Monthly Archives: June 2017

Amazon’s surprise acquisition today of Whole Foods Market just shows that Amazon is ahead of the curve. Yet again. It’s also a proof point that brick-and-mortar isn’t dead; it’s growing. The retail brands that have been struggling are not surprising. The brands that are closing their doors are the ones you would expect, because no one has loved them in a long time. Instead, retailers today must have a very clear digital strategy to survive, which places brick and mortar as a secondary adjunct to a well-designed experience ecosystem. Adding Whole Foods Market to Amazon’s family of brands not only expands its physical footprint—it also addresses Whole Foods’ core problems: how to do what they do and deliver value. As times got tougher, Whole Foods couldn’t deliver the additional value that consumers are seeking. The core of Amazon’s business is value and convenience.

Voice-assisted commerce is likely to be the next frontier for retailers. Rising comfort levels with virtual assistants and chatbots, as well as advances in technology, voice commands and messaging apps are presenting new sales platforms. “A shift has begun from consumer usage of websites to platforms like messaging apps and connected devices, so retailers and brands are trying to follow them there—and exploring the possibilities of using these channels for digital commerce,” said eMarketer analyst Krista Garcia, the author of a new eMarketer report, “Conversational Commerce 2017: Chatbots and Virtual Assistants.” (The full report is available only to eMarketer PRO subscribers). At its most basic, conversational commerce represents the intersection of messaging apps and virtual assistants with shopping. On the surface, voice-enabled speakers and chatbots might not seem that similar, despite both platforms harnessing AI and some degree of natural language processing, but in many ways both have the potential for added convenience, speeding up customer service interactions and removing friction from sales conversion.

Walmart agreed to acquire online apparel brand Bonobos for $310 million, adding to a list of digital acquisitions of companies that don’t necessarily align with the retail giant’s core customer base. Since Walmart’s acquisition of Jet.com last year, it has made acquisitions of digital retailers focusing on women’s apparel (ModCloth), shoes (ShoeBuy) and outdoor gear (MooseJaw). US apparel and accessories ecommerce sales are expected to reach $84.21 billion this year, according to eMarketer estimates, a gain of 15.4% over 2016. Growth is expected to continue in the double digits through 2020.

La Chine a réussi la première transmission quantique de données depuis l'espace et vers plusieurs stations au Tibet, distantes de plus de 1.000 km. La situation est ironique. Régulièrement suspectée d'être à l'origine d'opération de piratage informatique, la Chine vient de prendre une longueur d'avance sur ses concurrents dans la course à la mise en oeuvre d'un futur réseau Internet inviolable. Presqu'un an après avoir lancé Mozi, le premier satellite à communication quantique au monde , Pékin a annoncé avoir réalisé avec succès une "téléportation" quantique depuis l'espace et sur une grande distance. A l'aide d'un rayon laser, l'équipe du professeur Jian-Wei Pan de l'Université de Hefei en Chine, est parvenu à émettre depuis Mozi des particules de lumière (des photons) jumelles et à les envoyer simultanément à trois stations situées au Tibet et distantes pour certaines de 1.200 kilomètres, selon un article publié dans la revue américaine Science .

AMAZON HAS BEEN trying to crack the food delivery business for a decade. Today it may have finally figured out how: Buy a supermarket. In its biggest acquisition ever, Amazon has agreed to buy the Whole Foods supermarket chain for $13.7 billion. Given the Everything Store’s adventures in groceries so far, this promises to redefine what a trip to the grocery store looks like. Although the deal surprised a lot of people, the e-commerce giant has long wanted to figure out the online groceries game. It started testing delivery concepts in August 2007, when it unveiled Amazon Fresh—delivering produce and pantry staples through its fulfillment centers. Yet even after a decade—eons in Silicon Valley time—it's still trying. Turns out, the instant gratification business doesn't quite work with fresh food. Still, the market is just too lucrative—and too primed for disruption—for Amazon to simply give up. “Amazon buying Whole Foods is a good fit with the company's larger strategy for groceries,” says Jason Goldberg, vice president of commerce at the digital marketing company Razorfish. “Fresh groceries is the biggest category of consumer spending in retail that hasn’t been disrupted by online yet.” A recent report from the Food Marketing Institute and Nielsen found that the US grocery sector could grow five-fold in the next decade, with consumers spending upward of $100 billion by 2025. While around a quarter of US households currently shop online for groceries—up from 20 percent just three years ago—more than 70 percent will do so within 10 years, according to the report.

