Wu Haishan was at Princeton studying how schools of fish swim together when the crowd behavior of a much bigger group grabbed his attention: his 1.35 billion fellow Chinese. It was Lunar New Year back home in 2014, and Baidu, operator of the country's biggest search engine, had created an animation showing all the trips the Chinese had made during the holiday, which demographers say is the largest annual human migration anywhere. Wu, who'd seen the animation, soon joined Baidu as a data scientist in Beijing. With the company's vast amounts of user location information, he's come up with ingenious ways to measure economic activity.

Ocado, an online-only grocer and retail solution provider, has developed a 4G-based protocol to communicate with the thousands of robots powering its new automated warehouses. These highly-automated warehouses will be offered as part of a managed service called the Ocado Smart Platform which enables international partners to build scalable, sustainable and profitable online retail businesses, the company says.

Parcel shipping volume will grow annually at 5 to 7 percent between now and 2018, for a total increase of 20 percent, with the biggest gains coming in cross-border shipping, according to a study from Pitney Bowes.

This year's Black Friday and Cyber Monday were bigger than ever. But the numbers could be concealing an underlying trend away from those key dates in the retail calendar.

Holiday shoppers eager to snag big discounts turned to the internet in record fashion this week, one tracking company said, driving online sales on Black Friday to a new high. Consumers spent $3.34bn shopping online on Friday, a 21.6 percent increase from the same day last year, according to Adobe, which tracks online retail transactions.