Rene Konrad earns bonus miles from four airlines, plus loyalty points from six retailers and credit cards. But the one loyalty program he is most excited about now offers him something different: digital coins. Before he jumps on the train to Zurich most mornings, Konrad grabs a bottle of Caffe Lattesso. The 41-year-old can get about 12...
If you sit down to work at Unilever’s U.S. headquarters and you’re too cold or hot–or you’re working on a laptop and the lights above you are too bright–you can pull out an app on your phone and tweak the room’s settings. Throughout the building, 15,000 sensors also measure temperature, light, carbon dioxide, humidity, and who’s present in a...
Bleisure, despite its unfortunate name, seems to be having a moment. More workers are doing what they actually want to during, before, and after business trips, and the travel industry is playing catch up to adapt to shifting trends. Expedia Group Media Solutions and Luth Research polled more than 2,500 business travelers from a variety of...
Each day, Vegas hotels and restaurants dish up 60,000 pounds of food. It takes nearly 50,000 real-live humans to prepare and serve all those crab legs, potatoes, and chocolate cakes, and now they’ve made it clear: they don’t want to lose their job to robots. Members of the city’s Culinary Workers Union voted to go on strike if their contracts...
Built with the help of Microsoft AI and the company’s own Publicis.Sapient, the new platform aims to connect all 80,000 Publicis employees, across 200 disciplines in 130 countries, to provide more seamless communication, collaboration, and anticipation of client needs. It’s currently being beta-tested by 100 employees, moving to 1,000 in the...
Argentina bank Banco Masventas (BMV) has partnered with the local blockchain financial services startup Bitex to become the world’s first banking institution to actively leverage Bitcoin as an international payments standard. The move is a conspicuous move away from extant options such as the SWIFT clearing network, which has seen multiple...
For many companies, gauging employee morale is a nebulous process that feels almost artistic, relying on the intuition of people involved in building workplace culture. In fast-growing startups, agencies and remote working teams often great actions doesn’t get enough and lousy experience too late attention. Moodbot claims to fix this – on a...
The building industry, farmers, oil exploration... the list of companies making use of industrial camera drones is growing by the month. Now the Industrial arm of Danish camera manufacturer Phase One has launched an aerial camera that uses the world’s first backlit medium format sensor. It's called the iXM 100MP, and it's almost certainly the...
The restaurant-as-coworking-space concept isn’t exactly new. Nor is the idea of double-duty public spaces. But man, are there a lot of options these days, even compared to a couple years ago. The match makes sense. According to one study, an estimated 5.1 million people worldwide will be using a coworking space by 2022. But not all of them can...
Talking to a human financial adviser at your local bank may be a thing of the past. A bank in China has launched the world's first personless branch run entirely by technology. Customers are greeted by humanoids who answers inquiries via voice recognition. These banking humanoids are able to do most things a human assistant could, including...