Shake That Thing: Does Amazon Have No Limits?

In 2003, #Amazon & #RadioShack each had about $5b in sales". In 2013, $AMZN was $75b to $RSH at $3.5b. http://t.co/kgK64VrBA2 #Retail #Tech
— Michael Parekh (@MParekh) March 4, 2014

The Atlantic: RadioShack Is Doomed (and So Is Retail)

RadioShack's long slide coincides the steep ascendance of Amazon as America's great brick-and-mortar destroyer. In 2003, Amazon and RadioShack each had about $5 billion in sales, as WSJ business editor Dennis Berman pointed out. Last year, Amazon had $75 billion to RadioShack's $3.5 billion. ....... At the end of 2013, RadioShack had 5,000 brick-and-mortar stores with 27,500 employees and $3.5 billion in sales, which is $127,000 in sales per employee. Its website is the 1,066th most popular in the world. At the end of 2013, Amazon had zero brick-and-mortar stores with 117,300 employees (full- and part-time) and $75 billion in sales, which is $640,000 in sales per employee. Its website is the 5th most popular in the world. ..... The company's biggest sales category is the wireless market, and that's some of the worst news for RadioShack. “The mobile phones category was very weak, and mall traffic is very weak,” analyst David Schick said. “The majority of folks have their mobile phones. We are past adoption.” ...... the confluence of e-retail and increasingly efficient global sourcing and stocking (i.e.: the Amazon & Wal-Mart Effect) would eventually gut retail employment ...... With $600,000 in sales per employee, Amazon is 3X-4X more efficient than the stores it's eating.

Does Amazon.com have no limits? It does. It has severe limits. (1) It is not even attempting to do High Touch. Health and education are all about High Touch, it seems. That same principle can be applied to traditional retail. (2) You can piggyback on Amazon infrastructure and do retail. You can use their warehouses.

Stores like RadioShack do have the option to rise from the ashes. But I doubt they will. The rethink that is required, I don't think they will go for it. RadioShack is like the New York Times. It has taken a Huffington Post to "get" digital. News is not going away. Neither is retail. If anything it is getting bigger than ever. RadioShack has to move from being a poorly stocked itty bitty warehouse to being an experience.

Hey @DKThomp I don't @amazon is the final word on retail, if there ever was http://t.co/MuFZ030eDl — Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) March 7, 2014

Hey @MParekh I don't think @amazon is the final word on retail. http://t.co/MuFZ030eDl — Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) March 7, 2014

Hello @RadioShack http://t.co/MuFZ030eDl — Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) March 7, 2014

Do Amazon's Lockers Help Retailers? Staples and Radio Shack said no while coffee and copy shops say yes. http://t.co/pWGJY04xxh via @BW — Brad Stone (@BradStone) September 20, 2013

Amazon lockers are one step beyond delivery by van. It is a little more High Touch, but not all the way still.

BusinessWeek: Do Amazon's Lockers Help Retailers? Depends on What They Sell

The incentive for any business hosting an Amazon locker isn’t the monthly stipend the online retailer pays—”not even worth it,” says the manager of a Manhattan copy shop—but the lure of higher store traffic given the online retailer’s enormous sales volume and the gazillions of brown boxes sent across the nation each day...... many people who can’t reliably get their online purchases at work or at home ..... Coffee shops, parking garages, supermarkets, pharmacies, and copy-printing stores don’t have Amazon as a rival, whereas a retailer such as Staples will quickly realize that Amazon sells virtually everything it does—and possibly cheaper. ...... one reason 7-Eleven, home of the microwave burrito and gargantuan Slurpee—neither sold fresh by Amazon—seems to like its lockers just fine. (You can purchase a $24.99, 7-Eleven-branded Slurpee Maker machine on the site, however.) .... Bonhomme says his copy shop’s traffic has gradually picked up over the six months that the business has had a locker.

