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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years ago

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Mint: late-stage adversarial interoperability demonstrates what we had (and what we lost)

In 2006, Aaron Patzer founded Mint. Patzer had grown up in the city of Evansville, Indiana—a place he described as "small, without much economic opportunity"—but had created a successful business building websites. He kept up the business through college and grad school and invested his profits in stocks and other assets, leading to a minor obsession with personal finance that saw him devoting hours every Saturday morning to manually tracking every penny he'd spent that week, transcribing his receipts into Microsoft Money and Quicken.

Patzer was frustrated with the amount of manual work it took to track his finances with these tools, which at the time weren't smart enough to automatically categorize "Chevron" under fuel or "Safeway" under groceries. So he conceived on an ingenious hack: he wrote a program that would automatically look up every business name he entered into the online version of the Yellow Pages—constraining the search using the area code in the business's phone number so it would only consider local merchants—and use the Yellow Pages' own categories to populate the "category" field in his financial tracking tools.

It occurred to Patzer that he could do even better, which is where Mint came in. Patzer's idea was to create a service that would take all your logins and passwords for all your bank, credit union, credit card, and brokerage accounts, and use these logins and passwords to automatically scrape your financial records, and categorize them to help you manage your personal finances. Mint would also analyze your spending in order to recommend credit cards whose benefits were best tailored to your usage, saving you money and earning the company commissions.

By international standards, the USA has a lot of banks: around 12,000 when Mint was getting started (in the US, each state gets to charter its own banks, leading to an incredible, diverse proliferation of financial institutions). That meant that for Mint to work, it would have to configure its scrapers to work with thousands of different websites, each of which was subject to change without notice.

If the banks had been willing to offer an API, Mint's job would have been simpler. But despite a standard format for financial data interchange called OFX (Open Financial Exchange), few financial institutions were offering any way for their customers to extract their own financial data. The banks believed that locking in their users' data could work to their benefit, as the value of having all your financial info in one place meant that once a bank locked in a customer for savings and checking, it could sell them credit cards and brokerage services. This was exactly the theory that powered Mint, with the difference that Mint wanted to bring your data together from any financial institution, so you could shop around for the best deals on cards, banking, and brokerage, and still merge and manage all your data.

At first, Mint contracted with Yodlee, a company that specialized in scraping websites of all kinds, combining multiple webmail accounts with data scraped from news sites and other services in a single unified inbox. When Mint outgrew Yodlee's services, it founded a rival called Untangly, locking a separate team in a separate facility that never communicated with Mint directly, in order to head off any claims that Untangly had misappropriated Yodlee's proprietary information and techniques—just as Phoenix computing had created a separate team to re-implement the IBM PC ROMs, creating an industry of "PC clones."

Untangly created a browser plugin that Mint's most dedicated users would use when they logged into their banks. The plugin would prompt them to identify elements of each page in the bank's websites so that the scraper for that site could figure out how to parse the bank's site and extract other users' data on their behalf.

To head off the banks' countermeasures, Untangly maintained a bank of cable-modems and servers running "headless" versions of Internet Explorer (a headless browser is one that runs only in computer memory, without drawing the actual browser window onscreen) and they throttled the rate at which the scripted interactions on these browsers ran, in order to make it harder for the banks to determine which of its users were Mint scrapers acting on behalf of its customers and which ones were the flesh-and-blood customers running their own browsers on their own behalf.

As the above implies, not every bank was happy that Mint was allowing its customers to liberate their data, not least because the banks' winner-take-all plan was for their walled gardens to serve as reasons for customers to use their banks for everything, in order to get the convenience of having all their financial data in one place.

Some banks sent Mint legal threats, demanding that they cease-and-desist from scraping customer data. When this happened, Mint would roll out its "nuclear option"—an error message displayed to every bank customer affected by these demands informing them that their bank was the reason they could no longer access their own financial data. These error messages would also include contact details for the relevant decision-makers and customer-service reps at the banks. Even the most belligerent bank's resolve weakened in the face of calls from furious customers who wanted to use Mint to manage their own data.

In 2009, Mint became a division of Intuit, which already had a competing product with a much larger team. With the merged teams, they were able to tackle the difficult task of writing custom scrapers for the thousands of small banks they'd been forced to sideline for want of resources.

Adversarial interoperability is the technical term for a tool or service that works with ("interoperates" with) an existing tool or service—without permission from the existing tool's maker (that's the "adversarial" part).

