Future Commerce

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

BONUS EPISODE! We're giving away FIVE GOOGLE HOME MINIS! Sign up for FC INSIDERS newsletter before December 1st to receive one of FIVE Google Home Minis! PLUS - A quick shout out to Deborah Weinswig and a preview of Episode 52 of Future Commerce