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Marie Claire and Mastercard have partnered to open a pop-up shop in New York City, dubbed The Next Big Thing Concept Shop, that features a variet 
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Tiny electronics contained in the flexible snap tag connect the Jacquard Threads in the jacket’s cuff to your mobile device. The snap tag lets you know about incoming information, like a phone call, by giving you light and haptic feedback. Inspired by a strap that you would see on a cuff, it looks and feels like it’s a part of the jacket. The tag also houses the battery which can last up to 2 weeks between USB charges.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS Google announced the project in 2014 and now ships its first product. This may usher the dawn of an era for connected and digitally-enabled clothing. It will be interesting to findout about the technology and the possible applications. Looking at the video I can't help but wonder if this particular jacket will be useful, considering the fact that we all carry cellphones that allow you to do pretty much everything in this video. Here again, I believe this technology may be more appropriate and useful in business contexts rather than personal ones. We'll see.
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This is what your shopping experience will look like in the future.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT First, it is from the head of the largest retailer on the planet. Second, it draws from insights - and a great video - from the World Economic Forum.
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Walmart is investing in NVIDIA chips, which are high-level graphical processing units (GPUs), in order to build out its cloud network.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT The chart says it all: walmart investments in ecommerce have paid off with 60% growth in recent months.
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Get an introduction video to blockchain technology and see how it can be used to address global food safety.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT IBM has been an early adopter of blockchain technology and now videos such as this one begin to show where this new technology can be used in real businesses. Here the video presents blockchain in use for grocery food traceability from harvest to store shelves, in the grocery industry. The video is not great quality but the content is interesting.
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Engineers at MIT have designed a workout suit that responds to your body heat, according to a study published last week in Science Advances. The clothing, made from latex, is covered with thumbnail- to finger-sized ventilating flaps that open and close depending on how much heat your body puts out. But what's controlling the flaps isn't something you'll find weaved into your usual workout gear -- it's bacteria.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT A good digital strategy should now include smart fabrics and garments as they will become part of the trade in years to come. More leading edge companies should look at fabrics embedded with living organisms, motors and all kinds of electronics to improve confort, track progress or fatigue, reduce cleaning needs, and even, maybe, look better.
This article is part of a larger discussion on smart fabrics. Read more here: https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/23/the-future-of-fashion-and-technology/
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Instacart is excited to announce our first public dataset release, “The Instacart Online Grocery Shopping Dataset 2017”. This anonymized dataset contains a sample of over 3 million grocery orders from more than 200,000 Instacart users. For each user, we provide between 4 and 100 of their orders, with the sequence of products purchased in each order. We also provide the week and hour of day the order was placed, and a relative measure of time between orders.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT In today's eCommerce world, winners do not limit themselves to building great catalogs and payment processing experience. They actively analyze data to understand customer behaviour, to provide them with exceptional information to speed-up their shopping experience, but also maybe make them buy more or more expensive products. This is a great example of such a data analysis by grocery shopping leader instacart. It provides amazing insights into grocery shopping but also has open sourced the data for others to benefit.
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Selling groceries is an increasingly competitive business. What are retailers doing to stay in the game?
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT The retail stores will invariably change and this article explores some of the ways that this may happen: drive-thru stores, movement detecting sensors, digital shelves, social media interactions with stores to select products, scan-and-go or even better, grab-and-go without lines or cash registers. What will the store look like in the future?
bert juriyam's curator insight,
April 7, 2017 1:24 AM
Anti Aging Cream Review is a Consumer testimonial which they may be no longer Forced or Paid To Do so, which means they could DO a negative or superb review freely about this product. So, Do Not Buy This Aviqua Anti Aging Cream Product Wian are at it once more – flooding Facebook newsfeed with Ellen Degeneres’ anti-ageing advertisements. The advertisements appear to be featured on people.Com, eonline.Com or ellentv.Com. When you click on at the advertisements, it takes you to completely exceptional web sites selling miracle anti-ageing cream. Some of those so-referred to as miracle wrinkle cream encompass: Hydroderm, Triple Effect Eye Serum, BioGeniste Wrinkle Reducer, Dermal Meds, Bellavei, Miracle Phytoceramides, Belle Complex, Hydradiance ete web sites are unlawfully the usage of Ellen’s name and photograph to peddle unproven products. Ellen Degeneres and Dr. Oz DO NOT endorse these products. In addition, the sites also mention how an ordinary mom use Ellen’s mystery to lessen wrinkles in just 14 days. This is the image the.
