Future Commerce

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

"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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A Day of Days to Toot Our Horns! Future Commerce hit some amazing achievements over this year: 

##Fang Cheng from Linc discusses practical transparency in bot customer service:

##Brian Roemmele humorously tells us that we're making the decisions of our own destruction: 

##Jason Baptiste talks voice interfaces and how to harness "fun":

Remember: "The future is moving fast, but Future Commerce is moving faster."

Download Transcript

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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."

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. 

Photo credit: Getty/Politico, 2015

Download Transcript

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Download Transcript

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Download Transcript

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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!

Download Transcript

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.