Check out iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, learn about the powerful iPad Pro, take a look at the new features and bands for Apple Watch, and see the premiere of the all-new Apple TV.
Catch all the announcements from the event. Apple Special Event. September 9, 2015. Streaming video requires Safari 4 or later on OS X v10.6 or later; Safari on iOS 4.2 or later; or QuickTime 7 on Windows. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 5.0.2 or later.
Tim Cook joined Apple in March 1998 as Senior Vice President (SVP) of Worldwide Operations—he also served as Executive Vice President (EVP) of Worldwide Sales and Operations—and was Chief Operating Officer (COO) until he was named the CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011, when he succeeded Steve Jobs.
NCO eCommerce
A Journey Through the Last 30 Years of Tech.
MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte takes you on a journey through the last 30 years of tech. The consummate predictor highlights interfaces and innovations he foresaw in the 1970s and 1980s that were scoffed at then but are ubiquitous today.
A lot of people think Google Search is like a map: An objective guide to the best and most important material on the internet.
It’s not.
Google Search is the most important product of a very wealthy and successful for-profit company. And Google will use this product to further its own commercial ends.
This became clearer than ever this week when the Wall Street Journal uncovered an internal FTC report saying that Google was illegally using material from other web sites, like TripAdvisor and Amazon, directly in its search results.
When those companies complained, Google threatened to remove them entirely from the search listings.
The FTC report suggested suing Google for antitrust, but Google made some changes to its practices — importantly, it let companies opt out of letting Google show their content directly in search results — and the FTC commissioners voted to drop the investigation in 2013.
But it’s an interesting and rare insight into how Google actually works, versus how you might think it works.
Google’s challenge with search
First of all, for all we hear about self-driving cars and Internet balloons and Android and YouTube, search is still Google’s most important business today. By far.
In 2014, Google booked $45 billion in advertising revenue from its own sites, out of $66 billion total.
The company won’t break out how much of that is first-party ad revenue is Google Search versus other products, but by all accounts it’s the vast majority — Google’s only other massively popular web site, YouTube, reportedly booked “only” $4 billion last year. This is why the people who work on search and search ads at Google are still considered rock stars at the company, according to many people who work there.
Google actually has a very tough set of technical and business challenges with search. It has to make Google Search as useful as possible, otherwise people will stop using Google and turn to alternatives – not just Microsoft’s Bing, which has struggled to gain market share despite being perfectly good on most kinds of searches, but alternatives like Amazon for product search or Yelp for restaurant search. This risk is higher with smartphones, where people are increasingly using apps on their smartphones rather than a search engine in their computer’s web browser.
Sometimes, Google has a legitimate case that its own products offer better answers than the web at large — there’s no reason to force users to click to another web site to answer a question like “Who’s the president of Albania?”
At the same time, Google wants people to use its other products, where it also sells ads.
The end result of this difficult balancing act? In general, Google is taking more and more information that it provides itself and putting it at the top of its search results.
This graphic shows the difference between Google search results in 2008 (left) and 2012 (right).
Tipster
Google has used other tricks over the years, too, like putting Google users’ reviews ahead of reviews from third-party sites like TripAdvisor (as long as the person searching was signed in to Google).
BI
A lot of competitors, particularly Yelp, have been complaining about these kinds of tactics for a long time. While US officials have so far stopped short of formally calling Google Search a monopoly or filing formal charges in this area, it now looks like Europe will soon file charges.
Why shouldn’t Google do whatever it wants with search?
Is this fair? Do we need really governments to monitor and control Google’s search results?
It’s sort of like when Microsoft was being investigated by the US Department of Justice for bundling its own web browser, Internet Explorer, with Windows. Steve Ballmer reportedly said during the trial that Microsoft should be allowed to bundle a ham sandwich with Windows — after all, Windows was a Microsoft product, not some kind of public utility.
That was true until the antitrust case went to trial and a judge found in 2000 that Microsoft Windows was a monopoly product, and that Microsoft had used that monopoly power to exclude competitors. The precise legal reasoning is more complicated — antitrust is complicated — but the basic takeaway here is that governments can rule that certain products are so important, and so dominant, that they’re no longer exclusively under the control of the company that creates them.
The Microsoft case eventually went through appeals and the company suffered fewer restrictions than the first judge, Thomas Jackson, originally imposed. But his “findings of fact” were really important: They paved the way for dozens of antitrust lawsuits by US state attorneys general and private companies like Sun, RealNetworks, and IBM. Microsoft had to pay billions in settlements before the fallout receded.
This is what Google desperately wants to avoid. If a government body issues a formal legal ruling that Google Search is an anticompetitive monopoly that needs to be regulated, it opens the floodgates.
PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images
Just remember what Google is
Regardless of whether Google faces new charges, the thing to keep in mind is that Google is a for-profit company. Its products have to be good, otherwise nobody will use them. But they also serve the larger business goals of the company.
Android isn’t just a mobile operating system that Google decided to give away to anybody who wanted to use it. It’s also a way for Google to make sure that nobody else dominates mobile browsing, where they might be tempted to guide people away from Google’s search engine and ads.
Chrome isn’t just an attempt to build a faster, better web browser. It also gives you lots of ways to search Google, plus offers many subtle encouragements to stay signed into Google services at all time (if you want those personalized bookmarks on top of your Chrome browser, you need to be signed in), which in turn helps Google target search results and ads just for you.
Every Google product should be viewed through this lens. Last week’s revelations make this clearer than ever.
Online shopping began its steady growth in 1994 after new security measures allowed for safe ecommerce transactions to occur online. Surprisingly, Pizza Hut was one of the first major companies to adopt ecommerce by offering online ordering through their website.
As online shopping grew in popularity, brick-and-mortar stores began to offer their products online, and entire companies were created to facilitate web sales. In 1995 Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com which is now the world’s largest online retailer – they brought in $48 billion in 2011 alone. Online auction siteeBay also opened shop in 1995. Expedia was founded in 1996 as a small division of Microsoft, andZappos.com opened it’s digital doors in 1999.
With today’s high-res photos and speedy shopping carts, it’s easy to forget how primitive most ecommerce stores used to be. Check out how these big brand-names sites looked before they became popular. Although they seem simplistic, unintuitive, and kind of ugly, at the time they were cutting-edge, and they paved the way for what ecommerce is today.
You are encouraged to use your imagination creatively and to…. ..THINK!
Richard Harris was the first to record the song; “MacArthur Park” in 1968.
“MacArthur Park” was written and composed by Jimmy Webb in the summer and fall of 1967.
Everything in the song was visible. There’s nothing in it that’s fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw.
