring cash with me to the bars. Over the course of the night, as I saw my cash dwindle, I would question whether I really needed that next drink. The physical nature of using cash provided a natural check for me on my spending. On the other hand, the nights where I didn’t have cash but only credit were the nights where I easily spent the most.

Why is it that it’s so much easier to spend with credit instead of cash?

Behavioral economists call this phenomenon the “Pain of Paying”. The idea is that when consumers make purchases, they feel both a pleasure of consumption and a pain of paying. Each time we make a payment, we make a specific calculation on whether what we’re buying is worth the financial pain. Because cash is tangible and physical, humans have more of an emotional connection to cash than they do to credit.

Similarly, we have a deeper attachment to using our physical credit cards than to an automated payment through an app (e.g., Uber). As we get further detached from the payment, our threshold for the pleasure of consumption lowers.

The Rise of Frictionless Commerce In recent years, startups and retail companies have invested millions of dollars in new technologies that reduce the friction in payments in order to encourage individuals to spend more. These innovations include new subscription models, sensor-based transactions, conversational commerce, and predictive payments.

For example: · Amazon publicly launched their Amazon Go concept in January of 2018, allowing individuals to buy their groceries without ever pulling out their wallets. This builds on Amazon’s extensive history of reducing friction from their dash buttons to 1-click ordering.

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· In May of this year, Instagram launched a payments feature, allowing you to make payments without ever leaving Instagram. · Starbucks initially launched their mobile payments app in 2011. Now, the app has more than 23 million regular users and well over $1 billion pre-loaded onto the app.

The trend towards more seamless payments is so powerful that a 2016 A.T. Kearney study predicts that frictionless commerce (including digital) will account for over 45% of US consumer spending by 2026.

Why Frictionless May Not Be So Good for Consumers Lowering the inherent ‘pain of paying’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example, you are much more likely to enjoy a resort vacation when it’s all inclusive vs. when it’s not, regardless of how much you spend overall. Similarly, for many financially healthy consumers, the benefits of convenient seamless payments can outweigh the increased spending.

The challenge comes when you consider that so many Canadians and Americans aren’t financially healthy.

27% of Canadians don’t save any money from month to month and more than 4 in 10 Americans aren’t able to cover an unexpected $400 expense with their savings.

I’m willing to bet that there’s overlap between individuals that have trouble saving and individuals that use Amazon, the Starbucks app, Uber, and other methods of seamless payments.

Traditional thinking puts the onus of responsibility on the individuals (i.e., the inability to save comes from a lack of financial literacy and self-discipline). Decades of behavioral economics research, however, demonstrate that humans aren’t rational and small factors can greatly affect one’s spending. When retail

giants are so focused on leveraging data, design, and the latest technologies to encourage individuals to spend more, it’s no wonder why so many of us struggle with saving.

automatically calculating and depositing a safe amount to save each day. ·

So what can we do?

My personal thesis is that in order to fight tech, you need tech. We need to build tools that utilize the same underlying concepts behind frictionless payments to help individuals manage their spending and increase their savings such as: ·

Making Savings Frictionless: Apps like Digit and Mylo are designed with making savings as easy as possible either by rounding up daily transactions and investing the spare change or

·

Simplifying Mental Accounting: Simple’s Safe to Spend feature leverages the fact that humans naturally separate money for different purposes by taking into account an individual’s cash flow, future bills and budgets to notify them of how much it’s safe to spend each month.

Similar to seeing cash dwindle in your wallet, this feature serves as the mental check that helps you curb your spending.

consumption. What if we can tip this balance again by increasing the pleasure of saving? Prized-link savings accounts such as Save to Win and WinWin do just that by providing regular lotterybased rewards just for saving.

The examples above are just the start. As technology continues to evolve to make spending more convenient and to encourage impulse purchases, we’ll need to continue to develop counteracting technologies that help protect individuals from these influences (…and from themselves).

Increasing the Pleasure of Savings: Frictionless payments has tipped the balance between the pain of paying and the pleasure of

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Scan, Pay, & Go

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Uzair Siddiqui Founder Planckly

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C

urrently, high street brands in the UK believe that launching their own mobile app will improve their shopping experience and bring in more loyal customers. While the theory is correct, it is not practical.

