Monthly Archives: August 2019

“Amazon is at the core of this burgeoning delivery economy,” said Andy Grygiel, CMO of visibility solutions provider project44. “Where logistics was once and only a cost center, Amazon has turned it into a competitive advantage. For example, a friend of mine told me this situation where his daughter was home from college and she ordered something online with the expectation that it would arrive in 24 to 48 hours. But when she found out it wasn't going to be delivered in that time, she canceled the order and went somewhere else. That timely delivery is really important.”In a January 2019 survey from digital consultancy Avionos, the largest share of US digital shoppers said that fast shipping makes for a positive retail experience—more so than an easy return policy, friendly customer service reps, or buy online, pick up in-store (BOPUS) options.

L’information, révélée aujourd’hui par Capital, fait état d’un nouveau protocole blockchain et d’une nouvelle cryptomonnaie, dont l’ambition est de concurrencer le protocole Ethereum, deuxième du secteur derrière le Bitcoin en termes de capitalisation. Un objectif qui semble tout à fait réalisable pour Cyril Paglino, fondateur de Starchain : “Dune dispose d’une des technologies les plus avancées du marché, d’une gouvernance pragmatique et d’un des réseaux les plus sécurisés. Cela fait sens pour nous de soutenir un projet international d’initiative française, rendu possible grâce à une des équipes d’ingénieurs parmi les plus compétentes du pays”, explique-t-il au média.Une nouvelle qui devrait ravir le marché français, alors même que l’année 2019 a vu un retour en force du volume d’échange sur les cryptomonnaies, permettant au Bitcoin de confirmer un retour au-dessus du seuil clé de 10 000$ après une année 2018 des plus compliquées.

D’ici fin 2019, British Airways ouvre son cinéma 3D aux clients de la First. Dotés d’un casque de réalité virtuelle (VR), les passagers pourront profiter d’une sélection de films et documentaires primés en 2D, 3D ou à 360 °. Une offre de divertissement testée uniquement sur certains vols entre Londres Heathrow et New York JFK. Pour proposer cette expérience, le transporteur s’est associé aux spécialistes de la lunetterie VR dans l’aérien : SkyLights. Début 2019, la startup mettait ses casques à disposition de PXCom pour participer à la finale des Inflight Awards et des Crystal Cabin Awards. Skylights est un ancien élève de l’accélérateur Hangar 51 créé par IAG, maison mère de British Airways.Le fabricant offre désormais une expérience immersive de divertissement aux passagers en First. Ces derniers pourront accéder notamment à une offre de contenus thérapeutiques – méditation, thérapie sonore – spécialement conçue pour réduire les effets de la peur de voler. Baptisés Allosky, les casques de Skyflights ont été testés au terminal 5 d’Heathrow plus tôt cette année, donnant aux clients de British Airways un aperçu en VR de la cabine Club World.

Les Français ont passé près de 50 millions d’heures sur les applis de voyage en juillet 2019, contre à peine 30 millions en 2017, soit une augmentation de 70%. C’est ce que révèle une étude publiée par le cabinet App Annie, réalisée sur les seuls smartphones sous Android. Quelles marques profitent le plus d’un tel engouement à l’égard de notre compagnon de poche ? Sur la première partie de l’été (mai-juillet), Oui.sncf occupe la première place en nombre d’utilisateurs actifs, selon le classement de l’entreprise. Si l’on exclut PagesJaunes des acteurs du travel – ce qui semble logique -, Booking monte sur la deuxième marche, et TripAdvisor sur la troisième. Air France est la seule compagnie aérienne de ce palmarès, et se positionne ainsi juste derrière Blablacar.Top 10 des applications de voyage (sur Android)(en termes d’utilisateurs actifs*, en moyenne, sur la période mai-juillet 2019)Rank France Worldwide**1 OUI.sncf 1. Uber2 PagesJaunes 2. Booking.com3 Booking.com 3. Grab4 TripAdvisor 4. Ola cabs5 Uber 5. TripAdvisor6 RATP 6. Airbnb7 Airbnb 7. Careem8 BlaBlaCar 8. Yelp9 Air France 9. Flightradar2410 Flightradar24 10. Where is my Train : Indian Railway & PNR Status

