Author: azeeadmin

Last year, Walmart acquired outdoor retailer Moosejaw for $51 million –  a company that’s now one of several brands Walmart picked up during a speciality retail buying spree, along with ShoeBuy, Jet.com, Hayneedle, ModCloth, and Bonobos. Now, the company is making good on that purchase, as Moosejaw is the first of Walmart’s acquired brands to arrive on Walmart.com. The company will now curate its own storefront, in addition to operating its own separate site.

Since its acquisition, Moosejaw began to offer customers free, two-day shipping on orders over $49, and invested in technology improvements to its own site. It also enhanced its rewards program, and reported a 50% increase in redemption rates, as a result.

On Walmart.com, Moosejaw will now curate the new “Premium Outdoor Store,” which will offer Walmart online shoppers access to an assortment of outdoor speciality items that weren’t available on the site in the past.

This includes thousands of items from brands like Craghoppers, Deuter, First Ascent by Eddie Bauer, Gramicci, Jack Wolfskin, KLYMIT, LEKI, Stonewear and Tentsile. The store will also carry the full range of Moosejaw-branded clothing, jackets and gear. This premium assortment will complement the everyday camping assortment currently available on Walmart.com.

However, the store itself is not being branded as “Moosejaw” because Walmart plans to expand the assortment over time to pull in products from other speciality retailers and brands in the future. That means Moosejaw will fulfill much, but not all, of the orders placed in the new online shop.

In addition, the Walmart shop will launch with nearly 50 brands, while Moosejaw itself carries nearly 500 – that’s why it’s referred to as a more “curated” selection, in addition to the fact that non-Moosejaw products will join at a later point.

The online storefront will also feature Walmart.com’s new design, which offers a more modern and clean look-and-feel, and other personalization features.

In its quest to challenge Amazon, Walmart’s speciality retailer buying spree last year allowed it to bring in small, but tactically important brands targeting upscale shoppers and millennials.. But it was unclear if Walmart planned to allow them to run independently forever, or try to bring them onto Walmart.com – or both. In the case of Moosejaw, at least, the latter is true.

The addition is not the only way Walmart is trying to target a new type of consumer via more premium merchandise.

In May, Walmart announced  a Lord & Taylor speciality shop was arriving its site, to pull in more upscale shoppers. Many of its e-commerce initiatives – including online grocery, the redesign, partnerships like that with Lord & Taylor and others – appear to be finding success. The company reported its U.S. online sales were up 40% in Q2.

It recently took on Amazon in an area that’s a definite part of Amazon’s brand, too: e-books and e-readers. Through a partnership with Rakuten Kobo, Walmart now sells e-books, audiobooks, and Kobo e-readers online and in its store. It’s also rumored to be working on its own video service, which could help to flesh out an alternative to Amazon Prime.

Asked if Walmart had similar plans to launch speciality shops for its other acquired brands, a spokesperson replied with an intentionally vague, “not at this time.”

French cloud hosting company OVH just announced a new CEO. Michel Paulin is now heading the company. Founder Octave Klaba remains Chairman of the Board and plans to focus on the big picture.

Paulin recently worked at telecom company SFR. If you look further in the past, he also was a key member at Neuf Cegetel, another telecom company. He overlooked the IPO of Neuf Cegetel and the merger with SFR more than ten years ago.

While telecom companies and cloud hosting companies aren’t the same thing, it sounds like Paulin could bring his operational and M&A experience at OVH.

OVH is currently trying to morph its cloud offering into a leading alternative service to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud. The company is currently working on simplifying its offering and attracting new clients.

The company currently has 2,500 employees and generated $488 million in revenue in 2017 (€420 million). OVH still plans to invest a ton of money in hiring more people, opening more data centers and launching new offerings.

The company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. More recently, OVH got a $467 million credit line (€400 million) from multiple banks to expand aggressively. The new executive team could help when it comes to… executing this roadmap.

Caffeine-infused meal replacement products may be all the rage among techies, but a good ol’ cup of joe is still the choice morning beverage for most of us. To capitalize on America’s insatiable coffee habit, Bellwether Coffee has raised a $10 million Series A and begun selling its zero-emissions commercial roaster and online coffee bean marketplace to cafés and grocers. The funding follows a $6 million seed round in 2016.

Congruent Ventures led the round for the Berkeley, Calif.-based startup, with participation from FusionX Ventures, Tandem Capital, New Ground Ventures, Hardware Club, XN Ventures and SolarCity founders Pete and Lyndon Rive. As part of the deal, Pete Rive has joined the startup’s board, as has Congruent managing partner Josh Posamentier. Bellwether was founded by Ricardo Lopez, who serves as the company’s head of product innovation, in 2013. 

