Switzerland has joined a growing number of places around the world exploring the potential of electric autonomous buses, with a pair of driverless shuttles now ferrying passengers around the city of Sion as part of a two-year trial. Other autonomous buses being tested out across the globe include the EZ10 in California and Singapore, the Navia also in Singapore, and the IBM-powered Olli in Washington DC that can even talk to its passengers en route. Much like these projects, Switzerland's buses will take to public roads with local regulators eying a wider deployment of low-carbon, autonomous mass transport. The vehicles will be operated by Switzerland's leading …

On most mobile devices nowadays, location privacy is an all-or-nothing deal: You either allow applications to track you all the time, or you turn off the location setting and suffer the inconvenience of having to turn it back on every time you use the app. Both Apple and Google have improved this in recent years, adding granular controls to their mobile operating systems that allow users to permit or deny individual apps access to their device's location. But while that might be sufficient to prevent a sketchy flashlight app from snooping on you, it's still not quite enough to stop …

Quvium, a U.K. startup, has partnered with DSP Concepts, a Silicon Valley firm that sells digital signal-processing technology, to create a wearable device that monitors the coughing sounds of patients with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or other chronic respiratory ailments, in order to alert caregivers when a patient is likely to have an acute attack that could result in hospitalization. Dubbed CoughAware, the device will soon be validated by physicians and technologists at London's King's College, in advance of a clinical trial in the United Kingdom.

Pernod Ricard USA’s Absolut Labs is extending the reach of the vodka brand’s millennial-geared Absolut Nights campaign by teaming up with electronic dance music producer deadmau5 for a mobile application and virtual reality experience. The subsidiary of Absolut Vodka has developed an interactive virtual reality experience in partnership with deadmau5, showcasing how the company looks ahead to redefine and reimagine nightlife via its long-running Absolut Nights campaign. Fans will be able to download the Absolut deadmau5 application for their smartphones this July and purchase a branded VR cardboard headset to participate in the experience, which follows the EDM producer as …

As per capita purchasing power increases, proportional spending on personal goods has decreased, according to a new report from GfK. For the 28 European Union member states, retail sales accounted for 31.2 percent of spending in 2013 but only 30.4 percent last year. As newly earned purchasing power manifests itself in cultural and recreational spending, brands must invest in the experiential economy to regain prominence.

Throughout all industries, a majority of large companies (those with 1,000 employees or more) are using or planning to use IoT technologies, according to Forrester Research’s 2015 Global Business Technographics Networks and Telecommunications Survey. Those enterprises are hoping to gather data that can be leveraged to improve efficiency, serve customers better and gain insights into new ways of doing business. But IoT technology is already reshaping and revolutionizing the retail industry, yielding advances and new opportunities in customer service, throughout the supply chain and in brick-and-mortar stores and other channels — including new venues that show a lot of promise, …

The Internet of Things will boost retail sales, says an electronics wholesaler, as 1,000 smart sensors are set to track UK High Street footfall. Raimund Hahn, CEO of Rhino Inter Group, a wholesale groups for electronic goods, is convinced that the Internet of Things, in other words the connection of all kinds of everyday objects to the internet, will give retailers an enormous boost over the next few years. According to Hahn, all manner of internet-connected devices, from coffee machines and electric toothbrushes to washing machines, will soon be launched to the market, virtually putting people wishing to lead a …

Travel application Airside Mobile is leveraging contextual- and location-based push notifications to drive direct downloads among Android users in several major airports and inform them of experiences in their vicinity. Airside Mobile is leveraging sensor beacon solution Bluvision’s Nearby Notifications to prompt more airport travelers to download its app and interact with various in-terminal experiences. Once an individual walks by a Bluvision beacon, the device will send a push notification to his or her Android smartphone with an invitation to download the Airside Mobile app directly from the Google Play Store, thereby simplifying the user experience.

The potential use of wireless "beacons" to inform smartphone-equipped shoppers of nearby vending machines was the topic of the third technology-themed seminar at the National Automatic Merchandising Association's 2016 OneShow in Chicago. The session was opened by Lindsey K. Nelson, NAMA executive director of development, who thanked the Coca-Cola Co. for its sponsorship of the session. She introduced Google's Dan Cath and Coke's Derek Myers, who offered some insight on potential applications in vending for beacons. Cath explained that beacons have been used to convey information since time immemorial. Before the invention of radio, smoke signals, watch fires and flags were …