Mint's story is a powerful example of adversarial interoperability: rather than waiting for the banks to adopt standards for data-interchange—a potentially long wait, given the banks' commitment to forcing their customers into treating them as one-stop-shops for credit cards, savings, checking, and brokerage accounts—Mint simply created the tools to take its users' data out of the bank's vaults and put it vaults of the users' choosing.

Adversarial interoperability was once commonplace. It's a powerful way for new upstarts to unseat the dominant companies in a market—rather than trying to convince customers to give up an existing service they rely on, an adversarial interoperator can make a tool that lets users continue to lean on the existing services, even as they chart a path to independence from those services.

But stories like Mint are rare today, thanks to a sustained, successful campaign by the companies that owe their own existence to adversarial interoperability to shut it down, lest someone do unto them as they had done unto the others.

Thanks to decades of lobbying and lawsuits, we've seen a steady expansion of copyright rules, software patents (though these are thankfully in retreat today), enforceable terms-of-service and theories about "interference with contract" and "tortious interference."

These have grown to such an imposing degree that big companies don't necessarily need to send out legal threats or launch lawsuits anymore—the graveyard of new companies killed by these threats and suits is scary enough that neither investors nor founders have much appetite for risking it.

For Mint to have launched when it did, and done as well as it did, tells us that adversarial interoperability may be down, but it's not out. With the right legal assurances, there are plenty of entrepreneurs and investors who'd happily provide users with the high-tech ladders they need to scale the walled gardens that Big Tech has imprisoned them within.

The Mint story also addresses an important open question about adversarial interoperability: if we give technologists the right to make these tools, will they work? After all, today's tech giants have entire office-parks full of talented programmers. Can a new market entrant hope to best them in the battle of wits that plays out when they try to plug some new systems into Big Tech's existing ones?

The Mint experience points out that attackers always have an advantage over defenders. For the banks to keep Mint out, they'd have to have perfect scraper-detection systems. For Mint to scrape the banks' sites, they only need to find one flaw in the banks' countermeasures.

Mint also shows how an incumbent company's own size works against it when it comes to shutting out competitors. Recall that when a bank decided to send its lawyers after Mint, Mint was able to retaliate by recruiting the bank's own customers to blast it for that decision. The more users Mint had, the more complaints it would generate—and the bigger a bank was, the more customers it had to become Mint users, and defenders of Mint's right to scrape the bank's site.

It's a neat lesson about the difference between keeping out malicious hackers versus keeping out competitors. If a "bad guy" was attacking the bank's site, it could pull out all the stops to shut the activity down: lawsuits, new procedures for users to follow, even name-and-shame campaigns against the bad actor.

But when a business attacks a rival that is doing its own customers' bidding, its ability to do so has to be weighed against the ill will it will engender with those customers, and the negative publicity this kind of activity will generate. Consider that Big Tech platforms claim billions of users—that's a huge pool of potential customers for adversarial interoperators who promise to protect those users from Big Tech's poor choices and exploitative conduct!

This is also an example of how "adversarial interoperability" can peacefully co-exist with privacy protection: it's not hard to see how a court could distinguish between a company that gets your data from a company's walled garden at your request so that you can use it, and a company that gets your data without your consent and uses it to attack you.

Mint's pro-competitive pressure made banks better, and gave users more control. But of course, today Mint is a division of Intuit, a company mired in scandal over its anticompetitive conduct and regulatory capture, which have allowed it to subvert the Free File program that should give millions of Americans access to free tax-preparation services.

Imagine if an adversarial interoperator were to enter the market today with a tool that auto-piloted its users through the big tax-prep companies' sites to get them to Free File tools that would actually work for them (as opposed to tricking them into expensive upgrades, often by letting them get all the way to the end of the process before revealing that something about the user's tax situation makes them ineligible for that specific Free File product).

Such a tool would be instantly smothered with legal threats, from "tortious interference" to hacking charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And yet, these companies owe their size and their profits to exactly this kind of conduct.

Creating legal protections for adversarial interoperators won't solve all our problems of market concentration, regulatory capture, and privacy violations—but giving users the right to control how they interact with the big services would certainly open a space where technologists, co-ops, entrepreneurs and investors could help erode the big companies' dominance, while giving the public a better experience and a better deal.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/mint-late-stage-adversarial-interoperability-demonstrates-what-we-had-and-what-we

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wordpress-guides · 4 years ago

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WordPress Help, Support: Can Need Support, Help of WordPress Enterprise?

