If you own a retail business, customer experience needs to be one of your primary concerns. With more and more consumers turning to the Internet for many of their shopping needs, creating a positive experience is one of the most important things you can do to keep customers coming to your location instead of shopping online. While often thought of as solutions for accepting payments, POS systems are powerful tools that can help with nearly every aspect of your business – including improving customer experience. From streamlining the checkout process to providing an opportunity for shoppers to share their experiences, there are several ways that POS systems can help improve customer experience.
Avengers: Endgame beats box office records with $1.2bn debut | BBC News
Avengers: Endgame has made box office history by taking a record-breaking $1.2bn (£929m) in global ticket sales in its opening run.
The Disney blockbuster has become the fastest film ever to break the $1bn barrier, doing so in just five days.
Endgame is the 22nd offering in the Marvel Studios superhero franchise.
Its opening takings smashed the previous global debut record of $640m set by last year’s Avengers: Infinity War.
Trying to Make Your Product a Hit? Don’t Sell It on Amazon | Inc.com
Jules Pieri is the godmother of startup manufacturers. A former industrial designer, she and her business partner Joanne Domeniconi launched The Grommet 10 years ago to introduce novel consumer products to a community of quality- and values-minded consumers. The company evaluates 300 submissions a week, chooses the top 3 percent, and launches them into the market with videos about their origin stories and long chats between makers and customers. Products receiving early visibility from The Grommet include Fitbit, GoldieBlox, and SodaStream. The company also advises entrepreneurs on subjects like packaging and helps them develop distribution.
Nine Signs It’s Time to Drop Your Insurance Company | The Simple Dollar
While it’s far easier to simply renew an insurance policy year after to year rather than shop around for a new provider, it should go without saying that inertia can be costly.
Most industry experts suggest obtaining quotes from competitors every six months to one year, because the reality is that many insurance companies change their rates regularly and doing a little bit of research can save you quite a bit of money.
Cutting costs however, isn’t the only reason to leave one insurance company behind for another. We asked insurance industry experts to share some of the top signs it may be time to part ways with your insurance provider, whether it’s life insurance, home insurance, car insurance, or any other type of policy. Here are some reasons to cut ties.
The demise and rebirth of the ethical engineer | TechCrunch
Whatever happened to the ethics of engineering? We’ve seen just one disastrous news story after another these past few years, almost all knowable and preventable. Planes falling out of the sky. Nuclear power plants melting down. Foreign powers engorging on user data. Environmental testing thrashed. Electrical grids burning states to the ground.
The patterns are not centered around discipline or nationality, nor do these events share an obvious social structure. Facebook machine learning programmers mostly don’t hang with German VW automotive engineers or Japanese nuclear plant designers. They weren’t taught at the same schools, nor share the same textbooks, nor read the same journals.
Will Artificial Intelligence Enhance or Hack Humanity? | WIRED
THIS WEEK, I interviewed Yuval Noah Harari, the author of three best-selling books about the history and future of our species, and Fei-Fei Li, one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence. The event was hosted by the Stanford Center for Ethics and Society, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and the Stanford Humanities Center. A transcript of the event follows, and a video is posted below.
This Entrepreneur Wants Us to See and Record the World in a Whole New Way | Entrepreneur
I am Lawrence Greaves, co-founder and CEO at OPKIX. Created specifically for a social-first generation, our first of its kind OPKIXOne wearable camera boasts a uniquely compact size, and pairs with an integrated app that allows you to edit your footage with the addition of filters, music and AR, and share across your favorite social platforms.
What inspired you to develop it?
My business partner, Shahin Amirpour, came up with the original idea one day while snowboarding when he realized that there was a need to capture video content hands-free. I had a similar “a-ha” moment when my wife came to me and said, “If you could capture video of the kids without looking at them through the screen of your phone, it would be a game changer.” That’s when we knew we were really onto something.
Rehab Centers and Social Media Marketing | Getentrepreneurial.com
The addiction rehab industry is quite competitive. There are many rehab centers and millions of addicts. Many people may not realize that they have options when it comes to addiction treatment care. If you are in the treatment industry and are not satisfied with your client totals, you should know that social media may help.
You may need to drive more traffic to your addiction rehab website. If you are unsatisfied with your profits or the amount of clients you are treating, consider learning more about social media marketing today. You may learn marketing strategies to help you connect with the needs and emotions of potential clients.
Transparent Wood Now Stores & Releases Heat | CoolBusinessIdeas.com
Three years ago, we heard how scientists from Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology had created transparent wood – it could serve as a cheaper alternative to the silica-based glass currently used in windows and solar cells. Now, the material is additionally able to store heat and later release it.
In order to produce the initial version of the transparent wood, a KTH team led by Prof. Lars Berglund started by chemically removing light-absorbing lignin from natural balsa wood fibers – lignin is one component of wood cell walls.
Future violinists may be trained by AI | NewAtlas
If you’re training to be a concert violinist, you don’t want your technique to be merely “good enough.” A new computer system may soon be able to help, as it uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify a user’s bow technique, and could perhaps even tell them how to improve their performance.