Users do not like downloading hundreds of apps on their phone just to be able to enjoy the smooth online-style shopping experience at every store on the high street. Enters Planckly, a company offering all shops on the high street (from large stores to Big Issue sellers, buskers, and charities) to join as a one-stop platform and make it a lot easier for the users to effortlessly enjoy a similar experience at every store.

With products planned in IoT, voice, wearable batteries, and smart shopping trolleys, Planckly is aiming to help high street shops start the digital transformation and become future proof before it is too late.

Everyone agrees that shopping can be laborious at times. We hate the long queues that makes us wait for ages while everyone takes things out of their baskets or trolleys puts them on a conveyor and then puts them in bags and back in the trolley or basket. Planckly is an app made by TechWisely Ltd., a London-based startup, to tackle this annoying occurrences while shopping.

It’s a self-checkout mobile application which allows customers to scan for an item, pay for it on the phone, and leave the store without going to a checkout point. It also offers customers to click & collect their grocery from local convenient shops. Besides offering better

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shopping experience, it allows retailers to attract customers for repeat purchase and increases impulse buying by showing suggested products in the app ascertained with the help of the Artificial Intelligence algorithms integrated into the application. The broad set of behavioral data the app collects can also be used to tailor discounts and rewards for the user.

As of now, the app has been introduced in Singapore, Cambodia, Dubai, Bahrain, UK, and the US. At present, the team behind this innovative app are running test implementations at two large retailers in Dubai and UK. The beginning of Planckly The Founder of TechWisely, Uzair Siddiqui was studying at the University College London when he got heavily inspired by the slogan of their engineering department, ‘Change the world’. One weekend, he had to stand in line at a local supermarket for over 10 minutes just to buy some quick bread and eggs.

This was the tipping point to start developing a solution that can make shopping better. Inspiration of the solution came from the online shopping experience provided by Amazon which was and is loved by many.

Following this, Uzair and his brother, Shamail, got the initial prototype ready with some help from a friend from their home town in Karachi, Pakistan. Since then, they have got their friends and family to invest around £100K and have scaled up the prototype by building an in-house team of highly skilled developers and designers in the UK and Pakistan.

A futuristic leader driving the wave As an electronic engineer, Uzair chose the path of entrepreneurship to be able to make an impact on the society. As an entrepreneur he is keen to help the underprivileged. With one idea at a time and one step at a time, he believes he can make the world much more inclusive and a better place for all. Planckly is the first step towards that direction, as it not only helps bust queue while shopping or ordering food, it enables buskers and charities to receive high street donations through people’s phones – all done simply from the same app Planckly. Another unique feature of Planckly is that user can add a donation to a charity of their choice each time they pay for their shopping.

Uzair has a broader vision than just Planckly and has other projects being cooked up that can create a better ecosystem for us to live in. One such app helps find interesting activities to keep fit and healthy or another full blown dedicated charity donation app that brings in celebrities and donors together to raise money all the while having some fun! Uzair believes that the tech industry can do more good than harm for the future and create new markets and opportunities for the younger generation to be inspired to continue doing well for the earth, environment, animals, humans, and robots!

Making shopping experience super-fast and super-efficient Planckly works differently in different use cases. Broadly, it works very well for click & collect, in-store shopping using a phone and can also

be used to order delivery. In a retail scenario, it brings the online shopping experience of large online stores like Amazon to the high street retail store. Because it’s a platform, it also brings in the joy of personalization like Facebook or Google to create personalized advertisements, discounts and rewards.

Customers entering a shop can ‘identify the store’ using NFC, a QR code or a Bluetooth system. They then pick up the items they like and ‘scan their barcode’ using their mobile phone’s camera or browse the items from the shop’s inventory on the app. Once they are happy with the basket, they ‘pay on their phone’ and leave the store.

As an optional step, the shopkeeper can request to a customer to ‘send their shopping list’ to the staff’s phone ‘using a QR code’ and the staff can then scan a sample of their items in their bag using his own phone on a random basis to ensure most have been paid for. This works in deterring shoplifting.

For restaurants and coffee shops the click & collect or pay-at-the-table works best as users can place an order while on their way to the shop and just collect the food or order from the table using their phone and pay with their phone.

