CloudFlare reveals that this year’s holiday's biggest online shopping day was... Black Friday

CloudFlare revealed that the biggest day of the holiday season for holiday shopping this year was Black Friday, the day after the US Thanksgiving holiday, which has been embraced globally as the day retail stores announce their sales. 

But it was believed that the following Monday, dubbed “Cyber Monday,” may be even bigger. Or, with the explosion of reliable two-day and even one-day shipping, maybe another day closer to Christmas has taken the crown. Cloudflare aimed to answer this question for the 2019 holiday shopping season.

Black Friday was the biggest online shopping day but the second biggest wasn't Cyber Monday... it was Thanksgiving Day itself (the day before Black Friday!), with Cyber Monday taking the fourth position. 

Data shows weekends in yellow and Black Friday and Cyber Monday are shown in green. Viewers can see that checkouts ramped up during Thanksgiving week and then continued through the weekend into Cyber Monday.

Black Friday had twice the number of checkouts as the preceding Friday and the entire Thanksgiving week dominates. Post-Cyber Monday, no day reached 50 percent of the number of checkouts witnessed on Black Friday, and Cyber Monday was just 60 percent of Black Friday.

So, Black Friday is the peak day but Thanksgiving Day is the runner up. Perhaps it deserves its own moniker: Thrifty Thursday anyone?

Checkouts occur more frequently from Monday to Friday and then drop off over the weekend. After Cyber Monday only one other day showed an interesting peak. Looking at last week it does appear that Tuesday, Dec. 17 was the pre-Christmas peak for online checkouts. Perhaps fast online shipping made consumers feel they could use online shopping as long as they got their purchases by the weekend before Christmas.

IDC finds that the refresh cycle of Surface and iPad will keep tablets market alive in the EMEA region

The EMEA tablet market reached 10.9 million units in the third quarter of the year, a drop of 8.2 percent on the same quarter last year, according to data from IDC. The contraction in consumer demand continues to be the main inhibitor of tablet adoption. 

As consumers lack compelling reasons to refresh their devices, life cycles continuously increase, leading to a market slowdown. However, the deployment of tablets in the commercial segments remains healthy, with a 4.2 percent year-on-year increase, due to the larger number of usage scenarios generated by digital transformation.

"In a quarter usually marked by seasonality, where there is a balance between the top two companies, Apple maintained and consolidated its market leadership," said Helena Ferreira, research analyst, IDC Western Europe Personal Computing Devices. "The growing market saturation is driving consolidation, as the top five companies become increasingly dominant, and in developed economies, like in Western Europe, the top five represented more than three-quarters of the market."   

The overall tablet market in Western Europe declined 6.0 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of this year, while and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) declined 12.0 percent year-on-year.

"Slate tablet shipments are continuing to drag down overall tablet results in both CEE and MEA, mostly due to the consumer consumption slowdown and significant drops in below-10in. tablets, due to stiff competition from large-screen smartphones," said Nikolina Jurisic, program manager, IDC CEMA.

Apple retained the market leadership in EMEA, ahead of its product refresh cycle. Samsung posted a double-digit decline, as the main focus is on pushing its prosumer S series and driving more profitability. Lenovo regained third position, filling the gap left by Huawei's decline. 

Huawei dropped to fourth and continues to suffer from the impact of the ban on consumer confidence. Amazon remained in the top 5 and continues to dominate the ultra-low-end price ranges, particularly during promotional periods such as Prime Day in the third quarter.

The EMEA tablet market is forecast to decline by 10.2 percent year-on-year in both the fourth quarter and for the whole year 2019. The dynamics affecting the market, particularly in the consumer segment, are expected to persist both in the consumer and in the commercial segments in the coming quarters.

"Despite the decline in total units shipped, the tier A vendors will sustain market value, particularly through the most recent iterations of iPad and Surface," said Daniel Goncalves, senior research analyst, IDC Western Europe Personal Computing Devices. "The new iPad with a first party keyboard and a new operating system designed to enhance productivity features in a tablet environment is expected to generate interest among prosumers and to continue boosting renewals of old tablets. On the other hand, the adoption of Surface Pro as a notebook replacement is expected to continue to thrive and to increasingly drive horizontal deployments in enterprise." 

The commercial market in EMEA is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 4.6 percent between 2019 and 2023.