Richard Harris was the first to record the song, in 1968; it was subsequently covered by numerous artists. Among the best-known covers are Donna Summer’s disco arrangement from 1978 and Waylon Jennings’s version recorded in 1969 and his recording of the song from 1976. Maynard Ferguson,[2] Stan Kenton[3] and Woody Herman all performed big-band jazz arrangements.
If you feel like Rock and Roll You better take your shoes off. (At 3:46 in the video)
Dick Clark Interview Wolfman Jack 1976
Dick Clark interviews Wolfman Jack on American Bandstand. Clark asks him about his voice, his family, and takes questions from the audience. He speaks about how he has always been a silly man and how excited he is to be on a Dick Clark show. He also mentions how he is going to spend Christmas with his family and how his wife is very pretty. An audience member asks Jack how he got the name ‘Wolfman Jack.’
Headline News – Deaths of Gale Gordon & Wolfman Jack, July 2, 1995.
The perfect time for a product of this magnitude? Welcome to the very latest in mobile design. From now on, we think you’ll be shopping on a #sLablet.
The world’s largest tablet, the 42″ sLablet.
Where Online Mobile Shopping is Fun.
Ocado is the UK’s only dedicated online supermarket, which sells groceries, household products, toys, books, and magazines.
Education:Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges;the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
2013 How to escape education’s death valley. 19:11 min
2006 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity ?
2010 Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution !
The videos are of Sir Ken Robinson´s famous 2006 and 2010 & 2013 talks to the prestigious TED Conference.
If you are not prepared to be wrong, you´ll never come up with anything original.
Let the “learnin” begin ! TED Conference. www.netkaup.is
The largest transaction ever completed in Bitcoin, the virtual currency that approximates cash on the internet, was for $1 millionworth of computer hardware. That’s impressive for a currency that’s only been around since 2009, but Jack Sommer hopes to top it — by a lot. The casino owner-turned-developer is selling his 25,000-square foot Las Vegas mansion for $7.85 million, and he’s willing to accept the whole sumin Bitcoin.
“It’s very volatile, and of course… there is a lot of speculation,” Sommer says, referring to the wild price swings that have made some traders rich. “But there seems to be a growing amount of trade and commerce involving Bitcoin as well. So it gives me the confidence that we can accept it as a viable currency.”
Two of Sommers’ seven children have been investing in Bitcoin since around 2010, the very early days of the experimental currency. They convinced their father that the fundamentals were sound even though the currency jumped from around $20 in early 2013 to more than $1,000 by the end of the year. “My kids started picking them up at $5 and then they went to over $1,000 and they were making all this money,” Sommer’s wife Laura says. “What makes gold valuable? What makes a diamond valuable? What makes anything valuable? It’s what people want.”
“WHAT MAKES ANYTHING VALUABLE? IT’S WHAT PEOPLE WANT.”
Bitcoin is not backed by any nation; its exact origins are unknown. Some governments have passively sanctioned it, others have stayed silent, and China hasbanned its use. Bitcoin is also far from mature. It’s designed to have a total supply of 21 million bitcoins, but only about half of those have entered circulation so far.
There is also the matter of the transaction itself. The Bitcoin protocol is designed so that anyone can transfer any number of bitcoins to another person directly, without any third parties or fees — it’d be like handing over a suitcase with $7.85 million in cash. That won’t fly with a large real estate transaction — taxes and brokers’ fees must be paid in dollars and there is normally a 30-day escrow period, an eternity in the volatile Bitcoin market.
In order to accommodate the oddball currency, Sommer expects he would write a contract denominated in US dollars with reference to the equivalent amount in Bitcoin as well as a minimum and maximum range in order to hedge against wild price changes. Other than that, it wouldn’t be much different than accepting euro or yen for the house.
THE GESTURE IS A BIT OF A STUNT
The gesture is a bit of a marketing stunt — since advertising the Bitcoin angle, the Sommers have been swamped with interest from media and, to a lesser degree, potential buyers. They have had some Bitcoiners “sniffing around,” including one who was interested in paying in a mix of currencies, which the Sommers are perfectly happy with. “It could be a blend,” Jack says. “Part cash, part bit. Why not?”
Sommer is bullish on Bitcoin, but he’s also cautious. “I intend to eliminate the risks to the greatest extent possible,” he says. Keeping that much money in Bitcoin would be too risky because of the chance of government interference or a market crash, so Sommer plans to convert the majority of the sum into dollars and keep perhaps $100,000 or more in Bitcoin for speculative purposes.
“It’s actually good that not that many people know about it, because that means there are many more people who are going to know about it,” Sommer says. “I think that it is graduating to become a trend. And hopefully it will sustain itself — at least until we sell the house.”
The Gap between the very richest and the rest of us is getting Bigger WHY ?
A surprise viral hit: Income inequality, the movie.
Time 6.24 min
by Krissy Clark
Marketplace for Friday, March 8, 2013
STORY
You may have seen this video recently, about wealth inequality.
It’s gone viral over the last week or so, which isn’t news in itself, of course. Stuff goes viral all the time. But usually it’s cute kids dressed as turtles, strange and hilarious music videos and music video spoofs.
But wealth inequality? Not the sexiest of subjects.
It’s not a flashy video. It is a little over six minutes long. It has moody music. It has a voiceover from a guy with a slight southern twang. It has lots of charts showing how Americans think wealth is distributed, compared to how it actually is.
So why does this video suddenly have more than 3 million (hits) views ? Marsh 8 2013. Today January 9 2014 this video Income inequality, the movie. has had 13.908.449 views
I decided to work backwards and follow the viral chain. I first saw the video thanks to my boyfriend, who’d seen it through a post his friend, Brent, put on his Facebook page. I called up Brent, and he told me he found the video on Facebook too, and has no idea who made it. His best guess was “some guy in his bedroom who said, ‘You know, people need to know about this. I’m just going to make a little animation here.’”
Brent’s theory is basically right. Someone by the name of “politizane” posted the video back in November on YouTube. A reporter from the magazine Mother Jones tracked politizane down a few days ago. He said he wanted to stay anonymous, but described himself as a freelance designer, “from a red state,” who’d been struck by a wealth inequality study he’d read about, conducted by two professors.
Duke Marketing professor Dan Ariely happens to be one of those professors. “I think what made it big,” Ariely says of the video, “was that one of the actors from Star Trek put it on his Facebook.”
That actor, George Takei, who played Sulu on “Star Trek,” told me he posted the video right after the sequester kicked into gear, because he’d been thinking a lot about how the across the board budget cuts might affect an already shrinking middle class.
“I thought that video captured it so visually, so powerfully,” Takei told me. Takei happens to have 3.6 million followers on Facebook, meaning he’s a sort of “super connector” who all by himself can help a video go viral. But it turns out that Takei also found the video through Facebook, in a post that a friend linked to from mashable.com.