Disney Bets $1 Billion on Technology to Track Theme-Park Visitors

Walt Disney’s (DIS) $1 billion experiment in crowd control, data collection, and wearable technology that could change the way people play—and spend—at the Most Magical Place on Earth. ..... If the system works, it could be copied not only by other theme parks but also by museums, zoos, airports, and malls. ...... MyMagic+ promises far more radical change. It’s a sweeping reservation and ride planning system that allows for bookings months in advance on a website or smartphone app. Bracelets called MagicBands, which link electronically to an encrypted database of visitor information, serve as admission tickets, hotel keys, and credit or debit cards; a tap against a sensor pays for food or trinkets. The bands have radio frequency identification (RFID) chips—which critics derisively call spychips because of their ability to monitor people and things. ..... Disney’s $14.1 billion theme park and resort business. ...... “a more immersive, more seamless, and more personal experience”—allowing Disney employees to address a child by name, for example, or wish someone a happy birthday. “The implications for big data and for personalization are extraordinary,” says Quinby. “It could radically change interaction between customers and the company.”

Apple's Location-Tracking iBeacon Is Poised for Use in Retail Sales

a new technology called iBeacon that can pinpoint your location to within a few feet. ...... Prior to iBeacon, iPhones and other Apple mobile devices relied on GPS and Wi-Fi tower triangulation to track their location. Those are great technologies and remain part of iOS, but they’re only precise within 30 feet or so. That’s fine if you’re walking into an airport; iOS Passbook users already see their boarding pass pop up when they arrive at their terminal. GPS and Wi-Fi are less useful in smaller spaces such as stores. IBeacon can nail down device location more precisely because it uses Bluetooth Low Energy, a new version of the ubiquitous wireless standard. ...... Bluetooth LE can run constantly, announcing your phone’s presence to nearby devices with the short-distance accuracy of a conventional Bluetooth at little cost to battery life. ........ IBeacon’s range is about 84,000 square feet, Gottipati says. A typical Macy’s store of 175,000 square feet would need two or three iBeacon transmitters. Third-party manufacturers such as Estimote sell a three-pack for $99 ...... That’s another advantage iBeacon has over NFC: It’s not just a payment system. “There are opportunities for marketing and selling that don’t play in the NFC world”

Dell's Pitch: You Can't All Use Amazon Why Amazon Is on a Warehouse Building Spree

For a company whose showrooms are all online, Amazon.com (AMZN) spends a staggering amount on bricks and mortar. The e-commerce giant has invested roughly $13.9 billion since 2010 to build 50 new warehouses, more than it had cumulatively spent on storage facilities since its 1994 founding, bringing the total to 89 at the end of 2012. ..... Software that can sort items by delivery date and optimize storage space has helped Amazon roughly double the number of items it can ship per facility, says Clark. The warehouses are operational within 10 months, down from two years before the building spree started. ..... as the company adds 5,000 full-time jobs in 17 U.S. warehouses to its 20,000 existing employees, along with 2,000 customer service workers ...... Upstarts such as online grocery deliverer Instacart are moving in the opposite direction. “We don’t have to build warehouses, lease a fleet of trucks, or manage perishable inventory,” says Instacart Chief Executive Officer Apoorva Mehta, a former Amazon employee. Unlike AmazonFresh, which ships groceries in Seattle and Los Angeles, Mehta’s San Francisco-based startup guarantees delivery in less than two hours, using contract shoppers who drive their own cars to customers. ..... Since the start of 2010 the company’s stock has more than doubled.

To Tout Good Jobs, Visit Main Street, Not Amazon

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Deep Learning

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"..... deep learning, a relatively new field of artificial intelligence research that aims to achieve tasks like recognizing faces in video or words in human speech ..... "

Is Google Cornering the Market on Deep Learning?

