Main Takeaways: Baked by Melissa gives away 100,000 cupcakes to prove love and sugary treats really do win. Oculus Go is better than a party trick. Instagram decides that they want more than just dopamine-fueled likes from their users. Amazon vs. Alibaba, who will win the battle of the commerce giants? Did the world peak in the mid 90's? Now we can all recognize all the Royal Wedding guests. Magento Imagine: Coolest Kids on the E-Commerce Block: Phillip was the MC for Magento Imagine, which is supremely cool. Phillip was so excited to be able to be able to share the stage with the esteemable  Sucharita Kodali. On a slight side note: Phillip also got to interview Melissa Ben-Ishay on her business and how Baked By Melissa gave away 100,000 cupcakes in their #sidewithlove campaign, and to spread love and kindness. Also: Phillip opened a merch store on his other podcast to raise awareness about mental health, with all the proceeds going to Open Sourcing Mental Illness. Oculus Go: Cost-Effective Virtual Reality: Brian is super excited about this, and apparently so is the President of Sony, and everyone else. Could most of the hype surrounding Oculus be because of its price point? Brian and Phillip agree that Oculus is well.. good for what it is, entry level VR. One of the ways that this kind of tech would be incredibly valuable Verge Cast has a great review of Oculus Go. One of the ways that Oculus or similar technology can be really valuable is in the commerce space, in which basic level VR could be utilized to bring the storefront to the convenience of a customer's home or increase the value of an in-store experience. Brian is ready to go out and purchase an Oculus Go, Philip was three seconds away from buying one. Brian really doesn't want to hand his data over to Facebook. Beyond Just Likes: Get Ready to Shop The {Insta} Gram! Phillip decides that calling it "The Gram" might actually be worse than people who say "Insta". Instagram has been steadily adding commerce features for a while, including Instagram business features, and shoppable, but now purchasing through Instagram is much simpler. Now, nstagram will allow users to purchase directly through the Instagram app, and allow for payment information to be entered in the app. Basically, feel free to shop in the privacy of Facebook's data centers. Brian wonders if David Marcus had anything to do with this. Phillip says that this will just cut out the middleman, because before people would just purchase products they saw on Instagram off of the Amazon website. Will this hurt Amazon? Spoiler alert: Phillip is a baby hypebeast with folders full of sneakers. Will This Entire Episode be About Amazon? Amazon seems to be simultaneously sending push notifications for Chewbacca bobbleheads and trying to make Snapchat (spark) a thing (it's never going to be a thing) for some reason. If Amazon would bring Amazon pay into Instagram, then Phillip's life would be complete. Amazon is also trying to go after Alibaba, by picking up the tab for new merchants. Phillip says that it would be interesting to have Amazon pay buttons all over the internet, so that people could experience brands on Amazon even if the entire catalogue wasn't on Amazon. Check out Eric Broussard Keynote from Magento Imagine to better understand this. Everyone seems to have a different understanding of what Amazon actually is: music, streaming, echo? Or is Amazon two-day shipping? The price increase in prime seems to be the end of the world, Phillip is going to beat Amazon at its own game by buying more things on Amazon. The amount of Amazon prime users has reached 90MM people, and has exceeded any other voting bloc, including evangelicals. "Your customer is Amazon's customer". Brian can still not comment on anything Amazon related. Does GenZ have Amazon Prime 2-Day Delivery Privilege? Life seems pretty peachy for those born after the year 2000, especially regarding commerce. Brian says people born in the 2000's are growing up in a post-Amazon world, where they can order anything and have it shipped in two days. Brian also predicts that Phillip's shoe addiction might be long-lasting. Phillip laments that he cannot get the sneakers he wants within two days, proving that Amazon prime may have spoiled everyone's shipping expectations forever. Also: Phillip describes how ordering shoes used to work: and the process sounds both terrifying and exhausting. Was there even a life before smartphones? Bar banter is no longer a thing, which is kind of sad. All TV world problems have already been solved. Sky News is Using Facial Recognition to Identify Royal Wedding Guests: Sky News has decided to make the royal wedding a bit more entertaining, by using facial recognition & AI to let everyone know who's who at Meghan Markle's upcoming wedding to Prince Harry. This will be powered by Amazon's recognition cloud-based machine learning tool. Phillip finds this all fascinating. Brian says that this type of technology is an excellent opportunity for commerce and really could change the world. Maybe the future of smart TV's is personalized context. Brian cannot wait until Linkedin gets facial recognition so he can know everything about everyone when he goes to a conference. Go over to Futurecommerce.fm and give us your feedback! We love to hear from our listeners! Retail Tech is moving fast and Future Commerce is moving faster.

"Secondhand Commerce" is changing the way that we purchase luxury goods - from watches and handbags to sneakers - secondary markets are finding life after the initial purchase. Plus: Macy's acquires Story in a move to bring experiential retail to the big department store. Special thanks to Ryan MacInnis of Voysis for joining us on this episode of Future Commerce! Apologies for the audio quality in this episode as we encountered a technical issue. Should be fixed going forward! Thanks for listening! Main Takeaways: The advent of Voice, AR, and VR is allowing smaller retailers to compete with Amazon and Walmart. Phillip is a hype-beast-in-training. Second-hand and limited-edition may be calls-to-action for consumers. Is Amazon at war with everyone? Mobile-based-commerce may soon overtake desktop. Ryan (or Brian) And The Rise of Voice in Commerce: Ryan McIness of Voysis is standing in for Brian, and he seems pretty excited about it. Ryan gives some insight into Voysis: "Voysis is a B2B solution that mimics the Alexa experience". "If you have a brand and you want to voice-enable your mobile app, then you come to us, and we make sure its based off your data and your product catalog, the intelligence smart stuff that's related to your brand." Apparently, everyone's going to Vegas to talk about commerce. Voysis puts out an infographic that basically breaks the internet: The shock value may have made this go viral, in it Voysis claims that by 2020 75% of all households will have a voice-enabled device. Phillip points out that a lot of people are really starting to see voice as part of their brands. Also: "It makes you question how your brand voice translates to other mediums and how a brand goes beyond written word or logo." Ryan says that the advent of Voice, as well as AR and VR, has allowed brands to actually compete with Amazon and Walmart. But Amazon does have Alexa. Old is The New Brand-New: Second-Hand Commerce Edition: So consumers seem to be trying something new... ahem old by buying second-hand luxury items in a secondary market. In fact: there's a resale report by ThreadUp that points to the fact that one in three women shopped second-hand last year. Simon Birkhead writing in Daily Insights over at Gartner L2 talks about how second-hand purchases are becoming trendy, and resale sites like Poshmark, TheRealReal, and Depop are seeing a significant uptick in traffic. Phillip asks sneakerhead Ryan if he has ever bought second-hand sneakers? Ryan and Phillip discuss how Phillip is a hypebeast-in-training, and how he fell into the sneaker community by accident. Spoiler alert: It involves orange sneakers, limited edition LeBron 15's and Casey Niestat. The second-hand market does seem to defy all digital commerce logic Phillip wonders if a big box retailer could get ahold of this and make a move, would it be on a retail roadmap? Limited Edition Items Bring All The Consumers to The Yard: Phillip has finally figured out segues. Another Future Commerce alumni Richard Kestenbaum has written an article for Forbes on Macy's acquiring Story. Why is Story so cool? Because in keeping with their name, every six-eight weeks the store completely changes, and new items all keeping with a chosen theme (chosen by founder Rachel Shechtman) are curated and sold for a limited time. This kind of commerce is interesting because it creates a feeling of possible FOMO, and doesn't allow consumers to sit too long on purchasing situations. Phillip points out that brands with evergreen products can use limited-edition items to take more risks and be more daring. Voice can be a big part of this and allows brands to ahem... find their voice. Ryan makes the point that limited-edition experiential retail may help bring customers in the door, and then allow brands to be innovative to keep them. Is Walmart Trying to Challenge Amazon in India? Walmart and Amazon may be going head to head in India. So Walmart has acquired 77% of e-commerce brand Flipkart Flipkart currently number one in India for e-commerce, can anyone guess who is number two? In fact, Flipkart was started by two former Amazon employees. Phillip says that this points to a long-term strategy by Walmart, and actually changes the way he thinks about Walmarts place in commerce. Ryan says that this brings to mind Uber going into China and then selling its stake to its competitor (Grab), will Amazon buy Flipkart to step up its game? One of the most innovative parts of Walmarts strategy is how they are trying to personalize recommendations, this might actually give them an edge over Amazon. Amazon Sends Out a Siren's Call to Paypal Users: Amazon may be trying to start its own war, with Paypal, How is Amazon trying to compete? By hyper incentivizing Amazon Pay. Amazon announces they will help negotiate lower fees, and help merchants with discounts if they adopt Amazon Pay. This announcement caused Square and Paypal stock to short-circuit. Why does everything always come back to Amazon? Phillip points out that Brian wouldn't be able to discuss this since he works for Amazon. Can The Rise of Mobile-Based-Commerce Change Everything? Adobe says that we may soon be at the point where mobile-based-commerce overtakes desktop-commerce. Also: Retailers are saying that 70% of their traffic is coming from mobile. Ryan says that this shouldn't really surprise anyone. Macy's came out and said that mobile is becoming a much bigger part of their brand, and their new mobile app is integrated with their retail stores . Now, people never have to interact with another person, when in-store, or online, which sounds like a great idea? Phillip points out that not all conversion is direct-to-purchase. "Companies like Instagram enabling in-app purchasing is the path and the shortest path to purchase." What brands must realize that there really is no one strategy and that some consumers want in-store, and some like to shop online, and experiential retail really is everything. Go over to Futurecommerce.fm and give us your feedback! We love to hear from our listeners! Retail Tech is moving fast and Future Commerce is moving faster.

We're back! Brian joins Amazon, we talk subscription movie passes driving return to the shopping malls; and are we seeing leading indicators of unchecked inflation? PLUS: Who is the Nordstrom customer? Main Takeaways: Have Phillip and Brian run out of things to talk about? Odd-couple partnerships have become a thing in retail. Brian can never talk about Amazon, ever. GDPR: Friend or foe to small business? Brian makes a prediction that may change the way we regard the economy. Big Box Retail Crossover: Odd Couple Edition: Brian and Phillip graciously request a check from Magento for all the promoting they are doing this episode. Retail crossover is happening, and all the big box retailers are super into it. Nordstrom is now offering Anthropologie Home in their stores, will this bring new customers into Nordstroms? JCPenny is partnering up with Sephora (one of the easiest places to get lost in), which will remind customers that JC Penny still exists. Also, regarding Lord and Taylor and Walmart, the ultimate odd couple, can Wallmart upscale its offerings? Barbara Thau poses the question: Are retailers becoming mini malls? Kohl's is downsizing some of its stores, and adding German grocer Aldi's to their space, can discount shopping, and local produce make for a better retail experience? Brian points out that retailers are now free to be frenemies. Phillip wonders where these retailers are sourcing their data from, in deciding to form what may be the best crossover episodes ever. Can Movie Pass Bring Theaters Back From The Dead? Random movie news: Malls are trading the ghosts of retail's past for luxury movie theaters. In an effort to get people to actually go to the movies, Movie Pass is basically trying to be the Netflix for movie theaters. Brian is not all about movies, but find Movie Pass interesting. Phillip brings up a Retail Wire article that questions whether Movie Pass can reveive dying malls? One really interesting data point from the article: 54% of Americans prefer to watch movies at home, with only 13% preferring to go to the theaters. Brian points out that this makes sense: people can have an equitable movie theatre experience at home, especially with the emergence of streaming services like Netflix, and Hulu, and Amazon Prime. Phillip only uses Netflix to watch The Office (and Jessica Jones) which is pretty strange to anyone who has ever binge-watched anything on Netflix (which is basically everyone). Brian calls Phillip old. Does Anyone Really Understand GDPR? Phillip laments that only large business will have the resources to follow GDPR to the letter of the law. Many e-commerce platforms are only following the spirit of the law, not the letter, and it's putting all the onus on small business. If any e-commerce platforms are interested, here are the actual compliance regulations. Brian says he wants to wait before he makes a full prediction on how GDPR will impact small business. Are people okay with data sharing as long as they get some value in exchange? Brian says that government has a role to play in ensuring companies are not taking advantage of their customers. Sheryl Sandburg has said that for users who want to opt out of data sharing, there may be a premium Facebook product in the works. This may be a little daunting to some, who still want to believe that Facebook is totally harmless. Phillip wonders why the US government cannot just tattoo our foreheads. Could Economic Growth be Different Based on Social Class? Brian broaches an idea: Perhaps everyone is wrong about inflation, and the markers for economic growth. Brian is a big fan of The Atlantic. What if money is worth a lot less than we think, and what if that is what is confusing people about rate of economic growth? Seattle passes a $15 minimum wage to bolster wage growth, and somehow the world doesn't suddenly combust. Phillip points out that buying power depends on socio-economic status, so not everyone is really gaining the same from the uptick in economic growth. And as usual, the middle class will get the least and pay the most. Go over to Futurecommerce.fm and give us your feedback! We love to hear from our listeners! Retail Tech is moving fast and Future Commerce is moving faster.

