EP018 - Target "Goldfish", Instacart, and Amazon Peeves
Amazon News:
This week is the 10th anniversary of AWS. Stratechery has a great piece about how Amazon leverages AWS with it's novel strategy for scale Journalists touring Amazon Fulfillment centers, noticed that Amazon uses video shaming to discourage theft. You can take your own tour of an Amazon FC by signing up here. Dropbox announced that they are (mostly) moving off of AWS and developing their own storage. Walmart has released OneOps, their platform for deploying cloud based infrastructure apps, such as Walmarts own e-commerce platform. Apps can be agnostically deployed across Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Rackspace, and OpenStack. Amazon has VR guru Avi Bar-Zeev, and filed for a patent on room based headset-less VR. Amazon also filed for a patent around using selfies for payment. Amazon private label suits have been favorably reviewed by business insider.:Jason & Scot discuss our Amazon peeves:
Prime now not well integrated website Amazon Echo App Store (Skills) is just a 37 page list of apps. Delivery drivers, pantry GUI, and customer service edge cases could all use improvement.Non-Amazon news:
Ultra announced surprisingly strong earnings, and plans to open 100 new stores, and dramatically expand brand boutiques. US Dept of Commerce released it's February retail sales data. Brands are now paying instacart for deliveries.Target project "goldfish"
Target is running ads for engineers for a mysterious new project, codenamed "Goldfish". The job listings specify "You must have a deep understanding of the fundamentals of retail marketplaces, social commerce and influencer networks," which caused Jason & Scot to speculate about what the project might be.
Scot is in Florida this week for the Bronto conference, giving a talk on "E-Commerce and the On-Demand Economy"
Episode 18 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, March 15th, 2016.
http://retailgeek.com/podcast
Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at Razorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.
