Sydney, Australia – 15 May 2018 – VoiceFoundry, a principal provider of enterprise cloud-based contact centre solutions with a unique focus on customer experience and automation in North America, today announced that it is now expanding services to Australian and New Zealand businesses.

Australian media got into a bit of frenzy last week when it was reported that retail giant Amazon would soft launch on Thursday ahead of a full launch on Black Friday.

For reasons yet unknown, this did not happen. Although the soft launch went ahead as planned, if you had visited the Amazon Australia site at the time of writing, you would've seen what's been there for the last few years: the old Kindle shopfront, which isn't particularly exciting. Maybe Amazon wasn't ready. Perhaps it didn't want to get lost in the fog of all the other Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales hitting the web. It could have been a strategy to build even more hype. Or journalists might have got carried away.

Australia Post is trialling an autonomous delivery robot. (Supplied: Australia Post)

By Kate Letheren, Queensland University of Technology

Amazon’s launch in Australia (today) is likely to put fresh scrutiny on the speed of Australia Post’s own deliveries. To that end, Australia Post is trialling the use of robots to deliver parcels more promptly.

Research finds that consumer trust in a postal brand can influence willingness to purchase from an online retailer who ships with that carrier. Positive perceptions of postal services are not just important to the services themselves, but also to the online retailers who use them.

From 27th February to 2nd March this year, over 100,000 people attended the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, Spain.

More than 2,300 companies participated in the event with exhibitions covering connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, drones and more.

With the U.S. retail giant's recent announcement of the global launch of Amazon Connect - industry experts left wondering what outcome to expect

The level of industry disruption coming from Amazon places the company in a class all its own. From media company to tablet producer to contact centre solutions provider. Amazon is a multi-dimensional business disruptor. With Amazon Web Services (AWS) now offering contact centre solutions, the question begs, how will the industry cope and what impact will AWS have on the region if any?