"Hopefully, GDPR is the medicine we need to start putting our customers at the center of the story, and not our conversion rates." We review Shoptalk 2018 in the wake of Cambridge Analytica with a discussion about the content, the vendors, the experience, and how merchants can take the knowledge gained at a show like Shoptalk and turn it into actionable results. "Hopefully, GDPR is the medicine we need to start putting our customers at the center of the story, and not our conversion rates." We review Shoptalk 2018 in the wake of Cambridge Analytica with a discussion about the content, the vendors, the experience, and how merchants can take the knowledge gained at a show like Shoptalk and turn it into actionable results. Main Takeaways: Brian and Phillip recap some of the standouts of Shoptalk 2018 and how these standouts made lasting impressions. AR and VR are being implemented in new and creative ways and could very well be shaping the future of the retail industry. The technology that was being developed a few years ago is now being used in the state of the current retail industry but is there room for its development? Cambridge Analytica happened and shook the public to its core but will data security regulations like GDPR be able to prevent future leaks? One Beef, Two Beef, Red Beef, Blue Beef: Brian and Phillip start by bringing up some beef between them that they at this year's Shoptalk Conference. Brian registered for Press Passes for Shoptalk and listed himself as Host of Future Commerce, and Phillip as the co-host. (Scandalous!) The Future Commerce content team accompanied Brian and Phillip this year to help capture the show and be active on social media. Brian and Phillip went out to Red Rock Canyon, and even though they got stranded out in the desert, they can not recommend the location highly enough. Brian's Big Shoptalk Announcement: The Career Change: Brian made a big announcement at Shoptalk and let us know that he is now employed by Amazon (cue music) Expect the tone of the show to shift so that now Phillip will prod Brian until he is forced to recuse himself from the conversation. Brian is super excited to be on board at Amazon and thinks that his role working with the pay team and eCommerce platforms is a great fit. VR in eCommerce: Separating the Virtual World from the Real World: Brian hosted a panel at Shoptalk in which he spoke with Brian Cavanagh from the Hershey Company, Mike Festa from Wayfair Next, and Greg Jones from the Google AR Team. The Hershey Company is partnering with goPuff to create a VR Shopping App that will allow consumers to purchase convenience store items within a VR experience. The first thing that jumped out to Phillip as he was watching the panel was the Hershey Company's unique take on VR, which is to not replicate a commerce experience in the real world in VR. Phillip describes the Hershey VR experience as a Willy Wonka-esque experience in which you can explore a colorful world and purchase almost everything you see. The Retail Renaissance: A Recurring Shoptalk Theme: Phillip recalls that a recurring theme at this year's Shoptalk was the fact that retail is not dead, but rather, we are going through a Retail Renaissance. (And thus a show title was born.) Someone even compared the artistic progression of Picasso throughout his life to the evolution of retail to where it is today. Digital Hurdles: Overcoming VR Roadblocks: We still think about the online shopping experience in regards to aisles and carts, but with VR being such an expressive medium, the possibilities are endless. What's the most efficient way to shop versus what's the most experiential way to shop? The biggest challenge that retailers will face when trying to get into AR or VR is creating a library of 3D assets. Brian predicts that the 3D asset problem is not a problem that retailers should have to solve, but instead, brands themselves will provide the assets from the point of origin to retailers. Predictions Become Reality: Future Commerce at Shoptalk: Phillip talks about how nice it was to see so many listeners at Shoptalk and brings up how, for avid listeners of the show, a lot of the topics that were brought up at Shoptalk were things that they had already heard on Future Commerce. Iterations of things that Brian and Phillip had predicted on the show have come to fruition in the real world by brands known across the globe. Trevor Sumner from Perch gave a rundown of the store of the future that incorporates responsive and interactive displays that interact with physical items from store shelves. All of the information that we have available online is now available to us in new and dynamic ways right when we need it as we shop. Trends and Topics: The Arcs of Future Commerce: Phillip takes us back in time and talks about some of the arcs of Future Commerce as defined by the main conversation points of each year: the first year was voice and conversational technology, the second year was AR and VR, and this year's focus has been disruption and protecting our private data. Back in October of 2017, Phillip and Brian advised a retailer that stated not to believe anyone that said they were using AI or machine learning because AI has been reduced to a marketing term without any actual functionality. Phillip couldn't believe that Shoptalk had an entire area devoted to AI and Machine Learning and that the application of what could be a transformational technology to retail is abysmal at this point in 2018. (Phillip's feeling spicy today.) Brian brings up a past episode with Jonathan Epstein from 2 years ago that had one of the best applications of machine learning that he's ever seen, and there hasn't been much more innovation in those two years by other players in the industry. Making an Impression: The Standouts of Shoptalk: Phillip did not recognize the Handy booth until around the third day at which point he saw that they were everywhere. Handy has partnered with Walmart and will provide handyman services to Walmart customers in over 2,000 stores nationwide. Phillip also gives accolades to the startup Hemster, a technology/services company that provides tailoring and alterations (that are incredibly cheap) to business and individuals in addition to free delivery service of the alterations. Another standout was Mizzen+Main for the simple fact that it was an actual fashion brand at the show with clothes and that their domain name is comfortable.af. (Brian got to bring a Mizzen+Main shirt home and agrees that it is indeed Comfortable AF.) Three Shoptalks Later: Using the Past to Predict the Future: Brian states that we have hit a spot in technology where what is being spoken about in Shoptalk is similar to what was spoken about in Shoptalk 1 (which was two years ago). Brian also predicts that the technology that we are using now will be used for the next 3-5 years and will power the next wave of commerce. "There is too much to do with the technology that we have and too much opportunity to make money on it so people will put their dollars and effort towards that and we will probably see IRCE and NRF follow in this direction as well." Is it a good thing that other conferences will start to look more like Shoptalk with the current technology stack? Phillip Goes on a Rant: Technology is Not a Replacement for Quality: There was more than one brand that Phillip spoke with that had filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in the past 12-18 months that ranged from big-box retailers to actual fashion brands and the fact that some of these companies were looking at AR and VR as a means to save their business was terrifying to him. The current technologies that are emerging today are not replacements for the fundamentals of being a good brand with a good product that connects with your customer. Brian agrees that if you are looking at any one technology to save your business, you are looking in the wrong spot as you have made some bad business decisions to get where you are today. "If you are in eCommerce and you are not connecting with your customers regularly, then you are missing out on a fundamental". The State of Data Security: Cambridge Analytica Fallout: Brian references Episode 55 in which predictions were made for what was going to happen in 2018 and Brian predicted the idea of giving shoppers access to their data to help them leverage that data to accomplish things and sure enough, companies are beginning to do this. If you are affected by GDPR, you should probably consider that you don't want to run two different data strategies across channels and start planning your future data strategies now. Data security could not be more timely as the Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light during Shoptalk. What do you we actually need in our commerce experiences that can minimize data requirements as opposed to including everything just because we have the capability of plugging it in? "We need to put our customers at the center of the story instead of our conversion rates at the center of our story." Phillip predicts that in the same way that companies became "green" in response to customer demand, he sees an opportunity for companies to go private in which they will not partner with third-party companies to protect your data. As always: We want to hear what our listeners think! Should AR and VR play a bigger role in the future of retail? Does the Cambridge Analytica breach change the face of data privacy and will GDPR be a step in the right directions towards the protection of customer data? Let us know in the content section on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Linkedin. Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels, and we love hearing from our listeners! Retail Tech is moving fast, but Future Commerce is moving faster.

"No company can afford to stand still" - we sat down with David J. Katz - a Linked In Top Voice in Retail - to discuss how technology is changing consumer demands and pushing companies into creating better experiences. Show Notes: Main Takeaways: David J. Katz is here from Randa, the world's largest men's accessory company, that ships more than 75 million units of product a year. With the ever-changing technological landscape, retail has is being disrupted with advancements made in technology, and therefore, it's important to change approaches to fit the current retail environment. Digitizing the traditional brick-and-mortar shopping experience is essential today when customers rely on their phones for information and recommendations. Entertainment has taken a more significant role in retail than ever before but is there a worthwhile and lucrative space for entertainment in the coming years in the commerce world? The Most Rational, Logical Path You Can Imagine: David recounts the journey that got him to where he is today: a journey that began with him as a medical student studying neuroscience that granted him a unique view into the psychology and physiology of human behavior. Thanks to a bribe from his family, David took a year deferment before spending the next nine years in med school, and he ended up not going back and eventually went to business school instead. He got hands-on experience in operating businesses that had wholesale products and selling those to retailers. Brian points out some of David's prolific achievements, such as being named one of LinkedIn's Top Voice in Retail. Stimulating Customer Response to Grow Your Business: Because Randa is dominant in their market, their goal is to stimulate customer response to buy more product as opposed to getting a larger share of the market. Phillip brings up a recent Merchant to Merchant live podcast in which he spoke to Filson about how they are combatting the vertical challenge of modern technology by going horizontal with their product line. David illustrates Randa's strategy of increasing consumer exposure to belts by surrounding the pants sections of department stores with their products. (Can you sense some of that psychology education here?) With their market share and their marketing spend capability, Randa can ensure that every color in every brand is always in stock. What happens when you are shopping online? Do all the infrastructure specifications and display strategies put in place by David get disrupted? Growing Up Technological: The Cycle of Disruption: David takes us through the cycle of retail (from the days of the Wells Fargo wagon in fact) and how as technology advances, the retail cycle is disrupted. Phillip brings up that he has seen some recent advances in belt technology and asks David if they are able to improve and drive technology advancement to capture those areas of the market. "David responds with some serious pearls of wisdom by saying, "Nothing is so perfect, so ideal that you cannot reinvent, reimagine, and innovate to make it better and more relevant." As an example of some innovations made in the world of belts, there is belt that is also a phone charger. Talk about squeezing the last bit of power out of your smartphone. David brings up that women are typically faster at adapting to new technologies, which is why there aren't as many advancements in men's fashion as there are in women's fashion. Brian also brings up another technological advancement in the form of RFID-blocking wallets, an advancement that prevents the scanning of your id through your wallet. Digitizing the Brick-and-Mortar Experience: How to Recreate the In-Store Experience Online: Brian asks David what he is investing in or working on in regards to online shopping to mirror the amazing strategies that Randa has in place in regards to their brick-and-mortar installations. Randa is using a lot of digital technologies to dynamically display appropriate accessories to compliment what the customer is shopping for, and then they will continue to market those accessories even after the customer has finished their online shopping session. David also brings up that even while shopping in a physical store, customers still resort to their phones for product information, so it's essential for Randa to have an online presence, even for customers that are shopping at brick-and-mortar locations. Ever Changing Bits and Pieces: What is a brand today? Brian brings up an article recently published by Future Commerce alumnus Richard Kestenbaum (check out his episode) that defines "ingredient brands" and asks David how he sees brands evolving. Ingredient brands are essentially the things inside a product that make it more valuable (think Intel Inside). Randa has invented and patented belt technologies like Exact Fit that can be considered ingredient branding that they put inside other brands. The word brand initial came from cattle branding which dates back centuries and is found across many cultures, and we still identify ourselves as part of a "tribe" with similarly branded others which grant you membership and validation. Brian brings up that when customers used to associate themselves with a brand, they were assured of three things: A certain lifestyle coordination with that brand, value coordinating with the cost of items from that brand, and the benefit of being identified by other because of their brand choice. Today, with social media and online verification while shopping, you can see thousands and thousands of reviews and comments on any given product instantly. David predicts that there will be a tiny number of influential national and global brands that still mean something valuable, but there will be hundreds of thousands of digitally native brands that are targeting specific niches of customers. The Modern Proprietor: Big Data Knows What You Need: The ability to target the interests of customers on such a granular level is a powerful tool that will lead to changing the face of branding itself. David also brings everything full circle by comparing the data mining of today to the proprietors of old, both know their customers needs, interests, and wants and can custom tailor their products and recommendations to fit those needs. New data points are being created all the time, such as data related to your body that can even further customize personal product recommendations. David explains how they are just beginning to use AI to recommend products based on an image, essentially superimposing a belt onto the image that compliments what you're wearing. The Shiny Factor: Not All That Glimmers is Gold: Phillip asks if David thinks that people will follow technology into the future of if he foresees people overinvesting in technology as we see it today. David responds by saying the situation is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, people are distracted by whatever is new and shiny that people might think is valuable, but is only just shiny (like this security robot that took a nosedive into a fountain), but on the other hand, when technology provides a better experience for your associates and peers, then it provides an incredible value. Brian harkens back to a past episode with Sucharita Mulpuru in which she advocates the sentiment that just because you can build something, doesn't mean you should. Are You Not Entertained?: Entertainment's Role in Retail: What is the role of entertainment in retail experiences and does entertainment have a place in retail in the next couple of years? David says that Starbucks is an excellent example of entertainment in retail: you spend getting your coffee, and then you spend an hour on your laptop in their store and going through their carefully curated experience. On one of his stints on QVC, David recalls that when he was doing a bit dressed as a doctor, viewership went up, but fewer people were ordering because the entertainment factor alone did not convince people to order when the entertainment didn't show why the product was relevant. The key factor in making entertainment work for your brand is to engage your customers in a way that helps your brand and increases conversion over time. As always: We want to hear what our listeners think! What is the meaning of brands today, and how is that changing in this compressed supply change environment? Do you see entertainment playing a more significant role in retail in the next few years? Let us know in the content section on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Linkedin. Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels, and we love hearing from our listeners! Guest David J. Katz, EVP and CMO, Randa Accessories

