"I think the jury is out on this model, even though the logic is sound," says Lorna Hall, head of market intelligence, at trend forecaster WGSN.
The threat intelligence sharing trend has led other leaders in the tech industry to adopt similar initiatives.
"Kids today are so self-assured," said Jane Rinzler Buckingham, who heads Youth Intelligence, a trend-spotting firm.
"There's a new need people have to prove themselves," said Jane Buckingham, president of Youth Intelligence, a trend-forecasting firm.
In addition, he retains a team of outside experts who provide intelligence about trends in the financing and delivery of health care, facts and figures that inform his advice to clients.
She indulges that craving with a host of online fashion magazines, Web sites that cater to readers who, like Ms. Snyder, never seem to get their fill of advance intelligence on trends, shopping or designer dish.
Like LevelUp, Cardfree is a white-label platform, which allows merchants and vendors to personalize and rebrand the system according to their individual use, while collecting a variety of data points on their customers to ensure that they have access to competitive intelligence and trending information, both for the market at large and across their customer base.
Why, then, should breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence reverse this trend?
Lorna Hall, head of market intelligence at the trend forecaster WGSN, seconds the strategy.
It is, fundamentally, an intelligence exercise: Detect trends, analyze how criminal organizations are behaving, which cartel is fighting which cartel, who is winning and who is losing.