Amazon is taking a huge bite out of the fresh food business with its bid for Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion. But even though this is a deal between two companies, it’s not just the two of them being touched by it. The intersection between the food and tech industries has been playing out for years now, sprouting dozens of food startups; efforts from large tech companies to move into food; and strategies from large food players tapping tech to make sure they don’t miss out on the next wave of consumers and how they are choosing to shop. Here’s a look at how some of the biggest and most prominent of these, plus a few others, might be impacted by today’s news: Instacart This startup, founded at Y Combinator in 2012, blazed a trail in the US at a time when very few grocery stories offered delivery, by providing a way to shop through an app and get everything brought to your door. It’s positioned itself as an Amazon competitor, the business is making good returns in its biggest markets, and investors believe in Instacart: the startup has raised nearly $675 million and is now valued at $3.4 billion. Now here is the key: one of its investors and grocery store partners is none other than Whole Foods. In other words, the company that was Instacart’s prime competition will become a shareholder should the Whole Foods acquisition close. The question, then, will be how Amazon chooses to handle this: it could buy the company outright and knock it out as competition. Or it could hold on to its stake as a financial investment, while at the same time transferring all of Whole Foods’ delivery business to… Amazon Prime. That may not happen so quickly. There are four years left on the Whole Foods distribution partnership, noting that a source said Amazon’s purchase would not affect that arrangement. What this potentially does is put Instacart in the position of becoming an acquisition target itself. Possible buyers: those who are would-be Amazon competitors, such as Costco or Walmart. It could also make Instacart more strategically appealing as a delivery partner to more grocers if the Whole Foods partnership is disrupted. Indeed, that’s the tack that the market is likely to take, according to a person with knowledge of the Instacart’s plans. Rather than allow its arch-rival to keep a stake in the company, Instacart will look to buy back that stake that Amazon owns (which is less than 1% of the company). By the end of the year, Instacart will service roughly 80% of the U.S. market and the company has been rolling up big deals in the last week. It signed up or expanded its agreements with Publix, Wegmans, and Ahold Delhaize. Also worth noting that Whole Foods accounts for less than 10% of revenue for Instacart, the person said. There have been some hiccups along the company’s path: As Instacart has grown, it has faced a ton of costly backlash from contractors and customers who have been frustrated with its lack of pricing transparency. But still, it is growing and has built something that more than Amazon will want to have. Google Shopping Google was early in its moves back in 2013 to square up to Amazon with Google Shopping Express. It moved into more food eventually, and slowly expanded its partnerships. One of those partnerships is with Whole Foods. With Amazon as an owner, one probable outcome would be Whole Foods transferring its deliveries to Amazon and away from Google. Could this mean that Google will be looking for more food stores as partners? Will it expand what it delivers from other partners like Costco and Target? Amazon is feeling like an increasingly powerful force in the world of commerce. That could also spell an opening for smaller grocery stores that have little or no online presence. Feeling shut out of the game in mega-deals, those stores may suddenly get access to Google, which needs to make up the inventory if it loses Whole Foods. Google, on the other hand, may be able to strike friendlier deals, as there’s a mutually beneficial relationship to be had. Shipt Speaking of competition, Instacart and the rest are still seeing startups popping up who think that they can do what Instacart does better. One of these, Shipt, raised $40 million earlier this year to take on the challenge specifically in “non-coastal” markets that the likes of Google, Amazon and Instacart have yet to tackle. The startup also works with Whole Foods, and like Google may also end up losing them as a partner. Similarly, there is a question of how much of its business actually came from the grocery store, and how much from other partners (which includes a list of the biggest supermarkets in the middle of the country). This could spell more opportunity for Shipt as a partner at a time when those who are not Amazon are looking for options that are as far from that company as possible. And for better or worse, Instacart will be connected to Amazon, if only as an investment. The same might go for StorePower and Grubmarket, which are also providing Instacart-style alternatives, respectively to grocery stores and (in the case of Grubmarket) to producers and farmers who want more tech-direct ways of connecting with consumers, taking orders from them, and delivering those items. Both also have raised significant funding. All these companies may benefit from the perception that there are natural partners — and potentially acquirers — that they can peel away from Instacart given the complicated relationship it now has with Amazon. That means they may have better negotiation power when raising money. Costco Costco has a lot of chips in its hands right now. While the company itself isn’t known for being remarkably tech savvy, it’s the world’s third-biggest supermarket chain (Walmart and France’s Carrefour are one and two, respectively), and needs a partner to help it compete against Amazon. It has a lot of possibilities to choose from. Blue Apron, Sunbasket and other meal-kit companies Whole Foods is still a grocery store. But it also sells a lot of prepared food, and between those it’s a small step to moving into meal kits. Having sudden access to a lot of local nodes of groceries and food (including a brand that millennials love) may give Amazon an opportunity to spin up the kind of operations that Blue Apron has used to propel itself to an imminent IPO with a balance sheet that doesn’t look all that bad. It’ll have to deal with the economies of scale that Blue Apron has started to lock down, but it’s hard to write off the sheer proximity of all these stores — which have the resources to store and sell fresh food — in metropolitan areas that are the sweet spot for some of these companies. The story here has yet to play out, so we’ll have to wait and see how it goes. Such a business could be a big thorn in the side of these meal-kit companies. Walmart We’ve reached out to Walmart to ask for a response to the Whole Foods/Amazon news. In the meantime, like Costco, it has much to play for. As Sarah Perez pointed out earlier, Amazon wants to become Walmart before Walmart becomes Amazon, and while Walmart already has an extensive operation in food pickup, one area where it has yet to innovate is in the area of grocery delivery. This could spell an opportunity for Walmart to buy a company with the logistics experience to plug in to fill that gap. The other area that this could affect is in what markets Walmart targets: as Sarah noted in her Walmart / Amazon analysis, Amazon has saturated the middle and high ends of the market with its Prime tier. It will be doubling down on that with the acquisition of a premium supermarket chain like Whole Foods (sometimes known as Whole Paycheck). It will be interesting to see what Walmart might do to address that higher end. Given that others will be worried about the Amazon effect, this could give it good bargaining power. Jana Partners ]The activist efforts this investment firm engaged in seem to have paid off. After pressuring the company beginning in April, Whole Foods has finally wound up as an acquisition. That’s a boon for investors, including Jana Partners, which has minted a healthy return on its big bet on Whole Foods earlier this year. This may, too, embolden other kinds of activist pressure in the grocery market. Ocado, Bigbasket, Conershop ]There are a number of regional players in the area of grocery delivery, and while many of them have been described as Amazon competitors, we should now watch to see just how many of them Amazon might also try to acquire. Amazon’s big acquisition of Whole Foods may mean that its checkbook will remain in a drawer for now. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an appetite to start rounding up all these regional operations that may make more sense in a larger context with better data to work with. Whether they will get the same kinds of prices as a potential acquisition like Instacart or Postmates (which we’ll get to in a second) is a different story. Postmates While Postmates works as a food delivery service, its original operation as an on-demand delivery network is still alive and well. Like some of the regional operators and other delivery networks, Postmates may have an opportunity to start building better relationships with retailers given the increasingly complex relationship Instacart may have with them. Instacart’s close relationship with Whole Foods — and now Amazon — may end up causing some tension with competing retailers, which is always good for the competition. And it also means that these larger retailers may see them as strategically important to head off Amazon, which helps make the companies look more valuable. Slack Amazon’s made a lot of big acquisitions, but none of them are anywhere near as big as Whole Foods. Like we said earlier, if/when the deal goes through it likely means that Amazon’s check book is going to remain closed for a while unless this is the start of a huge acquisition spree for the company. There were whispers this week that Amazon was interested in buying Slack, though it appears that the workplace collaboration startup has decided to go a different route and raise $500 million instead. Still, we’ve seen instances where things change at the last minute — like Cisco snapping up AppDynamics right before its IPO — and TechCrunch previously reported that Microsoft seemed to be interested in the company, too. Regardless, now there is a price out there for Slack — and it’s pretty high. It might attract buyers out of the woodwork, especially some that could make a pitch if Amazon is off the table after spending this kind of money on Whole Foods. We’ll have to wait and see how this story plays out, now that the biggest signal Slack had for its value may have gone out.

