Open Access

This study explores the potential role of virtual influencers in future B2B marketing. Combining expert interviews and a literature review, the findings reveal the growing popularity of virtual influencers due to Web 3.0 and Metaverse advancements. The study suggests that virtual influencers may revolutionize brand-customer interactions in the digital space, with implications for B2B marketing strategies.

Recent research has suggested that there is no general similarity measure, which can be applied on arbitrary databases without any parameterization. Hence, the optimal combination of similarity measures and parameters must be identified for each new image repository. This optimization loop is time consuming and depends on the experience of the designer as well as the knowledge of the medical expert. It would be useful if results that have been obtained for one data set can be transferred to another without extensive re-design. This transfer is vital if content-based image retrieval is integrated into complex environments such as picture archiving and communication systems. The image retrieval in medical applications (IRMA) project defines a framework that strictly separates data administration and application logic. This permits an efficient transfer of the data abstraction of one database on another without re-designing the software. In the ImageCLEF competition, the query performance was evaluated on the CasImage data set without optimization of the feature combination successfully applied to the IRMA corpus. IRMA only makes use of basic features obtained from grey-value representations of the images without additional textual annotations. The results indicate that transfer of parameterization is possible without time consuming parameter adaption and significant loss of retrieval quality.

The ImageCLEF 2006 medical automatic annotation task encompasses 11,000 images from 116 categories, compared to 57 categories for 10,000 images of the similar task in 2005. As a baseline for comparison, a run using the same classifiers with the identical parameterization as in 2005 is submitted. In addition, the parameterization of the classifier was optimized according to the 9,000/1,000 split of the 2006 training data. In particular, texture-based classifiers are combined in parallel with classifiers, which use spatial intensity information to model common variabilities among medical images. However, all individual classifiers are based on global features, i.e. one feature vector describes the entire image. The parameterization from 2005 yields an error rate of 21.7%, which ranks 13th among the 28 submissions. The optimized classifier yields 21.4% error rate (rank 12), which is insignificantly better.

Nowadays graduates are more international than ever. This is especially true for graduates of business and management studies. They have passed international study semesters abroad; realized international internships; worked in international work groups; attended courses with international lecturers; learned several languages. Why would such graduates not think about applying for a job abroad directly after their studies? ‘Self-initiated expatriates’ is the term used to describe job seekers that are not sent abroad by a company but decide themselves to apply for a job in another country. Going for a professional stay abroad directly after graduation should be appealing since graduates are mostly quite flexible – no family, no children, not settled down. For companies, hiring self-initiated expatriates can be quite attractive, among others for cost reasons: they do not pay for relocation and they are not responsible for repatriation issues either. How easy is it for companies to hire such graduates?

China ist inzwischen Deutschlands Exportpartner Nummer acht. Im Vertrieb vieler Unternehmen wird neu gelernt, dass man das Vertrauen chinesischer Kunden nicht wie in Deutschland gewinnt. Der Erfahrungsschatz von Relationship Managern, die auf dem chinesischen Markt erfolgreich sind, kann dabei sehr hilfreich sein.