"In the long run, the commercial segment is expected to grow due to the transition to mobility and growing user case scenarios for deploying tablets into businesses," said Jurisic.

Odaseva increases its compliance automation apps to data privacy regulations, adds Salesforce Marketing Cloud support

Odaseva announced this week enhancements to its platform including increased compliance automation applications as well as support for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Ultra High Availability for Salesforce.

For the past few years, Odaseva has offered users the ability to automate their data compliance and privacy activities for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This has allowed organizations to reduce financial, regulatory and reputational risk by automating their compliance activities – utilizing such Odaseva tools as Sandbox Anonymization and Production Data Lifecycle. 

Now, Odaseva has increased its compliance automation offerings for a number of industries and regions including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Customers with large datasets in the cloud may now backup files from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to the Odaseva platform. These files include emails, social or online marketing files, among others. Benefits of the application include automated backup on a regular basis, managed backup services and data loss prevention. Additionally, the application complies with strict data privacy laws and security policies to ensure data is secure.

For many organizations, 99.9 percent uptime is not enough. In these cases, Odaseva offers Ultra-High Availability for any user who wants to continue working on Salesforce – even when Salesforce is temporarily offline. Ultra-High Availability mode ensures users never have to work in a “read-only” mode on Salesforce and instead, continue their work on the Odaseva platform. Once Salesforce is back online, their work is immediately synched and updated with the Salesforce platform.

“In today’s digital age, ensuring proper data governance, even in cloud platforms such as Salesforce, is more critical than ever,” says Sovan Bin, CEO and founder of Odaseva. “Data integrity and availability for cloud mission-critical applications must be protected by both Backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service. In addition, with the influx of new data privacy and governance laws such as CCPA, which goes into regulation January 1, 2020, businesses must automate consumer rights like the Right of Access or Erasure and minimize risks by anonymizing data and implementing data lifecycles.”

Gartner expects 80 percent of marketers to drop their personalization efforts by 2025

Gartner expects that, by 2025, 80 percent of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both. In fact, 27 percent of marketers believe data is the key obstacle to personalization — revealing their weaknesses in data collection, integration and protection.

Marketers face other impediments to personalization success including the continuing decline in consumer trust, increased scrutiny by regulators and tracking barriers erected by tech companies. While personalization comprises 14 percent of the marketing budget, more than one in four marketing leaders cite technology as a major hurdle to personalization.

Gartner has a number of recommendations for marketing leaders evaluating their personalization efforts, including leveraging a pilot or proof of concept (POC) with a vendor before investing in a personalization tool, while returning to the basics and test tailored recommendations at the segment level to avoid unnecessary or premature investment in a personalization engine. It also helps grow personalization efforts from a set of tactics or tools to a capability by focusing on strategic planning, use case development and consent management as part of a personalization roadmap.

The effort also helps collaborate with cross-functional teams to align personalization efforts and increase momentum. Sharing control of personalization efforts can lead to shared insight and expand collective impact and ROI.

Other Gartner predictions to help marketers adjust to rapidly evolving customer behaviors and plan accordingly include expectations that by 2023, chief marketing officer (CMO) budget allocation on influencer marketing will decrease by a third as consumers continue to lose trust in brands and entities they don’t personally know; by 2024, artificial intelligence identification of emotions will influence more than half of the online advertisements viewed; by 2022, 25 percent of marketing departments will have a dedicated behavioral scientist or ethnographer as part of their full-time staff; and in 2023, one-third of all brand public relations disasters will result from data ethics failures.

“Personal data has long been the fuel that fires marketing at every stage of the customer journey, and the drive to find new forms of fuel and devise new ways to leverage them seems to be boundless,” said Charles Golvin, senior director analyst in the Gartner for Marketers practice. “However, this quest has failed to meet marketers’ ambitions and, in some cases, has backfired, as consumers both directly and indirectly reject brands’ overtures.”

Intel opposes Qualcomm’s appeal in US District Court; files brief supporting FTC

Intel files a brief supporting the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and opposing Qualcomm’s appeal of the judgment rendered in May against Qualcomm by the United States District Court, Northern District of California. 

The District Court found that “Qualcomm’s licensing practices have strangled competition in the CDMA and premium LTE modem chip markets for years, and harmed rivals, OEMs and end consumers.” The District Court also found that Qualcomm’s conduct “unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.”