Companies like Google expect deep learning to help them create new types of products that can understand and learn from the images, text, and video clogging the Web..... Not everyone is happy about the arrival of the proverbial Google Bus in one of academia’s rarefied precincts..... a cultural “boundary between academia and Silicon Valley” had been crossed ..... deep learning experts were in such demand that they command the same types of seven-figure salaries as some first-year NFL quarterbacks..... Of the three computer scientists considered among the originators of deep-learning—Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio—only Bengio has so far stayed put in the ivory tower. “I just didn’t think earning 10 times more will make me happier,” he says. “As an academic I can choose what to work on and consider very long-term goals.” ..... in December, DeepMind published a paper showing that its software could do that by learning how to play seven Atari2600 games using as inputs only the information visible on a video screen, such as the score. For three of the games, the classics Breakout, Enduro, and Pong, the computer ended up playing better than an expert human. ..... might be particularly useful in helping robots learn to navigate the human world

Have you sometimes wondered, especially if you are someone who takes, uploads and publicly shares a ton of photos, that maybe noone else is seeing all those photos? What if your thing is video not photo? Then definitely even less people are watching the videos. What if there are important nuggets in them? What if it is a problem that no one is watching your videos?

Deep Learning

Deep-learning software attempts to mimic the activity in layers of neurons in the neocortex, the wrinkly 80 percent of the brain where thinking occurs. The software learns, in a very real sense, to recognize patterns in digital representations of sounds, images, and other data. ..... computer scientists can now model many more layers of virtual neurons than ever before ..... remarkable advances in speech and image recognition. ..... Last June, a Google deep-learning system that had been shown 10 million images from YouTube videos proved almost twice as good as any previous image recognition effort at identifying objects such as cats. Google also used the technology to cut the error rate on speech recognition in its latest Android mobile software. ...... a demonstration of speech software that transcribed his spoken words into English text with an error rate of 7 percent, translated them into Chinese-language text, and then simulated his own voice uttering them in Mandarin. ...... image recognition, search, and natural-language understanding ...... machine intelligence is starting to transform everything from communications and computing to medicine, manufacturing, and transportation. .... “deep learning has reignited some of the grand challenges in artificial intelligence.” ..... software that is familiar with the attributes of, say, an edge or a sound ...... This is much the same way a child learns what a dog is by noticing the details of head shape, behavior, and the like in furry, barking animals that other people call dogs. ...... In 2006, Hinton developed a more efficient way to teach individual layers of neurons. The first layer learns primitive features, like an edge in an image or the tiniest unit of speech sound. It does this by finding combinations of digitized pixels or sound waves that occur more often than they should by chance. Once that layer accurately recognizes those features, they’re fed to the next layer, which trains itself to recognize more complex features, like a corner or a combination of speech sounds. The process is repeated in successive layers until the system can reliably recognize phonemes or objects. ...... At least 80 percent of the recent advances in AI can be attributed to the availability of more computer power ...... Until last year, Google’s Android software used a method that misunderstood many words. But in preparation for a new release of Android last July, Dean and his team helped replace part of the speech system with one based on deep learning. Because the multiple layers of neurons allow for more precise training on the many variants of a sound, the system can recognize scraps of sound more reliably, especially in noisy environments such as subway platforms. Since it’s likelier to understand what was actually uttered, the result it returns is likelier to be accurate as well. Almost overnight, the number of errors fell by up to 25 percent—results so good that many reviewers now deem Android’s voice search smarter than Apple’s more famous Siri voice assistant. ..... Some critics say deep learning and AI in general ignore too much of the brain’s biology in favor of brute-force computing. ....... deep learning fails to account for the concept of time .... human learning depends on our ability to recall sequences of patterns: when you watch a video of a cat doing something funny, it’s the motion that matters, not a series of still images like those Google used in its experiment. “Google’s attitude is: lots of data makes up for everything” ...... deep-learning models can use phoneme data from English to more quickly train systems to recognize the spoken sounds in other languages ....... more sophisticated image recognition could make Google’s self-driving cars much better ....... Kurzweil will tap into the Knowledge Graph, Google’s catalogue of some 700 million topics, locations, people, and more, plus billions of relationships among them. It was introduced last year as a way to provide searchers with answers to their queries, not just links. ....... apply deep-learning algorithms to help computers deal with the “soft boundaries and ambiguities in language.” ..... sensors throughout a city might feed deep-learning systems that could, for instance, predict where traffic jams might occur.

It is possible to imagine a city that has zero traffic jams. If all cars are smart, driverless cars, and all traffic is machine coordinated, it is possible to get rid of traffic jams.