What happens when you no longer control your own likeness? Is there an ethical line to be crossed with posthumous product spokesmanship? We skirt the line in this episode and get topical - talking about the subject of ethics and artificial intelligence and how online communities have banned "Deep Fakes" - pornographic simulations produced by artificial intelligence. Deep Fakes: weaponizing AI We're seeing a really gross intersection of what we talked about on our prediction show around digital personal identity rights with body timage and data technology and how it advances with consumer products. The Verge and an AP article both discuss the emergence of "deep fakes:" applying people's likenesses using AI in a pornographic way. These communities take hi-res videos and still frames from notable actresses for training data and  apply their likeness to nude photos. There's no real legal consensus on deep fakes and their consequences, so a lot of these online sites have come together and banned them and their communities. This is hitting right on the topic of that scary, black mirror-esque world we now live in where your face can be unwittingly applied without your consent to literally any context in some of the seediest and darkest ways with no way for you to manage it. Legal Ramifications of Deep Fakes The legal ramifications are unclear because we've never had this sophisticated level of technology. This is something that will come up in law, and we'll probably start to see entire bills at the federal level. There's been no federal regulations yet that address how to handle your body data. The Historical Blind Eye to Invasive Technology It's troubling that there were a lot of communities that turned a blind eye for years to  still images. There was this incredible story in Wired about 10-12 years ago about how Gillian Anderson at one point was the most photoshopped face on the internet, and many of the photos were suggestive. They were suggesting it was because of facial symmetry. Those types of images have been around for decades with no one doing anything about it. We can all agree that it's harmful to somebody in some way when they're applying your likeness in that way. The advent of AI assisted fakery is taking it to the next level and blurring the line of realism. Incredibly complex technology in the hands of the people: We were talking to Greg Steinberg at Something Digital and he asked hypothetically, what if we applied this to products? You could change any scene, from commercials to videos, to represent your product with AI. You could apply the Coke filter to any image and anything anyone holding is a can of coke. Amazing movie technology is now available in the palm of your hand. It's now available for consumers and businesses to take advantage of in a pretty easy way. In 2016 at the Adobe max creativity conference they announced a tool that with creative cloud suite, that after 20 minutes of training spoken word data, you could train an AI or ML algorithm to parrot back phrases in another person's voice that you typed in. A year and a half ago tech demo showcased a face to face algorithm that was applied to fake CNN broadcasts that used a source actor and overlaid that actor with political figures to show that GW and Vladimir Putin saying things they didn't actually say. Is there even one way that this is a positive contribution to society? Manipulative technology for sales There are ways it could be used to leverage selling things, and businesses can use this type of tech as a tool. We touched on this in episode 8. People will have control of their body data and can leverage it for various reasons: they can sell it, it will outlast you posthumously, and you'll need someone to monitor and be in charge of it after you die. For models (and maybe everyone's a model now) they'll be able to give companies access to their body data for specific reasons. The question is: how are we going to enforce this? It's such powerful tech that if we don't have good governance than it's going to get out of control real quick. But just because we legislate this new reality, it doesn't mean that it's going to control people's behavior. Just because it's illegal won't make it cease to exist. The difficult and expensive road to wiping your image from the internet What's required to wipe your image off the internet, especially if it's someone's likeness or personal image, takes a lot of work: people have to trademark their face, or send DMCA take down notices to sites like Reddit to actually enforce their copyright. At some point, what's coming in weaponized tech and disinformation campaigns. In no way is it helpful for humankind. Policy Update with Danny Sepulveda! The political traction net neutrality has is fascinating. What happened immediately, and even before Ajit Pai repealed it, was a fairly widespread uprising of folks supporting net neutrality. Nonetheless the department went forward with repealing it. A number of States have gone forward with their own net neutrality rules. The original net neutrality rules were over 400 page long with fairly complex issues. "I've been working in this for over 20 years, and I've never seen an issue that's gotten so much traffic." Reasons for the traction: People love the idea of the internet as  a public space open and accessible to everyone as a relatively egalitarian basis People don't appreciate a regulator behaving in the best interest of the regulated as opposed to the interests of the public. Republicans believe that if you own pipes going into somebody's house, you should have the freedom to contract with the providers for different treatment for better ROI, and consequently, this would encourage additional investment in infrastructure around the country. But there's a tremendous amount of incentive to manipulate that gatekeeper function for non-productive ends to extract tolls and rents. Most Democrats believe net neutrality should be upheld because it works. The way people access internet now without intervention with internet service provider has worked really well with innovation. What's next Congress is considering repealing the FCC's decision. It's highly unlikely to work due to Republican control of both Congress and the house. Right now 49 Senators wish for repeal. We only need 1 or 2 more Senators to agree to repeal the rule, but it's highly unlikely the House would agree. Even if the House voted to go back to net neutrality, the President could still veto the effort. We are unlikely to see a restoration of net neutrality during this administration. There are also lawsuits against it right now. The courts could throw it out. Which would return us to Obama era rules. Once the courts decide, either way, it will create a political dynamic in which members of Congress will have to come to some decision about whether they wish to write into law some kind of compromise. In all likelihood, Net neutrality won't be restored. But there's been a lot of activism, and we'll see what it means politically in the midterms going forward. BACK TO THE DUDES BODY DATAAAA! In a commerce context, body data is really useful. But using it to accomplish things with people's image is just dangerous. We don't see it not being used. It's a tech that exists now, and it'll be used by businesses, and they'll find use cases for it. Now that it exists, we can't go back. Aside from spokesperson and generational licensing groups like the Elvis and Marilyn Monroe estates, all I see this being novel for in a commerce context is us having more and more Reba Mcentire and KFC Colonel Sanders mash ups. We don't need more Jim Gaffigan colonel Sanders to make me buy fried chicken, but that's where we're heading. Consider though, the Micro-Spokesperson: using AI to determine the best person to influence another set of customers. That influencer will sell their digital body rights to influence a certain set of people based of specific sets of DNA factors. DNA TESTING, FOLKS! 23andme was spamming the heck out of us on the Winter Olympics. If you've watched the Olympics, you probably saw the ads at least 50 times. It's just one example of new DNA testing groups. There's a ton of other really specific stuff going on with DNA testing. It's getting better and better, and you're able to determine more stuff with it. A company is matching DNA to medications: you get your DNA scanned and then get better understanding of what medications will work better for you based off your results. It's personalized medication for you. BACK TO INFLUENCERS! (Honey I shrunk the influencers.) Venturebeat talks about Influential, a company that just launched a social intelligence platform. They find influencers for brands using the help of IBM Watson. They can find people based on microsegment affinities to predict whether or not they would be influential for a brand for micro-influencer engagement. Imagine if they took training data from dating apps, and then used that data to help create influencers based off of attraction factors that would allow people to trust somebody more, or like them more, because they look a specific way ro have a certain personality. (We so need GDPR in the US). Who will influence the influencers? Everything is happening on instagram. There's a story on L2 called, "Can Nike keep snapchat alive?" Nike was the first company to sell directly on snapchat, and that collaboration is signaling that snapchat might be moving into e commerce. But in the same week, Kendall Jenner tweeted the snapchat 1 milliion dollar dip in their market valuation. Even when you're doing interesting things in retail, when influencers are doing things in retail, and have the products to engage in 1 to 1, even then it comes down to a handful of people having the eyeballs to really determine the fate of those platforms. So there are influencers for the influencers. The success will be in if you can keep the attention of the people who matter. And there's no amount of AI to keep the attention of capricious people. Ad Age recently talked about all the data that shows how micro-influencers are having an insane affect on people above and beyond the standard celebrity influencers. If you're a brand, you probably don't want a big celebrity, you probably want a series of micro-influencers. Instagram influencers wouldn't traditionally have any corporate sponsorship, but they do because they have million and millions of eyeballs. It's only because of their engagement in social. It has nothing to do with any accolade or aptitude. 15-20  years ago you'd have to be an athlete or actor to gain it. Now anybody can do it for just about anything for anybody. Or we can fake you with AI. Back to Body Data! Shoutout to Shapescale.com: a 3D body scanning tool for fitness tracking and visualization. You stand on their scale and it records your body and then you can get a picture of yourself from a 3D view and actually visualize different things, like how you should go about changing your body to see what you want to do. It looks at fat and muscle mass, and you get heat maps of where your body's changing, and you get visual goal tracking. It's marketed as the next gen of scales beyond the "smart" scale we have no. Beyond it being "cool," but we have to wonder, where does it go from here other than being cool? Perhaps you can mine the data and do your own A/B tests on your body? It does do is allow someone to attack weight loss or health like a business problem: and treat their life like something they can test and try something out on. Despite this wealth of technology and data, we're more depressed than we've ever been as a country. Maybe it's not actually helping us. That concludes our awesome meandering and tangential show, and we'd love to hear what you have to say. Go to futurecommerce.fm. Hit us up and lend more to conversation. Or Email us at and

We're bringing you a bonus episode - we sat down with Kiri Masters of Ecommerce Braintrust Podcast to talk about the proliferation of voice and voice commerce - and how it's changing the perception of what a brand is and how they engage their customers. To listen to the WHOLE thing head over to ecommercebraintrust.com and listen to Episode 19! Special thanks to Kiri Masters, Julie Spear and the Ecommerce Braintrust podcast for featuring us! Listen to the whole thing: https://www.ecommercebraintrust.com/episodes/voice-commerce-the-future-is-here

Voice is dominating commerce experiences: but is it kitsch or is it kismet? What separates retailers who are implementing voice strategies? Ryan MacInnis of Voysis joins us to talk about how to give your brand a voice in a world spoken by Alexa. Plus: Facebook Fiona and Aloha - one more smart speaker / tablet to contend for our attention. Show Notes Coming soon

We fulfill a promise to our listeners and provide an in-depth review of Amazon Go - including food, assortment, experience, and how the technology will be applied and extended into the future. Show Notes Main Takeaways Brian and Phillip take a trip to flagship Amazon Go Store in Seattle and enjoy the experience. How is an Amazon Go location set up, and what are some of the logistics in its day to day operations? Can the Amazon Go model be applied to other retailers? Shipping With Amazon might be Amazon's most significant business venture to date. Is Amazon Go the Future? Phillip says yes, and that future is now. Amazon Go is basically a grocery store that allows you to pick up any item and that item is automatically tagged, added to your cart, and is then charged to your Amazon Prime account upon leaving (as long as you have the app)). Phillip and Brian were excited about Amazon Go over a year ago. Did the Experience Live Up to the Hype? Brian and Phillip ventured to an Amazon Go location together to see what the experience was actually like. Brian says the Amazon Go experience was "good, easy, and exactly what it was advertised to be." Brian also experimented with picking items up and then putting them back on the shelf. Phillip says that he loved the experience. Amazon Go: The Set Up: Phillip and Brian agree that the store is not huge, but more akin to a convenience store (Or a "Whole Foods) convenient store" according to Brian). Phillip describes the products as "a really wide selection of a lot of things with unique selections in between" and goes into some serious detail of all the food items that are for sale. There was also a good selection of high-end items. How does the set-up contribute to the overall experience? Phillip points out that some of the sensors that track customer activity looked more commercial as opposed to industrial. What kinds of sensors are being used to detect what products are removed from the shelves? Amazon Go: The Haul: Since it was breakfast time, Brian walked out with a sandwich from a locally sourced bakery that was pretty good (for a convenience store breakfast sandwich). Phillip also left with a breakfast sandwich. Both Brian and Phillip agree that there were some pretty good, higher-end selections to be found. In addition to free cream cheese for bagel purchases, there was also free Cholula Hot Sauce and Sriracha packages. Bless. Alert: there was no hot coffee to be found anywhere in the store. (Unless Brian and Phillip couldn't find it.) For the products that were of the local variety (as in not pre-packed or mass produced), Phillip points out that there were unique QR codes that must help the sensors identify these items. The Logistics and the Competitive Landscape: Brian questions what the minimum number of staff would be to run a store like this, given the unique new factors this retail set up introduces. Will Amazon release any numbers detailing what it costs to staff a store like this (especially for a store that is not a flagship store). Phillip hopes that he sees some sort of Moore's Law that comes with this sort of tech innovation. Philip also points out that there are other companies that are implementing this technology in much larger stores than the Amazon Go store. Phillip thinks there will be innovation from a lot more players aside from just Amazon. Brian adds that we will see a lot more examples of this, a lot quicker than we might think. Will Amazon make this technology available for other retailers? (Probably not for Walmart.) Beyond Amazon: Implementing Consumer Ecosystems: Phillip wonders if other retailers would find success in a retail model like Amazon Go without the existing ecosystem that Amazon has established with its customers. Will this technology be useful in any other retail experience aside from a convenience store? With the phasing out of physical media for music, Best Buy is giving Phillip fewer reasons to shop there. (Who knew CDs would be such a trigger point for Phillip?) Brian reveals that he only shops at Amazon and Costco. Brian cleverly states that "there is no reason to go out of your way to have more convenience." Shipping with Amazon: A New Goliath on the Horizon: Shipping WIth Amazon (SWA) is probably a bigger announcement than Amazon Go. Phillip predicts that SWA might be the biggest part of Amazon's business in five years. Phillip calls FedEx and UPS the "cockroaches of logistics." With Target's recent acquisition of Shipt, Phillip points out that other entities are rising to compete with Amazon. Brian wonders if UPS or FedEx are anticipating the shrinkage that may occur once SWA gets up and running. Final Thoughts on Amazon Go: To harken back to Episode 21, Brian exclaims that Amazon Go "is the future of shopping." Phillip says that a few years ago, he would have made fun of Amazon for a venture like Amazon Go, but Amazon has continued to prove that they can deliver on experiences like this. Brian wonders if Amazon will release a new phone this year. Go over to Futurecommerce.fm and give us your feedback! We love to hear from our listeners!