When low-cost air carriers crowded European skies, railways phased out their long-haul, overnight lines. But as travelers fret about passenger jets’ carbon emissions, they’re hitting the rails again, OZY reports — and sleeper lines are coming back. Austria’s national rail company is leading the charge, with 17 percent of 2018 sales from overnighters, while Swiss, Dutch and British carriers are looking to fluff up their pillows again.Does that mean it’s full speed ahead? Despite the convenience these trains offer, analysts say their revival is still a “mixed picture,” noting how key nations France, Germany and Spain have yet to wake up to the demand.

These days, a dominant proportion of Gen Z consumers in the US are taking advantage of "buy online, pick up in-store." According to mailbox tech company Package Concierge, nearly two-thirds of shoppers ages 18 to 25, surveyed in May 2019, said they had used BOPUS within the past month.Convenience, unsurprisingly, was a major driver.Fifty-nine percent of Gen Z respondents said they had used BOPUS because they wanted to get a product in their hands quickly. Another 30%—who were recognized as last-minute shoppers—used the service because they needed something immediately.Another 18% said they liked an item online but wanted to see it in-person before buying, and slightly fewer (15%) received a discount if they used the BOPUS option.

The latest person to claim to be Satoshi had published a slew of press releases explaining that he would be publishing a series of posts leading to the ultimate reveal. News.Bitcoin.com reported on the story when the press release came out and explained how most people assumed it was a marketing tactic to get people’s eyes on something else. It still might be a marketing effort or ruse of some sort, but the person truly attempts to claim the Satoshi Nakamoto monicker. In addition to the declaration, the person wrote a 3,300-word blog post about the origins of Bitcoin and his pseudonym. The post says it was written “as told to Ivy McLemore,” the PR team behind the so-called ‘reveal.’ It was also edited a few times since it was published at 4 p.m. EDT, when the word “cyberpunk” was changed to the word “cypherpunk” on two occasions. The blog edit was a pretty foolish mistake as the two words have different meanings.The post was published at 4 p.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 18, 2019. It was also edited multiple times and the original can be seen on Archive.org.The so-called creator of Bitcoin said he’s always been a believer in freedom and that’s why he began the blockchain journey. In the post, he explained that Hal Finney was his “closet ally and mentor” and the technology was not designed overnight. “Bitcoin was created through circumstantial requirements, but its current exposure cannot be attributed to design,” he noted. The author then veered off into a tone that’s similar to the Australian Craig Wright’s recent blog posts. The new Satoshi claimant said that the creation of Bitcoin led him to hide so he couldn’t be tied to something deemed illegal by governments. “At its conception, Bitcoin was worth mere cents,” the author remarked. “Later, when its usage was hijacked for illicit means, I made decisions and set off a chain of events to create distance between my creation and myself.” In order to further highlight the alleged misappropriation of the technology he invented, he added:Today, when Bitcoin is understood by the advances of technology, but at the same time is being hijacked by greed, I feel I have a duty to work hard and make my creation better and take its vision to the next level.

Facebook aussi. Comme Amazon, Apple, Microsoft et Google, la firme de Menlo Park a admis avoir écouté certaines conversations de ses utilisateurs. Un aveu consécutif aux révélations de Bloomberg, selon lesquelles la firme a payé des centaines de contractuels pour retranscrire des enregistrements audio envoyés sur son application Messenger.« Tout comme Apple ou Google, nous avons suspendu l'écoute des enregistrements sonores par des humains il y a plus d'une semaine », explique Facebook dans un communiqué transmis à l'agence financière. Depuis 2015, la firme employait des sous-traitants, dont l'entreprise TaskUs, pour vérifier que son intelligence artificielle interprétait correctement les messages audio envoyés sur Messenger.Facebook affiche une croissance insolente malgré la pression des régulateursLes extraits sonores transmis à ces prestataires étaient anonymisés et ces derniers ne savaient pas ce que Facebook faisait de leurs retranscriptions, précise Bloomberg.Celles-ci peuvent servir, grâce à l'identification de mots-clefs, à affiner le ciblage publicitaire, voire à calibrer le fil d'actualités de l'utilisateur en fonction de ses centres d'intérêt, comme  le soutenait en 2016 un reportage diffusé sur une chaîne locale américaine.

