Costco’s Strong Sales Streak | Simon Seeks Out Start Ups | Black Friday’s Cyber Security Win

What began as a way to give micro-merchants a path to digital is now a superhighway for enabling a variety of important retail business functions for SMBs. The latest PYMNTS mPOS Tracker™ charts how developers are embedding inventory tracking, ordering recommendations and more into mPOS solutions. Plus, Prashant Sharma, global lead for Mastercard’s mPOS acceptance team, tells PYMNTS how SMBs worldwide are using mPOS as their onramp to rich data analytics that sharpens the focus of their businesses. Find that, headlines from around the space and a directory of 290 industry players, inside the Tracker.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is book smart, but is it street smart? With plenty of similar-sounding words in languages worldwide, humans use context to determine the meaning — but AI has not yet obtained that skill. Still, that doesn’t mean the technology will not have a place in today’s organizations, and it will certainly have an even bigger place in tomorrow’s. Karen Webster and IntraNext CEO Patrick Brown discuss predictions about how, where and why AI applications will emerge Read More...

Amazon’s Alexa just keeps getting smarter. Soon she’ll be making herself at home at work with new business-oriented skills, and she’s about to start powering payments, the company announced. Google’s Assistant has also picked up a new capability by partnering with Alphabet-owned Waze to power hands-free, eyes-free navigation control for drivers. Meanwhile, Apple has spun out at the starting line of the smart speaker race, delaying the release of its HomePod until early 2018. This and more top stories from the Frightful Five — just in case you missed them. Read More...