Websites like Mashable and Upworthy, which also posted the video in the last few days, make a lot of money embedding videos they think will go viral, says Maksim Tsvetovat, a professor of computer science who researches social networks at George Mason University. These sites will either sell ads next to them, or sell data on who clicked on what posts. “That data itself is priceless,” explains Tsvestovat. “Marketers will pay a lot to know what are people’s interests, how information spreads on a specific topic, and how fast.”
To those who see irony in a video about wealth inequality generating serious revenue for private businesses, Tsvetovat points out “it’s in the nature of capitalism to exploit anything that looks like an opportunity.” Even when that opportunity is a viral video highlighting the impact of unfettered capitalism.
Why do people long for eternal life when they don’t even know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon ?
Good thinking :
Vision Statements for this Site:
· A minds journey begins with a single Why? –Confucius
· Humour is also a way of saying something serious. –T.S. Eliot
· An unanswered question is better than an unquestioned answer.
· You are encouraged to use your imagination creatively and to …THINK!
Bobby Fischer
Chess Player
Robert James “Bobby” Fischer was an American chess grandmaster and the eleventh World Chess Champion. He is considered by many to be the greatest chess player who ever lived. Wikipedia
…If your time to you is worth savin’ Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’
Audio slideshow: Bob Dylan at 70
He’s a prolific singer-songwriter, poet and painter – and one of the figureheads for the generation who fought for civil rights and social change in 1960s USA.
Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait was so derided upon its initial release that Rolling Stone critic Greil Marcus opened his review with a simple question: “What is this shit?” Now, 43 years later, Rolling Stone is revisiting the time period aroundSelf Portait — and some of Dylan’s most misunderstood music ever — with a cover story by Mikal Gilmore probing why Dylan burned down his career at the peak of his fame to save himself.
With the help of Dylan’s new box set Another Self Portrait — which presents raw, unvarnished tapes from the Self Portrait sessions — Gilmore traces Dylan’s creative journey from his motorcycle accident in 1966 through his return to the pop charts in 1973 with “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.”
Focusing on the largely untold story of Self Portrait‘s creation, the cover story features new interviews with Dylan collaborators Al Kooper, David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, David Bromberg and Happy Traum. “I thought it was strange, strange, strange,” says Kooper of Self Portrait, which consists mainly of cover songs. “Why is the Shakespeare of songwriting doing other people’s songs? And why is he doing all these old folk songs? What’s going on?”
Look for the issue on stands and in the iTunes App Store this Friday, August 30th.
Samsung accidentally reveals new mini version of Galaxy S4 handset on its OWN website
The firm made the gaffe on its own website – showing the unannounced handset as an option in an online app store.
The handset is expected to be announced in July, and have a 4.3inch screen to counter claims the Galaxy S4, which has a five inch screen, is too big.
Leaked image spotted ahead of expected summer release
Expected to have a 4.3inch screen and 8MP camera, and go on sale in July
The Galaxy S4 mini was leaked on Samsung’s own website – and spotted by Israeli site tgspot
This image claims to show the Galaxy S4 mini (right) next to the full size S4, showing the smaller screen size of 4.3 inches on the mini compared to 5inches on the full sized handset
However, the firm has since removed the listing, and refused to comment on it.
Earlier this month anonymous Weibo user ‘PunkPanda,’ who has leaked photos of unreleased devices in the past, posted pictures of what is claimed to be Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S4 mini.
The pictures show a handset with a 4.3inch screen next to a full-size Galaxy S4.
It is believed Samsung has developed the handset after claims the ‘full size’ S4, with a 5inch screen, was too large.
The firm has previously created mini versions of its handsets.
It comes after Samsung came under fire after it Galaxy S4 buyers are getting much less storage than they pay for because the device is sold full of ‘bloatware’.
Another leaked shot of the Galaxy S4 mini, which according to Samsung’s own website, will be available in two versions
Bloatware includes apps and files that are added to handsets by the manufacturers and networks before they are sold to customers.
The S4, which costs around £550 SIM-free, is advertised as having 16GB of internal storage, yet because or these preinstalled apps, operating system files and network features, this is almost halved to 8.8GB.
A tale of two smartphones
SAMSUNG GALAXY S4
Height: 136.6 mm (5.38 inches)
Width: 69 mm (2.72 inches)
Depth: 7.9 mm (0.31 inches)
Weight: 130 grams (4.59 ounces)
Touchscreen: 5in
Pixel density: 441 per inch
Display: 1920-by-1080 pixels
Network speeds: 3G and 4G LTE Lite
Camera: 13 megapixel in back-facing camera, 2 megapixel in front-facing
Voice recognition: Can translate nine languages and utilizes voice-activated tools that can dictate, reply, forward or save text messages
Built-in apps: Video chat; internet browser; Gmail; Google Talk, Google Play Store; infrared LED; Google Maps; YouTube
Processor: 1.9GHz quad-core processor or 1.6GHz octa-core processor
Internal memory: 16GB; 32GB; or 64GB
Other memory: Data stored in Samsung’s HomeSync – a household cloud service
Battery: 2,600 mAh
Operating system: Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean
APPLE IPHONE 5
Height: 123.8 mm (4.87 inches)
Width: 58.6 mm (2.31 inches)
Depth: 7.6 mm (0.3 inches)
Weight: 112 grams (3.95 ounces)
Touchscreen: 4in
Pixel density: 326 per inch
Display: 1136×640 pixels
Network speeds: 3G and mobile 4G
Camera: 8 megapixel in back-facing camera 1.2 in front-facing
Voice recognition: Siri upgraded to allow spoken recommendations for films or restaurants. Possible to update Facebook status by voice command
Built-in apps: FaceTime; video editing; Safari internet browser; email; Apple maps; no YouTube as standard
Processor: A6 chip said to be twice as quick as A5.
Internal memory: 16GB; 32GB; or 64GB
Other memory: Purchases stored in Apple’s iCloud servers
Battery: 1,400 mAh
Operating system: Apple iOS 6
Smart: The screen reacts to movement, and a video will automatically pause if you’re not looking at the phone
Samsung’s new Galaxy S 4 phone is due to launch globally at the end of April.
Samsung finally pulled the curtains back on the Galaxy S 4, its next flagship Android smartphone, at an event in New York today.
In addition to bumping up the size of the screen from 4.8 inches to 5 inches, the guts of the device also received a significant boost — putting it ahead of the major competition in many technical aspects.
Granted, we haven’t seen the Apple‘s AAPL +0.96% next iPhone model for 2013, but for the time being the specifications of the Galaxy S 4 are a significant upgrade.
In addition, the device also sports some new software features not seen in the competition, like the ability to interact with the phone using eye movement and hand gestures without touching it.
The Galaxy S 4 will be available late April on most major U.S. carriers, and will run the most recent version of Google‘s GOOG -0.46% Android operating system, called Jelly Bean.