Sumaira Latif had been working at Proctor & Gamble for more than a decade when she decided to make them see things her way. Literally: Latif is blind, and she got other P&G employees and decision-makers to experience disability, even for a short time, with the use of dark glasses, wheelchairs and special gloves that simulated motor disabilities. “I got them to experience living just even one hour with a disability, accessing our own products and services that we’ve created,” she says. After that, she explained the business case for catering to people with disabilities: It’s a population with an estimated $8 trillion in disposable income that the company wasn’t pursuing. “They said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’”A week later, Latif was appointed the head of P&G’s diversity initiative and swiftly set about tackling a major problem for the blind and visually impaired: In the shower, all bottles feel basically the same. Bottles of the popular Herbal Essences brand were redesigned last year to put tactile reminders of which is which, with raised vertical lines on shampoo bottles and a grid of circles on conditioner bottles. The labels don’t use Braille, because fewer than 10 percent of blind people in America can read it, and, Latif says, the point was to make a system that worked for the largest possible number of people. The company’s also working with the app Be My Eyes — which connects the visually impaired with random sighted people who can help them distinguish between two cans or fix smudged lipstick — to offer a hotline about its products through their software.Latif’s revolution within P&G is part of a broader shift. Fashion has, in recent years, started signaling greater awareness of the needs of people with disabilities — disabled models have been seen in Fashion Week events from New York to London, and retailer ASOS premiered wheelchair-friendly clothes last year. Now, the beauty industry, which was lagging behind, is starting to catch up too, with a mix of small companies and major initiatives from larger ones. They’re recognizing what Latif explained to her bosses: that there’s more than just social responsibility at stake; there’s a relatively untapped market out there too. An estimated 15 percent of the world’s population is disabled, and as societies everywhere age, that number is forecast to rise.

THERE’S AN ARMS race afoot over who can store cryptocurrency safest. Perhaps you’d like your bitcoin buried in a vault under a mountain in the Swiss Alps? Xapo has offered that as a service to wealthy investors, for free. Coinbase, best known for its popular cryptocurrency exchange, prefers elaborate key-printing rituals along with a Faraday cage. Anchorage, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup, promises easy-access digital storage with some cryptographic voodoo. And now old-school firms like Fidelity and Bakkt, which shares an owner with the New York Stock Exchange, are jumping into the fray with storage solutions of their own.The aim behind all these sophisticated security arrangements: wooing Wall Street.A key property of crypto is that it’s proven a pretty dang easy target for thieves. Whether it’s North Korea hammering crypto businesses around the world or an exchange founder absconding with cash, vulnerabilities are abundant. For the crypto industry, that’s not a good look, especially when it comes to institutional investors—pensions and hedge funds and university endowments—for whom there are major consequences when breaches occur. For them, it’s not just a good idea to nail down the furniture, it’s the law.This week, the still-fringe world of crypto custody saw a spike in activity. Late Thursday, Coinbase’s custody arm purchased the institutional business of rival Xapo for a reported $55 million. The deal wasn’t a surprise, following reports this spring that Coinbase had outbid Fidelity Digital Assets, which started offering custody to clients in March. Then on Friday, Bakkt announced that it had received approval to offer bitcoin futures in September, following months of regulatory delays.So is crypto the next big thing in institutional investment, or is this fighting over scraps? For now, crypto custody still involves a relatively small pool of money. Coinbase got a boost earlier this month when Grayscale Investments moved its $2.7 billion worth of crypto funds from Xapo to Coinbase, more than doubling the company’s assets under custody. That’s tiny compared with the trillions under management for a company like Fidelity. Custody competitors like Palo Alto, California-based BitGo have reportedly been circling for Xapo’s other clients.Still, companies like Coinbase and Fidelity think there’s room for growth. In May, Fidelity released a survey of more than 400 institutional investors that found 22 percent already held cryptocurrency, and another quarter saw potential to do so.