A motion graphic showing how Amazon’s new shopping experience Amazon Go will work. Simply scan in, take what you want and “Go”.
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WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation
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Curated by
Farid Mheir
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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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For the past five years, Russia’s been building walls around its web and packing it with tech oligarchs, startup cities, face-finding algorithms, hacker hunters, and, of course, a few bears.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Hello World is an amazing series of video reports on digital transformations and Internet and technology. I find this episode on Russia of particular interest regarding privacy - or the loss of privacy. Must listen.
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From
hbr
Now a new breed of software applications is reshaping sales force management. Their common characteristic: Using digital data exhaust, which is the data generated from the regular activities of a sales force or their customers, to change the behaviour of frontline sales representatives in ways that dramatically improve sales productivity and effectiveness.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Daily activities leave digital traces that can be leveraged to improve processes and deliver value in organizations. We often overlook this data in organizations but we should realize that companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple and others have invested huge amounts of efforts to dig into the data exhaust of our digital and physical world activities in order to extract, infer, predict our tastes and behaviour. If it works for them, it should work for us as well, no?
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The practical appeal of an RFID implant, in theory, is quick authentication that’s faster, cheaper and more reliable than other biometrics like thumbprints or facial scans. When the chip is hit with a radio frequency signal, it emits a unique identifier number that functions like a long, unguessable password. Implantees like Andrew imagine the ability to unclutter their pockets of keys and keycards and instead access their cars, computers, and homes with with a mere wave of the hand.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Recent announcements of fully automated, no cash register no lineups Amazon stores, have made the use of RFID chips and other digital identification techniques the topic of discussion again.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Digital transformation requires bridging the physical world with the digital one. One of the simplest way to do so is to attached radio frequency beacons (RFID chips) to products so that you can detect their presence and make inventory management and checkout faster, easier and more accurate. Pushing this idea forward of course means that humans too should be tagged to help identify them in the digital world. Not only does this open a see of useful application - unlocking doors without a key, tracking location inside a building, removing the need for password - it also raises concerns about privacy and identity management. Fun times ahead!
Retail location tagging: http://sco.lt/6yVDqz Décathlon connected products and self checkout: http://www.force-ouvriere.fr/chez-decathlon-85-des-produits-sont-connectes?lang=fr
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Onfido delivers next-generation background checks, helping the world’s most innovative businesses verify anyone, anywhere.
Farid Mheir's insight:
AI and Big Data are being applied to identity verification by a startup that has received 25M in funding and is poaching employees from Google.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT AI and other techniques will provide enhance capabilities to deter theft and privacy violations. They will become essential tools in digital transformation of businesses. For example, UBER is using Onfido to verify that people are who they claim they are, thus making their service better able to curb credit card theft, and protect drivers by ensuring their passengers can be tracked is they behave inappropriately.
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I’m sure you’ll have noticed in the last few years of using smart phones that every time you add a new app, no matter what that app is for, it asks if it can “use your location”. Sure, you get a chance to allow or not, but how many of us just click that allow button without thinking what information that simple choice conveys?
Farid Mheir's insight:
Location services on mobile phone can reveal information you may not want others to know. This post describes in simple term what geolocation can reveal.
Comunipedia 3.0 's curator insight,
December 9, 2016 3:05 PM
¿Qué podemos hacer si no queremos que quede reflejada nuestra localización?
Brand Interactive Communications's curator insight,
December 11, 2016 6:56 PM
Location services on mobile phone can reveal information you may not want others to know. This post describes in simple term what geolocation can reveal.
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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 internet can be horrible, and it isn't weird to sometimes feel like you want to leave. But there's wasn't an easy way out, until now.
Farid Mheir's insight:
The web never forgets. This new site offers ways to remove some traces of your digital life. Useful.
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How I Burned 10 Million Dollars So You Don’t Have To. In February, my startup (Twenty20) employed 35 people. We had a board-approved plan to scale to 85 by the end of the year. As of July, we were at 55, and well on our way. Now, four months later, our team size is 12.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT I love those stories because they are real-life, pragmatic, and reflect the reality of startups. Should be true not only for startups but intrapreneurs and small groups that burst into life in larger organizations. Lesson to learn: don't grow until you know your business model. Also: self-service is good. Must read to give you confidence, hope and also scare you a little.
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Facebook AML director Joaquin Quiñonero Candela explains why the social network wants to teach you about AI.
Farid Mheir's insight:
If you have kids, have them read this.
