(This post originally appeared on Forbes)
Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business. Did you miss them?
1 — Pew: U.S. adult Twitter users tend to be younger, more Democratic; 10% create 80% of tweets.
A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that Twitter users tend to be younger and more Democratic than the general public. It also showed that Twitter activity is dominated by a small percentage of the overall population. In fact, the most active tweeters—just 10 percent of U.S. adults—send 80 percent of the tweets. Pew says only around 22 percent of American adults today use Twitter, and their median age is 40, compared with the median age of all U.S. adults, which is 47. (Source: Tech Crunch)
Why this is important for your business:
Twitter is a great social media platform. But, like any social media platform, it’s important for you to know its demographics so that you can determine if it’s worthwhile investing resources there. For example, if only 22 percent of American adults are using Twitter, what about the other 78 percent? Are your customers there? Are engagement and the number of followers misleading? Given Twitter’s user base activity it’s best to judge this data with a skeptical eye.
2 — Retailers are still wary of mobile wallets.
Retailers nationwide are concerned about adding third-party mobile wallets, which is why mobile payment adoption in the U.S. is quite low—just 20 percent as of October 2018. One reason is that they are unclear about how tech companies operating the mobile wallet platforms will use the data. Second, a merchant association representative says retailers have broader concerns about spending money on tech that may not yield significant ROI, given the low adoption rates of mobile and contactless cards across the country. (Source: Digiday)
Why this is important for your business:
All of these concerns are reasonable. So should you be accepting mobile payments in your store? Here’s some advice: listen to your customers. If you have the type of business that attracts the type of people who use mobile payments more than others that should be your motivation to consider these technologies.
3 — Google spinoff’s drone delivery business is first to get FAA approval.
A subsidiary of Google called Wing Aviation LLC has become the first drone operator to be approved by the FAA as an airline, meaning it now has the legal authority to begin dropping products to customers. Wing has the same certifications that smaller airlines receive from the FAA and the Department of Transportation. It announced that it plans to begin delivering small consumer items in two rural Virginia communities within months and, with FAA approval, can now charge for these deliveries and apply for permission to expand to other regions. (Source: Bloomberg)
Why this is important for your business:
Drone delivery is not science fiction. Google, Amazon and others are expanding their programs and this type of delivery service I believe will become common over the next ten years.
4— Coming to store shelves: cameras that guess your age and sex.
Retailers could soon be using a new technology that enables cameras to guess a customer’s age, gender or mood as he or she walks by. (Source: AP News)
Why this is important for your business:
Creepy, right? But it’s reality. According to the AP News report, the goal is to use this information to show customers targeted real-time ads on in-store video screens. The companies that make the technology are trying to convince retailers to install it in their physical stores so they can be more competitive with online sellers like Amazon that already have huge amounts of data about their customers and their buying habits.
5— The robot-recruiter is coming.
Several companies are now developing robots to use for recruiting. Just a few examples include VCV.AI, which has raised $1.7 million to automatically screen job candidates using facial and voice recognition; HireVue, which has raised $93 million to develop an AI-driven ‘Hiring Intelligence’ platform; AllyO, which has put $19 million behind an effort to make hiring more efficient by tackling the usual inefficiencies of lost applicants and conversions due to poor candidate experience; and Arya, which is a start-up that is using machine learning to identify successful sourcing patterns and choose potential candidates from online profiles. (Source: Tech Crunch)
Why this is important for your business:
Recruiting and interview tools using AI will be commonplace over the next few years and you can expect this technology to trickle down to smaller companies like yours and mine. Not only will this type of technology speed up and standardize your recruiting process, but it will also help remove bias. That’s a good thing.
