British Retail Consortium (BRC) figures show that footfall in retail stores fell by 3.3% in April 2018 compared to last year, marking a further shift in consumer behaviour towards digital adoption.

Two Consecutive Months

The drop in footfall numbers for April was the second consecutive month where the trend away from visiting the physical high street could be observed, and in comparison to this time last year when footfall was on the up, it is seen by analysts as being significant.

Visiting Even Less – But Still Spending

The last time such a significant drop in footfall occurred (3.8%) was recorded was in 2009 when the UK was in recession and consumers were spending less as a result. Even compared to that, this year’s drop in the numbers of people visiting physical store locations is larger at 4.8%.

Despite the apparent fall in physical store visits, Barclays bank data shows that consumer spending is still on the increase.

What’s Happening?

Retail experts have noted a shift in consumer behaviour towards digital shop visits rather than physical ones, based on a number of benefits including flexibility (in what goods they purchase and when), product / service ranges available, convenience, digital innovations enhancing customer experiences, and a predisposition towards leisure rather than retail spend.

This changing consumer behaviour is forcing the retail industry to evolve and re-structure.

Increased Leisure Spending

One key trend that has been noted by analysts is the increase in leisure rather than retail spending by consumers. For example, a report by Deloitte based on the quarterly survey of more than 3,000 UK adults found that 2017 (last quarter) ended positively for the leisure sector, with consumer spending increasing in 7 out of 11 leisure categories compared to the previous year.

The areas that have shown an increase include experience-led activities, short break holidays, going to the gym, drinking in pubs and bars and attending live sporting events.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

For retail businesses, these figures mean that the digital retail environment is posing many challenges, but the changes can also be embraced as part of a restructured strategy to remain competitive.

Many retailers understand that they now need to rebalance investment in physical and digital infrastructure, and change the way stores are used e.g. by adopting technology to engage people, and to make stores more like centres for experiences rather than just places for purchasing goods. This is particularly important for younger consumer groups.

Retailers can embrace technology as an opportunity to deliver more value to customers whether in store, at home or on the move. Retail commentators frequently talk about the importance of the need to create a seamless customer experience between online and offline, and to develop an omni-channel platform. Improving and optimising the current experience that retailers offer customers, and replicating these as effectively as possible across all channels could be the key to staying competitive in the evolving retail business environment.

If you sometimes have trouble opening and playing certain file formats e.g. for videos, free and open-sourced VLC software makes it easy to play almost any file format you throw at it.

To download the app, which works with Mac, PC, Linux, Android, and iOS, and states that it doesn’t deliver ads or engage in user tracking:

– Go to https://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html

– Click on the appropriate Operating System.

– Read the details and click on the orange download button.

Police in Australia are reported to be using data recorded by a murder victim’s Apple smartwatch to help catch her killer.

Murder

The victim and owner of the smartwatch was Grandmother Myrna Nilsson, who was found dead in the laundry of her Valley View home in Adelaide’s north-east in September 2016.

The prime suspect in the murder case is daughter-in-law Caroline Dela Rose Nilsson, who was found gagged and distressed at the scene, and who told Police that her mother-in-law had been followed home by (and had argued at length with) a group of men in a car.

How Could The Watch Data Help?

The Apple watch contains sensors that can measure fitness signals such as heart rate. The watch can also track a person’s movements and, being a watch, it can link the other signals to the exact time.

It is believed that this data could indicate when the victim’s heart rate indicated a loss of consciousness as well as the actual time of death.

Contradiction

Reports about the case so far indicate that while the daughter-in-law’s testimony puts the time of death at around 10pm, and that her mother-in-law allegedly argued with the men for 20 minutes, the data from the watch is not consistent with this version of events.

Reports about evidence uncovered by the Prosecutor in the case, Carmen Matteo, show that watch data shows activity consistent with the victim being ambushed and attacked as she walked into her home just after 6:30pm. The watch is also reported to show activity and heart rate measurements consistent with her body going into shock and losing consciousness.