In the meantime, here are how the specs compare with its predecessor and the iPhone 5:
Carriers
Like the iPhone 5, the Galaxy S 4 will be sold at the major U.S. carriers, as well as at U.S. Cellular and Cricket.
Screen resolution
Galaxy S 4: 1920 x 1080 pixels
iPhone 5: 1136 x 640 pixels
Galaxy S III: 1280 x 720 pixels
Pixels Per Inch
Galaxy S 4: 441 ppi
iPhone 5: 326 ppi
Galaxy S III: 306 ppi
Processor
Galaxy S 4: Qualcomm Snap QCOM -0.28%dragon Fusion Pro, 1.9 GHz quad-core processor; or Samsung Exynos 5 Octa, 1.6 GHz quad-core + 1.2 GHz quad-core processor (chip depends on market)
iPhone 5: Apple A6, 1.3 GHz dual-core processor
Galaxy S III: Qualcomm S4, 1.5 GHz dual-core processor
Display size
Galaxy S 4: 5 inches
iPhone 5: 4 inches
Galaxy S III: 4.8′ inches
Weight
Galaxy S 4: 4.59 oz
iPhone 5: 3.95 oz
Galaxy S 3: 4.69 oz
Memory
Galaxy S 4: up to 64 GB. 2GB RAM
iPhone 5: up to 64 GB. 1GB RAM
Galaxy S III: up to 64 GB. 2GB RAM
Camera
Galaxy S 4: 13 megapixel rear, 2 megapixel front
iPhone 5: 8 megapixel rear, 1.2 megapixel front
Galaxy S III: 8 megapixel rear, 1.9 megapixel front
Video Capture
Galaxy S 4: 1080p
iPhone 5: 1080p
Galaxy S III: 1080p
Battery
Galaxy S 4: 2,600 mAh
iPhone 5: 1,440 mAh
Galaxy S III: 2,100 mAh
Price
The iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III start at $199 on contract. The Galaxy S 4 has not been priced yet.
A surprise viral hit: Income inequality, the movie. Time 6.24 min
by Krissy Clark
Marketplace for Friday, March 8, 2013
STORY
You may have seen this video recently, about wealth inequality.
It’s gone viral over the last week or so, which isn’t news in itself, of course. Stuff goes viral all the time. But usually it’s cute kids dressed as turtles, strange and hilarious music videos and music video spoofs.
But wealth inequality? Not the sexiest of subjects.
It’s not a flashy video. It is a little over six minutes long. It has moody music. It has a voiceover from a guy with a slight southern twang. It has lots of charts showing how Americans think wealth is distributed, compared to how it actually is.
So why does this video suddenly have more than 3 million hits?
I decided to work backwards and follow the viral chain. I first saw the video thanks to my boyfriend, who’d seen it through a post his friend, Brent, put on his Facebook page. I called up Brent, and he told me he found the video on Facebook too, and has no idea who made it. His best guess was “some guy in his bedroom who said, ‘You know, people need to know about this. I’m just going to make a little animation here.’”
Brent’s theory is basically right. Someone by the name of “politizane” posted the video back in November on YouTube. A reporter from the magazine Mother Jones tracked politizane down a few days ago. He said he wanted to stay anonymous, but described himself as a freelance designer, “from a red state,” who’d been struck by a wealth inequality study he’d read about, conducted by two professors.
Duke Marketing professor Dan Ariely happens to be one of those professors. “I think what made it big,” Ariely says of the video, “was that one of the actors from Star Trek put it on his Facebook.”
That actor, George Takei, who played Sulu on “Star Trek,” told me he posted the video right after the sequester kicked into gear, because he’d been thinking a lot about how the across the board budget cuts might affect an already shrinking middle class.
“I thought that video captured it so visually, so powerfully,” Takei told me. Takei happens to have 3.6 million followers on Facebook, meaning he’s a sort of “super connector” who all by himself can help a video go viral. But it turns out that Takei also found the video through Facebook, in a post that a friend linked to from mashable.com.
Websites like Mashable and Upworthy, which also posted the video in the last few days, make a lot of money embedding videos they think will go viral, says Maksim Tsvetovat, a professor of computer science who researches social networks at George Mason University. These sites will either sell ads next to them, or sell data on who clicked on what posts. “That data itself is priceless,” explains Tsvestovat. “Marketers will pay a lot to know what are people’s interests, how information spreads on a specific topic, and how fast.”
To those who see irony in a video about wealth inequality generating serious revenue for private businesses, Tsvetovat points out “it’s in the nature of capitalism to exploit anything that looks like an opportunity.” Even when that opportunity is a viral video highlighting the impact of unfettered capitalism.
It all started with Georg Lucas; he had a problem …he being the genius that he was……I bought into that dream both sort of spiritually and financially and together we started Pixar in 1986
My model of business is The Beatles. You know they were 4 very talented guys who balanced each other… And the song was greater.. The total was greater than the sum of parts. I see business that way too. It’s really always a team…with the Beatles when they were together they did truly brilliant innovative work…And when they split up they did good work, but it was never the same ; and I see business that way too, it’s really always a team.
Q. to Steve: As a person what´s your biggest strength ? Steve: I have been very lucky in meeting incredibly talented people and uh…and and hanging out with them and so that’s been my greatest strength. Q. to Steve: And what is your biggest weakness ? Steve: You know I think all of us need to be on guard against arrogance which uh… which knocks at the door whenever you’re successful.
Have you lived through that ? Steve:
Oh Sure ! As you may know I was basically fired from Apple when I was thirty and uh…and was invited to come back twelve years later so… that was “the difficult” when it happened but maybe the best thing that ever happened to me?!
There would´nt have been a Pixar if that hadn’t happened and uh... so you move on. Life goes on and you learn from it. I like working with people. Where you have a chance to uh… in a very small way… influence how things go. Influence the way people look at you. I still believe that the computer business is in it´s infancy… that there’s a tremendous amount of innovation.. it´s gonna be coming out. I’m optimistic; as to The Future Computer Business.
Pixar Animation Studios, or simply Pixar (/ˈpɪksɑr/, stylized PIXAR), is an American computer animationfilm studio based in Emeryville, California. Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the computer division of Lucasfilm before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986 with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became its majority shareholder
Visa and Samsung today announced an alliance aimed at accelerating global mobile payments.
The deal, which combines Visa’s payment expertise and Samsung’s mobile technology, will allow financial institutions to use the Visa Mobile Provisioning Service to securely download payment account information to NFC-enabled Samsung devices.
Additionally, the Visa payWave applet will be loaded onto Samsung devices featuring Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, turning the smartphones into contactless payment options.
