Camp Tech: Your Friday Tech Roundup
| Here are a few things we’ve found online that we hope you’ll enjoy or find useful. Backing up photos and important documents, syncing files… we all use cloud storage. But which is best for you? Google Drive? Dropbox? OneDrive? This blog post from Zapier has the details you need: The 9 best cloud storage apps in 2026 Wow. More than half of Canadians have used AI for a shopping-related task, such as researching and comparing products. Another 48% said that ChatGPT offered better recommendations than search engines. Read more in The Globe and Mail (gift link): As AI upends shopping, retailers tailor their pitches for chatbots How Retailers Are Changing Their Strategies (Courtesy of Google) Optimizing for Large Language Models (LLMs): Retailers are rewriting product descriptions, specs, and marketing copy to ensure their products are readily “understood” and recommended by AI models. Brands are moving beyond keywords to proactively tell compelling, conversational stories about their products so chatbots naturally include them in recommendations. Conversational Commerce: Shopping is becoming a back-and-forth dialogue. Retailers are deploying their own tailored, branded chatbots—such as Walmart’s Sparky or Amazon’s Rufus—to function more like expert in-store associates. Closing the Trust Loop: Many shoppers still hesitate to complete purchases directly inside a third-party chatbot. To bridge this, retailers use AI for product discovery and comparison, while redirecting consumers to their own brand apps or websites to finalize the sale and maintain the customer relationship. You’ve probably heard of Chromebooks – the inexpensive laptops that run the Google Chrome operating system. Google just announced something new: Googlebooks. They’re AI-first laptops and they’re apparently coming this fall. Consider us intrigued. |
| Fun Things to Click On |
| We hope you’ll spend some time outside this long weekend, and you may notice a few birds you haven’t seen in a while. Spring migration is in full swing, and the Bird Migration Explorer from Audubon and Birds Canada is a beautiful way to see what’s happening above your head. Type in your region or pick a species (warblers, hummingbirds, sandhill cranes) and watch animated maps trace where they came from and where they’re going next. Happy Victoria Day weekend! |
| Camp TechToronto, Canada |