Amazon just won't leave us alone (healthcare?!). Plus we talk cell phone free zones, taking back control of personal data, and an open source voice assistant. Future Commerce featured in retail TouchPoints: We were wondering where all our new listeners came from. It came from this review in retail TouchPoints. Klaudia Tirico shoutout. Thanks for featuring us! Either we've elevated ourselves to Jason and Scott and the official NRF podcast level, or we've brought them all down to our level. We're currently in Seattle for a live show with Merchant to Merchant. We'll be joined in a panel with merchants from Filson and Mervin Manufacturing. Buzz Marketing alert! Filson's got a dope flagship store: it even manufactures products in store. (And Filson's been around since the Yukon Gold Rush). Amazon's a for-profit venture now to the tune of 1.9 Billion last quarter: Washington Post reports on their profits for Q4. Amazon attributes a good portion of the profit and gross sales to Echo device demand. Bezos: "Expect us to double down." Watch out, people. AWS drove profits. 26% of operating margin in Q4. AWS sales rose 45% to 5.1 Billion. Charlie O'shea: "Growth, growth, and more growth." Buzz Marketing! Amazon's Super Bowl commercial. Could they be teasing replacing Alexa's voice? Maybe a user configurable voice? (Please let it be J.A.R.V.I.S.) Brian's "wouldn't it be weird" moment: what if we could record snippets of our voice and turn them into audio assistant voices? Phillip geeks out and shares a Star Trek anecdote: Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, the original voice of the Star Trek computer, had every part of her voice phonetically captured before she died. Now they could embody her posthumously into a device using this data. CIA and FBI shout out! Another shout out! We were just on Kiri Master's podcast, Ecommerce Brain Trust. Check it out. We talked a lot. Thanks, Kiri! Hot take: Amazon is killing Whole Foods: (Brian says it's fake news) Is Brian ever going to say anything negative about Amazon? Probably not. Business insider reports on new procedures for Whole Foods that make people cry. Brian's take: Actually, Amazon is the savior. Whole Foods rolled out OTS before the merger and it didn't work. Amazon wants to fix the problem. Phillip's take: millennials now have to operate like an actual business. Sadness. Amazon again? Alexa added voice activated texting as a feature: Retail TouchPoints says Amazon's adding voice activated texting to Alexa. Brooks Brothers are an early adopter for Alexa business. They're using it for Business enablement on the back end. Seriously, more Amazon? Amazon healthcare, anyone? (free delivery for Prime members): Partnering with JP Morgan Chase and Warren Buffet to improve healthcare in some mysterious way. If you rearrange the letters in their names, it's an anagram for Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Wow, Brian is excited about this? No way! The all benevolent Amazon will use our personal data to improve our lives. Brian's privatized universal healthcare. Phillip says we're all already working for Amazon in some way. Chris Rock bans phones at shows: Chris Rock is using the yondr pouch at shows. A new move toward cell phone free spaces? People on Twitter are celebrating this. This is almost 5 years too late. Is there a social quotient? AQ. Yondr markets cell phone cases that lock your phone until the end of the event. Google clips camera Segue: It came out. Brian: We don't have to be involved. You can be in the moment and review the information later. Phillip: "You would not be saying this if you had watched Black Mirror." But a possible positive trend: we might wind up creating privacy and cell phone free zones. We can still live and have technology but still respect the boundaries of technology free areas. Strava Data Issues: This year, it turns out a bunch of US military personnel revealed secret US military bases by logging their activities on fitness trackers. This is a human flaw. Shouldn't they know better than to log their personal activity on secret military sites? What's the balance between personal and company/government responsibility? What responsibility do companies have over publishing body data? We should have greater control over how body data is used and published. EU's GDPR compliance. ZDnet article says 22% of businesses aren't near compliant in the next 12 months. Check it out. GDPR big decision: you not only have the right to your anonymity, but you can delete yourself from the internet. Merchants: make your customers data available to them and let them control it. Build partnerships with your customers. Open Source Voice Assistant: Mycroft just launched a Kickstarter for an open source voice assistant. They have a physical device you can actually source the parts and build it yourself. A third party company could make their own version. It's the Mark II device. The Mark I already exists as a private device. Brian is worried about this. They have a lot of interesting partners including Ubuntu foundation Mozilla foundation is supporting it. You have large partners supporting it. Open source alternative. Look out for a keynote on open source upcoming from Phillip. Phillip is stoked about it.

Show notes Family Date Night at the Olive Garden Special Episode. Homepod: more like yawn-pod. Plus: retail investment is gaining steam, mobile advertising to overtake traditional advertising, and bye bye sales! Finally, Nike makes the foam sole more personal. Homepod: nobody cares Actually, people do care: they care to talk about how irrelevant it is. Business insider even gives you 7 reasons not to buy it. It's just a giant ipod and it only works with itunes. Hey, Apple, it's 20 bleepin' 18 already. At least it's more competition for sonos? In episode 1, we talked about Apple's exciting developments. Unfortunately, they haven't followed through of them. The lesson: Apple gonna Apple. Amazon Go: Amazon Go is live! 2 weeks from today: we're going to the store and doing a review. Get ready. Bob Schwartz, friend of the pod, stood in line on day 2 of the launch said it worked seamlessly. But caveat: he didn't like the sandwich he bought. We're we get all these new listeners? Thanks, new listeners. Thanks, NRF. Thanks, Branden Moskwa, for all of the new listeners. The actual "Big News": A lot of positive news in retail. News from NRF: it's not a retail apocalypse, it's just a transformation. The Wall Street Journal reports on a 65 million dollar retail investment in Manhattan. Because Manhattan needs more retail :) But it makes sense to develop your own retail space without being entangled with existing retail lease agreements. A lot of people are redeveloping retail space. Developers taking expensive real estate and turning it into retail space is a really positive sign.   Phillip's family bet: is the new development in the neighborhood going to be a Walgreens? Probably. You know what's still relevant? Digital Advertising: Goldman Sachs predicting digital advertising will Account for over half of all advertising globally Facebook and Google probably gobble up 94% of it. Traditional advertising still on the decline. Amazon now has a paid self-service platform for advertising, so does Snapchat. Instagram integrated into Facebook's digital advertising model. They predict video will have a breakout year. Meg Whitman went from CEO of HP to a CEO of a startup of a Jeffrey Katzenberg backed venture called new TV. They're specializing in scripted content under 10 minutes long. From Digital to Brick and Mortar: Dollar shave club is opening a pop-up store in London. It looks like a retail experience with an old timey barber shop setup. Ecommerce companies starting to invade larger retail experiences. Potential Future Commerce field trips galore? We're Interested to see how the traditional market responds to this. There seem to be at least 2 responses: 1: adapt to the new models, like Nordstrom. 2: stop catering to bargain and passive shoppers, like Michael Kors, Gap, and Ralph Lauren. A disruptor company like Dollar Shave Club is interested in looking at the dollar cost average spent, not the per person purchase. Alexa reminds us that time for this episode is almost over. Nike's new foam: Nike's using robots to make their shoes. And specifically, the new React foam running shoe. Instead of taking a sample size of a shoe design, they're creating a perfectly designed shoe. It's an algorithmically designed shoe so that it has the exact same performance for every particular shoe made. This is getting us much closer to what we've been predicting for personalized products. It's Brian's hammer! Nike is boasting a 13% energy return because of the foam sole. Verdict: Future Commerce makes us want to spend way too much money.

We recap NRF 2018 in a way that only Future Commerce can - LIVE from the show floor at The Big Show! Plus: is retail real estate in trouble? Have we left Omni Channel behind? We're live from NRF 2018 Probably (definitely) exactly 3.619 times bigger than IRCE This year feels livelier than last year. Definitely better than shop.org this year. Brian was here all week. Flew in all the way from Seattle. Shoutout to Branden Moskwa here from eCommerce Allstars with the IBM social influencer team. Shoutout to Jason Del Rey from recode. "he's quite a voice." Tantric Commerce (you heard it here first): Social proof: you want to hear about other experiences before you make the purchase yourself. Example: thewirecutter.com Example from comedians in cars getting coffee. Jimmy Fallon jokes about how a commercial promises the product is going to change your life. You get excited about the product being a life changing experience. So you're happy when you buy it, you're happy when it arrives, and you're happy when you open it. The whole experience, you're happy. The product at the end of the day could be terrible, because you're satisfied all along the way. Platforms like Wish have capitalized on this where the actual thing you're buying is happiness in purchasing. That's what we call tantric commerce: the anticipation is so enjoyable that the product is almost unnecessary. Yes, you have to have a good product at the end of the day, But if 50% of the enjoyment of the product is engagement with the platform, then the product that you have is not just the thing you sell, you're in fact selling the whole experience. The things in the NRF innovation lab aren't going to save your company if your business doesn't know how to give it's voice to those things. They're assistive, not the holistic. Brand Voice Segue: You have to be able to put a voice behind the brand. For example, when you're product ships, make sure your client knows about it. Allbirds is a great example of consistent and satisfying brand voice that adds credibility to the product. Experience Experience was the center of the conversation at NRF 2018. The ones who are truly innovating are the ones making strides in experiential retail, not necessarily the ones presenting on stage. Interesting Doug McMillon Interview Part 1: Matthew Shay, NRF president, interviewed of Doug McMillon of Walmart. McMillon talked a lot about how they care for their employees and their employment culture. They've increased benefits and increased pay. But of note, Shay did not ask McMillon about Sam's Club closings and the weird way it was executed. People showed up to work with doors chained.  That seems a poor way of treating your employees and customers. It communicates more to not ask about it than to have a canned answer. Walmart's huge and knows what it's doing. They obviously assume it will pay off for them, but it sure looks bad. And it's an inconsistent move considering how they talk about treating their employees and customers. This sullies a good two year run of positive Walmart developments. Interesting Doug McMillon Interview Part 2: McMillon talked about learning from other countries. He said they're learning more about retail from China than any other place in the world. Shout out to Phillip's prediction in episode 55 of retail dominance leaving America. Retailers: consider putting Alipay on your 2018 roadmap. It's a first step to position your brand for a global audience. Global Commerce Impact of international commerce law and activity having a large impact on US brands. CVS in Europe bans photo manipulation on all products. Anyone doing business in Europe and France will have to comply with changes. Those things will shape and guide retail and commerce. The US used to be guiding the world in this, whereas we're now complying with global trends. Something from the comments of episode 57: calling us out on our take on bitcoin as a commodity. We made a distinctly US take on commoditized cryptocurrency. There are nations that are actually using it as currency, not as a commodity. Our point of view is very Ameri-centric. US leading the way is not always going to be the case anymore. Not just tech, but retail too. NRF Gala The elite of retail gathering together to celebrate each other. They had an award ceremony with all the trappings including a red carpet and honored guests. Emily Weiss from glossier won an award. Jeff Barnett, CEO of Salesforce Commerce Cloud won an award. (Brian may be biased) Omar Miller Emceed. Brian said "what's up" to him. Pic or it didn't happen, Brian. Five years ago this gala wouldn't have even been a thing. Retail is getting the royal treatment. It drives industry. Yes, the people who are driving this forward should get recognized, but maybe not a red carpet. Notable absences: Shopify (they're probably out in the Bronx somewhere) Amazon (guest coming soon!). 4% of all retail in US: you're a stakeholder. Where you at? Omnichannel: that word disappeared Diminished footprint: Google. Our whole approach to thinking about retail is pragmatic futurism. If you wanted to think about omnichannel, you'd probably want to talk with Amazon. Guess what, you can't; they're not here. 3 years ago NRF was way more brick and mortar focused. Starting last year you could see the shift. Salty Phillip statement of the day: what's going through your mind when you name your company chargebacks 911? The Innovation Lab: The Bomb. Phillip's vision of store of the future: 7-Eleven in 2090: a drone hovers in front of you and reads you an in user license agreement that you have to verbally commit to before buying your Slurpee reminding you that, hey, if you enter this place, you're going to be tracked by cameras. 4 Shoutouts We're going to have short mini interviews with these folks on our FC Insiders. Sign up for exclusive content like this in the future. June 20: a next generation kiosk platform for in-store product comparison. It provides a window into products and reviews through a tablet platform right in the store. They've created a tablet system on a rail that allows you to slide the tablet along the product display. It uses a camera and sensor to identify products to show you more detail: you can see videos, see reviews, see product features. You can even send yourself a text message through it and buy it online. It's a next level platform experience for a natural left to right timeline walkthrough for in-store experiences. Just like you would online, you can do a convenient personalized walkthrough in store. Focal systems: are an actual camera and machine vision in store system. They have cameras on shopping carts that do 2 things: they have an in cart presence for in stock items and out of stock items. They sense and read the images with machine vision (not beacons) of products that should be on the shelves and notifies staff to restock. They also utilize real time cart analysis. The system shows you real time tracking of the shopping cart that's doing the shopping for you. Lastly they have a tablet that's affixed to the shopping cart for wayfinding: for finding sales and products in store. Today, a camera fixed to a cart may be the most elegant way to track products. Optoro shout out. Sign up to FC Insiders for the mini interview. Fit3D: is an in-store body data scanner. They store the data, the retailer stores the data, and you have complete control over the data. They use a device in store to scan, as opposed to a 2D model to convert to 3D. The Vast NRF Burroughs Roundup There's so much here and it's impossible to cover it all. Come out one year to NRF. 50% of innovation lab were either brands I'd seen earlier at an innovation lab. The news ones took me by surprise. Another shout out: Authentic Media. They demoed an HTC Vive Cadillac showroom. It had a really cool feeling of presence. The modeling is tricky and representing real life material like paint and leather are challenging, so any old retailer isn't going to have a VR showroom, you're going to need a big budget. Same is true for AR. You need 3D models. But there are more companies popping up that are doing retail AR. In the enxt couple of years it will be easier to do it. Upcoming events to see us at: Shoptalk in March in Vegas. Etail West: Brian's at the LA one in February. Shoptalk in mid March. Brian has a  session March 19th at 5pm hosting a panel with Greg Jones, head of AR and VR at Google, Brian Kavanagh, head of retail evolution at the Hershey Company, and Mike Festa, head of Wayfair Next. NRF is the big show. Get here next year. If you're a retailer, it's practically free. Don't forget to sign up for FC Insiders for exclusive content.