Helping retailers getting ready for the future Uzair believes after Amazon buying whole foods and launching complete cashier-free stores as ‘Amazon Go’ in the US, the high street retail sector has been very afraid of the future. Many brick and mortar stores have now closed completely or have just adopted the online delivery model. “Just this year, the concept of Scan Pay and Go in-store has been adopted by another major tier-1 grocery store in the UK, ‘Sainsbury’s’ which provides further validation of our concept and pushes the independent and tier 2 retailers to join us as a platform in order to compete with the larger players on a level playing field”, Uzair asserts. “We are helping the high street get ready for the future where customer demands are becoming increasingly challenging thanks to the near perfect online shopping experience,” he continues.

Continuing to adapt new technologies while staying true to the core One of the moments when the team felt their hard work is starting to pay off is when they won the startup pod at

Project Kairos at TechXlr8, which happened in June 2018 at ExCel London. During that 3-day event, they not only met lots of investors and retailers who gave positive feedback but also managed to win the best pitch award from the Retail Tech Category. Planckly was also included in Top 10 UK Retail Tech Start-ups by TechAdvocates London.

Going ahead, Planckly is not simply about ‘scan pay go’ in-store. Planckly is looking forward to making the complete high street experience modern, fun, and encouraging so that people don’t forget the outdoors.

“We are developing solutions in IoT and Augmented Reality where Planckly is working on wearables like smartwatches and voice technology to make Plackly a must have in-store shopping app,” Uzair concludes. www.planckly.com

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The Sherlock Way

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Swarochish Chekuri Co-founder & CEO Penser Analytics

Shashi Kumar Co-founder & CTO Penser Analytics

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et’s consider we have a business question. So, we reach out to our analytics team. They take anywhere between three to four weeks to answer that question. Then we realize, an additional information is needed to take a decision, and the whole process repeats for another 3 weeks.

But, it’s already a month and half since we reached to our analytics team and there’s just waiting and waiting. The reason for this waiting is that traditional BI tools have a limitation to a certain extent, after which, the tools cannot answer our questions. And with every new question, there comes another problem of having to rebuild a report which again takes around a month’s time or sometimes more. But what if there was a better way? Wouldn’t that be a time-saving for everyone?

Well, there is a way – The Sherlock way. All we need to do is to type our question in English and Sherlock takes it over from there. It identifies the problem, and investigates the whole picture, and gives you a beautiful representation with an overview of the answer you are looking for. And most importantly, all of this takes just a minute’s time.

We can do this any number of times until we have the full picture. And the startup which has developed the Sherlock way is Penser Analytics – founded by Swarochish Chekuri & Shashi Kumar, and driven by cutting edge technological advances in the field of big data analytics. With the help of Sherlock, Penser Analytics provides a real-time decision support system and an advanced analytics and tracking platform.

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The journey right from the idea Before founding Penser Analytics, Swarochish spent about a decade in analytics. All throughout this experience, there was a gap that he observed in this field, right from MuSigma to Payback/Amex/Capillary. He realized that there should be system to minimize the timeframe from a business request to insight which was about 4-6 weeks, depending on the complexity of the question and seniority of the requester. He has always believed the perfect use of analytics in an organization happens when it is available to everyone – irrespective of their technical knowledge – in retail from a store manager/worker all the way to CEO – at the right time. He asked himself, when Google can deliver search results in milliseconds then why should applications be any different?

One shouldn’t have to wait for reports or numbers in the process.

This prompted the idea to create a question answering machine with no limits. Simply putting, slice and dice data using just English questions.

The idea for the Sherlock was there to be taken and it needed a partner to execute and that’s when Swarochish met Shashi through a friend in a coffee shop in Kormangala, Bangalore. Swarochish was struggling to get the Version 0 of base code of Sherlock-MVP to execute. He could not do this on his home computer or on SAS or any other platforms that he was experienced in. So, he had a chat with Shashi about how, if this piece of code works, it would revolutionize the big data analytics space. Shashi

bought into the idea as he could relate with how this would automate his team’s work at American Express. About 10 days later, Shashi brought this machine crashing code into something that executed in 18 minutes. Penser Analytics was born.

They got the first version of MVP by Dec 2014, around 6 months from the start. Now, the partners are in the process of building their Version 2.

“We are still way far from where we want to be, we want to build The Machine – from Person of Interest (a TV series),” exclaims Swarochish.

