Welcome to our monthly curation of emerging technology news tidbits and trends that help inform the research we do for our Avanade Trendlines program. Let’s discuss any thoughts you have in the comments.

Technology: Gaming proliferates into products and services
This fashion gaming app may be showing us how we’ll shop in the future. The Ada app enables users to select and buy designer clothes for an avatar. “Fashion, over the years, has found synergies with almost every high-profile and/or cash-rich part of the economy. And in the video-game world – especially the mobile-gaming world – cash is very, very plentiful. Mobile gaming is expected to be worth nearly $70bn in 2019 and accounted for 75 per cent of mobile revenue in the first two quarters. What’s more, the mobile sector gives the lie to the idea that video games are a pastime restricted to adolescent boys: it’s estimated that half of mobile-games users are now women.”

Why should you care? We’ve been watching signals that consistently show that gaming concepts are moving into new products and services. For brands, it’s nothing new, with product placement in TV and movies a common occurrence for a while, but brands that want to be more playful can explore potential new revenue streams./p>

Why sustainability is so hard
Here’s the story of how Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms, vowed to make its chocolate green. And failed. “Over the past decade, deforestation has accelerated in West Africa, the source of two-thirds of the world’s cocoa. By one estimate, the loss of tropical rainforests last year sped up more in Ghana and Ivory Coast than anywhere else in the world. ‘Anytime someone bites on a chocolate bar in the United States, a tree is being cut down,’ said Eric Agnero, an environmental activist in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast.”

Why should you care? While there are many factors prohibiting Mars from achieving its goal, data quality and sharing across the supply chain was the critical challenge. It all can’t be automated, and many elements of the supply chain will continue to rely on people inputting data.

Profile: The store moves into the home
Corie Barry, CEO of Best Buy. “‘Leaders need to be comfortable with who they are,’ Barry said. Through her years at Best Buy, she has seen the people who stumble have a conflict with ‘who they are as a person and who they are as a leader at work.’ If you are a workaholic, own it. For herself, she models a flexible lifestyle, acknowledging that work-life balance is never perfect.”

Why should you care? Best Buy expanded its services strategy recently with a focus on providing human touch with technology. It has over “700 in-home advisors, which evaluate consumers’ homes and make technology recommendations for free.” Acting as the CIO of the home, Best Buy is positioning itself for building a long-term customer relationship. Technology in our lives is not going to get simpler, and we expect to see more of this home-visit advisor as the physical and digital line crumbles.

Changes as we lose the landline
“My tween will never know the sound of me calling her name from another room after the phone rings. She’ll never sit on our kitchen floor, refrigerator humming in the background, twisting a cord around her finger while talking to her best friend. I’ll get it, He’s not here right now, and It’s for you are all phrases that are on their way out of the modern domestic vernacular. According to the [U.S.] federal government, the majority of American homes now use cellphones exclusively. ‘We don’t even have a landline anymore,’ people began to say proudly as the new millennium progressed. But this came with a quieter, secondary loss — the loss of the shared social space of the family landline.”