Intel agrees with the District Court’s findings. Intel suffered the brunt of Qualcomm’s anticompetitive behavior, was denied opportunities in the modem market, was prevented from making sales to customers and was forced to sell at prices artificially skewed by Qualcomm. 

Qualcomm would have you believe that its position in the market today — as the last surviving U.S. supplier of premium modem chips — is due to its “ingenuity and business acumen,” and that its rivals in the market failed simply because “they did not offer good enough chips at low enough prices.” This is simply not true.

Instead, as detailed in the District Court’s opinion and in our brief, Qualcomm maintained its monopoly through a brazen scheme carefully crafted and implemented over many years. This scheme consists of a web of anticompetitive conduct designed to allow Qualcomm to coerce customers, tilt the competitive playing field and exclude competitors, all the while shielding itself from legal scrutiny and capturing billions in unlawful gains.

The victims were Qualcomm’s own customers (original equipment manufacturers or OEMs), the long list of competitors it forced out of the modem chip market, including Intel, and ultimately consumers. 

Intel fought for nearly a decade to build a profitable modem chip business, and invested billions, hired thousands, acquired two companies and built innovative products that eventually made their way into Apple’s iPhones, including the most recently released iPhone 11. 

But when all was said and done, Intel could not overcome the artificial and insurmountable barriers to fair competition created by Qualcomm’s scheme and was forced to exit the market this year.

“As I have pointed out before, the District Court’s decision finding Qualcomm violated the antitrust laws comes on the heels of governmental entities around the globe reaching the same conclusion,” wrote Steven R. Rodgers is executive vice president and general counsel at Intel, in a post. “As a result of its anticompetitive practices, Qualcomm has been fined nearly $1 billion in China, $850 million in Korea, $1.2 billion by the European Commission and $773 million in Taiwan (later reduced in settlement). The FTC, however, did not seek monetary relief. Instead, it sought injunctive relief to prevent Qualcomm from continuing to engage in its unlawful conduct.”

Among other things, the District Court prohibited Qualcomm from continuing to implement the central component of its scheme, its coercive “no license, no chips” (NLNC) policy. Under the policy, Qualcomm cuts off handset OEMs’ purchases of modem chips unless they enter into a patent license agreement on Qualcomm’s terms. These onerous, one-sided terms enable Qualcomm to artificially lower the price of its modems while simultaneously inflating customers’ costs of using modem chips manufactured by competitors, like Intel, by charging royalties as large as the price of the modems themselves. 

The District Court concluded that the NLNC policy, together with other anticompetitive behavior on Qualcomm’s part, unlawfully distorted and, in fact, destroyed the competitive playing field.

The world benefits from fair competition in the wireless technology market. Given the importance of wireless technology to the future of connected computing, including the revolutionary promise of 5G, we strongly support the efforts of the FTC and other law enforcement agencies to require Qualcomm to obey the laws and compete on a level playing field.

“We hope our amicus brief will help in clarifying the full extent of the harm that Qualcomm’s unlawful behavior has caused and will continue to cause if left unchecked,” Stevans added.

Kaspersky data finds suspicious objects are malicious in close to three-quarters of investigated cases

Following Kaspersky’s analysis of anonymized and aggregated statistics of requests to the Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal, research showed that when security researchers requested additional details of a suspicious object, 72 percent of cases turned out to be malicious and could put corporate security at risk.

On average, 44 percent of security alerts are not investigated, likely due to the vast volume of incoming warning signals that security teams are challenged with. As a result, analysts must carefully choose which alerts need investigating versus those that do not justify further attention.

Of the 72 percent of cases that are found to be malicious after undergoing additional research, the share of such objects is especially high for web-related items including domains (86 percent), IP addresses (75 percent) and URLs (73 percent). This figure slightly drops for files, as 61 percent of hashes were categorized as dangerous. These statistics imply that it is more difficult for researchers to distinguish legitimate files from malicious ones without consulting with the appropriate threat intelligence.

The Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal is a web service which provides customers with knowledge about cyber threats gathered by Kaspersky. The company provides free access to basic information about suspicions files, hashes, IP addresses and others.

Global cybersecurity company Kaspersky offers deep threat intelligence and security expertise is constantly transforming into security solutions and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure, governments and consumers around the globe. The company’s comprehensive security portfolio includes endpoint protection and a number of specialized security solutions and services to fight sophisticated and evolving digital threats. 