According to the Apple watch, the deceased must have been attacked at around 6:38pm and had died by 6:45pm, some 3 hours earlier than the time stated by the daughter-in-law.

Bail Denied

The strength and apparent reliability of the watch data has been enough to lead Magistrate Oliver Koehn to deny bail to Ms Nilsson.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Our phones and gadgets are now tracking devices, and can store or transmit a lot of data about us and our activities. In the right hands, as in this case and in situations where mobile phone signals have been used in legal cases, this information can be valuable for some very important reasons i.e. in the interest of justice for victims and their families.

In the wrong hands e.g. ‘sports wearables’ possibly leaking our login credentials and transmitting our activity tracking information in a non-secure way such as that identified back in February 2016 in Canadian research by Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, could make us more vulnerable to crime.

This story should also, therefore, be a reminder to manufacturers of wearable technology that security and privacy of the data stored and transmitted about us should always be a priority, and it is in the interest of the manufacturer and the customer that correct safeguards are taken. After all, as this case proves, you never quite know how useful the secure, uncorrupted data from a mobile or wearable device could turn out to be.

In a bid to develop Siri and catch up with competitors in the digital assistant battle, Apple has hired Google’s top AI man, John Giannandrea.

Falling Behind

The battle to dominate the digital assistant market has been going on for some time now, but industry commentators have noted that Apple’s Siri, which was first introduced on the iPhone 4S in 2011, has fallen behind the competition i.e. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

Siri Problems

The problems that have plagued Apple’s Siri since its early lead and subsequent falling behind in the market are thought to include:

1. Infighting and internal politics within the Siri team at Apple.
2. Too many attempts to reorganise the basic underpinning technology.
3. Press criticism of the poor AI in Apple’s HomePod – the company’s attempt to compete with Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home smart speakers.

Hiring

Apple has, therefore, sought to quickly boost its expertise in AI and machine learning through hiring-in the top talent.
John Giannandrea joined Google in 2010 and previously worked as Netscape’s chief technologist. Mr Giannandrea is widely credited as being responsible for rebuilding the technology that is now at the heart of Google’s landmark products, which include search, translation and voice recognition. He is also recognised as being the person responsible for putting Google on a par with Amazon for technological supremacy in the field of voice-controlled assistants.

As well as hiring Google’s top AI man, Apple is also reported to have posted adverts for 160 other openings for work related to improving Siri.

Other high profile hires by Apple in the AI field in recent times include Carnegie Mellon professor Russ Salakhutdinov who studied at the University of Toronto under Geoffrey Hinton, who helps to oversee the Google Brain lab.

Different Approach

One of the key challenges that Giannandrea and the other news recruits will have to address is how to dramatically improve the AI and machine learning performance of Siri while giving it less detailed data for its AI training. This is because Apple has decided to take a different approach to Amazon and Google in terms of trying to gather less personal data about its users.

Apple believes that it can still produce good AI personalisation results for Siri users with a smaller dataset, and hopes that customers will value its attempts to protect their privacy, and that this will add to the positive differentiation of Siri.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The big tech companies can see the future potential value of widening the range of services that can be offered via digital assistants. As well as being able to access them through our mobile devices, smart speakers are now commonplace in many UK homes, and there will soon be business-focused versions.

The hope is that we will use our digital assistants for almost all of our daily activities e.g. paying bills, purchasing, and calling friends and customers. This illustrates why it is so important for Apple to quickly catch up with competitors and to make sure that its digital assistant is at least as capable as Amazon and Google’s offerings in terms of key AI and machine learning.

Apple is in the fortunate position of being able to attract and pay for top Silicon Valley talent, and the hiring of Google’s top man will no doubt be seen as a small victory in itself in the ongoing battle of the digital personal assistants.

If, as so many businesses do, you use Microsoft Word, and you have shared documents that others can make changes to, you may find the ‘Track Changes’ feature very useful.