Analytics at the speed of your thought At present, Sherlock is the only selfservice application which provides instantaneous access to actionable insights needed to make the best business decisions from natural language question based access using applied AI. It empowers organizations to make sense of large data volumes, get answers to their toughest business questions, build beautiful data visualizations, and ensure one version of the truth (1VOT) – at any scale, on any device within a minute. Penser’s clients have used Sherlock in a variety of ways, such as, ·

Marks & Spencer uses Sherlock to run about 15+ campaigns daily,

·

Saudi Arabia’s largest pizza QSR, uses Sherlock to revolutionize its CRM

·

Thick Shake Factory – QSR based out of India, uses Sherlock to ensure they have

the right ingredients in right quantities to minimize wastage and reduce stock-outs, ·

·

Big Bazar, Future Group, uses Sherlock to keep a track of the IOT sensors across stores, estimate waiting time for check-out and alert store manager, Nyx Medical, uses Sherlock to increase their insurance claim filing efficiency by more than 100%.

A desperate need for innovation to stay ahead in the market According to Swarochish, there was a lot of buzz about Big data analytics, which is now fizzing out. A lot of big data projects are failing only because people were running behind the technology and not a solution for their problem. There is a desperate need for innovation to stay ahead in the market if the technology is to survive and thrive.

“With Sherlock, we are primarily focused on the business solution. We automate data integration, data engineering, ML/statistical analysis, visualization – all parts of an analytics project. We deliver to a Citizen Data Scientist, and this breed is growing big & fast. We

do have some competition such as alteryx, IBM Watson etc, but, our focus is a bit different,” he adds.

Breaking every problem to its basic parts and solve With Penser’s expertise in retain and e-commerce bracket, clients can unlock Omni-channel, multi-channel and O2O aspects, improve store efficiency, drive sales, optimize inventory levels across stores and products, enhance the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and deliver a better shopping experience. Penser has below services in retail and e-commerce bracket, Marketing Analysis, Loss Prevention, Merchandising Analytics, Personal Shopping Assistant, Store Operations, ECommerce Solution and Omni Channel Solution & O2o.

When asked what are the building blocks of Penser Analytics and the reason they succeed at what they do, Swarochish said, “We throw ideas rather than money at a problem. We have passionate individuals about the product who have really passionate arguments.

Moreover, our team breaks every problem to its basic parts to solve and has laser-type focus on ensuring customer success.” Going ahead, Sherlock will be able to upgrade its capabilities as to adopt the changing times and customer requirements. www.penseranalytics.com

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Joe Hanson Dev Rel PubNub

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n the middle of the 20th century, Sears’s domestic annual revenue hovered around 1% of the entire U.S. GDP (around $180 billion in today’s dollars). They were an unbeatable behemoth — selling everything from tools, to washing machines, to houses.

Fast forward to 2005. A small company known as Amazon was bringing in just 17% of Sears’s revenue. The following 5 years, Sears’s sales dropped 14% per year, while Amazon’s quadrupled. By 2016, Amazon had revenues of $136 billion against Sears’s $22 billion.

How’d this happen? Though you can’t 100% credit Sears’s decline and Amazon’s explosion to eCommerce itself, it’s played a massive role in shaping the two companies. In fact, Sears has an online store. It’s not just making products available for purchase on a website that makes or breaks a company.

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The Challenges of eCommerce and Where Things Are Headed

The eCommerce space is an immensely competitive world.

Standing out in the noise, where competition is a click away, comparisons are a search away, and innovation is ripe and common, and fundamental to every company’s strategy. eCommerce companies are always looking for ways to differentiate themselves from other companies, deliver an efficient, delightful experience, reach new markets, and make data-driven decisions.

At the forefront of eCommerce innovation are cognitive services — a broad term for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and distributed algorithms. Cognitive services allow businesses to integrate problem solving, knowledge, language, analysis, categorization and more.

Current Challenges The Internet has changed how we discover, research, purchase, and receive goods. It’s an infinite world offering everything you could ever imagine. Everyone is well aware of this. This is great for the consumer, and a huge opportunity for any eCommerce company. However, with great opportunity come great challenges:

In the last couple years, Amazon has done this. From AI assistants, to VR/AR, to delivery drones, Amazon has heavily invested in emerging technology. AI assistants have stuck, and now handle the bulk of customer service queries, and, more recently, advising shoppers in researching products. VR/AR and delivery drones haven’t hit critical mass quite yet, but are viable options of the next-generation of eCommerce, and Amazon will be ready when the time comes.

