Black Friday is an immovable event – occurring at the same time of year, every year. With each iteration, we see more customer demand as more shoppers clock onto the best deals they can get in time for Christmas. And usually, we see more people flocking to the high street to get them.

Our working lives have long been open to disruption from tech and other external forces, but the arrival of COVID-19 has shifted the world of work at a rate of change that few could have predicted – and has raised urgent questions about how employment will adapt.

It’s been almost one year since the Covid-19 pandemic started. Data scientists worldwide have been analyzing data gathered during the pandemic to inform policies.

The disruption of the UK’s traditional grocery and supermarket scene by online providers looks to be accelerating, with Amazon now offering free grocery delivery to millions of customers in a massive expansion of the company's fresh food service.

A new challenge from XPRIZRE seeks evidence-based models using artificial intelligence to help governments reopen their economies during the pandemic. The accelerated crowdsourced competition has a total prize purse of $500,000, with the first deadline for team registration set for 8 December 2020.

The XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge seeks ways to safely reopen societies amidst a pandemic.

XPRIZE, an organization that creates competitions to solve humanitarian challenges, launched the Pandemic Response Challenge on Tuesday in partnership with Cognizant.

“Hotels use legacy systems for their back-office operations and it often limits the efficiencies they can achieve,” says Cognizant’s Vice President of Travel and Hospitality Joseph Rajadurai.

Cognizant’s recent ‘From Eyes to Ears: Getting Your Brand Heard in the New Age of Voice’ report says that brands not paying attention to voice could already be losing out on millions yearly. And while the vast majority of companies agree that voice will become essential to their success, only 20 percent have a formal voice strategy in place.

Technology has become central to keeping people connected during extended periods of forced social isolation. Whenever people get back to their routines in the physical world, it will merely be an effort to catch up, not be free from the virtual world.