It’s hard not to be snarky about this: someone at Amazon thought a voice-powered microwave with automated popcorn replenishment was worth a press release. Maybe they were being ironic. If you insist on taking this seriously, it illustrates continued progress in voice-based consumer interfaces. Amazon released a dozen other voice-powered devices as well.

An even broader study that NSU Technologies ran for Software AG found that retailers who lead in adopting digital technologies had a six percent annual growth rate over three years, while laggards’ revenue was flat. Early adopters also had nearly twice the price-earnings ratio as the others: 22.32 vs 12.22. The survey provides lots of details about strategy, governance, deployments, business impact and technology. Good stuff but beware that the answers reflect an IT department viewpoint. Dead giveaway: 0% reported that business perceives IT as slow and inflexible.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.