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Twitter Need Not Be Facebook To Do Well

Image via CrunchBase

It Turns Out Twitter’s Not for Everyone

Twitter need not be a mainstream product used by half of humanity to do really well as a business. Instead of trying to imitate Facebook (O, we also show you pictures in your stream!) Twitter could just deepen the relationship it has with its users.

If Google can help me search through the web, Twitter should at least be able to help me search through all tweets that rest on Twitter's servers. But it does not do that. That one feature alone would take Twitter into the stratosphere. I might not need a Dropbox. Twitter would be my Dropbox for the most part. Most stuff I like to save come in the form of URLs.

If you were to force me to pick between Facebook and Twitter - and I am glad you don't - I would pick Twitter.

So if you can be so well positioned for both search and social, and you were mobile before mobile became mobile, what gives? Beats me.

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The Natural User Interface And The Differently Abled

English: NASA StarChild image of Stephen Hawking. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I think the Natural User Interface, of which the touch is just the beginning and gesture is the next big step, though not the final step, not by a long shot, is a big gift for all of us, but it might be extra promising for the differently abled. Senior homes can make use of drones and robots. Voice commands would cut language barriers. The Internet is not meant for English only, and should not dump you into your particular language silo. You communicate, let the Internet translate.

The keyboard, if you think about it, does feel unnatural.

The ultimate is being able to command your computing environment with your eye movements, Stephen Hawking style.

At some level we are all differently. A lot of start wearing glasses early on. As soon as you put one on, you have gently stepped into the differently abled zone. Smart, robotic limbs are not a challenge anymore. They are not innovation challenges, they are simply now scaling challenges.

Your brain is one of the last parts of your body to give up on you. Which means the NUI taken to its logical conclusion will allow us to raise the retirement age. And since retirement is voluntary anyways, a lot of us could hope to live long productive lives through NUI.

Education remains the great unsolved mystery of our knowledge age, ironically. The industrial era education engines/structures don't recognize concepts like people learn at their own paces with their own styles. That individualization is now possible. But there are old institutional structures that get in the way.

There are enormous implications on education and health because a knowledge economy puts a major, unprecedented emphasis on human capital. Human capital is a concept much bigger than human rights because it takes human rights for granted.

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Internet Of Things And Climate Change

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Only something at the scale of the Internet Of Things will allow for humanity to have an intelligent relationship with the environment. Right now we are collectively flying blind. But when most elements of the biosphere will connect with us and when an average person will have a pretty rich understanding of what is going on and how enormous it all is, that will pave way for some smart action. Political will can thus be created.

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My New Startup

My new tech startup is in the mobile gaming space. I could call it the first tech startup of my life.

In 1999 I was a founding member - not the leader - of a tech startup that did really well for a few rounds until the nuclear winter hit and it was Gone With The Wind. We were trying to build the top South Asian online community. In early 2008 I met the stated goal and raised 100K for my startup whose vision was what the Chromebook is today. In early 2009 me and my Co-Founder gave the money back to the investors in the face of an extremely ugly economy: we did not see us raising round two money. This is my third attempt. Third time is the charm. When you have four borderline genius developers working towards a private beta product for equity, you know you got something.

There is a huge culture clash between the tech startup world and the rest of the economy. When you try to raise money from people who don't "get it," are not from this world, it is like you accidentally touched naked electric wires. Wow, what was that? You get all sorts of weird reactions.

The Angel List is a great starting point. Although I am in mind to pay Fred Wilson a surprise visit. Very likely I will show up and he will be "away" at one of his 100 Board meetings, either elsewhere in the city or on the Left Coast.

I feel like he owes me money for all the comments I have left at his blog over the years.

Fred, I have had your curiosity, now do I have your attention?



From The Angel List I have a short list of about 50 angels who have (1) listed themselves as interested in mobile gaming, (2) are in or near NYC, although not all are, and (3) who are not too far down in the ranks at the site. I am going through the list, and I am like, I'd want to know and hang out and converse with these people regardless of if they gave me money or not. They just come across as so very interesting people.

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Last night I went to the most mind blowing MeetUp.