Bellwether CEO Nathan Gilliland says the company sits at the nexus of software and hardware. The latter can be a tougher sell to VCs, though Gilliland said its latest round was oversubscribed. The company has just begun leasing its $1,000 per month ventless, electric coffee roaster to cafés, grocers and other businesses.

As part of the monthly fee, Bellwether customers get access to its online bean marketplace, which they can use to order beans from a revolving list of 20-some coffee farms curated by the team at Bellwether. Retailers and coffee consumers also can tip farmers directly via Bellwether. Gilliland explained that could be a game changer for the industry. Coffee farmers, he said, earn roughly 75 cents per pound of coffee sold. If a dollar is tipped on every pound of coffee, a farmer could double their revenue.

Tracing where the beans in your daily brew originated from, whether that be Guatemala, Ethiopia, Colombia or another one of the top producers of beans, can be difficult. Bellwether’s marketplace, which lets retailers browse coffee farms based on factors, including whether the farm is organically certified or woman-owned, is intended to add a bit of transparency to an often opaque business.

“We live in such a connected world now it really makes sense to enable consumers to know who made their coffee and where they are located,” Gilliland told TechCrunch. “We really try to align the quality and the taste with the sustainability metrics. We want a perfect balance between the two.”

Berkeley, Calif.-based Bellwether Coffee has raised a $10 million Series A led by Congruent Ventures

Bellwether has a large potential market, as most cafés and grocers don’t have in-house roasters, but can save money by leasing one like Bellwether’s. On top of that, Americans drink a whole lot of coffee. According to a recent study by the money-saving app Acorns, one-third of its users spent more on coffee annually than they invested. Most of their respondents, however, were millennials, who of course are known to overspend on avocado toast, among other things. So their spending habits may not be the most accurate representation of all coffee consumers. Regardless, there could be a big opportunity here for Bellwether.

In the coffee tech scene generally, a few other companies have captured the attention of venture capital investors recently. Luckin Coffee, a Chinese on-demand coffee delivery startup, raised $200 million in July at a billion-dollar valuation, followed by a $40 million round for Bulletproof 360, the company behind Bulletproof Coffee.

If Bellwether doesn’t soar into unicorn territory, Gilliland has at least come to appreciate a good cup of coffee and its many subtleties.

“I will admit, I used to throw a little creamer in my coffee but no, it’s all black now.”

Microsoft published a news item announcing Xbox All Access on the Xbox blog and then unpublished it. But multiple news outlets spotted the article before Microsoft could take the post down. So now that the cat is out of the bag, it looks like Microsoft’s new hardware and software subscription is real.

There have been rumors over the past few weeks that Microsoft was planning to announce a new subscription. Today’s announcement lines up with those rumors. Microsoft is launching Xbox All Access in the U.S., which includes a console, Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass.

You get to choose between an Xbox One S for $22 per month or an Xbox One X for $35 per month. After paying for 24 months, the subscription stops and the console is yours. You can then choose to keep paying for Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass or you can cancel your subscriptions — it’s your console after all.

So let’s do the math. You can currently buy an Xbox One S for around $299. Xbox Live Gold lets you play multiplayer games and access free games for $60 per year. The Xbox Game Pass lets you download and play games from a library of 100+ games for $9.99 per month — it’s a sort of Spotify for video games.

If you buy a console and subscribe for two years, you’ll end up paying around $659. An Xbox All Access subscription lets you save around $130. If you already planned on subscribing to those two services, it sounds like a good deal. If you didn’t really care about Xbox Game Pass, you’ll end up paying more than buying a console the normal way.

The Xbox One X currently costs around $499. If you add two years of Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass, the bottom line is $859. Two years of Xbox All Access with the Xbox One X costs $840. So it’s not that good a deal if you’re interested in the Xbox One X.

With this new offering, Microsoft shows that it wants to shift its gaming strategy to subscriptions. Buying a console every few years isn’t as lucrative as buying an all-in-one Xbox subscription. Subscriptions increase customer loyalty and create predictable recurring revenue.

More importantly, gaming consoles won’t stick around forever. At some point, games will run on expensive servers in the cloud and you’ll subscribe to a service. Rumor has it that Microsoft is already getting ready to launch a low-powered system to stream games from the cloud. This is what Microsoft is thinking about with Xbox All Access.

Over the weekend, pirates made off with millions in potential YouTube revenues by hijacking the live-streams of its pay-per-view “boxing” match between YouTube celebrities Logan Paul and KSI and broadcasting them on the rival streaming platform Twitch.