“Samsung devices enabled with Visa payment functionality will no doubt be a powerful product offering — especially in markets where paying with a mobile device is becoming commonplace,” Jim McCarthy, Visa’s global head of product, said in a statement. “However, the key to making mobile payments broadly available all over the world is to offer financial institutions a secure way to provision millions of smartphones with payment account information … and that is exactly what Visa and Samsung are ready to deliver.”
The two companies have worked on mobile payments before. They partneredin May 2012for a limited-edition Galaxy S III smartphone for athletes and trialists competing in the summer’s Olympic games. The specialized phones came with Visa’s payWave technology for users to wave their device at the register to check out at participating London retailers.
According to TechCrunch, the Galaxy S IV will be the first phone to include the Visa technology. Samsung plans to unveil the device at a New York City press event on March 14.
Dr. Wom-Pyo Hong, president of Media Solution Center at Samsung, called Visa a pioneer in NFC devices, adding that the phone maker is again leading the way for NFC-based mobile payments.
“The partnership with Visa represents a step towards a global mobile payment platform,” Hong said in a statement. “We believe that we have a strong value proposition for financial institutions that will ultimately allow consumer choice in NFC payments.”
NFC has yet to really pick up steam in the U.S., though ABI Research expects 1.95 billion NFC-enabled devices to ship in 2017.
Visa is demonstrating its payWave feature and Mobile Provisioning Service during this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
It’s a move dusted with mad genius: Why not release a phone so gigantic that many people can’t even hold it up to their ear without using two hands? That’s Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8, which was just unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The Note 8 is either the world’s largest phablet or an 8-inch tablet that just happens to be able to make calls.
Samsung seems to recognize that the logic of this device might not compute in the US, where the Note 8 will be released in a WiFi-only version that can’t be used as a phone. Stateside, this version is aimed directly at Apple’s 7.9″ iPad Mini, which has been a breakout hit for Apple.
But in the rest of the world, Samsung’s comically huge phone makes sense. As I’veoutlined before, for consumers in emerging markets with limited budgets, it doesn’t make sense to spend money upgrading two separate devices—a phone and a tablet—when a phablet is a good-enough solution to both needs.
What’s more, as improbable as it might sound given how absurd people will lookwhile making calls on the Note 8, giant screens have become status objects unto themselves. One recent survey by T-Mobile indicated that 77% of consumers would prefer smartphones with screens larger than the one found on the iPhone 5. In a world in which staring at our phones has become a global pastime, some consumers like having the biggest, flashiest “phone” in the room.
Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is yet again worried about Apple’s future.
In an interview with Bloomberg News, Wozniak expressed concern that Apple might not be considered the “cool” computing system for too much longer. “We used to have these ads, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC, and the Mac was always the cool guy. And ouch, it’s painful, because we kind of are losing that,” he said.
But Wozniak, who no longer works for Apple, has often vocal about his opinions regarding the company’s direction. In 2012, Wozniak said that he was worried about Apple’s cloud storage ventures. “I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.” Wozniak also told TechCrunch last year that he was worried that Microsoft might be innovating inmore interesting ways than Apple.
Hope is not completely lost, since Wozniak believes that “Apple is really good at setting a standard with a new device,” and the company “still has its halo in that regard.” Read the entire Bloomberg News report to get all the details — or crawl down the rabbit hole with this YouTube compilation of “Mac vs. PC” ads:
Steve Wozniak: The Evolution of Computer Technology 4 : 40 min.
Published on Jan 7, 2013
Steve Wozniak, or Woz as he is known, was a co-founder of Apple along with the late Steve Jobs. He contemplates future technological breakthroughs that can help solve some of the world’s problems from personalized medicine to the production of energy.
Is Blogging good for your health? By Richard Branson – Feb 18, 2013
Over the past few years blogging has become one of the most enjoyable and frequent activities in my life. It is a fantastic way of sharing news, opinions and having fun with people all over the globe. Bloggers are becoming increasingly influential, and can use their presence to positively impact issues they care about. They are able to share not just their own views, but reflect the sentiments of wider communities and make a real difference to the world.
Blogging every day is a good way to keep engaged with the latest trends, one of which is the growing area of health and wellness. Personally, I think blogging is good for your health too. It keeps the mind engaged and is an outlet for creativity, as well as encouraging communication. However, you can’t beat an active lifestyle for boosting productivity as well as fitness.
Throughout my life I have had a passion for health and wellness. Keeping in shape helps when you have a busy business schedule, and can also help stimulate an agile mind for decision making. Last year I climbed Mont Blanc with family and friends to launch Big Change Charitable Trust, and next month I will be taking part in the Argus, the largest individually timed cycling event in the world. Add to that regular swimming, tennis and kitesurfing sessions and my sporting activities keep me very busy indeed!
We put a big focus upon health in the Virgin Group, including sponsoring sporting events such like the London Marathon and London Triathlon, as well as with companies such as Virgin Active, Virgin Care and Virgin Health Bank. As a business area, health and wellness is proving resilient, and some fast-moving companies are finding success. Most importantly, the sector offers an opportunity to make a difference to people’s lives.
With all of that in mind, I am pleased to support Healthivate, a health activist blogger conference taking place in Sydney on March 2-3 2013. The themes include healthy eating, living, giving, movement and building. Health is a basic human right and spreading the message of healthy living is good for the planet and its people.
Head over to Healthivate to find out more, and get blogging too!
By Richard Branson. Founder of Virgin Group
Árni Rafnsson Founder/CEO Netkaup.is
Business Administration
Marketing and Advertising
arnira@nco.is
Samsung Mobile USA – SAFE and the Unicorn Apocalypse
Published on Jan 20, 2013
The Company gets a little help from the Galaxy Note II with SAFE technology in making Unicorn Apocalypse come to life. Play Hard. Work Safe. The Next Big Thing for Business is Here. Learn more and join the conversation at :
Samsung has announced a fourth-quarter profit for 2012 double what it was the year before, capping a record year for the company. The Korean technology giant made 20 trillion won ($18.8 billion) in profits in 2012 and 8.8 trillion won ($8.3 billion) in the fourth quarter alone. Revenue was boosted in part by record sales for Samsung’s high-end smart phones. The company launched 37 models in 2012, and its flagship, the Galaxy S III, sold 30 million units.
Samsung’s move into mobile devices seems especially savvy given stagnating sales of other consumer-electronics goods, such as televisions, where it faces stiff competition from cheaper Chinese rivals. Giants in mainland China like Huawei and Hisense, which made its stateside debut at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, are eager to take market share from Samsung, moving up from contract manufacturing to high-end branded products—which is exactly how Samsung became so successful.
However, it’s not all about mobile. Samsung is also projecting that it will becomethe biggest supplier of home appliances (like refrigerators and washing machines) by 2015.