By turning on ‘Track Changes’ you can see who has made changes to your document, you can choose which changes to accept or reject, and you can view and delete comments. This is a great feature for reviewing a document. Here’s how:

On the Review tab, in the Tracking group, choose Track Changes. Word then marks up and shows any changes that anyone makes to the document.

If you turn off Track Changes, Word stops marking up new changes, but any changes that were already tracked remain marked up in the document until you remove them.

On the Review tab, in the Tracking group, in the Simple Markup list, you can choose to view:
– Simple Markup – the default option which indicates where changes are with a red line in the margin.
– No Markup – which hides markup to show what the incorporated changes will look like.
– All Markup – this shows all edits with different colours of text and lines.
– Original – this shows the document in its original form.

In the Show Markup list, you can choose the revisions you would like to see – Comments, Ink, Insertions and Deletions, Formatting, Balloons, Specific people.

If you need to jot down ideas and to-dos and share them with team members, you may find ‘Google Keep’ a useful tool.

With Google Keep can:

– Record voice memos within Google Keep on your Android or iOS device.
– Transcribe text from pictures, so you don’t have to worry about typing up notes from a meeting or whiteboard session – you can even photograph a note to get the text from it.
– Create drawings and search hand written notes.
– Take notes you’ve created in Keep, and drag them into Google Docs e.g. client proposals and more.

A study by job website ‘Indeed’ based on job postings on its site since 2015 has found that demand for skills in AI and machine learning has almost tripled in 3 years.

Demand – AI Boom

With the Artificial Intelligence (AI) sector booming in the UK, and with the pace of growth in demand for AI roles here outstripping that in the US, Canada and Australia, AI is providing a shot in the arm to Britain’s jobs market, and Britain is consolidating its reputation as a world tech leader. The ‘Indeed’ figures show that the number of AI roles advertised in the UK is now 1,300 out of every million, but that there are six times more AI roles available in Britain than there are candidates to fill them.

Supply Increasing Too

Just as demand for AI professionals has shown a huge increase, the number of candidates actually looking for jobs in this area has doubled over the same period. One of the key benefits of landing a job in an emerging field is, of course, the salary. According to Indeed’s figures, jobs in AI advertised for an average of £56,385 a year and machine learning roles at £54,617.

Skills Gap & Brexit

Unfortunately, one of the reasons why companies are willing to pay so much is that experts of this kind are hard to find in a labour market where there is a real tech skills gap. Some tech commentators have long been predicting that Brexit is only likely to make matters worse. For example, a 2016 survey by the ‘Hired’ website highlighted skills gap challenges in many areas of IT, possible challenges to attracting high-skilled workers from across the globe because of Brexit, lower average salaries for London tech jobs compared to places like San Francisco and New York, leading to a possible brain drain, and the number of UK students graduating with computer science degrees falling.

A further example of the possible impact of Brexit on AI and robotics in the UK comes from an RSA report from late 2017 which showed that the UK receives up to 80% of its funding for autonomous systems and robotics directly from the EU, and even with the government’s Autumn statement promise of a boost to R&D, it may not be enough to plug the funding hole that Brexit will create.

Funding Needed

Also, some industry experts have recently criticised the UK government for making a strategic error in their perceived lack of funding in AI and robotics.

There have been calls for the setting up of systematic programmes to mobilise the brain power of AI and robotics communities around the most important challenges of government.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

If your business needs an AI or robotics professional, you may have a challenge on your hands. A home-grown skills gap means that you may need to attract talent from overseas, one aspect of which is being able to pay a considerable salary that is competitive with that offered in other countries. Getting an overseas professional to come to the UK, however, may be problematic because of the insecurities that Brexit is presenting to migrant workers.

Ideas to plug the UK’s skills gap in many tech areas include the offering of digital apprenticeships e.g. by Microsoft, but AI is a very specialised area, and much more investment and specialist education and training may need to be made available in the UK in a short time to enable UK industries to make the most of the UK’s AI boom.