Knowledge Update

​New Delhi, May 23 (IANS) IBM will provide its expertise to help Aditya Birla Group-owned online fashion retailer abof.com target millennials by providing them customised style tips, fashion content and trends, the US tech giant announced on Monday. IBM has delivered customer engagement and order fulfillment capabilities to abof.com that will allow the portal to constantly refresh the e-commerce experience and seamlessly add new content catering to the dynamic demands of the young consumers. In the first three months of operation, IBM-powered solutions have helped abof.com reach more than three million visits. abof.com fashion portal now reaches out to more than 500 cities in India. "We aim to grow our market share by offering a curated range of merchandise that goes beyond conventional boundaries to deliver quality service to our customers," said Prashant Gupta, president and CEO, abof.com, in a statement. "With IBM's global expertise and local experience in eCommerce space, we are optimistic that the company will emerge as the most admired player in online fashion segment," he added. The company needed a well-integrated e-commerce solution that would help it create a dynamic and interactive online platform that could better target consumers and increase brand loyalty. ​

New York, June 15 (IANS) South Korean smartphone giant Samsung sold the most number of smartphones worldwide in the first quarter of the year and is expected to sell 320 million smartphones by the end of the year, a new report said on Wednesday. According to US-based market research company IC Insights, buoyed by the strong sales growth of Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, Samsung sold 81.5 million smartphones, followed by Apple with 51.6 million smartphones -- in the first quarter. Although the list of top 12 smartphone makers is dominated by China-based smartphone suppliers -- taking eight spots in the list -- Indian smartphone supplier Micromax broke into the list for the first time. It sold five million devices in the first quarter of the year and is projected to sell 25 million smartphones by the end of the year -- 74 per cent increase from last year. “Among the Chinese players, Huawei is at number three, OPPO at number four, Xiaomi at number five, Vivo at number six, ZTE at number eight, Lenovo at number nine and TCL and Meizu are at spots 10 and 11, respectively,” androidheadlines.com said, quoting the report. Sony, Microsoft and Coolpad who were in the top 12 list dropped out this year. Lenovo, which was at fourth spot last year, dropped to ninth place this year - selling only 10.9 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2016. Their sales for the year are expected to drop 26 per cent from 2015. According to IC Insights, total global smartphone sales will increase by 5 percent from 1.43 billions units in 2015 to 1.5 billion in 2016. Samsung Galaxy Note 5 device has also topped the 2016 American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) poll. According to the annual poll comprising 12,710 people, Samsung Galaxy Note 5 phablet has a rating of 86 out of 100, 9to5mac.com reported recently. iPhone 6 Plus is one notch behind at 85. In last year's satisfaction index, Apple and Samsung were neck-to-neck at 80.​

​New Delhi, June 15 (IANS) Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry has been named a leader in the "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management" (EMM) Suites, research and advisory firm Gartner announced on Wednesday. The "Magic Quadrant" market research report aims to provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants. "We believe our positioning in the 'Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management Suites' is proof that we are delivering on our enterprise roadmap and providing the most complete EMM solution on the market," said Billy Ho, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Products, BlackBerry, in a statement. "Our leading productivity apps combined with our enterprise-level mobile security provides organizations the ability to optimise their mobile journey while protecting both corporate and private data across multiple endpoints," he added. The new "Good Secure" EMM Suites from BlackBerry provide simple and flexible options for customers to deploy security across devices, apps, content and data.​

​New Delhi, June 15 (IANS) E-commerce major Flipkart on Tuesday announced the launch of laptop sale event "Lap it Up!" on its website in collaboration with Intel India. The campaign will offer latest laptop brands at some exciting prices with EMI option. “Around 50 per cent of our demand comes from tier II and III cities as a lot of the new models are not available in these cities. Our latest campaign has been designed in line with this trend to make latest laptops and technology accessible to our customers across geographies,” Adarsh K. Menon, Vice President (electronic and auto) Flipkart, said in a statement. “Our endeavour has always been to make technology affordable and accessible, especially for the first-time buyers,” added Anand Ramamoorthy, Director (consumption sales) South Asia, Intel.​