WordPress actually powers 30% of all websites. It's an incredible figure, but it's sometimes overlooked by larger corporations — and with good reason. It's common knowledge that those figures are fabricated by teeny-tiny blogs and a website produced by, well, just about anyone. But here's the thing: while the above figure may be easily ignored by businesses looking for a CMS, WordPress remains a key player in the world's top echelon of website. WordPress controls roughly 26% of the top 10,000 websites on the internet, according to BuiltWith, and 14 of the top 100 websites in the world are powered by WordPress.

Big-name companies like CNN, Forbes, and UPS use WordPress as the foundation of their online presence. Is that confidence, however, misplaced? Is WordPress capable of supporting some of the industry's biggest digital players?

The Case for WordPress Help as a Business Platform

CMS -Grade

First and foremost, consider why such well-known brands have chosen WordPress as their web content management system.

1. Add-ons

There are over 50,000 plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory. These plugins will help businesses add a variety of features and functionality to their WordPress site. “Plugins help you ensure good SEO, protection, social media sharing options, and so much more,” said Andrew Stanten, president of Emmaus, PA-based Altitude Marketing. When compared to other enterprise CMS solutions, he said the broad range of available WordPress plugins allows businesses to customize and extend the functionality of their website with relative ease.

2. Capabilities for integration

WordPress, like a more conventional enterprise-grade CMS, will interact with "several business-critical platforms," such as CRM systems and marketing automation platforms, according to Staten. “By streamlining the website and other business-operational resources, the company and its sales [teams] are able to get information into the sales cycle faster and more efficiently than they could with disparate systems,” he said.

3. Capabilities without a head

Though WordPress does not come with a built-in headless CMS, the advent of the WordPress REST API means it can be used as one. Enterprises who want to stay important in the IoT era need headless content management capabilities, as platforms grow with the advent of smart voice assistants, smart wearables, and more. Matt Brooks, CEO of SEOteric in Watkinsville, GA, discusses how WordPress can be used as a coupled or headless solution. “The Wordpress REST API can be used to populate content on almost any platform that supports APIs. WordPress may be used as a headed CMS solution with custom views for various content types, depending on the application. It can also be used as a headless CMS, with data being funneled to other applications via API.” Nevena Tomovic, business development manager at Human Made in Derbyshire, England, described how the company uses WordPress' headless capabilities to create scalable, enterprise sites. “We use open source technology to build out digital products that scale because the core of what we do is focused on WordPress. “Basically, we create custom workflows for major media companies like TechCrunch so they can publish and manage content in real time,” she explained. Human Made assisted TechCrunch in adopting the WordPress REST API to decentralize its publishing experience. As a result, TechCrunch was able to keep the WordPress backend's simplicity while still using the REST API to build a user-friendly frontend on any platform or touchpoint.

4. Usability

The ease of use of WordPress in almost all aspects of the backend interface is a major reason for its success. Sure, things can get complicated, but as Stanten points out, WordPress appeals to advertisers and non-technical users because they can quickly "update the website after its launch."

The Case Against WordPress as a Business-Grade Content Management System

WordPress isn't just sunshine and rainbows in the business world. Indeed, WordPress's obvious limitations and challenges keep it from being a truly ideal fit for enterprise businesses, especially those outside of the publishing industry.

1. The ability to scale

Despite headless capabilities that help businesses scale their content delivery platforms, Matthew Baier, COO of Contentstack in San Francisco, sees WordPress' scalability problems as a disadvantage: “The issue arises as the website begins to scale, which occurs when you add more content [and] resources to the equation. When you start relying on a website for a critical part of your business, your needs for a CMS will change drastically, and what started out as a simple and inexpensive way to develop your site can easily spiral into a highly complicated and costly environment to manage down the road,” Baier explained. Baier went on to say that even with a simple WordPress website with only a few plugins, you'll quickly notice that "something goes bump in the night." Almost every single night.” “At other words, you wake up every morning with a new collection of problems in your CMS that need to be addressed. Third-party tools and open source are great for innovation, but troubleshooting such a specialized software stack — let alone getting enterprise-grade support — can be difficult, according to Baier.

The plugin-based architecture of WordPress, according to Christian Gainsbrugh, founder of Seattle-based LearningCart, can quickly become a disadvantage for enterprise-scale sites and applications. “Because WordPress is capable of so many things, the temptation is to use it for everything. This works well on a smaller scale, but the data structure that makes Wordpress so flexible becomes horribly inefficient to query at the enterprise level,” he said. “When you try to use WordPress for things like powering an ecommerce store or using plugins to capture data like complex feedback forms, this becomes an issue. In those cases, you'll have to rely heavily on metadata tables to track custom fields, which means that looking up a single record could take up to 50 queries, according to Gainsbrugh.

2. Support of WordPress: Safety and security

The open-source nature of themes, widgets, and plugins, according to Shawn Moore, Global CTO at Orlando, Fla.-based Solodev, can make WordPress extremely vulnerable to cyber attacks. “Many of these plugins aren't well-supported by their developers (and, in many cases, come from untrustworthy sources), and may contain exploitable code or 'backdoors' that make them vulnerable to malicious code, malware injections, spyware, and other threats.” “Security is another area where WordPress falls short for enterprises,” Baier added on this front. WordPress-powered websites have an automatic target on their back due to the CMS's widespread use. Yes, you can secure a WordPress environment, but it takes diligence and vigilance, and even the tiniest lapse in updating can have immediate and disastrous consequences."

3. Issue with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

Moore continued his anti-WordPress statement by claiming that certain WordPress plugins and widgets placed businesses at risk of non-ADA enforcement. “Large corporations such as Target, Five Guys Burgers and Fries, Charles Schwab, and Safeway have all spent millions of dollars settling litigation after their websites were found to be in violation of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. “WordPress [plugins and widgets] aren't kept to ADA guidelines, but the company website that uses the widget or plugin bears the responsibility, not the developers,” Moore explained.

4. A lack of business support

To ensure that their digital presence is live, stable, and performing well, businesses need round-the-clock support. “Despite having a large group of development experts, there is no transparency or guarantee for its results, and no way to reach a dedicated support individual during a crisis,” Moore said of WordPress's lack of enterprise-level support. Enterprise companies are forced to troubleshoot on their own or find an expensive third-party option because of inconsistent documentation,” he said.

Is WordPress Appropriate for Enterprise Use?

Is WordPress capable of meeting the digital needs of a large corporation? Yes, to put it simply. It can easily integrate with third-party tools, is simple to use, and can even handle content without the need for human intervention. But, more importantly, do you use WordPress to power your large-scale web presence? This is all up in the air. One thing is certain: as WordPress grows in size, it becomes a pain to manage. Also small website owners can testify to this fact.

Updates fail, plugins break, developers abandon themes, hackers attack your web, and you can quickly end up with a patchwork digital presence that resembles a house of cards rather than an enterprise-grade CMS. For businesses that rely on using WordPress, the solution seems to be working with a WordPress-centric organization that can keep a close eye on their WordPress-powered environment — anything less will likely result in the house of cards collapsing.

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hackernewsrobot · 6 years ago

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Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection

https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/safeway?ref=hn Comments

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thedanny522 · 5 years ago

Link

Hey there,I'm looking for delivery services providing groceries that are using affiliate feeds. Especially those that are providing a data feed that can be imported automatically. I know Amazon Fresh has it's own network/API. I already found some of the bigger players (like FreshDirect or Safeway) but they seem to have stopped/paused their program.Thanks in advance via /r/Affiliatemarketing

#affiliatemarketing #reddit #internetmarketing

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ryanrodenbaugh · 5 years ago

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Post-COVID19 Predictions

Shopping:

Persistent adoption of mobile ordering platforms

As people are trying to avoid leaving their homes, mobile ordering apps (e.g., Instacart, Uber Eats) have had strong and cheap customer acquisition. As a result of COVID, people will realize that apps like Instacart are not too expensive when you consider time and effort saved and have great user-experiences. I expect a lot of the growth these apps experience during COVID will persist. In a 2017 blog post (Cntrl+F “Instacart”) I shared a map of cities that Instacart operated in at the time and it was very limited to the coasts and some large cities throughout the rest of the US. At this point, it seems like they’ve expanded to all 50 states. Instacart is serving a critical role for consumers during COVID and is attracting a lot of new ‘shoppers’ as Uber and Lyft drivers have seen their number of riders drop off a cliff. In the second bullet of my post on grocery stores, I talk about some of the additional accommodations stores should make for Instacart shoppers.

I also believe that companies like Chipotle that have invested in building their own mobile ordering apps will do well during this period. I used the Chipotle mobile app and it had a surprisingly exceptional UI. Aftership created a Doordash API that companies can use to offer delivery to customers all within their own apps. Ubereats offers the same service so that restaurants can offer delivery in their own apps. This is great for large restaurant chains (Chipotle, McDonald’s, Starbucks, etc.) that want to own the user experience and data and can then outsource delivery without ever having to require a user to leave their mobile flow.