This week, Brian and Phillip get bullish on VR, talk hype in cryptocurrency, and wish for a facial recognition burger ordering system. Listen in for a recap of CES 2018 and all the interesting news in retail tech. Future Commerce Tells the Future: Predictions we made in December have already come true: 10 days in: Phillip is Eating a hat with Costco ketchup, because: Brian predicted VR fitness, and BlackBox VR made it so. Choice quotes: "All the nerds are going to be the fit ones now." "We're going to have a super race of Crypto Bros." Phillip predicted that companies would start using personal attributes to tailor products to you. Two new strange developments to report on that prediction: 1st: Ars Technica reported on an ingestible pill that tracks personal fart development in real time on your phone. Ikea wants you to pee on their ad. Ad Week wrote about Ikea's pregnancy advertisement for discounted cribs. How to prove you're pregnant? Pee on the ad and bring it into the store. Bitcoin: Either we're idiots or wise pundits depending on when you listened to our episode discussing Bitcoin Worth watching: Seth Meyers Bitcoin commercial Bitcoin reminds us of the early dotcoms. The local news coverage of the "world wide web" is very similar to the reporting happening on cryptocurrency. Bitcoin in the news: Warren buffet says cryptocurrencies will end badly. Long Island Iced Tea corporation rebrands for blockchain. No word on how DJ Khaled, fanboy of Rich Cigars, feels about its business model pivot to a cryptocurrency only company. By no means our last words on bitcoin: If bitcoin is the AOL of cryptocurrency, then we are only at the very beginning of this conversation. Note to merchants: using bitcoin on your website is an antiquated understanding of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is now a commodified investment similar to oil. It uses up a ton of energy. As much as Denmark. If Visa was on the blockchain, it would take the equivalent of 5000 nuclear reactors to meet its needs. Our favorite bitcoin tweet of the week comes from Petter Brannen, author of The Ends of the World. Remember: cryptocurrency has nothing to do with buying and selling goods right now. Will Amazon buy Target? NOPE - But Brian says they probably will continue to buy companies like body labs to acquire tech or patent that will take too long to develop on their own. But there might be a logical progression to this idea: Target did just acquire shipt. Then they announced they were rolling out $99 year same day delivery. This leads to a logical end: Target and Walmart can truly compete with Amazon. They could probably beat Amazon. So Amazon may have incentive to buy Target - but they won't do it. Target having $99 same day delivery shipping is compelling. It's an interesting turn of events. CES: Intel CEO gave keynote. Despite spectre meltdown, and seemingly being out of touch, almost every computing device you use is powered by Intel in some degree. They made a bunch of cool announcements in transportation, including a vertical takeoff and landing device at the show. Quote of the episode: "Dear 1950s, you're version of the future is finally here." Pizza Hut announced self driving pizza delivery cars. This gets back to Phil's supply chain theory: property doesn't have to be a physical brick and mortar  place anymore. CVS doesn't have to be just a building with pharmaceuticals. CVS can actually be a fleet of vehicles always wandering around, omnipresent, you just have to hail it like an uber and it will be there in a minute to deliver your order. We're very bullish on AR and VR techs with a context that makes sense for retail. 2018? Probably not. But more of it will keep coming. Why we talk about seemingly tangential tech: It's important for retailers to know what's happening in these tech spaces. Consumer product technology adoption will create consumer demand for good experiences in your retail spaces. That doesn't have to be just digital commerce. No one is safe in brick and mortar. The element of experiential retail will follow even into the retail experience. This is why we talk about CES, bitcoin, and all of these things. We want you to know them to avoid being blindsided by your customers. Technology affects commerce. You don't have to be an early adopter. You can bide your time on a lot of this technology. But they come fast. Voice is hear, even though it was a far tech a year and a half ago. The rate of adoption is faster and faster. Know what these developments are and how they apply to you. Brian's tangential segue into toys and tech: Sphero mini is an app enabled toy for kids to learn how to code. Earlier Sphero released a Lightning McQueen toy that shows the future for what's next with toys. Toy tech and robotics are getting to the point where we can tell even more engaging stories There's even an updated Teddy Ruxpin (although, Teddy Ruxpin is, and always will be terrifying). More on voice and recognition: Apple slept on Siri in a big way. Amazon realized they've been sleeping for a year on Echo, and CES proved they've woken up. Everything has alexa built into it now. And it's not because amazon is so smart developing this tech, but that they've opened it up for others to develop. Facial recognition for burgers is a thing. Caliburger's kiosks can now repeat and order based off facial recognition. Phillip wants a facial recognition burger chain to look at his face and place an order based off what it sees. We'll be at NRF next week! We'll be in the podcast booth from 3-5 on Tuesday, and then walking the show floor throughout. Innovation lab on site looks amazing. This one sounds cooler than Shop.org's: Shoutout List to a few of the exhibitors: Bond: handwritten cards Starship Robotics Locus Robotics Optoro Tangiblee Deep Magic AI Face Note Kimetric Transcript Coming Soon!

We're joined for a special interview with Greg Bilsland of HaptX to talk about VR for Commerce and how touch in VR isn't as elusive as you may believe. Impossible technology worth paying attention to now: how realistic haptics will add another dimension to our immersive experiences in retail and training. What is HaptX? Jake Rubin founded HaptX in 2012. HaptX's vision is for a full body system to deliver realistic touch to VR users. The ultimate promise of virtual reality is to open up impossible worlds and experiences to you and experience them with unprecedented realism. What is the specific definition of symbolic and realistic haptics? It's the science and Technology of touch. It's understanding how our body interacts with all the things around us. Most people experience it in your phone, the touchpad in your mouse, or the rumble in a gaming controller. Remember the Nintendo Rumble Pak? That was early haptics. That technology was an offset motor spinning around to create vibrational effect: that's symbolic haptics. It's only representing something happening in an abstract way. Realistic haptics delivers the actual sense of displacement on your skin when you touch something. Tactile feedback: Imagine putting your finger against the tines of a fork and you see all those points that are physically displacing on your finger. That's where you're actually feeling those points. Force feedback: imagine trying to bend a spoon: you're pushing on it and feeling resistance. Combine those two things and you get realistic haptics. A sense that you're touching a real object even though you're  in the virtual world. This seems like far future technology, but you're talking about it as current technology. Where do the technologies come from and what are its current and practical uses? Jake Rubin found that you could leverage the current game engine tech, Unity and Unreal, to bring touch to them. It turns out is has huge implications across commerce and retail and training. Imagine flight simulators taking VR and using haptic gloves to utilize training for pilots. Any professional role that needs training can utilize haptics in VR. What is the broad industry specific use of this tech? Is there anything currently existing? How do you see haptics being applied in the consumer space? Long term, haptic devices are going to make their way into the consumer space because VR will be part of retail experience. Short term, It's more of an enterprise tool. Companies doing commerce that benefit the most from haptic: a large physical space where consumers do their shopping or a large physical space they have to store something. Consider companies like Lowes and Home Depot. They have huge stores that are expensive to lease and keep tstocked. They're looking to VR to reduce that footprint so that their customers can have the whole store experience brought to them in a small package. Ikea is doing the same thing. You'll see more consumers using VR and haptics when at locations that can install VR and haptics. What's your endgame goal for seeing retail applying haptics? The long term vision is doing things and navigating immersive environments using your hands instead of using controller. We're a long way off before the price point makes that a feasible scenario. Can you tell us the price point? Do you have a new product? HaptX gloves: we have the first haptic glove to deliver realistic feedback all in one package. We're sharing that at Sundance in a few weeks. It's the first hardware product to debut at Sundance since Oculus. We're only selling a LImited amount of these products to strategic investors and companies. Will you see your product initially showcased by different companies showing off their tech to customers? Experience centers will be initial major way for consumers to interact with this technology. You might see them at VR arcades at places like malls or experiential centers. Entertainment will be a space for consumers to use haptic experiences. Branded experiences: the brands doing VR right are companies like Disney partnering with Nissan to do a Star Wars experience. To be successful, they create a real sense of value among the consumer. They're  delivering utility to customers. Future Policy with Danny Sepulveda President Trump's proposal is to close the borders to competition and do something on the tax side to put more money in people's pockets. And he's executed on that. Two relevant books: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance.   JD Vance theoretically explains the destruction of the low wage white Appalachian culture. Coate's book is about what it means, and what it takes, to grow up black in America. The reason these issues are important is because the policy decisions we make occur within not just economics and commerce, they occur within the four corners of law, human ingenuity, and regulation. How we react to how commerce is changing fundamentally affects the manner in which human beings live within their communities, govern themselves, and view themselves. As we look to struggling communities, like the ones described by Coates and Vance, we see centers of production, wealth, and commerce concentrating in specific places and the rest of the country living of off it. It's unsustainable because of what it means to the American promise that birth is not destined. Once social mobility is restricted we lose the american promise. That is the fundamental problem. The concentration of power, wealth, and authority will be central to our conversations going forward and what that means for people's everyday lives. Could you address any critics that say your technology only further isolates people from having real world experiences? Haptics ultimately have the ability to bridge distance and bring touch to what would normally be an isolating experience. Consider using Skype to give your parents a hug or hold their hand while you're talking to them. The isolation criticism has always been there going back to the argument that TV would rot our brains. But It depends on the content makers and their users to discipline themselves to how they use that technology. Brian says that the more realistic we can make them and mimic the real world, the closer to a real world experience will enhance that connectedness. Touch is something we've been missing from media. How do you foresee CMOs and marketers building out branding experiences with this? VR is still a novelty for a lot of consumers and so brands will try to use experiences to wow their consumers to create a really strong brand impression. Eventually consumers will become savvy enought to recognize the good from the bad VR experiences. That's when marketers are going to want a deeper level of immersion to create a competitive edge over their competitors. Imagine going to REI and be able to try on gear and ascend Mt Rainier. It's easy to see how immersion helps sell the experience. So how much can you feel? Can feel something slimy? Can you feel weight? Texture? Slimy and textures are challenging simply because they're a function of vibration. When you run your hand over something, the sensation is actually your hand vibrating at various frequencies. That's something we're working on to get the actuator technology. Actuators are little bubbles that inflate and deflate that create the sensation of texture. Slime is a little ways off. But running your hands over wheat, or a rocky surface, or even over a wall is something we can do really well. Weight is an interesting challenge: to feel something truly weighty, you need a full body exoskeleton to apply the downward pressure on your arm. Are you heading toward full body suits? Our original vision was to create full body suits, and that remains a goal, but our expertise is in touch. We're really good at translating the digital into tactile experience. Other companies doing really awesome exoskeleton systems. Long term training, if you want to give them a true fully immersive experience, that's where we'd probably partner with a company who could do the exoskeleton type experiences to create the "climb eht mountain" experience. Does haptics add to presence illusion? There's a lot of progress to be made. While we've been able to simulate touch better than any other company, it's going to take time to continue to progress. Example: when black and white TV first came out, it was amazing. Then color arrived and black and white was no longer interesting. Same with HD television, our standards increase. The goal posts are always moving. We're always going to try to move with the advancements in the field. VR is still a novel experience Retailers are starting to understand that certain tech can only be utilized and work in certain mediums. Are you enabling experiences and interfaces that couldn't already be realized? We want to create areas where you are able to use your hands in an immersive environment to interact with 3D objects in a way that feels intuitive. Have you explored the medical community as well? We've had a number of universities and medical communities reach out to us, especially in the training field. Imagine how much more comfortable you'd feel going into an operation that a doctor has already performed on you with VR and realistic haptics? What's the use case for Augmented Reality and HaptX? Haptics and AR are compatible but it's a much bigger technical challenge due to the way that most AR hardware works.   AR uses a kind of inside out tracking, taking a lot of snapshots of the environment and using complicated math to tell the relative position of the device so an object can remain locked in the virtual environment. Where that gets tricky is that haptics requires a really high level of precision to be able to deliver a realistic experience. If you're going to reach out your hand and poke a button, you need that button to push back against you at precisely where you see that button, otherwise it's going to feel wrong. You need submillimeter accuracy to make that work. AR isn't there yet with the tech. Until we hear more from customers demanding haptics from AR its not something that we're going to focus on. Any advice to our merchant listeners about when they should be investing in this? Is there anything we should be doing in this coming year? Anything about VR? What should we avoid? What about next 5 years? What should we be prepared for? VR is still a novelty for most consumers so merchants can rely on that to create experiences that are memorable. Adoption curve for VR that's more like the 90s cell phone market. I don't think in 5 years we're going to turn around and see 90% of Americans owning VR headsets. It always comes down to thinking about your business and how you're solving your consumers' problems. If you're in the travel industry: give them a 360 or VR experience to help solve your customers problems. But that's not going to be true of every industry. The branded AR and VR experiences are going to have a real long tail for brands and merchants who invest in delivering utility and value to their customers. The 5 year outlook is thinking about how VR and Haptics are going to apply to how you're going to train your workforce and how you're designing products. How you're using the new tools of VR and Haptics to build prototypes. Look at what the big companies are doing and if they're not investing in AR and VR then it might not be time to make those investments yet. If you're interested in VR now, then you're ahead of the curve. Immersive and wearable computing is going to be the next wave of technological adoption. It's worth paying attention to even if it doesn't match your business right now. Thanks, Greg Bilsland. Go check out HaptX.com for more information on this new technology. Guests Greg Bilsland of HaptX Transcript Coming soon!

