Last month, the grocery and CPG industries came together in Las Vegas for Groceryshop, a spinoff of the Shoptalk retail conference. Content focused on the intersection of food retail and tech, with buzzworthy sessions diving into robotics, personalization, and in-store experience. One clear takeaway from the event was that when it comes to adopting new technologies, the $650 billion grocery industry is rapidly playing catch-up.
Five years ago, Mission Data built a brand new SaaS platform for Asphalt Institute, a U.S.-based international trade organization promoting quality management for construction materials laboratories.
The headlines filter into our inboxes daily: “Blockchain Will Save Retail.” “Why You Desperately Need to Hire a Data Scientist.” “Brick-and-mortar is Dead!”
To cut through the noise and hear which digital solutions operators are actually investing in and planning to investigate, Mission Data recently hosted an Innovation Forum at FSTEC 2018 titled “Store of the Future: Beyond the Hype.”
The hotel and travel industry is poised for a wave of innovation. Emboldened by a strong global economy, consumers are booking more excursions as they seek experiences over goods and services. To remain competitive, established industry players are seizing the opportunity in the upswing to invest in technology that keeps them nimble in the face of a changing market.
Hospitality professionals will soon gather for the annual Foodservice Technology Conference (FSTEC), where Mission Data is leading a breakout session on the newest tech coming to the industry. The conference takes place in Orlando, FL, from October 1-3, 2018.
While wearable technology usually calls to mind devices such as smartwatches and fitness trackers, one exciting new avenue of research is augmented reality glasses. Virtual reality (VR) takes the user to a whole new virtual space, but augmented reality (AR) instead aims to enhance the real world by providing software interactions with physical things, through mediums like phone screens or glasses. This allows for a whole new approach to user interfaces, because programs can now interface with the real world in more meaningful capacities.
In the last two months, Amazon released their new machine learning camera to the public, the AWS DeepLens. The DeepLens is a unique video camera because it carries an onboard Intel Atom processor, meaning that not only can it run a full OS (it runs Ubuntu 16.04 by default), but it can also process video in real time using a machine learning model deployed to it over Amazon Web Services.
I recently had the opportunity to attend a research conference focused on projects related to computer networking, the IEEE LANMAN conference hosted at George Washington University. Researchers travelled from all over the world to showcase their projects, resulting in a three-day experience comprised of six speaker sessions, a panel, and a demo/poster session. I was particularly drawn to speaker sessions that shared new research in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT), given how much work we do with IoT at Mission Data.
Kroger’s recent agreement with robotics start-up Nuro, on the heels of its deal with Ocado to bring the British e-grocer’s automated fulfillment capabilities to the U.S., has got us thinking — how will artificial intelligence (AI) and robots accelerate digital transformation in retail warehouses?