Friday, December 8, 2017
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Sunday, November 26, 2017
Amazon’s actions are shaking the entire market ecosystem – says Roger McNamee
Amazon is not just disrupting industries, it is single-handedly disrupting the whole economy, according to Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee.
The investor, in his appearance on CNBC’s “Fast Money” on Wednesday, was commenting on the apparent deal between Amazon’s cloud business and Cerner, one of the world’s biggest health tech companies. Amazon has been looking for a way into the health-care industry.
McNamee said he sees this move as a “typical Amazon” approach to the type of disruption it is causing in virtually every industry.
“Any industry that has been reluctant to adopt cloud services has been at risk for being disrupted by amazon,” McNamee said. “Health care is one of the places where the cloud has had much less impact than it could have or should have.”
Much of Amazon’s success, McNamee argued, comes from the company’s robust and expanding cloud services. In addition to its health investments, Amazon Web Services looks to expand into the public sector, announcing plans for a group of cloud data centers for the U.S. intelligence communityMonday.
“The reality is that Amazon is the world’s most successful player in cloud services. And any industry that has been reluctant to adopt cloud services has been at risk for being disrupted by amazon,” he said.
Health care may not be a huge money-maker straight away, but if Amazon’s success in other industries is any indicator, McNamee anticipates AWS’ partnership with Cerner will be a good start.
“In each market in which they operate, [Amazon has] changed the rules profoundly. It makes it really hard for competitors to fight back, they are effectively playing a different game,” he said.
While health care looks like the next big target on Amazon’s cloud disruption list, McNamee thinks streamlining retail and perishable food distribution will bring the company its biggest value over the short term, especially as traditional retailers struggle.
“There are just too many square feet of retail space and it is allocated in a way that inevitably is going to have lots of losers,” McNamee said.
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#amazonMonday, November 20, 2017
AmazonFresh to deliver Allrecipes ingredients in new online integration
Allrecipes is teaming up with Amazon to help cooks get their groceries delivered.
The online recipe giant today announced a new integration with Amazon’s grocery delivery arm AmazonFresh, making it easier for customers to get ingredients shipped to their doorstep. It’s the latest example of Amazon’s growing interest in selling grocery items as the tech giant tries to make its way into your kitchen.
Allrecipes users will now see an AmazonFresh widget within recipe pages, alongside other grocery store options like Target and Walmart. Users can add all required ingredients for a given recipe to an AmazonFresh shopping cart; the purchase is completed on Amazon’s website, where users can tweak the recommended food brands provided by Allrecipes. The option is available to people living in regions where AmazonFresh delivers.
Allrecipes said this is the first direct API integration with AmazonFresh, which costs $15 a month on top of a $100 per year Amazon Prime membership. The integration will start with the top recipes and later expand to all possible recipes.
One of the other grocery options on the recipe pages includes Whole Foods — acquired by Amazon for $13.7 billion in August — though the widget link directs to this page.
In 2015, Allrecipes announced a similar partnership with Instacart, though now Instacart doesn’t appear to be on the Allrecipes site.
This isn’t the first time Seattle-based Allrecipes has worked with Amazon. Last year, it released the first cooking skill for Alexa, the voice-controlled assistant that powers Amazon devices; in June Amazon released the Dash Wand with Alexa with an Allrecipes skill available at launch; that same month, Allrecipes launched a new skill designed for the touch-screen Echo Show.
Allrecipes, founded in 1997, has 80 million users and attracts 1.5 billion annual visits. It was acquired by magazine publisher Meredith Corp. in 2012 for $175 million.
AmazonFresh, meanwhile, has been around for a decade. Amazon recently announced that it is shutting down AmazonFresh in neighborhoods across nine states; Recode reported that Amazon blamed USPS for unreliable deliveries.
This past summer, Amazon began delivering its own meal-kits, taking on Blue Apron with its own version of pre-packaged ready-to-cook dinners.
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#amazonWal-Mart demonstrates its agility against Amazon
Wal-Mart isn’t afraid of Amazon. No, not even in the slightest.
The big-box retailer is laser-focused on internal initiatives, according to Wal-Mart’s head of U.S. e-commerce, Marc Lore. That includes luring more high-end brands to sell on Walmart.com and across its stores, expanding an online grocery pickup service and keeping prices competitive but not necessarily at rock bottom.
Wal-Mart’s stock rocketed more than 10 percent Thursday, reaching an all-time high, as Wall Street rallied behind the company’s upbeat third-quarter results and heavy momentum heading into the holiday season.
“The discount giant is clearly reaping the benefits of its massive investments in associates, stores, technology, and acquisitions,” Retail Metrics’ Ken Perkins wrote in a note to clients. “Walmart is taking share and growing its food business.”
Food was a notable bright spot in Wal-Mart’s latest quarter, even in the midst of Amazon buying supermarket chain Whole Foods and beginning to slash prices on frequently purchased items. Target has also made additional price cuts in recent months, aligning more closely with Wal-Mart’s “everyday low price” model.
But shoppers continue to flock to Wal-Mart for fresh produce, bakery items and meat, management pointed out. Currently, more than 1,100 of the retailer’s U.S. stores can fulfill online grocery orders for in-person pickup, and Wal-Mart plans to add another 1,000 locations to that list next year.
“New customers, suppliers and partnerships are coming to Wal-Mart,” as its grocery and other initiatives blossom, Chief Executive Doug McMillon said on a call with analysts and investors. “We’re making good progress attracting premium brands to [Walmart.com] such as KitchenAid and Bose.”
Over the past year, Wal-Mart said, it tripled the number of items on Walmart.com to reach more than 70 million SKUs today, and some of that growth stems from unique relationships with well-known brands.
Earlier this week, the company announced an upcoming partnership with Hudson’s Bay‘s Lord & Taylor, where Walmart.com will feature a “store within a store” for the department store chain’s merchandise.
Wal-Mart’s Lore has already hinted at more of these types of partnerships to come, as it prepares to launch a redesigned website with a focus on fashion and home goods. Next year, Walmart.com will also run Jet.com’s “smart-cart” feature, which grants shoppers cheaper prices if they pack more items together in one box, use a debit card when paying for purchases, or opt out of returns.
Wal-Mart’s acquisition of Jet about one year ago has allowed the company to tap into Jet’s technology, its younger consumer base and private-label penetration.
As part of a strengthened digital push, Wal-Mart will hire about 2,000 “category specialists” to monitor the company’s website and rewrite item descriptions, among other tasks. The personal touches are aimed at holding onto existing customers, but also attracting a more “affluent” shopper.
“Walmart’s longer-term aim is clear: it wants to become the go-to online destination for both every day and specialty items,” GlobalData Retail Managing Director Neil Saunders wrote in a note to clients.
Meantime, “for a retailer of its size and scale, we believe that Walmart’s ability to keep its stores growing is impressive,” Saunders added.
According to Cowen & Co. analyst Oliver Chen, “[P]hysical stores arm Wal-Mart in the digital war.”
Without such a vast physical store footprint, Amazon’s retail strategy has been to partner with brands, including Nike, Tapestry‘s Kate Spade and Levi Strauss, to create a broader and more appealing merchandise assortment on Amazon.com.
And on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that this holiday season Calvin Klein will for the first time sell new underwear styles only through Amazon, bypassing traditional department stores. That marks another brand in Amazon’s bucket.
Still, Wal-Mart has a lot of good things going for it, especially heading into the holidays. The retailer has set expectations for comparable sales at U.S. stores, excluding fuel, to increase as much as 2 percent in the fiscal fourth quarter, which would be slightly better compared with last year.
“We expect top-line growth going forward to be led more by comp sales and eCommerce with less emphasis on new units in the U.S.,” Chief Financial Officer Brett Biggs said. “We have good sales momentum and cost transformation is gaining traction.”
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#amazonSunday, November 19, 2017
Baidu introduces smart home speaker to rival Amazon’s Echos
Chinese internet search giant Baidu on Thursday introduced a speaker and two robots as part of its Raven series in a serious push into the highly competitive smart home market.
The products, introduced at the Baidu World conference in Beijing, are powered by the company’s DuerOS conversational artificial intelligence technology. That system is similar to virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, the Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana.
The smart speaker is called Raven H and will be available for purchase in December for about 1,699 yuan ($256). Design-wise, the speaker looks like a stack of thin, colored square blocks and it comes with a touch-sensitive light-emitting diode (LED) display controller.
The controller can be detached from the speaker base and used as a voice-powered remote for all Raven-compatible smart home devices.
The speaker was designed by Raven Tech, a start-up that Baidu acquired in February, and Swedish consumer electronics manufacturer Teenage Engineering. It also has components from Danish high-end audio systems maker Tymphany.
The DuerOS allows the device to carry out other voice-based commands and tasks such as looking up information, playing music and hailing a taxi, according to Baidu.
The idea behind the Raven H is to make the interaction between man and machine as seamless as possible, according to Jesse Lyu, the founder of Raven Tech, who joined Baidu’s intelligent hardware unit as general manager.
“Its adjustable design lets its [users] move through their home or workspace, while remaining connected to both the Raven H system and their personal world,” Lyu said in a statement.
That said, the Raven H will face stiff competition in the smart home speaker market, which according to Strategy Analytics, is currently dominated by Amazon.
Baidu also introduced the Raven R, a multi-jointed robotic arm that can move in response to user commands and to express emotions.
A second robot — still in development — is Raven Q, which will eventually incorporate various technologies, such as simultaneous localization and mapping, computer vision, voice recognition and natural processing.
Baidu did indicate any pricing or availability details for the Raven R and Raven Q robots in the announcement.
“Each product in our new Raven series is integrated with Baidu’s latest AI technologies, including facial recognition, computer vision and even our Apollo autonomous driving technology,” Lyu told the conference audience.
“These smart speakers and AI home robot may sound like a small step in the history of technology — but they will help people’s everyday lives and bring them an experience once only seen in sci-fi movies,” Lyu said.
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#amazon