Technology solutions and staff training top the list of initiatives that companies are using today to improve global shipping performance and reduce costs, according to the Global Trade Management Report from Tompkins Supply Chain Consortium.

Everyone is changing their user interface these days"”even new automobiles have touch screens rather than buttons. However, not all UIs are created equal. Some of them are just pretty faces.

Usually in a fairy tale there is a big, bad wolf "¦ one that is going to eat you up! Such a wolf is swallowing up the supply chain.

Symphony EYC, a player in retail and distribution improvement software formerly known as Aldata, announced that its second U.S. holiday shopping survey has determined that in the United States shoppers want to use their mobile phones to make shopping easier, more personalized, and to have more control over inventory, but that purchasing groceries with a mobile is still in its infancy.

The use of highly scaled, shared, and automated IT platforms"”known as cloud computing"”is growing rapidly. Adopters are driven by the prospects of increasing agility and gaining access to more computing resources for less money. Large institutions are building and managing private-cloud environments internally (and, in some cases, procuring access to external public clouds) for basic infrastructure services, development platforms, and whole applications. Smaller businesses are primarily buying public-cloud offerings, as they generally lack the scale to set up their own clouds. But as attractive as cloud environments can be, they also come with new types of risks.

Consumer-oriented collaboration and file-sharing tools that have gained popularity as the workforce becomes increasingly mobile are customarily cheap, even free, for employees to use. But they could be costing businesses plenty, a recent study suggests.

Aberdeen Group has released research reports from its business intelligence and networking and application performance research practices.