Despite all this, Samsung is still not the most profitable technology company on Earth. Apple will retain that title through 2013, out-earning Samsung despite selling fewer phones and making none of the other products in which Samsung dominates, like chips and displays.
That difference in profitability reflects, in part, that fact that Samsung started out making parts and got into branded goods only later. The company’s diverse portfolio buffers it against the success or failure of any one product, but it also means that Samsung competes in increasingly commoditized products with manufacturers throughout mainland China and Taiwan.
They might out-compete it eventually. But for now Samsung can boast of being the largest vertically integrated technology company on the planet. It enjoys both healthy margins for its high-end products and huge volumes for its basic goods. Success across this spectrum should bolster the company’s fortunes through 2013, at least.
The retail giant Wal-Mart announced plans Friday ( Des. 14th ) to offer the 16 GB iPhone 5 for $127 (normally 189.97)
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
If you’re looking for the cheapest iPhone or iPad that isn’t used, Wal-Mart is the first place you should turn this holiday season.
The retail giant announced plans Friday to offer the 16 GB iPhone 5 for $127 (normally $189.97) and the 16GB iPhone 4S for $47 (normally $87.97), along with a two-year contract. They’ll also sell the third-generation iPad for $399.
Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) discounts aren’t unheard of this time of year, but Wal-Mart’s (WMT,Fortune 500) will be tough to beat. Best Buy (BBY,Fortune 500) and Radio Shack (RSH) both have discounts on the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S, offering as much as $50 off advertised prices, along with gift certificates to sweeten the deal. Apple’s own Black Friday sale offered up iPods and previous-geneneration iPads for $30-$40 off the regular price.
As for the iPad discount, Wal-Mart appears to be following in the footsteps of past sales. In July, Fry’s knocked $100 off the iPad 2. But by then, the iPad 3 had already been available for almost six months.
While the iPad sales just seem like an offloading of stale products, Wal-Mart’s motivations for discounting the iPhone aren’t exactly clear. Some, such as the LA Times, speculate thatdragging sales are to blame. Whatever the case, it’s best not to sleep on this deal if you’re in the market for one of these devices. Wal-Mart told MacRumors thatthe sale is first come, first servedepending on inventory, and rain checks will not be issued.
Wal-Mart was looking ahead as it turned 50 this year, focusing on mobile, social and e-commerce initiatives aimed at positioning the retailer to serve a fast-changing customer base. “We’ve hired hundreds of incredibly talented people, in Silicon Valley and around the world. We are playing to win,” says CEO Mike Duke. Fast Company magazine
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, embraces social, mobile, and the startup spirit to compete against Amazon. Will it be enough?
Illustration by Owen Gildersleeve
Jeremy King was ignoring the largest retailer in the world. For a month, he’d been getting calls from a Walmart recruiter. King was used to being wooed, since he was well known in Silicon Valley as an engineer who built key parts of eBay’s infrastructure. The calls kept coming. Finally, he picked up the phone and let Walmart know exactly what it would take to get him to interview. “I was like, ‘Why don’t you get the CEO on the phone–let him talk to me and then maybe I’ll come in?'” recalls King, who didn’t even know who the CEO of Walmart was. “I was being cocky. The CEO of the world’s largest retailer wasn’t going to meet with me just so I’d do an interview.”
The next thing King knew, Walmart arranged for him to join a videoconference with CEO Mike Duke. “It was the strangest thing,” King says. “Mike’s office in Bentonville is the original one that Sam Walton had, complete with 1970s wood paneling. I was looking at this video, thinking, Where is this place?”
Over the next 45 minutes, though, Duke made what King calls an irresistible pitch. After years of seeing his company lag online, Duke swore that digital was now a priority for Walmart. Duke had restructured the company, placing e-commerce on equal footing with Walmart’s other, much larger divisions. He had made serious investments in high-tech talent, acquiring several startups. One, a 65-person social media firm called Kosmix with expertise in search and analytics, was the impetus for Walmart rechristening its Valley operations “@WalmartLabs.” Duke was looking for people who would revive the company’s sites and services, and energize its entire culture. He hoped to turn a company famous for rigid, coldly effective business processes into one that’s flexible, experimental, and entrepreneurial. In other words, Duke wanted to inject a bit of Silicon Valley into Bentonville, Arkansas. In the summer of 2011, King signed up as CTO of Walmart.com. “We’ve hired hundreds of incredibly talented people, in Silicon Valley and around the world,” says Duke of his aggressive moves. “We are playing to win.”
WalmartLabs is now housed in a boxy office tower in San Bruno, California, a few miles south of San Francisco. In just over a year, it has helped Walmart.com revamp its search engine; presciently identified the potential of the now red-hot “social gifting” market, where companies use social media cues to suggest presents; and this fall launched a test that offers same-day shipping to customers.
This last move is a clear signal of Walmart’s serious intent to compete in digital e-commerce–and blunt the looming threat of Amazon, which has its own same-day shipping experiments. Having marginalized Barnes & Noble and Best Buy, Jeff Bezos has his eyes on a bigger target. Amazon has been moving aggressively to sell Walmart staples such as diapers, soap, pet food, and cereal, even letting customers subscribe for items they want to receive regularly. Walmart is the world’s biggest grocer, and a central part of its strategy is that the millions of folks who visit its stores weekly to buy food will purchase a lot of other stuff. That’s a key reason Walmart’s 2011 revenue of $419 billion dwarfed Amazon’s 2011 sales of $48 billion.
In e-commerce, however, Walmart is a distant challenger. The company has never broken out its Internet revenue, though in 2011, the analyst Internet Retailer estimated it to be $4.9 billion. In October, Walmart projected that global e-commerce would be $9 billion in the year ahead. Meanwhile, Amazon has been on a tear, with sales rocketing toward $100 billion annually in 2015. Analysts I spoke to believe Amazon has eaten into Walmart’s sales of books, music, DVDs, electronics, and even toys. “When people started to say that Amazon was going to be the Walmart of e-commerce,” notes Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce technology and consulting firm, “that’s when we started to see more signs of life from Walmart.”
It would be a radical oversimplification to chalk up Walmart’s digital revival solely to a hungry competitor (and Walmart execs often insist, perhaps a bit too strenuously, that they are not fixated on Amazon). No, Walmart needs to get digital because that’s where its customers are headed. Soon everyone’s phone will be smart enough for easy shopping. With Internet-enabled tablets selling for well under $200, lower-income families are already turning into online customers. “The way our customers shop in an increasingly interconnected world is changing,” Duke says.
“I’m not going to be Chicken Little and tell you the company is going to go away if we don’t get the Internet and mobile right,” adds Neil Ashe, the company’s top-ranking e-commerce executive. “We have an obligation to the mission to get this thing right because the customer expects it of us.” Like the best Internet companies, Walmart obsesses about its customers more than its competition.