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Unleash the bots! Automation has emerged as a critical issue in the US following a 2016 election that focused largely on jobs and plans to save them. Though a significant amount of attention has been directed towards autonomous driving as a potential job killer, specifically for long-haul trucking, delivery robots appear poised to go mainstream much sooner.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT We think of robots as fixed machines that assemble cars. However, with the advances in autonomous driving we may see an explosion of delivery robots. We have seen experiments with the use of drones to deliver products (Amazon and others) and now we are seeing self driving robots appear on the streets as it is much easier to get permits for those than it is for flying objects that can crash and hurt people. This is important because delivery remains the Achille's heel of eCommerce (slow, expensive): whoever cracks this problem and comes up with a low cost and economical solution will make a killing.
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Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Based on a detailed report, this article provides a chockful of stats about investments in certain technologies. Although based on a survey, it confirms certain trends that are widely accepted - so there should be no surprises for readers of this blog.
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The Artificial Intelligence Revolution isn’t around the corner—it’s here. A common remark is that as soon as some new form of AI is possible, it’s no longer AI, it’s just what computers “do”. And while we won’t notice most of AI’s effects in our world, there will be visible signs as digital technology is infused with AI. Through the lens of commerce, it’s easier to see AI’s deep effects as progress continues. Here are a few examples.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Very proud to share an article I recently co-authored on CloudRaker blog with Simon Hudson. It sheds lights into the potential impacts that AI will have on retail stores. A must read ;-)
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Floodwatch is a Chrome extension that tracks the ads you see as you browse the internet. It offers tools to help you understand both the volume and the types of ads you’re being served during the course of normal browsing, with the goal of increasing awareness of how advertisers track your browsing behavior, build their version of your online identity, and target their ads to you as an individual. We want to assemble the largest amount of advertising data we can— and then not give it to the advertisers.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Knowing what information is captured about you, stored and the digital profiles that is created behind the scenes as you browse the web is a first step in regaining control over our digital twin so we can have better digital lives.
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This transformation echoes the impact of Facebook on the media: there is a dramatic leveling of the playing field. The advantages of scale that guaranteed success in the post-war era just don’t matter very much when advertising is cheap, shelf space is infinite, and shipping is free. And, just as Facebook’s breakdown of the media broke down the political parties, Amazon’s break-down of physical retail will have its own knock-on effects: carrying household supplies is a major reason to own a car, for example, which means Amazon is a laying the foundation for a service like Uber to shift from being a car supplement to a full-on substitution.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A discussion on the impact that technology innovation has had on the election of Trump and more disruption to come from Amazon.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT The author presents compelling arguments about reasons why technology innovation has had such an impact and forces us to rethink most business models. Moreover the analysis of Trump's election as evidence that the power has shifted from editors and political parties to voters and end users is just brilliant and I will certainly use it in the future!
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A motion graphic showing how Amazon’s new shopping experience Amazon Go will work. Simply scan in, take what you want and “Go”.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Below are some articles that describe AmazonGO technology in more detail, including a video animation. As you can see, we know very little and everyone is guessing at this time based on patent filing and an article from a consultant now hired by Amazon.
Various other articles:
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As we pass 2.5bn smartphones on earth and head towards 5bn, and mobile moves from creation to deployment, the questions change. What's the state of the smartphone, machine learning and 'GAFA', and what can we build as we stand on the shoulders of giants?
Farid Mheir's insight:
Amazing insights into the mobile industry state and trends.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Andreessen Horowitz, and Benedict Evans in particular, have been known to spot trends long before everyone else. Here again, it appears they are making predictions about retailing - following in the steps of the print industry when Internet came along. Not certain I agree about the parallel but I agree that mobile and AI and other technologies will impact and transform the retail world in the near future. However, as opposed to the print media, retailers often sell physical goods that cannot, for now, be 3D printed at home. So either you pick them up in the store or get it delivered by FedEx or a drone. That being said, retail stores are bound to transform in showrooms and service centers as I wrote about in the past. And this is a major shift that many will fail to take.