So, what are the trends that are taking the eCommerce by storm?

Personalization 84% of online shoppers would no longer buy from an organization that doesn’t account for preferences and purchasing history.

The days of spray and pray are over, and businesses are realizing that they need to curate a personal experience for each individual prospect and repeat customer.

Competition is always lurking: Throughout the entire sales cycle, from discovery to order, competition is always right around the corner in so many different ways. It’s never been easier to compare pricing of similar products across the web, and other eCommerce storefronts are a click away.

3rd party websites make money curating comparisons in a single page. And large Internet retailers, who sell massive catalogs of items, utilize recommendations similar to your product.

Who is buying from you?: How do you truly understand who your customers are with a name, address, and email address? Who’s visiting your website, but not buying from you? What’s influencing browsers to be customers?

Spray and Pray: Deploying display ads across the entire Internet, to everyone using it, is not efficient. You need to curate and engage prospects at the individual level.

Big Trends — Where Things Are Headed To remain competitive in the crowded eCommerce world, you must invest in emerging technologies and experiment with new platforms. But innovation isn’t easy. You need to know that some may fail. But setting your business up as an R&D department, and choosing low-risk, high-yield technologies to deliver innovative features is key.

Personalization, also known as one-to-one marketing, is utilizing tracking and predictive technology to create a personalized shopping experience for customers. This is accomplished by collecting granular details on visitors — their searches, clicks, purchases, behavior, and any external data that exists on them. This allows them to deliver more relevant recommendations, dynamically update layout for more efficient navigation, and automate interactions to retain and re-engage prospects and customers.

Localization Localization is a simple, but powerful eCommerce tactic that determines the customer’s location (through an IP address) and delivers tailored content based on it. Not only does this build a wider audience, by enabling you to engage

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more personally with a wider base of customers, it also builds a strong trust between you and prospects, since the more localized the content, the more it’ll resonate with them.

‘Second-screen’ In-store 49% of customers cite not being able to touch, feel or try a product as one of their least favorite aspects of online shopping.

With online shopping booming, and brick-and-mortar locations struggling, companies are beginning to utilize technology instore to take advantage of the benefits of online resources to increase conversions and engage their customers. In browsing instore, consumers turn to their smartphones to compare pricing, research alternatives, or even sample the product in-store and buy it online at a later date.

A quarter of online shoppers (25%) have made an online purchase from a brick-and-mortar store.

To engage with in-store shoppers, businesses are utilizing geo-proximity aware applications to stream offers and content the moment shoppers enter the store. A smartphone acts as a shopping assistant throughout sales cycle, providing additional info and as a comparison tool for other products.

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Research from Deloitte (September 2016) indicates that 37% of all retail purchases last year were influenced by mobile device search, discovery, research, or price comparison. Among digital buyers, 60% researched while in-store, and 64% used a retailer’s app (ComScore for UPS, Feb 2016).

Email Automation Email automation has come a long way, and is a core table stake of eCommerce. It’s a proven channel for increasing brand awareness, bringing back customers, and updating the database on new features and products.

However, email automation has started utilizing other advanced techniques to make it even more powerful. This includes connecting your email automation system to the behaviors and actions an individual user takes on your website, and sending personalized, tailored content to them.

With that, you can send more targeted and timely emails that are more relevant to the user when they want it, whether they know it or not.

Chatbots

Though online shopping has completely changed the way we buy goods, eCommerce lacks one key component that you get in a brick and mortar store — a helpful employee. At the scale at which online stores operate, having actual people staffing live chat simply isn’t economically viable.

As a result, many online stores are turning to intelligent shopping assistant bots to assist shoppers with their questions, to make recommendations, and even to check out.

Nordstrom dominated the 2017 holiday season with their Messenger chatbot, which went beyond simple predefined questions and answers and used cognitive services to truly understand what the customer was looking for and assist as needed. It offered gift recommendations, and could even assist with fulfilling the order.

Chatbots are also saving us from the dreaded customer support phone calls, waiting an hour for a representative to deal with a simple problem. Amazon, with who knows how many orders per day, has deployed chatbots to deal with most small issues that a customer faces if they need help with their order.

Business Insider predicts that 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human by as soon as 2020.

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