New York, June 14 (IANS) Microsoft officially confirmed on Monday that a slimmer version of its gaming machine Xbox One will be launch in August. Dubbed the Xbox One S, the new console will be 40 per cent smaller than the existing model, Xbox One, making it the smallest gaming machine Microsoft has produced, Xinhua quoted the company as saying at the E3 Expo. The company said out of a new visual design, "the sleekest, most advanced Xbox ever" also comes with 4K Ultra HD video support and High Dynamic Range capabilities for both gaming and video, among other new features. The new Xbox One S also comes with a slightly redesigned controller, featuring textured grip, increased wireless range and Bluetooth support. The company also announced another new console, Project Scorpio, which will offer virtual reality and 4K gaming. The console will be backwards compatible with both the Xbox One and Xbox One S, existing alongside both simultaneously.​

New Delhi, June 7 (IANS) US-based tech giant InFocus on Tuesday launched Buddy, a portable notebook, that runs on Windows 10 and will be available exclusively on Snapdeal for Rs 14,999. "InFocus Buddy is our endeavour to cater to the core needs of youth - Internet browsing, multimedia and portability. The laptop delivers high performance, superior build quality of Foxconn, and a high design quotient while being low on budget," said InFocus India team in a statement. "We are confident that it will be well received by our customers who are looking to upgrade to a sleek notebook experience at an affordable price," said Tony Navin, Senior Vice President, Partnerships and Strategic Initiatives, Snapdeal, in a statement. The InFocus Buddy features a 13.3-inch HD display and is powered by 2.6 GHz Intel Celeron processor paired up with 2 GB RAM. It comes with a 32 GB eMMC storage and allows users to add up to 256 GB SSD internal storage. The battery in InFocus Buddy provides a backup of 8 hours. It supports a micro-SD card slot, two USB 3.0 ports and a HDMI port.

​New York, June 6 (IANS) A vast majority of the food and beverage products endorsed by some of the most popular celebrities in the US are unhealthy, finds a new study. The findings showed that advertisements on fast foods, sweets as well as non-alcoholic beverages like soda and other sugary drinks, were the second-largest in the endorsement category, comprising 18 per cent of endorsements and frequently targetted children and adolescents as the audience. Celebrity food endorsements promote higher product preference, and exposure to any kind of food advertising is linked to "excessive consumption, the researchers warned. "Research has already shown that food advertising leads to overeating and the food industry spends $1 billion per year marketing to youth alone," lead author Marie Bragg, assistant professor at the New York University (NYU). Full-calorie soft drinks were the most commonly endorsed in the category. Of 69 beverages endorsed, 49 or 71 per cent were sugar-sweetened. Twenty-one out of 26 food products -- or 81 per cent -- were deemed as "nutrient poor". In contrast, water-related endorsements appeared only thrice. Also, none of the stars were found endorsing fruits, vegetables or whole grains. Such advertisements have led to an alarming rise in childhood and teenage obesity, the researchers rued in the paper published in the journal Pediatrics. The study used a rigorous nutritional analysis to evaluate the health quotient of food and drinks marketed by music stars, reviewing dozens of advertisements that were disseminated over a 14-year period. "Because of our childhood and teenage obesity public health crises, it is important to raise awareness about how companies are using celebrities popular with these audiences to market their unhealthy products," added Bragg. "As the popularity of celebrities among adolescents makes them uniquely poised to serve as positive role models, they ought to endorse healthy products and aid in exacerbating the society's struggle with obesity," added Alysa N. Miller from NYU.