"You just went super future on me, man, and I love it." We do predictions as only Future Commerce can - with honest insight into what the retail year ahead in 2018 may hold. Buckle up - it's a fast and furious ride! Let us know your predictions for 2018! Who knows, maybe we'll share them on the show. Go super future on us, we'll love it. Applause, Applause: Congratulation Google 5 Home Mini winners! Thanks, and congratulations to all the winners. Remember to sign up for our FC Insiders for more weekly content and giveaways. LEGITIMATE PREDICTIONS EPISODE We reserve the right to predict more things as the year goes on. A wise person once said: "How can you achieve your 10 year plan in the next 6 months?" Round 1 Rolling thunder round: retail consolidation: More retailers that don't belong in the landscape will go out of business. We'll continue to see retailers coming together that belong together And we'll continue to see a weeding out of retailers that belong in the landscape. Invest in tech. If you can't invest in tech, you're marching toward bankruptcy. We'll see more services like Westfield's OneMarket: retailers sharing data and tech to provide high end experiences for their customers. Physical space is no longer at a premium. The premium space will be experiences in, and access to, tech and data. Philip's challenge: if you can only come up with technology for technology's tech, then you're in for some woes in your business. Round 2 Flagship retail will move to true showroom: We'll see more stores without any merchandise because they're: Easier to stand up. Easier to roll into markets. Require less commitment. They'll give digital consumers the ability to have the tactile experience We'll have more experiential retail. Delayed gratification can work in a retailer's favor: 48 hours for a product is a trained expectation, and an experiential showroom can leverage this expectation in your favor. Round 3 Hyper-personalization: Glossier is already pointing in this direction. We'll see more and more 1 to 1 personalization at a product level. Retailers will be able to have more customizable products based on your data.   Imagine perfectly fitted hammers for your little hands: do it soon, hammer companies. Future plug: R Riveter is coming on the show to talk about innovation in their manufacturing process soon. Brian Says: "Expect to see improvements in manufacturing that result in hyper personalization in products and even services." Change in supply chain and manufacturing will allow for more personalized products. A company called ubiome has a product called smart gut: probiotics tailored to you. Whether you like that with that is irrelevant, we're going to see more and more of this type of specialization. Round 4 More instability in marketplace security: Yet another Fortune 500 will succumb to a massive data breach like Uber's data breach that it kept under wraps for 14 months or so. These data breaches are just following the economics of where people happen to be and be shopping. Recently, Starbucks access points in Argentina were compromised for bitcoin mining. It's not that retail is under attack, it's that all the eyeballs are heading there. Macs serve as an example: they were insulated for so many years not because they were so secure, but because they had less market share. These insecurities will become a fact of life. FUTURE POLICY Ecommerce and job disruption: When deciding policy, you bring in experts who can bring data to the conversation. Nobody really knows what the impact will really be. But you do have analogs to look at to predict future possibilities.   If robotics in automation just affect specific companies in specific places, then the idea that we should let things be is correct. If automation is economically structural, then we have a communal responsibility to deal with this structurally. Think globalization and trade: the same conversations happened on both sides.   There are free and open market debates vs. we should close off our borders and insure our jobs stay as they are vs. the middle ground where we believe there's a net/net good outcome, but we ought to provide assistant for workers whose jobs are lost. The problem is it worked in a geographically lopsided way. It worked in California, but not in coal mining regions. It's the same problem with retail: there are more ecommerce jobs being created than local retail jobs being lost. But you have a geography problem again. The distribution of ecommerce goods is concentrated. And that causes huge disruptions in areas where people are losing their jobs. The next part of the challenge is republicans and democrats coming together and dealing with what we could and should do about this emerging lopsided job problem. Round 5 Identity management and persistent login and single sign on will advance: Amazon will really push on this. It's already available, but marketed poorly. More control over single sign on. Amazon will lead. Payments companies can move into log on beyond just payments. Brian says, "I would rather run my life through Amazon." Google has made single sign on really convenient in their ecosystem. Brendan Eich recently started a nonprofit called Brave that values privacy over all else. There's a growing trend of heightened consciousness of security and identity management and more tools to manage them coming in 2018. Round 6 AR proliferation - of the Merchant-enablement variety: It's not ubiquitous yet, but a lot of companies are investing in it. A lot of interesting "AR lite" experiences already. Amazon is testing AR to let you see furniture in your own rooms. Target has a lego display that uses their app for AR experiences in store. Ultimately, we'll see ad tech advancements in this field. A lot more AR but specifically around tool enablement and Ad Tech for commerce. You don't need tech to create an experience, instead AR is a tech to help retailers, not a gimmick for experiences. Round 7 Brian's biggest prediction of the year: personal big data: The New York Times explored mining your own personal data back in 2012 using your own email. In 2018 the digital data we have is massive. Each person is their own set of big data: body, health, financial, purchasing, relationship and social, personality, location, time, usage, efficiency data, and reading history, browsing history,  search history, chat and voice history. There's a great Ted Talk by Talithia Williams on owning your own body's data. But the trend is restarting a general market idea about people leveraging their own data to make better decisions and have better lives. Merchants: help your customers use their data. We're not all about converging on the spot, we're about lifetime customer value. The best way to make a repeat customer is to help them make better decisions with their data. Look for tools to help customers understand their own patterns and trends. Give them the ability to do what they should do or want to do with that data.   Businesses and merchants have the opportunity to be transparent about how data is used and can really allow customers to use it in the same way that businesses do it. Round 8 Two-part prediction: AI and American decline in tech supremacy: First: Businesses are battling market fatigue around machine learning and artificial intelligence. Much like watson has become a brand, AI terms are becoming brand terms. Example - Shopify Hatchful: they launched an actual branding assistant that didn't do anything that couldn't be human curated. It was nothing more than a brand term. At the same time, China is starting to grow leaps and bounds ahead of the US in artificial intelligence. Eric Schmidt said that the US needs to get its act together in AI competition with China. It's not going to bode well for us is a more stringent globalization economic policy in the us with a more astringent guidelines around immigration will create a brain drain in the US Therefore: Market fatigue and overuse of term AI will lead to stagnation and apathy and we'll lose the global race to artificial intelligence dominance which will lead to jobs overseas, which might then lead to new and interesting products that are actually in markets outside the US first. We'll then have to experience something that we haven't had to yet: that other markets are more competitive than us, and products won't be English language first, and maybe not US dollar based. All of these technologies will become part of a larger whole. The thing that emerges from the ashes of those sorts of tech terms will be brand. Brand affinity and inspiration from brands is powered from how they fit into your life and the things you identify with and integrate into your life. You heard it hear first on FutureCommerce. Let us know your predictions for 2018 on futurecommerce.fm. Who knows, maybe we'll share them on the show. Go super future on us, we'll love it. Credits Transcription - Mallory Triana Editing - Christopher Harry / Podsherpa Theme Music - Spectral Wolf Transcript Coming soon!

From the Gutenberg Press to Twitter - how tech innovation gives legitimacy to our words. Phillip gets down and dirty with AI and warns retailers of marketing confusion. Also - what exactly is Deep Learning? Show Notes Vibe notice: if the vibe is different, it's because this is the first in-person episode with Phillip and Brian and they're having way too much fun with no imbibing of ethyl alcohol before recording. For more information about the evolution of media and journalism check out Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan, a fascinating read covering the evolution of media in the Western World. Shoutout to Kiri Masters: We're sorry we forgot to mention your great podcast on episode 52. We're sorry; we're the worst. Come on the show to talk about building a brand! In the meantime, folks, go listen to Kiri Masters' Ecommerce BrainTrust. Our Inaugural NPS: Very first NPS went really well. It was fun to hear from our listeners. The FutureCommerce's copywriter's job is in jeopary: thanks NPS commenter. The Big Think Segment What can HAM radio teach us about decency in the social Age? Evolution of the written word: the Gutenberg Press gave authority to printed material due to the medium in which it was distributed. When something is in print, it carries weight and authority. Journalistic practices evolved out the necessity for us to bring ethics to the printed medium. Fast forward and Facebook and Twitter over the last 5 years have become the authoritative choice for disseminating news. Riley Florence tweeted parallels between Twitter and HAM radio's early toxicity of the medium. Early adopters had to come up with a set of guidelines to root out rampant toxicity. Retail Prophet Retail Prophet Doug Stevens first podcast says the future of commerce is social. Implications for retail: if some of our greatest thinkers say social is the next frontier for retailers, and social is a toxic place, then we need to know how to behave ourselves as retailers and consumers in the social medium. New mediums create paradigms that require getting used to and understanding. Facebook Messenger Kids What you think it is vs. what it actually is: What you probably think it is: we don't need another product to help our kids get on chat. There's an Inherent creepiness to marketing chat to kids. A real fear that creepy people can subvert the platform for dangerous purposes. What it actually is: a way to control and keep your kids safe when chatting online. It gives parents the tools to keep your kids safe when using a chat platform. It's like kik or snapchat with parental controls. It's, "I as a parent get to moderate who gets to talk to you." Which is smart and healthy. Important to shepherd and teach our children that these can be mediums for both good and bad. Future Policy with Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Daniel Sepulveda: Episode 51's conversation about the Digital Divide serves as a good frame for the policy conversations we're going to have. It's exactly how the legislative process works: a conversation between 2 people from either side of the aisle hashing out problems and solutions. Together they come up with a zone of agreement and bring it to their bosses and the bosses talk to each other, and then bring it to their colleagues and they take it to their colleagues, and eventually a solution is proposed. Brian took the course of free market economics and the rise of innovation as the natural course of economics, so net net it will be a positive. Phillip worries that we have responsibilities to each other and and have communal responsibilities for those who are going to lose out that aren't being discussed. They each held two different points of view, each listened to each other and have a natural respect for one another and were able to have a respectful conversation. / What's missing today is the ability to come together with mutual respect and listen and examine the question to eventually come to a solution That's what Danny hopes we would do as we talk about future issues going forward. Machine Learning and AI and Marketing Confusion: Google Brain's auto machine learning (Auto ML) created its own Artificial Intelligence. The researchers at Google Brain announced the creation of autoML, an AI that is capable of creating its own AI. The babies are having babies. It created something called NASnet that recognizes objects in video at real time and has an 82.9% success rate. Brian wants you to watch Person of Interest. AI term and the Machine Learning terms are being abused because people don't understand the difference. See episode 14 for an overview of this with Jonathan Epstein from Sentient Technologies. Retailers: caveat emptor! Be highly skeptical of any technology provider telling you they're using deep learning or AI. It's only been recently that Google and Amazon have productized deep learning. Explanation of Machine Learning Machine learning is trying to find the best fit algorithm. Think of a scatter plot in Microsoft Excel You can make a best fit straight line with a particular slope that will try to hit an average or median between all of the points on your scatter plot Imagine what that looks like. You'll see that the straight line is really far off the mark from most of those points because it's an average. That means there are major outliers. The difference of machine learning is the straight line. The deep learning continues to perform refinements to the line to get it closer to all of those data points. That's called gradient descent. It's not just 2D it's a multidimensional scatter plot. It's still just trying to find a better fit line, and n finding that better line, it can begin to make predictions about where a particular data point may fall along that line. What most people are selling you is the straight line. They're selling you a really average product. It's the difference between A/B testing and 1 to 1 personalization. Most are doing A/B testing and calling it 1 to 1 because they don't have the means to do it. Retailers: if you're being sold that you have to bake AI into something, or every single product has AI branded on it, don't be fooled. If they are not using Google, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft or Sentient technology, it's probably not legitimate. If you're listening to this right now in 2017, be skeptical. Future AI/ML In a while it may become so simple any founder can use: think Amazon Rekognition and Google Poly. Think of them like the Gutenberg Press: at first it was a highly skilled profession that only a few could use, and now any numbskull can start a tumblr and share their thoughts. Amazon Sumerian for example: anyone can make 3D now. Microsoft Paint for VR. Wrap it Up! Bitcoin Edition: We're making  a commitment to getting a Bitcoin expert on our show! It's doubling again: 16K as we speak. Two news reports have come out. One: Bank of America won a patent for cryptocurrency. Two: JP Morgan put out a buy rating for Bitcoin for 15K. Buy at 15K. We know nothing about bitcoin, so we need to get an expert on with us. Finally: Our 2018 prediction show is coming up! Subscribe to our podcast anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts and sign up for FC INSIDERS for exclusive content.

"If consumerism is our religion, then malls were our temples. Our temple now is the internet." Episode 53 is all about how Amazon owned Black Friday and while our heads were spinning they decided to take over Augmented Reality as well. Did You Recover from the Holiday Shopping Blitz? Brian favorite deal: buy a Google Home for $29 and link it up with your Google Express accounts to get a $25 credit for walmart.com. Phillip's favorite: Timbuk2 had a 70% off sale on cyber monday. Brian is unimpressed. Voice is Big in the News this Week: Amazon's top selling item for Black Friday was the Amazon Echo Dot. Conversational commerce is here. Even our giveaway was a voice device, because the price was so ludicrous. Voysis' exclusive report shows that 50% of retailers are investing in voice. They reference Mary Meeker's 2016 report that 75% of all content consumption will happen via mobile by 2017. The pull quote: "voice is not the future it's the present." Retailer Challenge: go to your top search terms, or your long tail of search from 2 years ago, and compare those results to today. You'll see more verbose and natural language formatted searches because people are speaking into your websites. Check it out, the data will prove it out. Toaster.co has an article called "Giving Brands a Voice," discussing how to modify your brand in a UI-less conversational interface and what the growth of Voice First devices could do to your brand. If you have thought to yourself "why should I, as a brand, care," then read that article. Market Equilibrium Watch: Data and colo center competition is causing a surplus of space in their centers. Because of that, price points are dropping. So we're seeing price competitive options for people to build out impressive private clouds for very little money, bringing some degree of equilibrium back to the market. The Most Impressive Thing Brian Has Ever Seen: Amazon Sumerian, "the fastest and easiest way to create AR, VR, and 3D experiences." Lets you create all of the above quickly and easily without any specialized expertise. Did they just win? We think Amazon just won. They're aiming to educate the marketplace on how to create these environments. Brian let's Philip know that he's going to build out a FutureCommerce HQ in VR. Merry Christmas, Philip. Retailers: it's still going to be difficult to create experiences in AR and VR in retail if you don't have accurate models of the products you're selling. You might be able to create spaces for the products to live, but the hardest part is getting your models in there. The amount of data you have to maintain is next level difficult. Check with your brands to see if they have models of their products. Amazon Sumerian Hosts: You can create a digital narrator to narrate a scene you create. This is a clear use case for their acquisition of body labs. There's a lot a lot of personalized interaction options ahead with this technology. Reminder: it's still in preview, and it's a novel concept, and of course we've seen a lot of things sunset that seemed novel and unique at the time. Google Poly Program: Google just announced the Google Poly Program. A way to address the difficulty of modeling your products for 3D. Working backwards from the endpoint you can see Google in this space for decades. 3D generation has been part of google's masterplan for a while and follows very similarly their Voice plan. They build on prior success working towards an end goal. They have a vision that helps guide their product roadmap. Black Friday? Black November. Brian's been a nerd about Black Friday for years. Thanksgiving day sales were up by 18% online. They kicked off their sales the morning of Thanksgiving this year. Philip wonders if it's a response to companies responding to REI and others distancing themselves from Black Friday. Brian thinks it's just about cold hard cash. The businesses looking to capitalize on Black Friday madness will find any angle they can to make more sales. If the numbers say start sales earlier, then start them earlier. And now with online sales, it doesn't even matter if you open your store. Holy Cow! Digital commerce 360 said that early numbers point to more than 46% of revenue coming from mobile sales. Web sales were 18% higher than last year. 61% of visits to retail site were mobile, and 46% of the sales came from mobile Have we solved the gap that we keep hearing about in ecommerce that people don't want to purchase on mobile? Brian's theory: A two year old flagship phone can still do a lot of shopping. Those phones are now in the hands of a broader market of people. So a larger percentage of people are equipped to purchase items easily on mobile. 2 Black Friday Takeaways: The idea that mobile doesn't convert is getting debunked. It doesn't just have to be the small device they don't want to convert on, it seems many people are motivated to purchase. If you look across the brands we manage professionally, the numbers are up for all of November. It's not just black Friday. Black Friday is dispersing throughout the year and creating a lower margin for business. Brick and Mortar Brick and mortar sales were only down by 1.5%. Last year they were flat. There's a certain person that loves that (Brian! Cough, cough.) There's an excitement and buzz to be a part of a very specific American ritual. If our god is consumerism, then the malls were certainly our temple. Our temple is now the internet. Final Thoughts: We're slowly moving away from aggregate portals for search and starting to become brand loyalists when searching for goods and services. See Episode 40 and our conversation with Richard Kestenbaum for a in-depth look at this from a passive commerce perspective. All of this is subject to change and nothing is fixed, but this upward trajectory is going to continue in the short term but is ripe for disruption in the future.