The rise of CloudGrocers:

I wrote a longer post talking about how grocery stores should react to COVID and how they might change in the future here. The question I keep asking is why are CloudKitchens coming to prominence but CloudGrocers are not? To borrow from my other post, the closest example of this idea is GoodEggs. GoodEggs has no physical storefronts and has an inventory of high-quality, organic, etc. products that you can have delivered to your home the same day. While they seem to be the only real player in this market, their products are too expensive and do not appeal to a mainstream audience. What I imagine is possible is that existing chains like Safeway (or a startup) could buy up cheap warehouse space, stock inventory Costco-style, and then allow people to place orders online. Over time, they could augment with robotics to make the packaging of items seamless and inexpensive. It seems like what GoodEggs doesn’t have is their own inventory though. I imagine a startup that creates its own private label products (e.g, Safeway’s “Signature Select” or Whole Foods “365 Everyday Value”) and supplements with other manufacturer brands so that they own the whole value chain. They could either start doing delivery via Instacart or have delivery be a key part of their own company from the start. I have to imagine that in many cases, consumers don’t actually care whether they are buying private labels or Clorox. Consumers want the highest quality at the lowest cost. A ‘CloudGrocer’ could be uniquely positioned to deliver this.

New Tools for Online Shopping

A lot of shopping has already moved online and in the same vein as the last two bullets, I expect to see more and more adoption of online shopping of all kinds across new demographics. With this, companies and startups will need to develop tools to make online shopping even simpler. A friend of mine put together an analysis (that I don’t have permission to share) that highlights some of the mobile e-commerce trends that happened in China during COVID. In China, e-commerce grocery shopping benefitted the most and net new adds to Chinese mobile e-commerce spiked the most for people 30+ in tier 3 and tier 4 cities. With more shopping moving online, it makes sense that tools will continue to emerge to make this process even easier. My friend runs a startup called Encarte which is an incredibly easy to use Chrome extension that allows for instant checkout on 10,000+ retail sites. Tools like Encarte (think of it as a simpler version of the “Pay with PayPal button”) that bring an “Amazon-like” shopping experience to other sites will be of tremendous benefit to shoppers and independent online retailers.

Amazon Continues to Dominate

Inevitably, Amazon will continue to grow during COVID. The fact that they are still able to provide 2-day delivery on so many of their products, provide Amazon Fresh delivery via Whole Foods, keep their warehouses running, have a streaming video service, own Twitch (the largest live streaming service outside of China), have kept AWS running at full speed, and are now creating video games is baffling. The Financial Times wrote an article titled, "Amazon auditions to be ‘the new Red Cross’ in COVID-19 crisis” that perfectly sums up the point.

Fitness and Health:

The Decline of In-Person Gyms

I predict that gyms will see a notable decline post-COVID. For long-time gym goers like myself, I am finding it surprisingly efficient to workout at home. With the exception of a squat rack/straight bar, I can do everything I would have done in a gym from the comfort of home. Right now, I suspended my gym membership, but given 1-2 more months of working out from home, I might not feel the need to resume my membership post-COVID. The rise of at-home fitness hardware will also make this transition easier for a lot of people. Besides expensive hardware providers like Peloton and Tonal, there are also less expensive options like doorframe pull bars, exercise balls, and kettlebells. For fitness studios, I could see a decrease in gym memberships going either way. For example, because I am no longer paying for a gym membership, I might be more open to paying for a monthly yoga membership or paying money to pick up a new physical hobby (e.g., Archery lessons), but still TBD.

Health (and masks) as Fashion Symbols

In Asia, it’s been the norm to wear masks for a long time. I believe this has largely been due to poor air quality. When I was living in Asia, I always appreciated how fashionable people looked in masks. I am excited to see how major brands can speed up this transition to mask-wearing becoming a norm in the US. I expect brands like Adidas/Yeezy or Nike to manufacture stylish, branded masks. You could own them in multiple colors to match your outfit for the day. As my friend Steve Weiner points out, “we’ll probably see this go further and be a big growth period for another layer of wearable / connected tech (heart rate, O2 capacity, temperature, embedded microphone, etc). This could even tie in with a personal health certificate / electronic medical record application on your phone or apple watch that can be scanned for “proof-of-health”.

