Amazon aims to compete with FedEx and UPS in the logistics and shipping industry. That’s what analysts told CNBC after Amazon Air recently expanded to 50 planes and announced it will open a $1.5 billion air hub in Northern Kentucky in 2021. Amazon is handling up to 26% of its own shipping, meaning FedEx, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service are losing a portion of Amazon’s business. FedEx says it’s not worried, but Morgan Stanley reports the major shippers have already lost 2% revenue to Amazon Air. (Published on Feb 16, 2019 )
Published on May 9, 2019 A business empire needs decisive leadership, but also a steady hand. For over 40 years, Charlie Munger has been the latter for Berkshire Hathaway. As Berkshire’s Vice Chairman, the 95-year-old Munger is Warren Buffett’s right-hand man. He’s also an investing legend in his own right. Munger ran a firm in the 1960s and ’70s that scored returns of over 24% per year. He’s here to talk about how to make investment decisions and life choices that help secure prosperity and longevity.
Charlie Munger Berkshire Hathaway. Published on May 9, 2019 Influencers with Andy Serwer
Tipping points we will reach by 2030. From driverless cars to robotic workers
Many emerging technologies that you hear about today will reach a tipping point by 2025, according to a recent report from The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Software & Society.
1 trillion sensors will be connected to the internet by 2022.
21 technology tipping points we will reach by 2030
1 90% of the population will have unlimited and free data storage by 2018.
2 The first robotic pharmacist will arrive in the US 2021.
3 1 trillion sensors will be connected to the internet by 2022.
4 10% of the world’s population will be wearing clothes connected to the internet by 2022.
5 The first 3D-printed car will be in production by 2022.
6 The first implantable mobile phone will become commercially available in 2025.
7 The first government to replace its census with big-data technologies by 2023.
8 10% of reading glasses will be connected to the internet by 2023.
9 80% of people on earth will have a digital presence online by 2023.
10 A government will collect taxes for the first time via blockchain 2023.
11 90% of the global population will have a supercomputer in their pocket by 2023.
12 Access to the Internet will become a basic right by 2024.
13 The first transplant of a 3D-printed liver will occur 2024.
14 More than 50% of Internet traffic to homes will be from appliances and device by 2024.
15 5% of consumer products will be 3D-printed.
16 30% of corporate audits will be performed by artificial intelligence 2025.
17 Globally, more trips will be made using car sharing programs than privately owned cars by 2025.
18 Driverless cars will account for 10% of all cars in the US.
19 The first AI machine will join a corporate board of directors 2026.
20 The first city with more than 50,000 people and no traffic lights will come into existence by 2026.
21 10% of global gross domestic product will be stored using blockchain technology 2027.
As blockchain technology take off, more money will be stored using the technology.
According to the report, the total worth of Bitcoin in the blockchain is around $20 billion, or about 0.025% of global GDP of around $80 trillion. By 2027, about 10% of the global GDP will be stored using blockchain.
Whale Watching Tour in ReykjavikWhales are beautiful animals and one of nature’s most extraordinary sights. This cruise will take about 3 hours. The abundant marine life and the our crew’s expertise has ensured we have spotted whales on over 90% of our tours. www.extremeicelan…
Top executives who spoke at WSJD Live this week, from Netflix’s Reed Hastings to Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, offered their thoughts on the AT&T-Time Warner merger.
Pinterest Inc. Chief Executive Ben Silbermann on Wednesday ruled out an initial public offering any time soon while the social-media site focuses on building out its core advertising business.
Social media has swallowed the news – threatening the funding of public-interest reporting and ushering in an era when everyone has their own facts. But the consequences go far beyond journalism
In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true.
Here is the news – but only if Facebook thinks you need to know
Twenty-five years after the first websitewent online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page:
The former home of the South Wales Evening Post – the title moved to smaller premises two years ago.
The rise of Donald Trump is ‘a symptom of the mass media’s growing weakness’, according to academic Zeynep Tufekci. Photograph: Jim Cole/AP
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.
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.
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 world’s largest media owner, according to ZenithOptimedia’s Top Thirty Global Media Owners report.