Apparels form one of the largest retail categories all over the world. It is one of the most happening retail categories. Consumers belonging to different segments have different choices and their choices in this category change fast. When we think of fashion, we think of apparels first. As fashion by nature is changing continuously, the consumer preferences related to apparels keep on changing. The changes in this category is not related only to merchandise being retailed, but also in the way retailing is done. The advent of new technologies provide new ways for apparel retailing. When we look at the data related to online retailing, we find that clothing is one of the most purchased product categories. This trend is visible in many parts of the world like Europe, Middle East, Latin America and so on. Online shoppers have many obvious advantages over offline shoppers. The most important is they can buy directly from the merchants situated in any part of the world. This may result in better value for their money and direct interactions with these merchants expedites the process of product development as consumers' choices and consumers have chances of being better informed about the products. No wonder, a large number of online shoppers from Eastern European countries can be seen buying directly online from the clothing merchants in East Asian or Western European countries. In other cases, there are large number of customers who do the switching between the channels. They sometimes use the ecommerce websites as virtual shop windows, and purchase in physical stores. Filtering options and attractive images facilitate smooth browsing and shopping experience. Many online retailers are creating attractive social media profiles, and are able to pull the buyers towards through Facebook and Twitter. The social media offers many conveniences at one place. They can compare the product offerings, they can get the opinions of other shoppers through reviews and can check the availability and product details about large number of products in short time by using various combinations of filters and keywords.​​ The possibility of shopping through mobile phones and tablets have made online buying further attractive. In a few countries, shopping through mobile phones is growing very fast. For example, in South Korea, thirty percent shoppers purchased their recent clothing through mobile phones. Consumers are also using mobile applications like The Hunt, LIKEtoKNOW.it, Keep, Lyst etc. The distinction between the online and offline activities of shoppers are getting blurred. Shoppers are not only moving between the devices, they are using mobile devices for shopping while in stores as well. It helps them in assuring that they get the best value for their money and they are able to check all the relevant products before making any purchase. We will see far smarter technologies in near future, which will change the way we shop today. The advent of Virtual Reality and various apps has so many surprises in store for all of us. A new app under development will do away with the need of physically trying clothes on our bodies. It will create a composite image of a person's form and then facilitate the 'trying on' items of clothing.

​Beijing, June 5 (IANS) Nestle and Alibaba on Sunday announced plans to upgrade their partnership. The world's largest food retailer will launch its biggest e-commerce campaign ever with its diverse products, spanning 30 brands from coffee to baby formula, being sold on Alibaba's expansive e-commerce platforms such as Tmall, Xinhua reported. "Our partnership with Alibaba is all about the consumer. What is so exciting about China as a market is not only its size or population, but that Chinese consumers are a step ahead of consumers in other markets in the digital way they consume," Wan Ling Martello, executive vice president with Nestle overseeing the Asian, Oceanian and African markets, said in a conference marking the company's 150-year anniversary. China is the right place to start Nestle's next 150-year growth story as Chinese consumers have a more developed understanding and are quicker to adopt new consumption technologies than their global peers and have great passion for innovation, she added. China's consumption pattern and manner have evolved fast and consumption is becoming increasingly digital with more young consumers choosing to shop online, said Zhang Yong, Alibaba CEO. The volume of online purchases surged by more than 12 times from January 2011 to April 2016 in China, while per capita consumption grew by 27 percent, according to a joint report released by Alibaba's financial services platform Ant Financial and a private economics research institute. Nestle strengthened its global capabilities in e-commerce by signing a strategic cooperation partnership with Alibaba in late 2015 to increase its online sales and build its brands. In 2015, half of Nestle's sales in China were online.​

​New York, June 2 (IANS) While Apple devices still remain the preferred choices for the US citizens, it is Samsung Galaxy Note 5 that has topped the 2016 American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) poll. According to the annual poll comprising 12,710 people, Samsung Galaxy Note 5 phablet has a rating of 86 out of 100, 9to5mac.com reported on Thursday. iPhone 6 Plus is one notch behind at 85. In last year's satisfaction index, Apple and Samsung were neck-to-neck at 80. This year, Samsung retained last year's score while Apple just edged past Samsung at 81 rating. Lenovo's Motorola receded 3 percent to 77 as did HTC at 75. LG remained at 74 while Microsoft Mobile came down to 74. According to the index, smartphones scored well on the satisfaction levels with battery life the main exception where satisfaction levels fell to 75. A latest study by market research firm Counterpoint Research revealed this month that Samsung reclaimed the top spot in the US market that it lost to Apple 11 months ago. In March, Samsung had 28.8 percent share of the US market riding on the success of Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge devices while Apple slipped down to 23 percent.​