Almost three-quarters (63%) of consumers would respond more positively to a social media ad if it appeared on a more traditional advertising channel, according to a new report from the CMO Council. Having surveyed 2,000 adults across the UK, US and Canada, it found that despite delivering the second highest volume of advertising messages, social media platforms were the least trusted by consumers among the top five media channels. And although the study is just a snapshot, marketers might still feel alarm with just over 40% of those polled revealing they already have ad blocking software installed on their devices. Another 14% plan to add an ad blocker to their devices in the near future. A big reason behind the social media dismay, the research claims, is a lack of trust and the rise of objectionable content. Some 60% of consumers state that offensive content appearing on the likes of Facebook and Twitter had already caused them to “consume more content from trusted, well-known news sources and established media channels”. Following an investigation by The Times that revealed ads being placed next to extremist content on sites such as YouTube, the public concerns expressed by marketers such as P&G’s Marc Pritchard have been hard to avoid. However, according to the CMO Council study, the concerns of marketers are being shared by consumers. In fact, 48% will abandon even brands that they love, should they see their ads appear next to ‘objectionable’ online content or on fake news sites. And some 37% of consumers say this would “change the way [they] think of a brand when making a decision to buy”. Another 11% would flat-out “not do business with that brand” while 9% say they would become vocal critics of the brand. “CMOs and brand advertisers are increasingly concerned about various aspects of digital and programmatic advertising, including concerns about their ads showing up next to offensive content,” says Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. “This consumer survey demonstrates that those concerns are well founded. Advertising placed next to objectionable content is damaging to a brand, while ads that accompany more trusted content and media are more accepted.”