In 2012, Walmart celebrated its 50th birthday. In its first 25 years, Walmart became the world’s biggest general merchandise retailer. But Sam Walton wanted to be a grocer as well. “A lot of people said that was crazy,” says Joel Anderson, the CEO of Walmart.com U.S. who joined the company in 2007. “Twenty-five years ago, we couldn’t even spell grocery. People thought we’d never figure it out.”
Anderson says the next 25 years are about becoming a digital company. “In the first few years, were we tinkering and experimenting and not moving? There’s some truth to that. But look at our history. When Walmart leans into something, it’s like a tidal wave.”
In April 2011, Walmart bought Kosmix for a reported $300 million. Kosmix’s expertise lay in simplifying the sprawl of the web for users; its algorithms were novel because they tried to understand what a user wanted rather than just match her query text. For example, if a user searched for “presidential election,” Google would return pages that contain variations on that term. Kosmix could find pages that were part of that topic even if the pages didn’t contain the specific phrase. It then sorted them into categories such as candidate biographies, news stories, and polling data. Only in the past year have Google and Microsoft’s Bing added Kosmix-like topic pages to their search results, but Kosmix’s founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, hit upon the idea way back in 2004.
Walmart wanted to apply Kosmix’s artificial intelligence to commerce, but it also wanted the real brains behind the tech. Harinarayan, 45, and Rajaraman, 40, both born and raised in India and graduates of the prestigious IIT Madras university, have been inseparable friends since they met as PhD students at Stanford in the 1990s. Both skinny and short, they have more than a passing physical resemblance, and they operate as a united pair. In the Valley, which loves its duos (such as Bill and Dave, Jobs and Woz, Ev and Biz), they’re known as Venky and Anand.
The pair first tackled the problem of organizing the web in 1996, when they founded Junglee.com. In 1998, Jeff Bezos acquired the company for $250 million in stock. He realized that Junglee’s technology would help its customers compare prices with other online stores, a bold move toward transparency that turned out to further solidify the company’s hold on those customers. Rajaraman became Amazon’s director of technology, while Harinarayan was charged with creating Amazon’s Marketplace, where any merchant could sell its wares on Amazon’s site. “I’d meet with Jeff for a couple hours every week,” says Harinarayan. “What we came up with in 2000 was pretty much what Amazon has executed on since then.” Analysts estimate 40% of the goods sold on Amazon are via Marketplace.
The duo left Amazon in 2000, and after a four-year stint as venture capitalists, founded Kosmix. The company had a unique ability to find meaningful information in the cacophony of the web. An application it built, called Tweetbeat, became one of the hottest ways to explore Twitter during the 2010 soccer World Cup, because it made it easy to discover who was talking about your favorite team or even individual players. That’s part of what lured Walmart execs–they salivated at the idea of bringing this kind of intelligence to shopping. People are always offering clues about products on social media–writing reviews, liking brands, checking into stores, announcing the products they want to buy.
And what lured Harinarayan and Rajaraman, besides the money? They saw an opportunity to do something more interesting than merely replicate their work at Amazon for its rival. (In a delicious irony, Bezos profited from the Walmart deal–he was an early investor in Kosmix.) “What has changed since Amazon became big?” Rajaraman asks rhetorically. “You can connect the social experience, the in-store experience, and the online experience. Nobody could do that.”
When the Kosmix team landed at Walmart in the summer of 2011, they found a mess. “The only thing Silicon Valley about Walmart was that we had an office in Silicon Valley,” says Gibu Thomas, the senior VP who heads up Walmart’s mobile tech team and was one of the first executives to approach Kosmix about a deal. “It was run like a traditional IT organization,” he says, explaining that Walmart used outsourced, off-the-shelf systems to power key parts of its site. Worse, Walmart’s 27 worldwide subsidiaries used incompatible technologies; the sites did not connect seamlessly with the stores or with Walmart’s legendary supply chain.
Walmart.com’s search engine epitomized its failure. “Executives at Walmart–at the board level–were running searches and saying, ‘This is embarrassing,'” says Sri Subramaniam, the WalmartLabs exec who ran the rebuilding effort. If you used Walmart.com’s old search engine to check out “smartphones,” you’d get links to a couple of cell-phone chargers, not the iPhone. A “cotton socks” query returned results for cotton candy and balls of yarn.
The Kosmix team, so deeply ensconced in the ways of Silicon Valley, worried that cultural differences would hamper their efforts to turn the site around. “My first reaction was, Wow, this is going to be interesting,” says Chris Bolte, who works on Walmart’s search marketing systems. But those fears proved unfounded. More than a half-dozen people on both sides of the acquisition say that Kosmix’s integration into Walmart was amazingly smooth. “I think part of it was that Walmart knew that they needed us, that this was a turnaround situation,” Subramaniam says.
Their first job was to create a new search engine. It took just 10 months, with just a dozen or so engineers. Walmart will not discuss specific sales figures, but execs report that the improved search tools have increased the number of people who are converted from visitors to buyers on Walmart.com by as much as 15%. If you search for cotton socks now, you’ll actually find them.
When Harinarayan and Rajaraman transformed Kosmix into WalmartLabs, they put roughly half the staff on such boring but crucial tasks. They deployed the rest as true lab workers, with the freedom to experiment in small teams on far-flung new ideas. “We organize these teams as mini startups with six to eight people,” says Harinarayan, who learned from Bezos’s organizational innovation of so-called two-pizza teams. “One person acts as CEO, and they have a clear business goal. We step out of the way and let these guys run it.”
One of the first projects born from this approach was Shopycat, a gift-recommendation app that Walmart.com launched on Facebook before the 2011 holidays. Shopycat scans your friends’ profiles to identify interesting gift ideas from their stream of likes, comments, and status updates, discerning if the “Ted” your pal is raving about is the geeky ideas festival or the Seth MacFarlane stoner comedy. Shopycat then seeks out an appropriate gift for such a stoner/thinker from Walmart’s product database. Walmart says Shopycat led to an increase in purchases on the site, though it won’t say by how much. For the 2012 holidays, the team built Shopycat into a section of Walmart.com called Walmart Gifts; customers will log in with their Facebook or Twitter account to get personalized recommendations.
Another clever retail application of WalmartLabs’s core technology has been to use spikes in social network chatter to predict demand for out-of-the-ordinary products. Last year, the team correctly anticipated heightened customer interest in cake-pop makers based on social media conversations on Facebook and Twitter. A few months later, it noticed growing interest in electric juicers, tied in part to the popularity of the juice-crazy documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. The team sends the data to Walmart’s buyers, who right now are only using it to confirm its other research. But as these signals become stronger, execs say it will play a larger role in purchasing decisions.
