Author: Carter

Loyalty programs remain a powerful tool for businesses. According to last year’s Statista survey, a third of marketers believe their company earns five to seven times more from these programs than it spends implementing them. But the bigger picture is less optimistic: The Bond Loyalty Report 2025 shows that even in mature markets, user satisfaction is low — only 48% of Americans and 32% of Canadians are happy with their loyalty programs. Why? People expect more. If all you offer is point accumulation for future discounts or cashback, you don’t stand out among dozens of other programs. Rational benefits still…

Key PointsOpenAI is spending $38 billion over seven years to use Amazon’s cloud.The two companies may have another deal in the works, with Amazon potentially making a $10 billion investment in OpenAI.Amazon is well positioned to benefit from the estimated $2 trillion AI cloud computing market.Amazon(NASDAQ: AMZN) recently launched a new website for Alexa+, the latest iteration of its AI chatbot. While it’s only available to a limited number of early access users, the eventual goal for the Alexa+ site is to better compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini.This recent move highlights Amazon’s effort to catch up with its…

Netflix’s Stranger Things is a world where the mundane can suddenly become a portal to the deadly Upside Down, a perfect metaphor for the current state of the Internet of Things (IoT). From smart home gadgets to industrial sensors, IoT assets connect our world in staggering new ways, promising efficiency and convenience. However, much like the town of Hawkins, Indiana, these assets also harbour hidden, often ignored, vulnerabilities that can open a gate to the digital equivalent of the Upside Down. Below are the top eleven risks that every security team should address to effectively close the gate on common…

Vision-based strawberry plant assessments are essential first steps towards increased automation, mitigating periodically high labour demands In temperate regions such as Belgium and the Netherlands, strawberry plants are propagated on open-air tray fields. After the summer solstice, runner plantlets develop into young plants over the course of four to five months. In June-bearing varieties, shortening days trigger flower induction; in everbearing types, the first flowering flush begins. Once plants reach the right stage, they are cold-stored for later production. Transforming labor-heavy propagation processes Strawberry propagation involves many labour-intensive tasks, which include predicting runner production, plantlet harvest, plantlet quality control, installing…

Elon Musk’s controversial Grok artificial intelligence model appears to have been restricted on one app, while remaining largely unchanged on another.On Musk’s social media app X, the Grok AI image generation feature has been made for paying customers only and has been seemingly restricted from making sexualized deepfakes after a wave of blowback from users and regulators. But on the Grok standalone app and website, users can still use AI to remove clothing from images of nonconsenting people.Early Friday, the Grok reply bot on X, which had previously been complying with a torrent of requests to place unwitting people into…

The AI-centric security product demo looked impressive. The vendor spoke confidently about autonomous detection, self-learning defences, and AI-driven remediation. Charts moved in real time, alerts resolved themselves, and threats seemed to vanish before human analysts even noticed them. Every chief information security officer (CISO) has seen some version of this story. And with AI-powered or AI-enhanced cyber security tools now everywhere, the challenge is not just whether AI belongs in security but how to identify practices that truly deliver value. For CISOs and buyers, distinguishing adequate AI security from marketing hype is crucial for making informed decisions. Security outcomes…

Introduction set is one of the most beautiful mathematical objects ever discovered, a fractal so intricate that no matter how much you zoom in, you keep finding infinite detail. But what if we asked a neural network to learn it? At first glance, this sounds like an odd question. The Mandelbrot set is fully deterministic, there’s no data, no noise, no hidden rules. But this simplicity makes it a perfect sandbox to study how neural networks represent complex functions. In this article, we’ll explore how a simple neural network can learn to approximate the Mandelbrot set, and how Gaussian Fourier…

Web3 Marketing MarketMarket OverviewWeb3 Marketing Market is poised for substantial growth, with projections estimating it will reach USD 26,150.27 million by 2035, expanding at a CAGR of 26.52% from 2025 to 2035. This surge is primarily driven by the increasing adoption of blockchain-based platforms, decentralized applications (dApps), and NFTs across various industries. Marketers are leveraging Web3 technologies to create more personalized, transparent, and engaging customer experiences, which traditional marketing frameworks often fail to deliver. The evolution of digital advertising toward decentralization, tokenized incentives, and community-driven campaigns is further bolstering market expansion. As businesses aim to maintain competitive advantage in an…

Building autonomous vehicles is no longer just a question of sensors and software. It has become a test of how well companies can manage vast amounts of data, run large-scale simulations, and validate safety across millions of scenarios before a vehicle ever reaches the road. For automotive firms working on self-driving systems, the ability to test and retrain models at scale is now as important as the vehicles themselves.This shift helps explain why cloud infrastructure has become central to autonomous driving development. Training and validating self-driving systems requires low-latency compute, high-throughput data processing, and the capacity to run repeated tests…

The present-day retail markets are becoming increasingly accessible and optimized globally. And, this is due to the fully-connected, sensor-driven ecosystems where not only physical stores, but the entire logistics network and customer touchpoints are being used to generate real-time data.Earlier, the systems were not modernized enough, which led to higher manual workload, inefficient demand forecasts, and more. But with the integration of IoT in ecommerce, the digital platforms have gained more power and intelligence. This allows retailers and brands to manage their inventory, supply chain, and customer expectations a lot better. Moreover, issues can be tracked and improved quickly as…