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Maths ability will get you furthest, says Harvard's Davis Deming. As long as you've got the social skills to go with it. Could a robot do your job? Millions of people who didn’t see automation coming will soon find out the painful way. The answer is a resounding yes. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs study predicts that 5 million jobs will be lost before 2020 as artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and other socio-economic factors replace the need for human workers.
Farid Mheir's insight:
One important stat from The Future of Jobs report is that the top trend that will drive change in work is new technology and innovation.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT All jobs will be affected by technology and thus every good digital transformation should include the human disruption and its impact on current and future employees. Too often, we implement digital change and fail to consider people impact. Look at UBER taxis: their model is to plow ahead and disrupt the market but they have failed to accompany the taxi drivers that are impacted. Because of it they are facing huge head winds from governments and established corporations. On the other hand, Teo Taxi (Montreal-based) has recognized the people impact and embraced human transformation of the cab drivers which results in much better relationships and less confrontation. Same technology, same process, different human approach.
Gonzalo Moreno's curator insight,
December 9, 2016 5:06 AM
TASK Management vs. PEOPLE Management, a superclassic...
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Back-to-the-future and too much time on your hands: create a Slack client for Commodore 64 via @gnat
Slack is great. Manysmarterpeople than me also think that Slack is great. Slack is great because its simple and easier to deal with than emails. With all the time it saves me on emails, I But while Slack might be great, it does not have a great native client for the Commodore 64. In fact, they have no client for Commodore 64 at all!
Farid Mheir's insight:
I thought this was just useless and funny at the same time to repurpose old technology for new uses. Maybe there is something here when considering digital transformation and extending life of existing technologies...
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT That being said, there is so much work involved - write assembler code, build custom hardware - that you have to appreciate how much we have evolved in the past 30 years as this solution can now be developed much more rapidly and much more easily with current tools and technologies.
https://scotch.io/tutorials/building-a-slack-clone-in-meteor-js-getting-started
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AWS Snowmobile is an exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. Snowmobile makes it easy to move massive volumes of data to the cloud, including video libraries, image repositories, or even a complete data center migration. Transferring data with Snowmobile is secure, fast and cost effective.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Moving large amounts of data to the cloud - petabytes and exabytes - would take years to do if transferred using networks and the Internet. Amazon provides its customers with dedicated and secure hard drives - they call snowballs - and truck - they call snowmobiles - to move the data from one data center to the next.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT There are limits to our network infrastructures and physical solutions often are required to migrate data to the cloud or digitize products. For example scanning paper files or converting books to digital ones often require specialized equipments in order to perform the work rapidly and cost effectively. Google had patented a book scanning equipment in order to create its Google books project in the past. I assume this same kind of innovation will start to happen in other fields as well. http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/13/3639016/google-books-scanner-vacuum-diy https://books.google.com/googlebooks/about/
More on this here: http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-snowmobile-truck-is-a-funny-for-real-product-2016-11
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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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Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts that is designed to get you quickly up to speed with deep learning; from first principles, all the way to discussions of some of the intricate details, with the purposes of achieving respectable performance on two established machine learning benchmarks: MNIST (classification of handwritten digits) and CIFAR-10 (classification of small images across 10 distinct classes—airplane, automobile, bird, cat, deer, dog, frog, horse, ship & truck).
Farid Mheir's insight:
Very technical series of articles on deep learning coding techniques. Useful to read even if you have only limited DL coding experience because it pulls the covers from over a very new way of coding - especially for old nerds like me!
part 2: http://online.cambridgecoding.com/notebooks/cca_admin/convolutional-neural-networks-with-keras part 3: http://online.cambridgecoding.com/notebooks/cca_admin/neural-networks-tuning-techniques
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A world beyond passwords is possible--technology is on the verge of rendering passwords obsolete, bolstering security as well as making users and customers happier.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A very good review of the limitations of passwords and the multiple new methods we will have to enhance our digital security.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT To go digital, being secure is very high on the list of priorities. Maslow had put security as the second layer in the pyramid of needs - and I believe this is also true in the new pyramid of digital needs!
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Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A study of 250K people over 2011-2015 timeframe across 33 countries in OECD shows that most users can barely operate their computer of mobile phone.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Digital transformation strategies and roadmap often fail to allocate sufficient effort/budget/time/resources to accompany employees and users with the proper change management. This study shows why: most people don't know how to perform simple computer tasks. Put them in front of a new software or technology and they will fail, or even worse, they will discredit the solution so as not to show their inability. Accompany them and recognize that they need help and they will succeed in their transition. And you will succeed in your digital transformation.
