What do you get for the man who has everything? When it comes to Jeff Bezos — the richest man in the world with around $130bn to his name — many U.S. cities competing to host Amazon’s second headquarters have an answer: billions of dollars in tax incentives.

A common question warehouse operators often ask themselves is: "what can we do to further increase productivity and efficiency?" For a while, this challenge has been met with Six Sigma methodologies to identify and eliminate waste in the process. However, one of the biggest sources of waste remains non-value-adding movement and material handling. A new breed of robot has recently emerged that tackles this challenge and is helping warehouses to reach next level productivity and efficiency. -John Santagate, Research Director, IDC

The coming year looks like smooth sailing for container-shipping lines — if they can meet shippers’ increasing demands for service.

With the ability to automatically and accurately share data across corporate boundaries, blockchain is more than just hype. It has the potential to be a true game-changer. On par with how email changed the way we communicate in business, blockchain is on the cusp of a tremendous breakthrough in how products and the data associated with them move across the supply chain. -Melanie Nuce, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, GS1 US