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Amazon Go is a new kind of store featuring the world’s most advanced shopping technology. No lines, no checkout – just grab and go! Watch the video: amazon.com/go
Farid Mheir's insight:
Take a minute to watch the video. This is the future of retailing.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Amazon has disrupted many industries with its online business. Recently, as other digital leaders have done, Amazon is trying to bring digital revolution in the world to blend our physical and digital experiences - think Google self driving cars, Starbuck mobile phone payment and geofencing app, Apple stores that are more showrooms and help centres than stores because eCommerce is there to fulfill orders to your door, etc. Amazon has been focussed on grocery for the past 10 years to use this weekly recurring, low cost, high volume shopping trip to the supermarket as its pathway to bring digital into the real world and blend it with online e-commerce. With Amazon Fresh for examples they have been busy putting trucks on the road to deliver groceries to your door overnight with minimal costs. Why grocery? Because its high volume guarantees that trucks will be on the road everyday in all areas. And once trucks are running around carrying groceries they can also bring other items - books, TVs, etc. - at little or no cost, effectively making FedEx irrelevant or at least giving Amazon huge negotiation power. I wrote about this in many blog posts, just see here: http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-transformation-of-businesses?q=amazon Here with Amazon GO, it addresses some of the major pain points of customers in grocery stores: waiting in line at the cash register. As they've done online, Amazon focusses on its customer issues to smash them or make them so irrelevant that they are not issues anymore. See "amazon secret sauce" for insights on this: http://sco.lt/979c4P Take Amazon Prime for example. It addresses the delivery fee issue: we do not want to have to pay for delivery. So they make it a non issue, providing 2-day delivery for free for an annual fee. Side effect: if you've paid for prime, then you spend up to 5x more at Amazon (300$ annually for average client, 1500$ for prime member), basically becoming a loyal shopper. Wow. Back to Amazon GO and why it is important. The grocery industry has not seen a major disruption since Costco started top sell grocery in bulk format years ago - grocers ost 10% market share with that new player in the field. But today, grocery stores are the same, the layout is the same, the process is the same than it was 50 years ago. There has been little or no innovation in stores recently (last one may be the barcode in 1970s) but GO shows that there may be a perfect storm of technologies that combine to make physical stores transformation a reality: 1- mobile phones are on every customer back pocket; 2- electronic payment is everywhere, making cash almost irrelevant; 3- loyalty programs and big data allows retailers unprecedented customer knowledge and forecasting trends; 4- artificial intelligence enables real-time image analysis, feature detection, and robotic improvements. From the concept store video and the Amazon description, all that GO is doing is applying these new technologies on a new problem set: adding and removing items to shopping basket and speeding the checkout process. Of course, at the end of the day, the winner will not be the grocer with the best technology. It will be the one with the lowest prices and the best selection (best marketing and customer service won't hurt either). On those fronts (price & selection) Amazon GO faces huge headwinds from established grocers that have long standing relationships with suppliers and way more volume than Amazon. But it does not mean Amazon cannot provide customers with a more enjoyable, easy, fast experience - especially to millennials - which may give GO 5% or 10% of the market (the "good" 5% by the way, those that spend more and spend on higher margin items) from established retailers. And this will hurt established grocers like hell.
Also see the analysis from business insider here: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-go-grocery-store-future-photos-video-2016-12/
and the plans for Amazon to open up to 2000 store in the future if GO concept works: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-2000-grocery-stores-10-years-2016-10
Flores Marisol's curator insight,
December 7, 2016 9:04 AM
Wow! Now that would be nice! No standing in lines!
Emily Herbek's curator insight,
November 4, 2019 10:51 PM
Amazon recently came out with another feature of their company called Amazon Fresh. This addition to the company propelled their business into the grocery industry. As a part of this new feature, Amazon incorporated the phrase amazon go. Once again, they promoted this feature via video.
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The sliced apples or cut broccoli -- the merchant won’t say what’s involved exactly -- are being used to test blockchain, a new database technology. If successful, the trial could change how Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which serves some 260 million customers a week, monitors food and takes action when something goes wrong. That could spur big leaps in food safety, cut costs and save lives.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WalMart is testing a new food traceability solution co-developed by IBM using blockchain technology.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Blockchain, the technology behind the bitcoin currency is being actively enhanced to be used for other application than Finance or payment. In this particular case, food retailers may find that using this technology will improve traceability of food products and facilitates recalls when they are needed. The fact that WalMart embraces it so early probably means the current systems are not very efficient and that there are opportunities to reduce costs and improves brand image and reduce liabilities. Digital transformation does mean more than just being present on social networks and improving marketing.
