Chris Halaschek, VP of IoT at Pindrop, a pioneering company in voice fraud prevention and authentication, invited me over to the company’s Atlanta-based headquarters to talk about where we are today with security for these kinds of devices, and what can be done to make it safer to use the popular devices to do more things.

Recently an article came discussed a situation where an Amazon customer was trying to post a review for the book she bought. But she kept getting notified that due to a rules violation she wouldn’t be able to do it. Well after the news about Facebook sharing information came out, it appeared that Amazon may have used the data to assume there was a “real” friendship that wouldn’t allow for an honest review of the book.

John Lawson and I discuss the implications of Amazon using Facebook data to determine who knows who and how that plays into protecting shoppers on the site. And what are the wider implications of big tech companies sharing data without telling the folks who’s data they’re sharing.

While many of you probably know who Grant Hill is, you might not have known that he went from playing on the court to being a co-owner of the Atlanta Hawks – also serving as Vice Chair of the organization. And last week I had the honor of hosting a conversation with Hill and Nzinga Shaw, the Hawks Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, during the Diversity in Tech Summit held in conjunction with Salesforce’s World Tour Stop in Atlanta. The event was organized in partnership with The Atlanta Tribune – the Magazine.

Shaw, who is the first person to hold such a position in a professional team sport in the US, and Hill discussed a number of interesting around leadership, the benefits of inclusion and equality, and why diversity has to be part of the corporate culture in order for it work.

It was obvious that SAP CEO Bill McDermott was enthusiastic about the purchase of Qualtrics and referred to it as being a transformational moment for the company. Which got my buddy and CRM thought leader Paul Greenberg (aka the Godfather of CRM) fired up to discuss for our CRM Playaz video podcast. But while we focused on whether we felt McDermott was right about the deal being transformational, we went beyond that and started thinking about what does it really mean to be transformational in business today, and what are good examples out there to follow.

Genesys, a leader in omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions, recently published their Consumer Insights Survey including responses from one thousand US adults. There are a bunch of interesting numbers coming out of the survey, including:

• 41% of respondents willing to pay up to 10% more for a better customer experience

• 94% of consumers viewed their last customer experience as positive

• 75% of consumers say humans provide the most effective customer service, but 76% still want the option to interact with companies via digital channels (webchat, social media, etc.)

• Only 12.5% of respondents hate interacting with bots

Chris Connolly, VP of Product Marketing for Genesys, joins me to share some additional insights from the survey.

There are a growing number of signs pointing to a shakeup in how marketers are allocating their digital advertising budgets. Now to be sure Google and Facebook are still the top destinations for those ad dollars. But more and more you’re hearing about big brands beginning to switch as much as 50-60% of their budgets to Amazon.

With Amazon having a lot of momentum in the digital ads business, I had to pull in my Watching Amazon partner and ecommerce expert John “ColderIce” Lawson to talk about what he’s seeing in this area, how teens shopping is changing the digital ad spending equation, and what impact this shift might have on small businesses.

Adobe Intern Cedrick Ilo: Working on Having Alexa Read Your PDF Documents to You by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends

It’s been fifteen years this month since Anita Campbell started Small Business Trends! So, after congratulating her on such a big accomplishment, I had to ask her about her journey transforming a personal blog into one of the most influential sites in providing advice to millions of small business owners and professionals each month.

Well, after the bomb Amazon dropped yesterday announcing an arsenal of Alexa-enabled devices – from microwaves, cars devices, wall clocks, outlet plugs, subwoofers – it’s easy to see we’re a quickly moving into a voice-first world. But the reason for all these new voice-enabled devices is because we kind of like talking to them, according to a recent study from Adobe called The State of Voice Assistants. Taylor Schreiner, director of Adobe Digital Insights, shared some of the key finding from the study with me for this series.

I attended HubSpot’s INBOUND conference last week, where about 24,000 marketers descended on Boston for four days. While at the conference I had a chance to spend a few minutes with Jon Dick, HubSpot’s VP of Marketing, and pick his brain on a few of the hot topics currently facing marketers today