Blogs & Media

For local businesses, the platform economy can feel like a rat race instigated by the tech giants. How on earth can they keep up? More importantly, should they even try, or is it smarter to build a strong market presence in your own local market? Tapping into...

Platforms – there’s no way around them, not in onlife retail. Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Tencent/WeChat are simply involved in every single step of the customer journey. They have access to every single scrap of data provided by the end...

Over the course of two decades, we’ve watched numerous businesses ride the waves of the Internet to their advantages and global breakthroughs. Many of them had humble beginnings as startups. Their founders simply tapped into opportunities for adding value to both...

Why on earth would retailers to decide to participate in a circular economy, where onlife consumers are intent on consuming less, while still requiring vision, investments and a giant dose of tenacity? What would it take to accelerate the – rather sedate and gradual –...

The players in the retail value chain are clear, right? Producers, consumers and (web) stores. But what about government, what about new players such as mineral processors – who can turn waste into new raw materials – and familiar faces donning new hats? Consumers can...

Smarter design paired with a longer lifespan, that’s just one of the many ways to be circular. In the current linear system, goods are written off when they cannot be used in obvious ways. In the circular economy, they will be repaired, taken apart, given other...

Over the next few years and decades, we can expect to see an immense shift: the linear economy will gradually become circular. Following years of boundless consuming and the harmful emissions that has produced, society is now faced with tough questions. The answers...

The engines for the current sharing economy are Internet, social media and GPS. Tools for social change and a rise in connections between people, near and far. From here, the sky is the limit for sharers. New technology and apps will lift the sharing economy to the...

Challenges and threats swirl around the sharing economy. Is there sufficient trust between people and companies for the sharing economy of the future to fulfill its potential? What positive effects will the sharing economy have on the workforce and employment? Can we...

Online marketplaces, platforms and networks are the key business models of the sharing economy. They tap into the resources of others in order to work. In their book What’s Mine Is Yours, Botsman and Rogers defined three different systems: Product service systems...

In the bold words of poet and author Mark LeVine, sharing is clean, crisp, urbane, postmodern; owning is dull, selfish, timid, backward. In the future, possessing goods will be less important than access to them, according to Jeremy Rifkin, the famous American...

The technology called blockchain is what lies behind digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Still far from being perfect, it is likely to have an enormous impact on the world of onlife retail. The blockchain is a mechanism to automatically guarantee the...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is gradually seeping into all aspects of everyday life. Not to mention being the byword in tech sector. At the base of AI are machine learning and deep learning. Whereas the human mind still provides the foundation for machine learning,...