Read more about it :
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Unacast’s latest Q4 Proxbook report confirms that beacon deployments are on track and the numbers align with ABI Research’s forecast of 400 million beacons to be deployed by 20201. Last year, we saw big brands undertaking large scale beacon deployments. And, this year started with Rite Aid’s announcement of initiating the largest beacon-deployment in a retail setting till date. Discover the top 25 proximity marketing campaigns in retail and what they are doing right.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A review on real-life beacon deployments in retail store tends to demonstrate a resurgence of proximity geographic location tracking.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Digital transformation strategies require that customers are tracked in the real world as much as they are in the web-world. This often means that the mobile devices we carry enable a seamless digital communication - tools to push promotions and notifications while we walk the street or store aisles. To do so, retailers must know where you are and geofencing is not enough anymore. Beacons come to the rescue and mobile OSes - both Apple and Google - now build into their APIs very good location services which allow mobile app developers ways to connect with users in a very personal way. Using GPS location is not sufficient, especially indoors, so beacons are a must and reports such as this one show that our physical world has become a forest of digital beacons to track our every moves. We all thought this technology was dead after the initial failure of the 2013 Apple announcement. However, all retailers should now include geolocation and proximity tracking in their digital strategies and mid-term roadmaps, as it has apparently moved from the lab to the real world.
More on location services in the OSes, see the following links:
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/location/index.html
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In-store technologies can enhance the shopping experience, and many retailers are seeing the benefits of them. A June 2016 survey found that technology can help retailers reach more consumers, as well as better inform in-store employees.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Looks like in-store technologies - screens, beacons, kiosk, mobiles apps, etc. - should be considered for other purpose than to increase revenue.
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Farid Mheir's insight:
Always interesting reading on digital transformation by Capgemini which has been at the forefront of defining digital transformation. Read this one, then flip through old ones...
Jean-Marie Grange's curator insight,
October 24, 2016 2:02 PM
Very good examples of digital transformation in some industries. The platform strategy developed by Visa could be very successful... if they really open it to developpers.
There is also a list of 15 startups showing good potential at the end of the document...
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In this episode of Pulsate Academy, Patrick Leddy introduces Geofencing for location-based marketing and how you could be using it with your app today
Farid Mheir's insight:
Outstanding 20 minutes video that explains what geofencing is and how to it, them in layman's terms.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT We all carry mobile devices in our pockets so we are all targets for beacons and geofencing by retailers and brands. We were just getting used to being tracked everywhere we go online, and now we have become targets in the physical world as well. It is essential that we all know what level of tracking we are subjected to. On the other hand if you are a brand or a retailer, you must know about beacons and geofencing and ensure your marketing team includes it in their digital strategy otherwise you may be missing out over your competitors.
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Ecommerce research, latest blog posts and training. Includes case studies, recommended reports, buyer's guides and supplier search.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A great blog on different elements regarding eCommerce, from strategies to solutions and statistics. Here, one post that identifies the issues that prevent ecommerce deployment.
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Remember your first attaboy or attagirl... That pat on the back, look of approval, or recognition you deserved for accomplishing something special? There’s just
Farid Mheir's insight:
Explains how runkeeper uses eCommerce to reward customers and achieve impressive conversion rates of 4% to 7%.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT We too often think of eCommerce in classic, undifferentiated terms: catalog of products, shopping cart, checkout. This paper offers an interesting twist to the whole thing, embedding eCommerce within the mobile app and unlocking certain products based on goals achieved by customers. Retailers should apply this approach to leverage their eCommerce platform beyond the classic website: behaviour-based rewards, special categories, loyalty-based commerce, mobile commerce, social commerce, etc. The eCommerce platform should become a platform not merely a transactional tool.
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“We are predicting that by 2020, it will cost .50 cents to internet enable a product,” Mr. LeHong said. This enables functionality such as a dryer alerting a homeowner that the laundry is done. Amazon has already created touch buttons for reordering products (Amazon Dash) and Mr. LeHong noted that some retailers believe that the connected home will be the next retail store.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Short on details, I still find the Gartner website full of useful insights and things to ponder.
Craig Broadbent's curator insight,
January 3, 2016 5:15 PM
Exciting time to be in 3D printing and IT!
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From
gigaom
Cambridge Consultants, a product development group based in the U.K., is showing off a connected shopping cart that can tell a retailer where you are in a store within three feet. The smart carts are equipped with Bluetooth radios and sensors to track the cart’s location so store owners can offer promotions and eliminate checkout…
Farid Mheir's insight:
Not everyone has a mobile phone when they shop groceries but everyone pushes a cart. So having a connected cart - especially if it costs only 7.60$ to retrofit - makes perfect sense, no?
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Curated by Farid Mheir
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WHY IT MATTERS
Retail stores are transforming to become more digital friendly, mobile-friendly, omni-channel enabled, and basically more like an Apple Store than a Costco warehouse - more service, less aisles with shelves.