Technology can help you take your next step in retail - so we review the current landscape of retail-tech-focused podcasts, provide critique and offer insight into our favorite resources for keeping up to date on retail news. Show Notes Retail Tech Podcast Roundup Jason and Scot | The Jason and Scot Show Retail Geek https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasongoldberg/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/ Andrew Younderain eCommerce Fuel Private community Podcast https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-youderian-ba74a623/ Jose Chan and Todd Harris, Brick and Data LOVE this show AR goes BOOM https://www.linkedin.com/in/jos%C3%A9-p-chan-b4a73446/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddjharris/ Leyton and Trent Kling Retail Focus https://www.linkedin.com/in/trent-kling/ Melissa Campanelli and Joe Keenan Total Retail Talks https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissacampanelli/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/16365/ NRF/Bill Thorne/Jessica - Retail Gets Real https://nrf.com/blog/neiman-marcus-ceo-karen-katz-putting-digital-first eCommerce Masterplan - Chloe Thomas https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloethomasecommerce/ No audio clips Brandon Moskwa eCommerce All Stars Andrea Wasserman Captain Customer

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The Digital Divide and New Classism This week we've entered The Odd Couple territory. Brian's relentless optimism and hope for harnessing technology for a bright future contrast with Phillip's expressed skepticism that advancements in AI and automation will benefit the working class without regulatory oversight. Get out your Xanax and buckle up! Making Walmart cool again Lord and Taylor will start selling on walmart.com with their own special homepage. It seems to Phillip that they've transformed from a prestige based brand to a value shopping brand. Why does Lord and Taylor make this move? Walmart's official press release gives us the answer. To reach a larger market and increase their digital presence. And this advances Walmart's own upmarket brand strategy. The Digital Divide: Many Americans are in a lower market tier based in cash only transactions, and companies like Walmart are trying to enable these customers to purchase digitally. But how do Walmart's upmarket aspirations affect the working class market? Brian thinks Walmart's just appealing to all markets, not just moving up. The middle class is a new opportunity, and they have the scale to expand. Brian's optimistic about the future of technology and the working class:  "maybe there will be more people in the lower class, but the lower class won't suck as much." He thinks technology is enabling us to be more efficient and provide better products, better services, and better life for the working class. Counterpoint: Only the top 1% of earners will benefit from AI and machine learning: Robby Berman posits that AI will serve and make life better for humans, but only the top 1% of humans. A Princeton study on bias in bots explores how AI has the problematic ability to target people for committing potential crimes based off the bias and prejudice of the bot creators. Walmart has a litigious history of negative workforce practices partly due to their workforce scheduling algorithm.   Brian sees the problem as cultural. He wants business leadership to create ethical algorithms and let the responsibility rest on individual business leaders making ethical decisions. Retail Apocalypse: Bloomberg's collaborative article explores the reasons behind the "retail apocalypse." It's not just about how many people have real estate and retail debt but about the number of people delinquent per capita in certain markets. The consumers in debt don't have the income and opportunity to pay it back due to lack of employment in retail. "You can be as rosy as you want about the corporate ethics, if there are no jobs, then it doesn't matter what how ethical the corporation is." Brian thinks we can create better jobs and pay better wages, and maybe it's ok that retail jobs shrink over time. He considers Amazon's warehouse workforce. And Brian takes comfort in the employment rate being at an all time high. AI enabling job elimination: Chris Gardner from Forrester predicts that automation will eliminate 9% of jobs in 2018. "These jobs are not low end jobs, they're white collar jobs being replaced." Brian is again optimistic: a whole new host of jobs will be created for creating and servicing AI. Bank of Amazon:   Internal rumblings that Amazon might also become a bank. Some regulators are willing to explore this option. Brian's optimist view: As Amazon has a view into our finances, they're going to start to help us like mint does by keeping track of our purchases and how they relate to other items. They might even create living type packages. Amazon will aggregate your financial data and help you craft a livable and economically responsible lifestyle. Phillip feels like the foxes are guarding the hen house in that scenario. When you rely on a few companies that do way too many things so that they become ingrained in society, then when that company fails, a disproportionate amount of the population is negatively affected. AI and Permanence: Reuters reported that a son used data to recreate his dad as a chatbot. Listen to this week's FC INSIDERS Exclusive Content on the possibilities of body data and machine learning. Download Transcript

A Day of Days to Toot Our Horns! Future Commerce hit some amazing achievements over this year:  In just a year's time, you our listeners, have propelled us into thought leadership. It all started with a podcast partnership with the Jason and Scot show.  Accolades for the humble: Forbes listed us as one of the 6 tech podcasts worth your time. Rated one of the 5 best retail podcasts for consumer brands. Brian takes award for most things predicted: Called Amazon's Whole Foods acquisition.  And called Amazon's Body Data acquisition.  The ghosts of future past: 50 episodes ago there was no:   Snap spectacles.  Snap stock, whole foods acquisition.  Google home.  Pokemon go.  Introducing Passive Commerce to you:  Wouldn't you know it: Study released claims passive commerce is the means of marketing consumer packaged goods. Actual data is proving theories we've had for many years. All Amazon all the time:  Brian keeps the dream alive: maybe swole Jeff Bezos is listening to this show acting on Brian's suggestions?  Conversational Commerce: Scott Emmons, one of our first guests, called conversational commerce a fad.   If it's not a fad, at least it's overhyped.  Like VR, the enthusiasm outstrips the reality of the technology. Wait on it, it'll come back.  Remember drake bot?  Thank you to our far flung listeners:  We're going worldwide: Japan, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Spain, UK, the Nordic countries, Iceland, and even one lonely listener logging in from Mongolia. You're a world wide audience engaged in making strategic decisions about the future retail technology you're going to use.  And you're using futurecommerce to make those decisions: thank you! Our most popular guest: Nick Vu, Adidas: Nick Vu explained how you need to tailor your approach to bringing innovation into your organization based on culture and size.  Amanda Manna from Lowe's Innovation lab: Explained how Lowe's uses story telling to advance rapid innovation.  The answer is super powers. No really, Iron Man-like exo-suits. They use them.  Temper that with Sucharita Mulpuru's advice: Don't do technology just for the sake of technology Retailers can embrace basic ideas such as putting a marketplace on their website.  But Saku Panditharatne gives a more urgent view of technological adoption:  Tech is central to everything, so can't skimp out on it.  ##Fang Cheng from Linc discusses practical transparency in bot customer service: Unrealistic to expect bots to be able to do everything we can do on day one.  Be open and transparent with your customers when they are conversing with a bot or human. ##Brian Roemmele humorously tells us that we're making the decisions of our own destruction:  "Everyone who thinks they have job security, they don't. Nobody has job security any longer. Everybody is going to be out of a job." ##Jason Baptiste talks voice interfaces and how to harness "fun": "A big problem I have with Silicon valley is that it's dry and not fun. Snapchat was smart to go into L.A. and do things that are fun."  How to get customers to interact with your products:  Products have to be fun and engaging and make our lives better. Another Brian prediction? 2018 is going to be the year of entertainment.  Customers want to enjoy and be entertained by an experience. Dazzle your customers. See episode 22 and our discussion with Amber Armstrong.  But don't knock TJ Maxx, man. The hunt is the most dangerous game.  Sears, on the other hand, that's the death of retail. Stand out episode: Body Labs. Using innovative technology to disrupt verticals: Episode 29: Body labs approach using their products and applying them in new and unexpected ways. "If you could easily provide businesses with the 3D shape of that consumer...you could unlock this whole other realm of both shape based analytics and size recommendations." Stand out episode: the last word goes to Caleb Light of Power Practical: Episode 42: "You're not taking a pot and making electricity with every product... sometimes those super innovative products don't sell that well as something like an LED strip that you thrown on the back of your television." "Even if you don't have super heavy tech products, you can still think of ways of bundling it or packaging it so you can make it a clean experience so that someone wants to come back to your brand to buy whatever's new." Caleb embodies what future commerce is all about: Taking the tools available to him and maximizing them for his success in business. We're living in the new retail:  Things that used to work aren't going to work anymore. The new retail means constantly poking and prodding and finding new ways of doing things.  Find people that can interpret different data, and smaller sets of data, and come up with meaningful insights that direct your business.  You can become the new retail. Join FC Insiders: you can expect more of the same in the future.  Expect more thoughtful insights, great interviews, and thought leadership. Together we're going to build a community of retail futurists to help us bring tomorrow into today.  Remember: "The future is moving fast, but Future Commerce is moving faster." Download Transcript

This week we dive deep into the public policy that reflects the challenging relationship between commerce, the internet, tech giants, domestic and international policy, fair treatment of employees, and the future of our economy. With the help of Daniel Sepulveda, Phillip and Brian tease out the threads and agree that “we’re going to have to make a communal decision to involve everyone in the modern digital economy or we’ll have a bifurcated society” that falls prey to the wolves of populism. Daniel Sepulveda, "ambassador of the internet": Involved in commercial technology and policy for 20 years. Politically appointed ambassador on issues of technology and telecommunications. Appointed by President Obama and John Kerry. There is no differentiator between the internet economy and the regular economy. "if you're business doesn't understand that, then you're not long for this world." On what we take for granted when using the internet: The internet is an amazing act of voluntary human engagement. There is no law that says communications firms have to accept internet protocol. It's a handshake agreement among technologists, engineers and developers who use voluntarily agreed upon rules for the operation of the internet.  A brief summary of ICANN: what it is and how it functions Before there was ICANN there was Jon Postel, and he personally managed IPAs.  ICANN is a huge nonprofit multinational organization acting as an internet yellow pages. Changing US net neutrality policy:  Tim Wu was the original thinker around network neutrality. The point of net neutrality is to keep networks from having a gatekeeper function. Ajit Pai, and as an extension, republicans do not believe net neutrality should be a legal mandate.  They think companies should manage access as they see fit as a function of commerce.  Compromise: Republicans agree that companies cannot block you from access content, attaching a legal device to that content, or charge you on discriminatory terms. Daniel's Take on net neutrality:  The point is to have democratic access for users. No one should come between the creator and participant's interaction online.  Ajit Pai's view: letting companies manage their networks as they want could create revenue and regulatory flexibility to build networks out to underserved areas.  Consider a compromise for a non-neutral behavior with a large public welfare benefit.  Concern: last mile service is still a concentrated market that needs regulation to protect against consumer abuse.  Avoiding internet policy pitfalls: Promote public policies and incentives to maximize public good of tech innovation.  Construct public policies to discourage any technology out of fear is a bad idea.  Find solutions from tech outcomes rather than create regulatory structures to deny tech innovation.  Otherwise we'll have a real political populist problem.  On universal basic income:  A primarily gig economy is a challenge: the law and public benefit systems are built for a society in which employers have a responsibility to workers, we have responsibility to each other, and entities have consumer protection responsibilities.  We'd need a wholesale revisiting of everything from labor law to education and back to public welfare law if we have a society that is mostly self-employed.  How to develop a modern workforce:  Skill development is the cop-out answer. It needs to be much more than that.  It didn't work for steel workers or coal miners. They neither relocated to find work, nor gained new skills for different professions.  We need to "develop entrepreneurship for people in place, people within geography to create and build community."  Communities and cities are embarrassing themselves for the next amazon headquarters. Take that energy and communal cash and use it for an entrepreneurial community. Brian's 2 Takeaways to building a modern workforce: 1: Invest in your employees. Teach them to be entrepreneurs or at least intrapreneurs. 2: Some of you need to go start a business. Don't hide behind the walls of a corporation. Daniel agrees: as a matter of public policy we have to reward that. We should encourage and reward the risk-taking of investing in your own company.  Phillip's 3rd cynical takeaway: The current administration is not going to be very friendly to these ideals.  It likely gets worse before it gets better.  Get politically involved to put the right people into office who have the desire to see those policies carried out, or it won't happen. People have to actually be in office to shape public policy.  Amazon and US trade policy:  Amazon is the most interesting and strongest company in America. Jeff Bezos is a genius. He's in everything.  They have some of the most talented people in the game. They understand the need to spread value to consumers and employees better than most companies. But there is a basic need in competition law, antitrust law, and societal function to understand the degree to which Amazon becomes the Walmart of the internet.  Not having a public dialogue on that issue would be a failure of duty for public officials.  Daniel's 5 year snapshot:  We risk an overcorrection in dealing with technology.  We haven't had a proactive mechanism for working with silicon valley and undeniably giant companies.  With no conversation about their practices, there'll be an overcorrection because people are afraid of how big these companies are becoming.  The hope is for a positive and inclusive dialogue that creates reasonable guardrails and authority for consumers and workers relative to tech operators and owners for the assets in their lives: personal identification data and labor.  We need a conversation about how our system better and more democratically distributes wealth. We're going to have to make a communal decision to involve everyone in the modern digital economy or we'll have a bifurcated society. Photo credit: Getty/Politico, 2015 Download Transcript