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I recently had the pleasure to meet Pilgrim Beart now the CEO of devicepilot at a TM Forum workshop about the Internet of Everything (IoE) business models and monetization. He shared his story about alert.me an early connected home start up founded in 2006 that was sold in 2015 to British Gas for 100 million €. He said that they were in intensive discussion with three industries: utilities, retail (DIY chains) and Telcos, as he felt for all three of them there was a huge potential to build a platform on top of their core business. Despite trialing and piloting with all three industries only the efforts with Telcos never led to any real-life implementations.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A very interesting article on the changes that could happen in the telecom industry with the evolution towards Internet of Things and 5G technologies.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT The paper highlights many important questions and decisions that players in the telecommunication industry must answer. I argue that similar questions must also be had in other industries, such as in Retail for example.
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The future of medical learning Take a look at the latest work from our 3D4Medical labs, where our developers and experience designers are working on immersive anatomical learning, by blending our models and technology with Mixed Reality.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Short video that shows how human anatomy is being put into augmented reality to create lifelike, interactive models to help medical students learn anatomy.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Right now this is a generic human but in the future we will be able to have our own bodies represented in AR for medical doctors to peer into our corpse, via scans and radiology pictures.
IF they can do this with a human body, why are not more companies investing in making AR models of their most complex machines (think boats, planes, complex manufacturing machines, etc.) to help training, safe operations and troubleshooting? I would imagine that digital transformation strategies and plans should include elements of AR and VR, don't you?
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From
qz
Emoji URLs for websites are the logical endpoint of a global, mobile internet. Emoji have quickly emerged as a language understood by almost anyone with a smartphone, regardless of their native tongue (though sometimes these symbols are up for interpretation). Rather than words and phrases, companies and individuals can promote a universal, memorable string of visual symbols easily entered into smartphones.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A short post with links to useful resources claims that we may very soon have emoji URLs. Instead of the familiar www.cnn.com for example you may find emojis such as hearts and smileys.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Internet has become so important and the browser so essential to many that URLs have started to "mean" something instead of being purely a reference to a website. I remember the dotcom URL rush, where savvy investors were registering short URLs such as pet.com or meaningful ones like mcdonalds.com then sitting on them for months or years and selling those URLs for thousands or hundreds of thousands. Are we going to relive that era? Maybe...
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Convolutional neural networks. Sounds like a weird combination of biology and math with a little CS sprinkled in, but these networks have been some of the most influential innovations in the field of computer vision. 2012 was the first year that neural nets grew to prominence as Alex Krizhevsky used them to win that year’s ImageNet competition (basically, the annual Olympics of computer vision), dropping the classification error record from 26% to 15%, an astounding improvement at the time.Ever since then, a host of companies have been using deep learning at the core of their services. Facebook uses neural nets for their automatic tagging algorithms, Google for their photo search, Amazon for their product recommendations, Pinterest for their home feed personalization, and Instagram for their search infrastructure.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A 3 part post that explains what CNNs are. It explains their architecture, and provides plenty of examples and diagrams to help even non technical readers understand the concepts.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT CNNs are essential technologies behind the current boom in artificial intelligence and deep learning that has led us to have very good speech recognition in Google Android phones, amazing image recognition, self driving cars, etc. etc. They are essential components of any digital transformation strategy.
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Accenture examines the challenges of immutability to permissioned blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems and explores a solution.
Farid Mheir's insight:
A report by Accenture that presents use cases where editing the blockchain may prove to be required, which goes against the blockchain fundamental principles.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT Reading the report you realize how the blockchain can be used for non monetary transactions and proposes reasons why editing it may be good. If you are considering - as I am - to leverage blockchain in your projects and strategy, then this is a must read paper.
Craig Broadbent's curator insight,
November 6, 2016 4:37 PM
THis is an interesting development. Agree with the premise that we should be open to changes!
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By retrofitting industrial robots with 3D printing guns and artificial intelligence algorithms, Ai Build has constructed machines that can see, create, and even learn from their mistakes.
Farid Mheir's insight:
Article describes how a 3D printing company uses AI to look at the 3D print and adjust it throughout. What is most impressive is the video of the creation of a very large 3D structure that is happening over many days.
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT We have been used to see 3D printers as desktop devices. With this we now see that robots equipped with 3D printing heads can now become production machines able to spit out - almost literally - very large structures. This has an impact on any manufacturing company as they look into the digitization fo their manufacturing plant.
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Curated by Farid Mheir
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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: