 Source: Reuters/Aly Song - Screen Showing Value of Goods Being Traded During Alibaba's Singles Day Singles' Day, the annual online shopping event from Chinese giant Alibaba, has broken last year's record of $30 billion in sales within the first 16.5 hours of the 24 hour event. Sales hit $1 billion within the first minute and eight seconds, and Alibaba expects over 500 million users to make purchases during this year's event. For perspective, the online shopping event brings in the equivalent of over 80% of Amazon's online store sales from the last quarter in just 24 hours. Singles Day Facts:
 Source: Reuters- Global Shopping Event Sales Singles Day began in 2009 and is today by far the biggest online sales event worldwide, regularly beating out Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined (Cyber Monday in the United States took in $7.8 billion last year). This is the first time the event is being held without Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, who stepped down this September as chairman to "start a new life."
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 Source: The Verge Ahead of its annual fall hardware event, Amazon announced yesterday that it had created an alliance called the Voice Interoperability Initiative with more than 30 companies. The initiative was built around the companies' shared belief that voice-enabled devices should offer more flexibility to customers by being designed to support multiple voice services. Each of the voice services would work seamlessly alongside one another on one device with customers accessing specific voice services by using their respective wake word. With support for multiple, simultaneous wake words, customers would be able to choose which voice service to use according to their particular needs. More than 30 companies have joined the initiative including Amazon, Baidu, Microsoft, Salesforce, Spotify, Tencent, Orange and Verizon.
According to Amazon's Press release on the subject, the Voice Interoperability Initiative has four priorities:
Multiple voice services on each device will allow various kinds of voice assistants to emerge. For example, customers would be able to access voice assistants with a broad focus and knowledge (Alexa) as well as those with a deeper, and more narrow, context-specific knowledge (such as Salesforce's Einstein Voice, a CRM assistant) on the same device. Of the companies currently involved the initiative, there are three prominent names missing: Google, Apple and Samsung. Click here to read the full article.  Source: Getty Images Amazon's yearly online shopping event, Prime Day 2019, beat all previous company records to become Amazon's largest online shopping event ever. The now two day shopping event reserved for its Prime members, who number around 100 million, resulted in over 175 million products being purchased. For Amazon, that makes this years Prime Day sales larger than last year's Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined. Amazon's Prime Day success has not gone unnoticed among competitors with over 300 unique competitors running Prime-Day related offers (up from 27 in 2016), according to RetailMeNot.
The reality is that many retailers have been successfully able to piggyback off of the annual event to boost their own sales, with close to 38% even using the word Prime in their messages to consumers. According to Adobe Analytics, large retailers saw a huge increase, 64%, in their e-commerce sales on Prime Day when compared to an average Monday. The increased revenue, was lead by an increasing in traffic from visitors, accounting for close to 66% of the lift. This was followed by an increase in conversions, which accounted for 27%, and an increase in consumers' basket sizes, 7%. Adobe Analytics predicted that US e-commerce sales would be pushed to over $2 billion when Prime Day is all said and done, making it the third time outside of the holiday season (after Labor Day 2018 and Memorial Day 2019) when sales have reached that milestone. Amazon Prime members pay an annual subscription fee of $119 per year for a number of benefits, and bring in almost $12 billion in revenue to Amazon from their annual fees alone. Click here to read the full article.  Source: Associated Press Starting today, Google announced that its Maps app will be able to provide transit predictions for how crowded your bus, train or subway will be in almost 200 cities. These predictions will be based on past ride information provided by application users and should help you plan your daily commute better. Also launching alongside these new transit crowdedness predictions are live traffic delays for buses, which will let you know if your buss is late as well as provide more accurate travel times. Google has released a series of updates to Google Maps recently as it tries to maintain its position as market leader among navigation apps, combating ride-hailing companies attempting to become one stop shops for all transportation modes.
Google collected data for this new prediction service by asking application users about their trip, asking them to rate their trip with one of the following four options - many empty seats, few empty seats, standing room only, or cramped standing room only. Google Maps has also released the following updates in the past months: Click here to read the full article.  Source: Panasonic Corp Senior Managing Executive Officer, Makoto Kitano, shakes hands with Toyota Motor Corp Operation Officer, Masayoshi Shirayanagi - REUTERS/ Kevin Buckland Toyota and Panasonic, two Japanese giants, will create a joint venture, named Prime Life Technologies Corporation, that will merge each companies' housing businesses in order to begin developing "connected" services related to urban development and housing. The company will be a 50-50 partnership between the two and will try to create value in cities and homes by harnessing the opportunities brought about by developments in connected vehicles, home applicants and other devices (also known as IoT - Internet of Things).
Statements from both companies demonstrate their willingness to combine their respective competencies to create a new value proposition. Toyota is massive player in the mobility and connected vehicles field, while Panasonic's strengths lie in its connected home appliances and IoT business. The partnership is the latest venture between the two Japanese companies. Earlier this year, Toyota and Panasonic announced a joint venture that will pull manufacturing and R&D strengths of both companies to build EV (electric vehicle) batteries. Click here to read the full article.  Source: Microsoft Microsoft is developing AI for its Word online software, called Ideas, that will use machine learning to help improve the clarity, concision, and inclusiveness of your writing. In addition to features that help improve your writing, Ideas will also have features that assist in reading and styling documents. Test versions of Ideas will become available in June and the software is expected to roll out to everyday users in the fall of this year.
Ideas will be able to not only suggest grammar changes but also provide recommendations for how to rewrite phrases. When it comes to reading assistance, Ideas will be able to use machine learning to estimate reading times and explain acronyms and potentially even select the key points from a selected text. Microsoft has also revealed that Ideas will come with a designer feature that will assist users in styling parts of their documents (ex: tables). Google has also recently announced it's own AI-based writing assistance tool that will come its online Google Docs software. The tool, according to Google, will not only be able to identify grammar mistakes but will also detect "nuances" in language. Click here to read the full article.  Source: REUTERS/ Elijah Nouvelage/File Photo Three of the world's largest automakers announced today that they would be joining together to create a consortium along with SAE International, an automotive engineering group, to help establish "safety guiding principles to help inform standards development" for autonomous vehicles. The new group will be called the Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium and will work together on data sharing, safe testing guidelines and vehicle interactions. While the world watches and waits, the United States has yet to successfully pass legislation in its ongoing attempt to discover how to properly regulate self-driving cars. The goal of the consortium will be to expedite standards development and facilitate rule making.
Concerns about autonomous systems have increased following a fatal crash of an Uber self-driving vehicle in 2018 and two crashes of the highly automated Boeing 787 MAX. The crashes have put regulators' ability to assess the safety of autonomous systems into the spotlight. The Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium cited a standards group which helped create close to 4,500 aerospace standards as a successful model. Click here to read the full article.  Source: TechCrunch Through a blog post on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained how Facebook's new vision for the future is to become a privacy-focused social networking platform. In the post, Facebook's CEO discussed how he believes Facebook's future will be centered around private, ephemeral, encrypted communication rather than the company's current, open platform news feed. According to Zuckerberg, these changes will occur over the next few years and should also open the way for new online commerce and payments services.
In Zuckerberg's Facebook post, he details Facebook's new privacy-focused platform will be built around the following principles:
This announcement comes at a time when Facebook is under increased scrutiny over the spread of "fake news," which has resulted in public pressure on the social network company to better moderate its customer content. The new privacy focused social network envisioned above may be designed to address some of these concerns as content will become private from even Facebook itself, reducing its vulnerability to privacy issues. A couple of the more concrete changes and policies outlined by Zuckerberg are listed below:
Facebook's Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp are all used by more than 1 billion people each. This shift to a more privacy focused social network will make it harder for Facebook to continue generating the level of revenue from targeted advertising that has allowed it to become one of the largest companies in the world. As it undergoes the changes identified above, there is no doubt that the company will have to develop new revenue generating tools, services and strategies. It is important to note that Mark Zuckerberg did admit that elements of the plan could still change as the company speaks to experts over the next year. Click here to read the full article.  Source: The Verge / Alex Castro Tesla announced that it will shift away from physical stores to only having e-commerce, stating that clients will be able to buy a Tesla in North America on their mobile phones in close to 1 minute. Tesla stated that the decision to move away from physical retail locations was driven by the company's need to remain financially sustainable as the move to e-commerce will help Tesla cut operating expenses. Most of the Tesla's current stores will close and those that stay open will become Tesla information centers, galleries, or showcases. The company announced the move to e-commerce at the same time as it finally begins to make available its long awaited "Standard Range" Model 3.
Tesla also announced that in order to serve the needs of its growing customer base, they will be increasing the number of service centers by a significant amount with the goal of providing same day service to all Tesla owners. Current Tesla owners can currently order a mobile service truck through their Tesla mobile app. Tesla announced a company-wide restructuring in June of 2018. Although the company has had two back-to-back profitable quarters, Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, reported that he isn't expecting Tesla to earn a profit in Q1 of 2019 in a call with reporters. Customers who buy a Tesla online will be able try out their vehicle for 1,000 miles or 7 days and still be able to return the car for a full refund. Click here to read the full article.  Source: The Verge / Alex Castro Microsoft is partnering with Albertsons, the second largest grocery store chain in the United States, to create a "frictionless" customer experience inside their stores. As part of the deal, Microsoft will use their Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure services to apply data science, AI, and cognitive technologies to transform the shopping experience both in store and online. The partnership comes as Amazon is becoming increasingly more focused on the physical retail business with reports that it is planning to open several thousand Amazon Go stores in the United States by 2021.
According to Microsoft, the two companies will work together to create this frictionless customer experience by helping employees track store inventory and restocking needs while also reducing waiting times and making it easier to find items. They will also work together to improve Albertsons' logistics and supply chain using data science. The two companies have already had two successful results from their partnership - Albertsons' eCommence platform and gas station app that allows customers to pay for gas using their phones both run on Microsoft Azure. Microsoft also partnered with retail giant Walmart, last July, and and Kroger this January. Microsoft will be helping Kroger build high-tech grocery stores and bringing Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure to Walmart over the next 5 years. Click here to read the full article. |