Le président de la République est venu rendre visite aux startuppeurs pour le premier jour du Salon qui a ouvert ses portes ce jeudi à la porte de Versailles, à Paris. A Vivatech, Emmanuel Macron était en terrain conquis. Et à trois jours du second tour des législatives, il n'a pas manqué l'occasion de faire passer quelques messages : montrer la France qui va bien, celle qui entreprend et qui se veut positive. Son passage au Salon lui a aussi permis de vérifier que sa cote de popularité est encore intacte un mois après son installation à l'Elysée. Au cours de sa visite, dont le déroulé avait été réglé par ses équipes au millimètre près - une rencontre avec trois start-up (H3 Dynamics dans le domaine des drones, Blue Frog dans celui des robots et Histovery dans le domaine culturel) et une autre avec six entrepreneurs - Emmanuel Macron a été constamment interpellé. La foule était dense, réservant un accueil chaleureux à celui qui est identifié comme le président des startuppeurs. "Les start-up comptent sur toi Manu", lui a lancé une fan à son arrivée.

Quand avez-vous compris qu'Internet allait véritablement transformer nos vies ? Ian Rogers : J'ai étudié l'informatique à l'université. Au départ, je ne voyais dans Internet qu'un outil à vocation académique. Mais, en 1994, quand j'ai commencé à travailler dans la musique, j'ai découvert Internet Underground Music Archive (l'Iuma), lancé l'année précédente. On pouvait, dès lors, avoir accès à toutes les musiques que l'on voulait sur Internet. J'ai compris, à ce moment-là, que la manière de distribuer un produit comme la musique, mais sans doute aussi tous les produits, allait changer fondamentalement nos modes de vie. On allait passer d'un monde où certains tenaient les postes d'aiguillage à un monde beaucoup plus ouvert. Stéphane Richard : J'ai compris que le monde allait changer et très rapidement, le jour où l'on m'a démontré le potentiel de la 4G. Je me souviens, il y a trois ans, dans ma voiture, j'ai pu regarder la télévision sur mon smartphone grâce à la 4G sans coupures. Internet existait déjà mais la 4G était la brique technologique qui nous manquait. Pour que cette révolution digitale soit complète, il nous fallait la composante mobilité que la 4G a apportée. Tout s'est accéléré avec la 4G et les smartphones et cela va ­continuer avec la 5G. I. R. : S'il y a eu une bulle Internet à la fin des années 1990, ce n'est pas parce que la promesse de l'Internet était fausse. C'est juste qu'il nous manquait deux briques essentielles pour que l'innovation rencontre son audience. Le smartphone et les réseaux mobiles haut débit. Aujourd'hui nous avons l'outil et l'infrastructure. Où en est-on dans la révolution Internet ? Au début, au milieu, ou plutôt vers la fin ? S. R. : La première fois que je suis allé chez Amazon, à l'entrée du bâtiment, il y avait cette phrase de Jeff Bezos : « Nous n'en sommes qu'au premier jour du voyage ». Je pense que c'est toujours le cas aujourd'hui. Nous allons déployer la 5G, cela va changer à nouveau les choses. Il y a encore des pans entiers de notre vie sociale et de l'économie qui n'ont pas encore été pleinement impactés par la transformation digitale, comme l'éducation ou la santé. Et je n'évoque même pas le potentiel de l'intelligence artificielle. I. R. : Internet ne change pas tout mais a un impact sur tout. Regardez la musique. Il y a toujours des chansons et des albums mais on ne découvre déjà plus du tout la musique comme avant. Internet a déjà changé notre définition du local. Mais la technologie va encore créer de nouvelles possibilités. La réalité augmentée, par exemple, va encore changer notre rapport aux ordinateurs. Nous n'en sommes qu'au tout début.