The theft represents a pretty bold move in the continuing cat-and-mouse game between rival entertainment platforms Twitch (for live streaming) and YouTube (for pretty much everything else in the world of user-generated video). It also shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

For Twitch, the case of the pirated content is less a mystery worthy of the Hardy Boys and more a simple case of history repeating.

Back in the halcyon days of live-streaming, when Twitch was a young upstart service known as Justin.tv (and well before it was bought by Amazon), the service had already had several run-ins with the law over pirated content.

Basically, Twitch had a piracy problem before Twitch was even Twitch.

At the time, the company was able to ultimately duck its fight with UFC parent company Zuffa, using the platform argument that tech companies manage to use a shield against all sorts of criticisms (offering a platform for nazism, insane conspiracy theories and serial harassment and abuse).

That was when the company was still a relatively small, independent business with arguably limited resources. Now that it’s owned by Amazon, there’s less of an argument to be made that the company lacks the tools to monitor the streams that it hosts.

Already, Twitch has come in for a fair share of criticism for its handling of the whole sordid business.

There’s no real protagonist in this story (I can’t find it in me to weep for YouTube and its lost revenue when it pulls in billions and hasn’t figured out a good way to moderate its own user base — including Paul), but it’s worth noting that Justin.tv’s pivot to focus on video game streaming came as it was looking to make itself more respectable to investors and possible acquirers.

“In the lead-up to the actual acquisition from Amazon, [Twitch] implemented a service that would look for copyrighted music and would remove audio files,” noted Will Partin, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on platform economics and a game reporter for a number of sites. “It did its rebrand around games in 2011 and has gotten gradually more permissive.”

The benefit of focusing on gaming, Partin noted, was that it’s a medium that’s far easier to moderate and control. As Twitch has diversified with Twitch Creative and Twitch IRL, it’s opening itself up to the same kind of problems with copyright infringement and abuse it suffered from nearly a decade ago.

As they’re currently written, DMCA laws offer little protection to copyright and license holders in the modern era of live-streaming content. “Twitch gets 24 hours to do a DMCA takedown. That’s beside the point when you’re doing a livestream,” Partin said.

In the case of the Paul fight, Twitch can’t even say that it didn’t know the streams were happening. As noted eSports commentator Richard Lewis flagged on Twitter, there were Twitch employees watching and commenting in some of the pirated streams.

“There were clearly Twitch staff in the channel that were watching,” said Partin. “It brings up a tricky and challenging topic… it’s not enough just to blame Twitch, which is not to say that Twitch doesn’t share some of the blame.”

Over the weekend, pirates made off with millions in potential YouTube revenues by hijacking the live-streams of its pay-per-view “boxing” match between YouTube celebrities Logan Paul and KSI and broadcasting them on the rival streaming platform Twitch.

The theft represents a pretty bold move in the continuing cat-and-mouse game between rival entertainment platforms Twitch (for live streaming) and YouTube (for pretty much everything else in the world of user-generated video). It also shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

For Twitch, the case of the pirated content is less a mystery worthy of the Hardy Boys and more a simple case of history repeating.

Back in the halcyon days of live-streaming, when Twitch was a young upstart service known as Justin.tv (and well before it was bought by Amazon), the service had already had several run-ins with the law over pirated content.

Basically, Twitch had a piracy problem before Twitch was even Twitch.

At the time, the company was able to ultimately duck its fight with UFC parent company Zuffa, using the platform argument that tech companies manage to use a shield against all sorts of criticisms (offering a platform for nazism, insane conspiracy theories and serial harassment and abuse).

That was when the company was still a relatively small, independent business with arguably limited resources. Now that it’s owned by Amazon, there’s less of an argument to be made that the company lacks the tools to monitor the streams that it hosts.

Already, Twitch has come in for a fair share of criticism for its handling of the whole sordid business.

There’s no real protagonist in this story (I can’t find it in me to weep for YouTube and its lost revenue when it pulls in billions and hasn’t figured out a good way to moderate its own user base — including Paul), but it’s worth noting that Justin.tv’s pivot to focus on video game streaming came as it was looking to make itself more respectable to investors and possible acquirers.

“In the lead-up to the actual acquisition from Amazon, [Twitch] implemented a service that would look for copyrighted music and would remove audio files,” noted Will Partin, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on platform economics and a game reporter for a number of sites. “It did its rebrand around games in 2011 and has gotten gradually more permissive.”

