It's a Game of Pac-Man for Amazon. Bot or Not? Do I Hear an Echo? Weird News of the Week!

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It's a Game of Pac-Man for Amazon
Loup Venture Co-Founder Gene Munster believes Amazon will acquire Target this year.
“Target is the ideal offline partner for Amazon for two reasons, shared demographic and manageable but comprehensive store count”
Market share numbers suggest a deal would be approved by regulators, and Wal-Mart Stores would still have a larger share than an Amazon-Target combination
He estimated a takeout valuation of $41bn, or a 15% premium to Target’s current value.
Predicting Amazon’s next deal has become a common theme for analysts.
In November, DA Davidson analyst Tom Forte wrote that Lululemon Athletica may be attractive to the online retailer
Citigroup analyst Paul Lejuez recently catalogued a host of potential targets, including Abercrombie & Fitch, Bed Bath & Beyond and Advance Auto Parts.
Sources: 

http://www.mytotalretail.com/article/analyst-predicts-amazon-will-buy-target-this-year/

https://techcentral.co.za/amazon-will-buy-us-retailer-target-analyst-says/78874/?ct=t(DAILY_FEED_SEP_1_20169_1_2016)&mc_cid=3898b7d1e4&mc_eid=6ca18c274e

Bot or Not?
In 2018, AI-enabled bots will provide a better customer experience than human-to-human chat exchange
More than two billion messages are exchanged between people and companies every month on Facebook Messenger alone.
Other major players have been investing heavily in the space, creating platforms to support companies in their pursuits to engage customers where they are and in the way they prefer.
Bots, on the other hand, can respond immediately, and combine prompt buttons and other visual cues along with supporting textual conversations to offer a much richer, guided user interaction. -Human agents, on the other hand, need to be trained, respond inconsistently and need to be motivated to care about the customer.
Challenges: companies will need to create clear routes through conversational maps, understand the outcomes customers are trying to drive and prime the system with smart defaults.
Source: 

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/message-bot-customer-care

Do I Hear an Echo?
While Amazon Echo has been the clear leader - that could very well change in 2018.

Google has set partnerships with Walmart, Home Depot and eBay that give Google Home greater utility as as a retail shopping tool.

At the same time, Amazon has a pretty big lead in the smart speaker market, with as much as 65-75% market share, and it hasn’t exactly been resting on its laurels.

The e-commerce giant announced new Echo smart speaker products just a couple of months ago, and it aggressively priced its Echo devices during the holiday shopping stretch — not the typical behavior of a market incumbent with a big lead.
Not to mention partnerships with Sonos and other well entrenched “dumb speaker” systems.
An interesting question though - Is Amazon Echo at a disadvantage to Google because Google can establish partnerships directly with retailers? Amazon may be holed up in its own ecosystem.

Sources:

https://www.retaildive.com/news/can-google-home-take-on-amazons-echo-in-2018/513930/

Weird News of the Week
Apple built a gorgeous new Apple store on Chicago's waterfront this year.
But it also has one big problem: People discovered in late December that icicles tend to hang off of its roof in cold weather, forcing parts of its courtyard to be closed for safety reasons.
"The roof has a warming system that's built into it. It needed some fine-tuning and it got re-programmed today. It's hopefully a temporary problem."
https://twitter.com/mattmaldre/status/946532228783333376

EP 41: Bot or Not?

Great story behind this hot custom clothing company out of Boston! 

Fan Bi is the Founder and CEO of Blank Label, a custom men's clothing brand based in Boston. He dropped out of Babson in 2009, with one semester left, to start the company. He's a recipient of the BusinessWeek 25 Under 25 and INC 30 Under 30 awards. 

Blank Label Overview
Blank Label is a men's clothing brand with stores in Boston, Chicago, D.C., Atlanta, Denver and online. Through their own custom clothing line, their mission is to help men feel comfortable and confident in the clothes they wear. The company's vision is to build a long-standing national clothing brand.

Founded in 2010, they raised $1 million in 2013 to expand into brick-and-mortar. Four years later, they have six stores and are expanding their retail presence.

EP 42: Blank Label Founder & CEO, Fan Bi

José and Todd got a few minutes at NRF 2018 with Michelle Bacharach from FINDMINE. It's a little noise in the background because there were just a few thousand people in the area. Michelle tells us all about FINDMINE and why their "complete the look" tech is changing the way we pair our outfits and the way retailers represent their brand.



Michelle Bacharach is CEO and Co-Founder of FINDMINE. As a product and strategy expert, she’s experienced in growing startups and large media companies by launching apps and websites to millions of people, putting together joint ventures, and conceiving of new products. Michelle has shared her expertise with thousands of leaders in retail and technology as a speaker at SXSW and NRF Retail’s Big Show. She has an MBA from NYU Stern and a BA from UC Berkeley, where she wrote her honors thesis on managing innovation in multinational organizations.

FINDMINE 
FINDMINE scales outfitting across a fashion retailer's enterprise. Their automated "Complete the Look" technology creates complete outfits around each product. Blending the art of styling with the ease of automation to faithfully represent your brand at scale and help you answer, how do I wear this?

Find out more about FINDMINE on Twitter and over at their internet home.

EP 43: FINDMINE Co-founder & CEO, Michelle Bacharach

It didn't fit, so she did something about it. Not just for her, but for all women. We got to spend a very interesting 20 minutes with Cricket Lee from FitLogic at NRF 2018. 

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About Cricket Lee
While shopping for clothing and struggling to find clothes that fit, Cricket Lee realized there was a fit problem across the fashion industry. She set out to solve that problem, and improve the shopping experience for all women.

Cricket is a veteran of the retail industry who has invented a revolutionary sizing technology called Fitlogic. Fitlogic is a universal sizing standard for women's clothing. It's currently being evaluated by top retailers interested in adopting it to their clothing lines.

Cricket is a marketing expert with over 70 awards for advertising excellence, and learned how to solve problems from her father who designed missiles for NASA.

FitLogic 
Fitlogic is a world patented commercial clothes fitting standard that includes size and shape applications. The technology was developed with more than 60,000 women's measurements, then refined through brick and mortar tests with retailers (Nordstrom, QVC, Macys), online and in designer boutiques. Consumer direct programs, customer service and global applications were studied, and a proof of concept was completed through direct to consumer house brand LittleBlackPant after a year of testing. Fitlogic has garnered over 750 media exposures including Wall Street Journal cover story, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, ABC News and segments on The Today Show.

Find out more about FitLogic on Twitter and at http://www.fitlogic.com/

EP 44: FitLogic Founder & CEO, Cricket Lee

Where did those discounts go??? | Sit down, Microsoft. | Store No 8 Gobbles Up Another. | Weird News of the Week

EP 45: Discount Rehab

Brick & Data is a podcast dedicated to retail news, analytics, and tech with Todd Harris and José Chan. We’ll cover trending news of the week, interview some of the biggest players, surface game changer technologies, and explore how retailers are surviving and thriving.