This week, JD.com has teamed up with several hotels to showcase its technologies and marketplace products, enabling guests to purchase items they find in their rooms. Selected rooms at these partner hotels including Wanda, Sheraton, Beijing 5L, and Greenland, would be suited up with products identified to be popular amongst travellers, such as power banks to charge their devices, a Philips Sonicare electric toothbrush, and JD.com’s smart speaker cum personal assistant device. The Chinese e-commerce giant said it introduced the programme [...]

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Despite a monumental build up, the EU GDPR may not have made quite the splash the industry expected – it rather depends on who you ask. However, what it has done, is set the wheels in motion for other countries, such as Brazil, to adopt similar legislation. One in particular, which is starting to take data privacy very seriously, is the U.S. Multiple states have started updating their consumer privacy acts, and the state of California, the home of [...]

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Is independent ad tech on the wane? Its most vocal champion, Brian O’Kelley, is now a paid employee of AT&T. His company, AppNexus – for the best part of ten years the standard bearer for independent ad tech – is now part of the biggest telco in the world. You wonder where the priorities will lie in the coming 12 months. Will it continue to be the home of the innovative independent ad tech companies that built their [...]

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Data science has increasingly been at the forefront of developments in advertising and marketing technology; and with very good reason. In the video space, data science is a crucial element for ensuring brand objectives are met against billions of data signals. In this piece for ExchangeWire, Dr Jon Morra, vice president, data science, Zefr, details the three components of data science in delivering those objectives for brands advertising on YouTube. We believe that advertisers and brands should be able [...]

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This week, Google has unveiled a rebranding of its digital payments service and plans for further expansion of the platform in India, where consumers have made more than 750 million transactions with the app. Called ‘Tez’, when it was launched in the country last September, the payments platform since has chalked up more than 22 million users – including 1.2 million local businesses – each month, according to Caesar Sengupta, Google’s general manager for payments and the company’s next billion [...]

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Predictions about how the Internet of Things will radically change consumer lifestyles have often included a ‘conversation with the fridge’. Advances in connectivity and AI-driven voice technology could enable consumers to do their weekly grocery shop through voice commands to their fridges. The final version of the smart fridge may not yet have launched, but ‘Voice’ and ‘The Internet of Things’ are identified as key trending topics for 2019 at DMEXCO 18, Expo and Conference – the largest European [...]

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QR codes have emerged as a popular tool to facilitate mobile payments, but their potential goes beyond enabling transactions and should be tapped to help retailers build brand equity. In fact, the matrix barcode and other visual-recognition technology can provide a way for businesses to bridge the gap between offline and online realms, according to Marcus Tan, CEO of AIQ, a Singapore startup that develops artificial intelligence (AI) software capable of mining images and visual data. Founded in 2014, the [...]

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ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biggest stories in the European digital advertising space. In this week’s edition: Brand Safety Study Reveals Carelessness of Marketers; Sublime Skinz Expands European operations; mediasmart & Brave Partner; Additional Funding for Drawbridge; and Partnership for Eyeota & TwentyCi. Brand Safety Study Reveals Carelessness of Marketers A new study by Sizmek on brand safety reveals that 38% of marketers are aware of having delivered adverts on harmful or unsafe web pages. At the same time, only 61% [...]

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There is some big news coming out of Brazil at the moment. The Brazilian government has sanctioned a law that defines data privacy regulation, with vetoes; and for the first time in the country’s history, political parties can use paid-for digital advertising campaigns as part of their canvassing strategies. This article was originally published on ExchangeWire Brazil. The Brazilian GDPR The Brazilian President, Michel Temer, sanctioned last Tuesday (14 August) the General Law [...]

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