Keith Kirkpatrick

Contactless payments, which can be initiated via a smartphone, have been slow to gain traction in North America and Europe, according to research conducted in the fourth quarter of 2019 by comScore. The research found that just 16% and 14% of smartphone buyers in these regions used contactless payments through their phones, likely due to a lack of financial incentives or perceived benefits of switching from traditional mag-stripe or chip-and-pin cards to no-touch modalities.
That may be chang...

Article on information gerrymandering and the impact of social media circles on access and exposure to competing viewpoints.

Communications of the ACM, December 2019, Vol. 62 No. 12, Pages 19-21
10.1145/3365583
Comments (2)
In the spring of 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress, largely in response to the news that British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had captured and used the data of more than 87 million Facebook users to influence elections without the social media giant's knowledge or consent, as well as the admission that Facebook itself had been used by Russians to spr...

Current / Distributor’s Voice
Aligning the sales and marketing departments is even more essential when relationship building is a virtual practice.
PRE-COVID, OUR BUSINESS struggled to align sales and marketing beyond the occasional pocket folder update and sell sheet insert —and even that was mostly generated with little input from a sales team that didn’t see much value in traditional marketing. Now, both teams face a need to transform communication strategies and are sharing knowledge and ...

Communications of the ACM, July 2020, Vol. 63 No. 7, Pages 17-19
10.1145/3398390
Comments
It is hard to imagine a world without electronic devices. From servers, personal computers, and storage devices to smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices, electronic devices drive businesses, entertain and enable consumers to interact with the world, and keep the world's information and physical infrastructure networks running on a 24/7 basis. Not surprisingly, the number of electronic devices in use...

The use of Internet-based distance learning has become commonplace among for-profit colleges and at traditional universities, with most programs focusing on older, non-traditional students who are seeking a degree while balancing other work/life commitments. With the mass closings of K-12 schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic, distance-based learning is now being deployed at the primary school level to ensure students remain engaged and educated.
Schools have taken myriad approaches to using t...

The concept of a smart city has been around for decades, driven by a utopian vision of city systems, services, workers, and residents functioning in synchronicity for a more efficient, safer, and productive environment. Artificial intelligence (AI) will likely be the catalyst for enabling the smart city. Smart cities will use machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), computer vision (CV), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies (among others) to enable city services, assets, and s...

As of late February 2020, there have been more than 80,000 reported cases of coronavirus infections around the globe. While the spread of the virus may have been inevitable, modern technology has certainly added to the challenge. For example, inexpensive air, vehicle, and rail travel has allowed infected people to spread the virus far beyond its genesis in Wuhan, China. The use of social media is allowing unfounded rumors around the cause, prevention techniques, and likely impact of the virus...

The quantum computing market is a small but rapidly maturing one from the technology perspective. However, for quantum computing to succeed it needs the market in suitable applications to also mature. The quantum computing scientists will tell you: despite the progress the question remains if, not when, quantum computing will become mainstream. This statement on the future for quantum may make it seem as if it is a technology more relevant to a 2050 Trends to Watch than a 2020 one. However, t...