It estimates that in 2012 Google accounted for 65 per cent of all internet searches across the world 82 per cent of all paid search advertising. With its investment in Youtube, ownership of Google+ and moves into mobile advertising – ZenithOptimedia estimates that Google has 15 per cent of display advertising worldwide
Top 30 media owners for 2012 (ranked by media revenue in $bn).
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
Carne Ross is the founder of Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit that offers freelance diplomatic representation to small, developing and yet-unrecognized nations in the complex world of international negotiations.
Why you should listen to him: Diplomacy like business is a business of solving problems
14:38 …falling off a cliff
14:39 is actually a good thing and I recommend it !!
14:43 and it’s a good thing to do at least once in your life
14:46 just to tear everything up and jump
16:18 what that means is instead of a asking your politicians to do things you have to look at yourself to do things…
Carne Ross was a member of the British diplomat corps for a decade and a half — until a crisis of faith in the system drove him to go freelance. With his nonprofit, Independent Diplomat, he and a team advise small and developing nations without a diplomatic corps, as well as unrecognized nations that would otherwise lack a voice in negotiations on their own futures.
Carne Ross is the founder of Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit that offers freelance diplomatic representation to small, developing and yet-unrecognized nations in the complex world of international negotiations.
His group helped advise the Kosovars in their quest for recognition as a nation, and with Croatia on its application to join the EU. They’re now working with Southern Sudan as it approaches a vote to separate (a vote that, on Sept. 8, 2010, US Secretary of State Clinton called “inevitable”).
As Ross said to Time magazine, when it profiled him in a 2008 story called “Innovators/Peacemakers”: “Our work is based on the belief that everybody has a right to some say in the resolution of their issues.” He’s the author of the 2007 book Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite.
Read BIF’s in-depth interview and feature on Carne Ross , by Christine Flanagan >>
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…
Hugtakiðkrossmiðlun vísar til fjölhæfni. Hvernig tvinna má saman marga ólíka miðla, til að nýta sem best kosti og eiginleika hvers miðils fyrir sig til að ná settu markmiði.
The new iPhone 5 is here. It’s thinner and faster than ever, with a new form factor that uses a gorgeous panoramic screen with more resolutions and less consumption. It also surfs the web much faster, thanks to its new LTE capabilities. And, just as we knew, it has a new smaller dock connector called Lightning.
Overall, it seems they have incrementally improved every single aspect of the iPhone. It’s not a revolutionary phone, but it is a very nice release.
Physical specifications
The iPhone 5 looks exactly as the leaked images: an unibody aluminum body with a glass screen. “It’s thinner than the previous generation: 18 percent thinner, which puts it at 0.29 inches (7.6 millimeter). They are claiming this is the world’s thinnest smartphone. It’s actually the world’s thinnest LTE smartphone.
It’s also 20 percent lighter than the current iPhone, just 3.95 ounces (112 grams). It comes in black and white models.
Their new manufacturing method seems quite extraordinary. According to Jon Ive, they “have never built a product with this extraordinary level of fit and finish.” They claim that the “variances from product to product is now measured in microns.”
The screen
Apple claims that the new 16:9 4-inch panoramic screen has 44 percent more saturation than the iPhone, which makes the display full sRGB. The display has its touchscreen sensor built-in.
How does it work? Instead of having two layers, the pixels of the display and the touch sensors, Apple affirms that here “the pixels do double duty—acting as touch-sensing electrodes while displaying the image at the same time.” Apple says that no other phone in the market has this, which Apple says is crucial to the iPhone 5’s thinness, lower weight and—more importantly—its image quality. Since there’s nothing between the glass and the pixels, the say the image is much clearer than before.
Connectivity
As expected, it uses LTE connectivity, so it will be much faster that the current iPhone 4S. It supports all the standards needed for all carriers: HSPA+, DC-HSDPA and LTE. Apple says that their single-chip solution works everywhere.
The iPhone 5 also has dual-channel 5GHz Wi-Fi—aka 802.11N. That means a 150Mbps maximum connectivity speed.
Brains
It also has a new CPU, the A6—which Apple claims is 2 times faster than the current iPhone 4S both in CPU and graphics. In real life, they claim it loads web pages 2.1 times as fast.