WalmartLabs has also created projects that just get customers to think differently about Walmart and e-commerce, including Get on the Shelf, an online contest for people to submit their own inventions to go on sale at Walmart. Get on the Shelf was a social marketing blockbuster, garnering more than 4,000 submissions, over 1 million votes, and news hits in small towns across America. Then there’s Goodies, a subscription service in which Walmart customers pay seven dollars a month for home delivery of a gourmet food box–creating a discerning test market for the grocer in the process.
By themselves, none of these projects will single-handedly boost Walmart’s e-commerce business. Taken together, though, they showcase a new dynamism at the retailing giant. “We’re going to find ways to live at the edge,” says Walmart e-commerce exec Ashe. “Every three or six months, you’ll see something come out from us that will make you say ‘Wow.’ ”
The next step, says Harinarayan, is about “scaling up Labs.” But he and Rajaraman won’t be part of it: In June, Harinarayan and Rajaraman announced that they were leaving WalmartLabs. To many outsiders, the abruptness of the founders’ departure seemed troubling. It had been only a year since the acquisition, and they hadn’t completed the “earn-out” phase, meaning they wouldn’t receive their full share from the sale. Was their departure a sign that dynamic tech entrepreneurs felt smothered by Walmart’s corporate culture? Or was it that Walmart could no longer tolerate leaving these hands-off leaders in charge?
Harinarayan and Rajaraman dismiss the speculation. They say they had spent eight years on the startup, and they were simply ready for time off. One Friday not long after the announcement, I meet Harinarayan at a coffee shop across the street from Kosmix’s first office in downtown Mountain View. He’s the picture of a relaxed man. After chatting about Walmart and Amazon for an hour, he told me he was free to keep talking, as he didn’t have anything else to do that day. And he is quite sanguine about walking away from the money. “Given the fortune that Anand and I have had in our careers, if you’re doing anything just for money, at this point it’s going to be the wrong thing to do.”
Jeremy King took over as the head of WalmartLabs, and to get a sense of where he will bring the skunk works, I visit the gleaming new Walmart store off the Almaden Expressway in San Jose where Jonathan Sherman, a WalmartLabs product manager, gives me a peek into the digital dimension being woven into this temple of American retail.
That future begins, like everything else, with a smartphone app. Walmart imagines that as you go through an average day, you’ll remember things you need–milk, bread, a new tennis racquet, a toy truck for your nephew’s birthday–and tell the voice-enabled Walmart app. The app will list each item’s location inside your local Walmart and include product info; eventually, it will also learn your preferences and offer recommendations. And once you’re actually in the store, you’ll be able to summon an associate to help you.
Walmart’s current iPhone app has only a few of these features: The voice-list system works very well, and, depending on which store you’re in and what you’re looking for, the app can sometimes locate your product.
At the moment, though, it won’t show you extensive product info for all items, and it won’t summon store help. The company has begun to test mobile checkout in select stores. As part of it, Walmart presents customers with a running tally of their total bill as they shop, the first explicit nod in my journey through WalmartLabs to the fact that millions of Walmart shoppers are on tight budgets.
This effort to reinvent the in-store shopping experience is an argument that Walmart’s physical stores are a great asset, not a liability. “We are uniquely positioned to give customers anytime, anywhere access to Walmart by combining the smartphone, online, and the physical stores,” Duke says. “Ultimately, that will give us an edge over any competitor.” When I ask Walmart executives about Amazon’s moves to offer more customers next-day and same-day shipping, many were amused. “It’s fun to see them trying to be us,” says Walmart.com CEO Anderson. “We have more than 4,000 forward-deployed fulfillment centers and we’re already doing shipments from some of them. Some people call them stores.”
“If you think about the last 20 years of retail, how people shop in a store has not changed,” Thomas says. “The question we’re asking is, how do you bring to a store the capabilities that have made e-commerce successful? With 200 million customers a week, if you can increase the average basket size by a dollar–that’s billions of dollars every year.” In fact, it’s more than $10 billion–more than its projected annual e-commerce revenue this year.
If Walmart fails in its digital transformation, it won’t be for lack of resources or possibilities. Ninety-six percent of Americans live within 20 miles of a Walmart. No one has as much money; no one has a better supply chain; no one has such a close connection with so many customers. Walmart execs know this. “We’ll spend more on capital expenditures this year than Amazon has spent in its entire history,” Ashe tells me (hyperbolically).
That size, however, is also Walmart’s greatest enemy. WalmartLabs’s two-pizza teams can come up with a thousand innovative ways to improve shopping, online and off, but none matter if the company’s execution is slow and bureaucratic. And the fact is that implementing these ideas will always be complex. Every change to how items are delivered, or how customers navigate stores, or how applications work with the company’s existing IT structure is a maneuver that requires the coordination of thousands of moving parts.
But Walmart can succeed online without becoming the Amazon of the web. The phrase I hear most often from Walmart people is that the only way the company will win online is “by being Walmart.” And they’re right. Walmart doesn’t need to be something radically different. The company that mastered IT in the service of unbeatable prices must now master web technology. It doesn’t need to chase Amazon so much as it needs to identify how a digital Walmart can be as much a part of its customers’ lives as the stores are today.
And it has to think long term. It may take a decade or more for Walmart to be a successful digital retailer. “Somebody at one of the board meetings asked me, ‘Neil, how long is this going to take, and how much is it going to cost?'” Ashe recalls. “And I said, ‘It’s going to take the rest of our careers, and it’s going to cost whatever it costs. Because this isn’t a project, this is the company.'”
Long Island’s first Microsoft store opened the 28th of Sept. at Walt Whitman mall
Thursday September 27, 2012 1:47 PM By Keiko Morris
Microsoft opened its first Long Island store on Friday 28th of Sept, continuing its push to connect with customers by providing a hands-on, face-to-face experience.
The store, at Walt Whitman mall in Huntington Station, takes its bow with a grand opening at 11 a.m., followed by celebrity performances by John Legend and Taio Cruz in the evening. Hall of fame running back Curtis Martin will be playing Kinect…
# About Connecting the Dots…Again, you cannot connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking back…
# About Love and Loss… You got to find what you love….
# About Death… Death is the destination we all share… Death is very likely the single best invention of life… Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition…
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged STANFORD graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks — including death itself — at the university’s 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005.
Tipster
BI
PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images
The Galaxy S4 mini was leaked on Samsung’s own website – and spotted by Israeli site tgspot
This image claims to show the Galaxy S4 mini (right) next to the full size S4, showing the smaller screen size of 4.3 inches on the mini compared to 5inches on the full sized handset
Another leaked shot of the Galaxy S4 mini, which according to Samsung’s own website, will be available in two versions
Smart: The screen reacts to movement, and a video will automatically pause if you’re not looking at the phone