The benefit of focusing on gaming, Partin noted, was that it’s a medium that’s far easier to moderate and control. As Twitch has diversified with Twitch Creative and Twitch IRL, it’s opening itself up to the same kind of problems with copyright infringement and abuse it suffered from nearly a decade ago.

As they’re currently written, DMCA laws offer little protection to copyright and license holders in the modern era of live-streaming content. “Twitch gets 24 hours to do a DMCA takedown. That’s beside the point when you’re doing a livestream,” Partin said.

In the case of the Paul fight, Twitch can’t even say that it didn’t know the streams were happening. As noted eSports commentator Richard Lewis flagged on Twitter, there were Twitch employees watching and commenting in some of the pirated streams.

“There were clearly Twitch staff in the channel that were watching,” said Partin. “It brings up a tricky and challenging topic… it’s not enough just to blame Twitch, which is not to say that Twitch doesn’t share some of the blame.”

Google today is expanding YouTube’s set of “digital wellbeing” tools, with an added feature that will calculate how much you’re watching videos. The idea is that this will allow users to take better control over their viewing behavior and place limits on their time spent on YouTube by way of other app features that remind you to take a break. The “Time Watched” feature, rolling out today, will inform YouTube users how much they’ve watched today, yesterday, and over the past 7 days, says YouTube.

The company, along with Apple and Facebook, have more recently begun to take responsibility for the addictive nature of their devices and services which were designed to exploit vulnerabilities in human psychology, and are now facing the unintended consequences of those decisions.

At Google, the company is now addressing digital wellbeing across its products, including Android, Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube and elsewhere.

At its Google I/O developer conference earlier this year, it introduced a series of controls for YouTube viewers, including reminders to pause your viewing (“Take a Break”) and those that would disable notification sounds for periods of time, and allow you to receive notifications as a digest.

At the time, Google said it was “soon” preparing to roll out a “Time Watched” profile that will appear in the Account menu – that’s what’s new as of today.

When the feature arrives, you can visit your profile in the account menu to see your stats, including time watched over various time frames, as well as your Daily Average. This information is calculated based on your YouTube watch history, the company says.

That means if you have deleted videos from your history or watched in Incognito Mode, that viewing won’t be counted. Additionally, if you pause your history, you’ll also be unable to track your stats.

It was initially unclear if YouTube TV watch history is being counted. A screenshot shared by Google today says it’s not, nor is YouTube Music. However, the answer on the YouTube Help support site Google linked to in a blog post says it is. We’ve asked Google to clarify which is correct and will update when the company responds. Google says it is not counted, which is good – YouTube TV is basically just like television, which is associated with longer programming blocks, and longer time spent viewing, in many cases.

The new feature is rolling out starting today, YouTube says.

Google today is expanding YouTube’s set of “digital wellbeing” tools, with an added feature that will calculate how much you’re watching videos. The idea is that this will allow users to take better control over their viewing behavior and place limits on their time spent on YouTube by way of other app features that remind you to take a break. The “Time Watched” feature, rolling out today, will inform YouTube users how much they’ve watched today, yesterday, and over the past 7 days, says YouTube.

The company, along with Apple and Facebook, have more recently begun to take responsibility for the addictive nature of their devices and services which were designed to exploit vulnerabilities in human psychology, and are now facing the unintended consequences of those decisions.

At Google, the company is now addressing digital wellbeing across its products, including Android, Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube and elsewhere.

At its Google I/O developer conference earlier this year, it introduced a series of controls for YouTube viewers, including reminders to pause your viewing (“Take a Break”) and those that would disable notification sounds for periods of time, and allow you to receive notifications as a digest.

At the time, Google said it was “soon” preparing to roll out a “Time Watched” profile that will appear in the Account menu – that’s what’s new as of today.

When the feature arrives, you can visit your profile in the account menu to see your stats, including time watched over various time frames, as well as your Daily Average. This information is calculated based on your YouTube watch history, the company says.

That means if you have deleted videos from your history or watched in Incognito Mode, that viewing won’t be counted. Additionally, if you pause your history, you’ll also be unable to track your stats.

It was initially unclear if YouTube TV watch history is being counted. A screenshot shared by Google today says it’s not, nor is YouTube Music. However, the answer on the YouTube Help support site Google linked to in a blog post says it is. We’ve asked Google to clarify which is correct and will update when the company responds. Google says it is not counted, which is good – YouTube TV is basically just like television, which is associated with longer programming blocks, and longer time spent viewing, in many cases.

The new feature is rolling out starting today, YouTube says.

Abbyy, a maker of optical character recognition software, has exposed a trove of sensitive customer documents after a database server was left online without a password.