Healthcare is no game, but try telling insurance carriers that. Phillip gets manipulated into buying a denim jacket, innovation in fitness and fashion, Adobe "reinvents" fintech, and the guys go deep (real deep) on healthcare and insurance. "LOL, jean jackets are still a thing" Phillip got a new jean jacket Moral of the story: even when you know what's happening to you, even when you know you're being manipulated but digital marketing, you still buy the product.  Brian suggests the inception theory of jean jacket marketing (perhaps Phillip watched Stranger Things 2?). Pricing elasticity on an individual basis as an untapped area of potential Minority Report Policing in Dubai Dubai International Airport plans a new face scanning virtual aquarium. They are legitimately there to just track your face and scan you and make sure you're not a terrorist of some kind. A prediction: at some point facial scanning is going to drive advertising to you.  Amazon's Inadvertent Market Contraction?  Microsoft partners are getting lifts in azure deployments ever since Amazon acquired Whole Foods. It seems that retail is really shaken up about Amazon kind of owning the world.  Keep an eye on it: Amazon needs large brands and enterprise partners to continue using AWS: a large exodus might cause business contraction.  Something to keep an eye on: maybe the contraction in this space may have a negative effect overall on amazon's business because Amazon needs the large enterprise partners and brands to still use AWS. They can't all jump ship for Azure.  Amazon's Athleisure Adventures Amazon is in talks with two manufactures to create its own sportswear brand.  Both Taiwanese companies already make clothing for the Gap, Uniqlo, Kohl's, Lululemon, Nike, and Under Armour.  Brian predicts "make" will be more important than "brand." See episode 8 for reference. Brian and Phillip meet Michael from Best Made Company, an upscale lifestyle clothing and gear company recently acquired by silicon valley startup, Bolt Threads to pilot a new type of spider silk.  We no longer need a consumer marketing campaign for people to accept nylon or to buy more cotton (Phillip reminisces about "the touch, the feel of cotton.") Shout out to Kniterate, and Bolt Threads, to potentially disrupting the textile industry.  Apple's New Retail Stores: If It Works, Double Down Apple's new Town Square store just opened in Chicago.  Shocker: it's just a big giant Apple store. Retail spaces are more than just about purchasing at this point: this is Starbucks 2.0.  A new discovery: the Apple store and the play area at the mall are the exact same thing, we just don't call the play area a town hall.  Mark it: Brian saliently wins Phillip over to his Apple optimism at 27:47: why wouldn't Apple invest in this more? Why not? Go ahead and make it bigger, make it nicer.  Adobe and Banks Team up to "Reinvent" fintech Adobe is working with banks to merge physical branches with digital experiences.  Brian's having a hard time getting excited for Adobe teaming up with banks to merge physical branches with digital experiences.  Adobe's "sensei" uses artificial intelligence to automatically reformat content on a bank's website to fit a screen inside the bank.  It sounds a lot like they just used AI to build a responsive webpage. What's new?  One interesting point: using a customer's geographic location to trigger a notification on a smartphone once they enter a branch: bank geofencing.  Loyalty Programs and the FBI REI and the FBI worked together to catch a suspected airport bomber by using an REI bag they found in the woods and tracing the purchase back to the loyalty card of the suspected bomber.   We finally found a real use for loyalty programs in this country.  Body Dataaaaa! John Hancock partners with Apple to offer $25 Apple Watches.  The catch: you have to exercise regularly for 2 years with it, or pay it all back.  Insurance getting involved in body devices might herald a move to the gamification of healthcare.  A move to "push" healthcare rather than "pull." Push customers to healthy living rather than wait for them to come to the doctor.  Potential hazards: what if your provider has access to your purchase data? Do you really want them to see how often you ate at Taco Bell last month?  Brian goes a "little bit future" and suggests free preventative care for every American to save the country a ton of money.  Silicon Valley has the chance to make healthcare a game and transform its role.  We have legitimate technology that can help save your life.  In fact, it helped save James T. Green's life.  Puerto Rico and Tesla Grid Update Tesla is continuing to invest in Puerto Rico.  can Tesla adopt their work on a larger scale?  Is it smart for Puerto Rico to privatize their energy grid with Tesla's help? Should we allow the privitization of a fundamental human need in 2017? Tesla's and Google's work in Puerto Rico is a silver lining in an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Cryptocurrency Russia considering it's own cryptocurrency, which goes against the fundamental tenant of cryptocurrency: decentralization.  Bubble watch: Bitcoin is approaching 6,000 to 1 US dollars.  Mastercard announces its own blockchain service. A reversal of their previous anti-Bitcoin position.  Cryptocurrency Domain squatting: everyone is trying to stake lay claim to a name or brand while other markets go crazy.  Bitcoin is still the wild west The Hack Back Bill A new bill introduced in the House of Representatives let's people hack back. It's called the AC/DC act. Metal. Legislation as a defense of people who have to do something technically illegal to stop viruses and malware, perhaps?  An attempt of the the government to get a handle on new threats in a digital world.   Snapchat Vandalized in AR Snapchat partnered with Jeff Koons to add AR elements to his artwork.  It was vandalized.  But was it really? Someone used a separate app, recreated the exact model, and added virtual spraypaint vandalism.  Brian, breaking with his usual optimism, thinks we're seeing a new norm: subversive acts built on AR in different spaces, layered one on top of the other. Lenses uon lenses, with little to no regulation or enforcement.   That bleak note leads us to the SEC announcing investigations into blockchain. Download Transcript

This week’s episode arc: the future is a nuclear hellscape full of zombies to the future filled with sustainable food, vibrant public transit systems, voice ux assistants for non sighted developers, and a technologically innovative rebuilt Puerto Rico. Sometimes you need the dark to see the light. Google Home vs. Amazon Game over? Target partners with Google for voice enabled online shopping, joining Walmart to give Google two huge retailers. Amazon, what happened? You had a two year head start. Brian reminds Phillip: Amazon doesn’t need to partner with Walmart or Target. Amazon’s Alexa is trying to be branded the same way, but at some point, is it a blender, too? Its definitely a fridge. Amazon’s been blowing their lead to Google Google Missteps Google be creepin Google Fi accidentally throttled half a million subscribers. Does that mean they’re going to renege their promise not to throttle users ever? Amazon Acquires Body Labs Amazon Acquires Future Commerce podcast alum Body Labs for $70MM Brian called it, and he’s excited; confirms that Jeff Bezos listens to Future Commerce. Body Labs is a body modeling software that takes a 2D picture of your body and turns it into a 3D representation. Ramifications for: private label brands, custom clothing, new sizes, sporting goods, and even video game avatars. Uber eVTOL Phillip got an Uber survey; subject: rockets. Specifically, eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing). 100 questions almost entirely on eVTOL, e.g. does it need a pilot for you to feel safe, or can it be autonomous? Show title idea: “I’m running a little late, my eVTOL crashed.” Phillip peers into the future and sees only two options: eVTOLs, or scrap metal fortified shelters protecting the huddling remnants of humanity from zombies and nuclear apocalypse. Facebook Facebook Announces it’s own food delivery service Definitely not on brand: “Of all the things they could go invest in, this is not the thing I’d expect” Oculus Go: VR for the common folk Exciting development, Facebook announces Oculus Go. Affordable entry point, stand alone, embedded audio, “near high VR experience.” Phillip says, “it doesn’t sound good to me, that’s like saying ‘it’s not diarrhea, it’s near diarrhea.’” A clear upgrade in the affordable VR realm: this is not pseudo-experience that feels like a phone hack. Not only visual VR, but spatial audio as well. Hugo Barra, Zuckerberg, if you’re listening, send the guys over for a demo. VR still kitsch: it’s not clear how it makes life better for consumers. Magic Leap gets some serious Series D funding 1 billion dollars of Series D funding. That’s a lot of money, especially for an unknown product. Prediction: Magic Leap is the Solyndra of 2017 Exceptional at fundraising, but nothing else? Or maybe the CEO of Magic Leap is just Killgrave from Jessica Jones. Technology for good in the public sphere Brent Toderian, tweets Enrique Penalosa, Mayor of Bogota’s, inspiring quote: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich ride public transportation.” Real disruption comes when convenience outweighs other factors: need innovation in public transit. “The whole world depends on disrupting food delivery and public transit systems.” Shoutout to Jason L Baptiste and his new company, Studio Live. Google’s Project Loon connects Puerto Rico to wifi using hot air balloons. Mark Zuckerberg uses Puerto Rico to shill for his new Facebook feature. Download Transcript

Show Notes Future Commerce Episode 46 Review of 2017’s Shop.org conference FC Interviews Magento's own Peter Sheldon Kobe Bryant gave the keynote Brian’s favorite talk: the textile guy () letting the audience see behind the veneer of his business. “The garden section,” and “The OG Future Blanks.” Writing thank you notes with [https://bond.co/](Bond, the robot auto-writer) VNTNA, holograms, and the shared experience If the future is now, where are our flying cars? Google Pixel Buds: the potential to reshape the world with a real-life Babelfish Rebuilding Puerto Rico with Elon Musk’s help. Will Tesla battery packs help modern cities rethink infrastructure with tech at the core? Reminder, friends of the future: we want to be more engaged with you! Join FC Insiders, follow us on Facebook (it’s hoppin’), follow us on Twitter, find us on LinkedIn (Brian lives and breathes LinkedIn). We want to know who you are and what you want! Augmented Reality’s leap in sophistication Nike and AR: combating sneaker bots Ikea’s new ARKit built app verging on uncanny valley territory Toys “R” Us, bankruptcy, and a chance to rebrand with AR at the core of store experience AR’s role in commerce: “just like we don’t call movies talkies, and we don’t call cars horseless carriages” the name and the technique of AR will fade into the background Assessing your AR strategy Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” and social media’s role in commerce Brand perception: stay in your lane? The Amazon sphere of influence affects Costco: Costco announces grocery delivery program Costco’s had a trick up their sleeve all along: a hamburger. What hamburger is up your sleeve? Phillip’s cuckoo clock room of Amazon Echoes What better way to end a podcast than with a reference to Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Download Transcript

"If it doesn't add value, don't invest in it" - Peter Sheldon of Magento joins us to talk about crowdsourced ecosystem innovation, what PWAs mean for retailers, and gives his input on what the next 5-10 years looks like for retail.

The guys discuss the future of music, digital goods, ephemeral products, and how Spotify is changing our consumption behaviors and expectations. With John Beeler and Lowell Brams of Asthmatic Kitty Records.

Amanda Manna, Head of Narrative @ Lowe's Innovation Labs, talks with Brian about the importance of story and narrative in technological innovation

Caleb Light of Power Practical shares his experience on Shark Tank, finding new success with Amazon, and partnering with Mark Cuban Companies.

We host top retail analyst and strategist Sucharita Mulpuru to review the state of the market and discuss strategies to stay competitive.

A new Viant study shows that "passive commerce" can persuade customers away from CPG loyalty brands. We break open the data and go deep with Richard Kestenbaum, a Forbes Retail contributor.

Robert Scoble gives us a look at the not-so-distant future of VR, AR, and MR. By the end of the episode, even Phillip is ready to recommend that merchants turn their attention to this tech.

Brick and Mortar retail is in crisis, digital is thriving. We discuss the ins-and-outs of what makes a successful digital commerce strategy in businesses that depend on wholesale, and how to find success in a vertically-integrated direct-to-consumer brand. A panel of veteran ecommerce managers discuss how to navigate the months ahead and map out their own plans for success. To hear more episodes of Merchant to Merchant visit the site here and subscribe on iTunes Event Sponsors A very special thanks to Something Digital and Magento for sponsoring this event, and to Rothman's New York for providing the venue. Guests Lee Bissonnette - VP of Ecommerce, Mark Fisher Footwear Julie Lefkowitz, Ecommerce Director, Ramy Brook Heather Kaminetsky, President, DreamLabs Moderator Phillip Jackson - Ecommerce Evangelist, Something Digital

The guys discuss in-store experiences that don't suck, and recap IRCE.

SAME DAY ANALYSIS! Choo choo! 🚂 All aboard the Amazon Hype Train! Amazon announces $13.7B acquisition of Whole Foods and the guys break it down.

The guys review the announcements coming out of Google I/O and some of the breakthroughs in MV/VR/AR.

Nick Vu, Senior Vice President at Adidas Group, joins us to talk about how they're using data and analytics to transform retail.

This is Part 1 For part 2 head on over to http://retailgeek.com/jason-scot-show-episode-85-futurecommerce-joint-podcast-part-2/! Guests Jason Goldberg - Co-host, Jason and Scot Show and SVP of Commerce at Razorfish Scot Wingo - Co-host, Jason and Scot Show and Executive Chairman at ChannelAdvisor

Brian and Phillip sit down to talk about Echo Look and 2000 other, more important, things

Guest Saku Panditharatne, Retail Analyst - @sknthla

We sit down with Acquia to talk their new partnership with Magento, the role of personalization, and recap of ShopTalk 2017

We sit down with Jon Cilley and Bill O'Farrell from Body Labs to talk about AR, Body Data, the future of Apps and the social economy

We get with Funko's Director of Digital Innovation Jacob Matson to discuss how digital and blockchain are changing how retailers do business

We interview Brian Moran of the IBM Influencers team to talk about the future of SMB

We continue our NRF interview series by sitting down with Bryan Eisenberg

Brian continues our NRF interviews by sitting down with Retail Analyst and IBM Influencer Andrew Busby

We sit down with Brett Curry of OMG Commerce and discuss how Voice and other tech will change SEM forever

The guys recap NRF and make some bold predictions for 2017