Overall, researchers are most interested to learn about which resources the endpoints in their network are communicating with, as shown by 41 percent of total requests falling under this category. With information on IP address reputation and associated web sites and files, security teams can make a decision if they should deny access to this resource or block any communication with it. 

In addition, a third (31 percent) of requests were about a file hash category, meaning analysts are looking for additional information about the file (i.e. geographical distribution, popularity and connections with other objects) during their investigations.

“As our statistics show, security analysts in organizations rarely make mistakes when they suspect that an alert poses a security risk and might need further investigation,” said Anatoly Simonenko, group manager for technology solutions product management at Kaspersky. “However, it’s not all about checking the hypotheses. To be able to accelerate their incident response and forensic capabilities, analysts need to see the bigger picture on a threat, quickly. Access to threat intelligence provides just that, ultimately saving time and effort for typically understaffed security teams.”

Gartner reports that global smartphone demand weak in third quarter this year, as Apple and Xiaomi find their shares declining

Global sales of smartphones to end users continued to decline in the third quarter of 2019, contracting by 0.4 percent compared with the third quarter of 2018, according to data released Tuesday by analyst firm, Gartner. Demand remained weak as consumers became more concerned about getting value for money.

This shift has led brands such as Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO and Vivo to strengthen their entry-level and mid-tier portfolios. This strategy helped Huawei, Samsung and OPPO grow in the third quarter of 2019. By contrast, Apple recorded another double-digit decline in sales, year over year.

Huawei was the only one of the top-five global smartphone vendors to achieve double-digit growth in smartphone sales in the third quarter of 2019. The company sold 65.8 million smartphones, an increase of 26%, year over year. Huawei’s performance in China was the key driver of its global smartphone sales growth. It sold 40.5 million smartphones in China and increased its share of the country’s market by almost 15 percentage points.

While the ban on Huawei to access key U.S. technologies is yet to be fully implemented as a three-month extension was just announced, the proposed ban brought negativity around Huawei’ brand in the international market. Nevertheless, Huawei’s strong ecosystem in China continued to show growth. 

The current situation with the U.S. has also fostered patriotism among Huawei’s partners, which are now keener to promote its smartphones in China — a development that makes it difficult for local competitors to compete aggressively against Huawei. Huawei’s long investment in subbrands (Honor and Nova), in multichannel operations (online and retail), and in 5G and other technological innovation forms the basis of its success in China.

Samsung maintained the top position globally in the third quarter of 2019, by increasing its smartphone sales by 7.8 percent, year over year. “Samsung’s aggressive revamp of its portfolio, with a focus on midtier and entry-tier segments, strengthened its competitive position,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner.

Apple’s iPhone sales continued to decline in the third quarter of 2019. Apple sold 40.8 million iPhones, a year-over-year decline of 10.7%. “Although Apple continued its sales promotions and discounts in various markets, this was not enough to stimulate demand globally,” said Gupta. “In the Greater China market sales of iPhones continued to improve, however, it follows a double-digit decline recorded at the beginning of the year. The iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max saw good initial adoption, which suggests that sales may be positive in the remaining quarter.”

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching, smartphone deals are likely to spur consumer demand in the fourth quarter of 2019. Vendors including Google and Samsung are likely to offer aggressive price promotions not just for their older smartphones but also for new devices such as the Google Pixel 4 and Samsung Galaxy Note 10.

Competition between mobile phone manufacturers will increasingly focus on more intelligent smartphones. These devices will deliver increasingly personalized content and services that draw on users’ contexts and preferences. 

“To deliver relevant personalized experiences, manufacturers will need to improve the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in smartphones and make security capabilities and privacy key aspects of their brands,” said Roberta Cozza, senior research director at Gartner.

At a time of limited technology-led innovation, product managers should focus on offering attractive features at low prices as quickly as possible. By offering better value for money, they can increase demand for smartphones.

“For the majority of smartphone users, desire has shifted away from owning the least expensive smartphone. Today’s smartphone user is opting for midtier smartphones over premium-tier ones because they offer better value for money,” said Gupta. “In addition, while waiting for 5G network coverage to increase to more countries, smartphone users are delaying their purchase decisions until 2020.”