The exposed server was found by former Kromtech security researcher Bob Diachenko, who now works independently. In a blog post shared prior to publication, he said one of the company’s MongoDB servers was mistakenly configured for public access. He told TechCrunch that the server contained 203,896 scanned files, including contracts, non-disclosure agreements, memos and other highly sensitive documents dating back to 2012.

The data also included corporate usernames and scrambled passwords.

The Moscow-based company specializes in document capture products and services, including converting physical documents to searchable and indexable digital content across a range of languages.

The company claims to serve thousands of organizations and over 50 million users.

After a private disclosure earlier this month, the server was pulled offline. Abbyy confirmed the exposure in an email Monday but did not say why the storage server was left open for anyone to access.

“The incident in question concerns one rather than several customers and files bearing commercial information,” said spokesperson Anna Ivanova-Galitsina. “The customer has been duly notified and we are cooperating on corrective measures.”

“As soon as [Diachenko] notified us we locked external access to the documents. We have made all the notifications that are legally required, have conducted a full corrective security review of our infrastructure, processes and procedures,” the spokesperson said. The company said that the exposure was “a one-off incident and doesn’t compromise any other services, products or clients of the company,” but noted that a “further analysis is ongoing.”

When pressed, the company confirm the name of the customer affected. Abbyy has dozens of major global customers, including Volkswagen, PepsiCo, McDonalds, and the Australian Taxation Office.

Abbyy would not say if anyone else accessed the database.

It’s the latest in a string of exposed MongoDB databases found by Diachenko in recent months, including a popular virtual keyboard app with 31 million users and more recently an app for connecting babysitters.

MongoDB is widely used across the enterprise for scalability and versatility, but many older versions of the database software still in use today operate without a password by default. Last year, hackers took advantage of thousands of exposes servers by downloading and deleting their contents — effectively holding them for ransom.

Amazon this morning announced the opening of its second Amazon Go convenience store, which is again located in the retailer’s hometown of Seattle. The new store is 1,450 square feet in size – a bit smaller than the first store’s 1800 square feet – and will be located at 5th and Marion in Seattle. It will feature a range of ready-to-eat breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack options, as well as Amazon’s Meal Kits.

The food options will be made by Amazon chefs and various local kitchens and bakeries, the retailer notes. For example, it will stock quick snacks like chips, bars, candy and locally made chocolates, along with lunch options like salads, sandwiches, and wraps. For dinner, the Amazon Meal Kits offer all the ingredients for a home-cooked meal for two that takes about 30 minutes to prepare.

This is a smaller selection than available at the flagship Amazon Go store, which also stocked beer and wine and various grocery items, including Whole Foods’ 365 Everyday Value brand products.

Also because of the store’s smaller size, there’s not a kitchen on the premises. Instead, the fresh food will come from an Amazon kitchen elsewhere in Seattle, according to a report from The Seattle Times, which toured the space ahead of its opening.

The store will be open only on weekdays, from 7 AM to 7 PM, Amazon says, as it’s meant to cater more to the office worker crowd.

Earlier reports had said Amazon was planning to open as many as six Amazon Go locations throughout 2018. But the company has not publicly discussed its roadmap. In May, however, Amazon job postings pointed to store plans for Chicago and San Francisco. Amazon would only confirm plans were in the works, not when it would launch in those markets. It’s been expected that the first handful of Go stores would arrive in Seattle and L.A.

This second location works the same as the first, from a technology perspective.

The Go store’s system includes a number of cameras mounted overhead that track shoppers’ movements from every angle, weight sensors on the shelves, and the Amazon Go mobile app, which is swiped on the way in to automatically charge shoppers for whatever they take.

The stores are a feat, in terms of computer vision and machine learning, and have spurred a market of competitors who want to bring similar technology to Amazon’s rivals and other retailers. But some question the necessity of replacing human store staff with camera arrays and other technology only to save shoppers only a minute or so of time at checkout.

Eventually, the larger vision here is reducing headcount – despite any claims to the contrary about shifting workers to “customer service” and “stocking.”

Combined with other advances that automate out the need for as many employees in jobs like fast food, quick serve restaurants, coffee houses, and apparel shops, one has to wonder if it’s responsible to develop the technology that eliminates jobs, before there’s a plan to train workers in the jobs of the future – which could be those involving maintenance on the machines that replaced them, optical engineers, A.I. and software developers, and other tech work.

In the long-term, workers may gain access to better, higher-paying jobs as a result of these changes, but the immediate result is short-term layoffs, as those who have jobs in convenience stores aren’t trained to be software engineers.

Amazon isn’t currently discussing its opening dates for future Go stores.