Battery life
If true, this is impressive: 8 hours of 3G talk time, 8 hours of LTE browsing, 10 hours of Wi-Fi browsing, 30 hours of video and 225 hours of standby.
Camera features
They have also updated the camera. On paper, it’s better than the one in iPhone 4S with a new dynamic low light mode too (I wonder how it compares to Nokia’s IOS) and a sapphire crystal. Knowing how scratched the glass on my iPhone is—making the photos not as crisp as when it was new—that’s good news. Shapphire crystal is the hardest thing you can get this side of a diamond.
Like the 4S, it has five-element optics and a 8 megapixel sensor (3264 x 2448 pixel), backside illumination, a hybrid infrared filter, and a nice f/2.4 aperture.
The new image processing chip has spatial noise reduction, with a system to analyze which parts of the image needs to be noise reduced and which should be left alone. As a result of all this, they claim low light photography is now much better than before.
Here’s an image taken with the new iPhone, which Apple claims it’s completely unretouched:
The image capture is also faster: 40 percent, they say. The iPhone 4S camera is now quite fast, so it will be interesting to see how this feels. Certainly, there’s not such a thing as fast enough when it comes to taking photos.
Panorama mode
They have also added a new capture mode called panorama. It doesn’t require you to stitch photos one by one: just pan the phone and it will automatically capture a panorama for you. Even if you can’t hold it steady, iPhone 5 is smart, using its gyroscope to correct for any variation in motion and make a perfect panorama. It also gets rid of any moving objects, they say.
The final result covers 240 degrees.
Video face detection
Like the previous iPhone, this one has 1080p FullHD capture. They claim they have improved the image stabilization in this version, added face detection (so it will be able to tag people automatically in videos) and, this is good, it will allow you to take full still photos while recording video.
Front FaceTime camera
They have also make the 720p front camera better with a new backside illuminated sensor. It also has face detection and—at last—the operating system will enable FaceTime over cellular.
Audio
Apple has also upgraded all the audio: the microphones, the built-in speakers and the earbuds, now called EarPods.
It now has three microphones—on the front, back and bottom. These will improve the quality of your voice calls—whoever calls anymore—and sound recordings. More importantly, they have include noise canceling without the need for external specialized headphones. Apple says that their technology cancels the noise from the place in which you are in, so you hear “the voice on the other end” more clearly.
The speakers have much better quality now, going from three to five magnet transducers, which will result in a clearer, richer sound. Any improvement over the cricket boxes of previous versions is welcome.
They have also improved the quality of voice calls. According to Phil Schiller, the new iPhone 5 can use something called wideband audio. If supported by the carrier, the phone will use more of the spectrum bandwidth to send much better and high-fidelity version of your voice over the network.
New Dock connector: Lightning
As predicted, the dock connector has changed. It’s now much smaller. Apple calls it Lightning (a name play of their other connector technology: Thunderbolt). It’s all digital and has 8 connectors. It also has an adaptive interface, which I guess means that the connector will send different signals according to the kind of features you need in your connection.
They best thing about the new connector, however, is that it is reversible. This may seem stupid, but being able to connect your cable no matter of the orientation will protect humanity against the 529th Article of Murphy’s Law: “Thou will always try to connect your iPhone cable on the wrong side.”
Does that mean that you would have to trash your old dock accessory? No, they are giving us an adapter that will turn the old connector into the new Lightning. Phil Schiller says that they are working with peripheral manufacturers to include Lightning in their next batch of products, which will arrive this Holiday Season.
Price and availability
They are keeping exactly the same prices as the previous generation. The iPhone 5 16GB is $199, the 32GB is $299 and the 64GB is $399, all with a two-year contract.
In the United States, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore you will be able to pre-order it this Friday and get it the next, September 21 The other countries will have it on September 28.
Oh, and if that’s still too expensive for you: the iPhone 4S is now $99 with a two-year contract. The iPhone 4 will be free with the same contract.
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Bob Birch, a bass player and prolific session sideman best known as a long-time member of Elton John’s band, died Wednesday of an apparent suicide at his home in Los Angeles. He was 56 www.netkaup.is
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have joined forces to offer free online courses in a project aimed at attracting millions of online learners around the world, the universities announced Wednesday.
Beginning this fall, a variety of courses developed by faculty at both institutions will be available online through the new $60 million partnership, known as “edX.”
“Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world can have access,” Harvard President Drew Faust said during a news conference to announce the initiative.
MIT has offered a program called OpenCourseWare for a decade that makes materials from more than 2,000 classes available free online. It has been used by more than 100 million people. In December, the school announced it also would begin offering a special credential, known as MITx, for people who complete the online version of certain courses.
Harvard has long offered courses to a wider community through its extension program.
The MITx platform will serve as the foundation for the new learning system.
MIT President Susan Hockfield said more than 120,000 people registered for the first course offered by MITx. She said Harvard and MIT hope other universities will join them in offering courses on the open-source edX platform.
An exciting weekend ahead bringing together press, gaming industsry and players in a massive celebration of the virtual world of EVE Online.
21. mar. 2012
Fanfest brings together press, gaming industry and players in a massive celebration of the virtual world of EVE Online next weekend on March 22- 24th. Travelers from all around the world gather in Reykjavik for the occasion. Allies and rivals alike set aside their in-game differences to share drinks with one another and forge new friendships. CCP developers mingle with the community, always up for “talking shop” and getting to know the players.
GusGus and Ham headline CCP Games annual EVE Online Fanfest “Party at the Top of the World” show on Saturday night.
Previous years guests include 2manyDJs, Booka Shade and FM Belfast.
Also performing this year will be HaZar, PartyZone DJs, RöXöR, Permaband & DJ Margeir.
Please visit EVE Fanfest site for further details:http://fanfest.eveonline.com/en/default
Event: Fanfest 2012 Dates: March 22nd-24th, 2012 Location: Harpa Concert Hall and Convention Center, Reykjavík, IcelandFanfest brings together players in a massive celebration of the virtual universe and community of EVE. Travelers from all around the world gather in one of the most beautiful and unique locations the planet has to offer. Allies and rivals alike set aside their in-game differences to share drinks with one another and forge new friendships. CCP developers mingle with the community, always up for “talking shop” and getting to know the players.Information and new announcements on the latest tech and upcoming milestones will be presented exclusively atFanfest 2012. The universe of EVE Online is expanding in every way imaginable and there’s no better place to herald news this awesome than at the top of the world, surrounded by throngs of excited fans.
51% of mobile comparison shoppers who research in-store and buy online are between the ages of 18 and 39.
It’s a store retailer’s worst mobile commercenightmare come true. 29% of consumers who use a smartphone to research a product while in a retail store end up purchasing the item online, many fromAmazon.com Inc., according to a new study by market research firm ClickIQ.
Of consumers who used a smartphone to research in-store and then purchase online, 55% were men and 45% were women, says the survey of 406 U.S. consumers who have researched a product while in a store and purchased that product.
For store merchants wandering their aisles watching shoppers on smartphones, age is a key indicator of who is comparing products and buying online. 26% of consumers age 30-39 and 25% age 18-29 recently used a mobile device to research a product while in a store. The numbers fall drastically from there with only 12% of those age 40-49, 6% age 50-59 and 2% age 60 or over researching products in a store using a mobile device.
Some big retailers are being hit the hardest by this m-commerce activity. Respondents possibly visited more than one retailer but the study shows that the retailers most frequented for research were Best Buy Co. at 36%, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. at 30% and Target Corp. at 29%.
To find out what happened after the in-store research was complete, survey respondents were asked to state where they eventually purchased the product they were researching. Best Buy did the best job of retaining the sale. 35% of those that researched at Best Buy ended up purchasing at the Best Buy store with another 14% purchasing at BestBuy.com. However, 21% purchased the product from Amazon.com. The rest did not purchase. Of those that did their research at Target, 29% purchased at the Target store, 8% purchased at Target.com and 21% purchased from Amazon.com. Wal-Mart retained 26% who purchased at the Wal-Mart store and 10% who purchased at Walmart.com. Wal-Mart lost 24% to Amazon.com.
When respondents were asked why they made the purchase where they did, an overwhelming 67% stated price as the determining factor. Lagging behind are availability at 14%, product features at 8%, free shipping at 7%, and already at the store 4%.
51% of mobile comparison shoppers who research in-store and buy online are between the ages of 18 and 39.