Renaissance of Cooking

I’ve discovered a new love of cooking during this quarantine. Most groups I am a part of have added channels for “quarantine cooking” where people can share their latest creations. From what I can see on Twitter of people making sourdough bread, it seems like a lot of people are enjoying cooking, possibly for the first time in a while. This could be a win for DTC companies that make high-quality ingredients. Companies like Kettle and Fire and Anthony’s Goods come to mind. I think this will spur a lot more opportunities for YouTubers and cooking websites to monetize as people are turning to the web to figure out how to cook new recipes. My friend Steve again points out that this could also be a win for live streaming likes like “Twitch and IG Live. Group cooking is very social and much lower barrier to entry since people are cooking and streaming themselves much more”

Generation Germaphobe

During COVID, I have found myself becoming extremely conscious of everything that I touch. I think it will be tough to rid myself of his consciousness. I can see a whole generation of people turning into permanent germaphobes. This could long-term be good for hand sanitizer and long-term bad for public places like gyms (as I touched on above). Steve points out that this could also manifest in some unexpected domains like dating, “The AIDS epidemic caused people to start practicing safe sex much more frequently and asking a partner about their history. That wasn't done before.”

Startups:

Digital Spaces Replace More Physical Spaces

I saw a stat that OnlyFans new registrations have spiked during COVID. Can websites like OnlyFans continue to grow and become ’the digital strip club’ post-COVID? According to a company spokesperson, "the platform had received 1.85 million new registrations (both content creators and consumers) since Feb. 29. Between March 6 and 17, there was a 75% increase in people signing up.” I’ve read the same is true for Patreon, YouTube, and Twitch. According to Wikipedia, "As of February 2020, [OnlyFans] [already] has 20 million registered users and claims to have paid out $400 million to its 200,000 content creators.” Given that OnlyFans splits rev 80% content creator / 20% only fans, this stat implies OnlyFans has made 100M in revenue in its 4 year existence. The OnlyFans take rate is notably more than Patreon (5-8%) and lower than YouTube ads fee (45%).

While I was writing this post, I came across an article in the NYT titled “Inside the Strip Clubs of Instagram”.

New Social Experiences

As people crave more social interaction, potentially long-term if remote work truly picks up, people will seek to create new social experiences from actions that previously weren’t social. I believe in the past there were social sites specifically curated for food. I could see a company like Tasty successfully launching an Instagram-like feed purely for photo foods + recipes. It would be great for them to insert their own content alongside user-generated content. They could add options like “Keto” or “Vegan” so you could curate your feed to your own dietary preferences. Chinese companies like Pinduoduo (summary video of the company) have succeeded with making shopping social and at least one US-company, Supergreat (notably, backed by Benchmark Capital) seems to be attempting to do something similar for beauty products and shopping. Video Games like Fortnite and Roblox have done a lot to create one new type of social experience, but there are still many untapped frontiers.

Less Funding Towards Companies focused on the Physical World

One trend I have noticed in venture funding is a lot of money going towards companies operating in the physical world. I use companies like Uber and OpenDoor as examples of companies that are clearly technology companies, but that have a large physical presence. I’ve said to friends that there is a fine line between OpenDoor and WeWork, where OpenDoor is a tech company that tries to do things in the physical world and WeWork is a physical company that tries to be a tech company. Possibly due to the success of companies like Uber, scooter companies, etc. VCs have been keen to fund companies that dance on this line, but seeing as these companies are getting crushed the most in this COVID downturn, we may see VCs back away from companies going after these kinds of problems.

Extra credit: Ben Thompson’s ‘What is a Tech Company’ describes this better than I could hope to.

New types of Online Learning

There has been a lot of talk about remote learning from a few different angles, but one that I find most interesting are companies focused on learning for practical skills (cooking, fitness, woodworking, pottery) that you pay for possibly on a monthly basis. Similar to wikihow, but where the video creators take home a large chunk of the revenue for the videos they create. An overly simplistic framework for a company doing this:

Total monthly rev for the company is $1M

January has 10M total views across all videos

Ryan creates an archery tutorial that drives 1M views in a month (10% of total views)

Ryan makes 1M * 10% * 80% = $80,000 for the month of January

I recently came across Jumprope, a company that makes it easier for creators to create ‘how-to’ videos.

Jen Yip makes the great point that there is a huge difference between watching a how-to video and thinking you understand doing something and then trying it and realizing how tough it is. A company that could bridge this gap by e.g,. Merging online instruction + real world practice (in the form of studios or take home kits) would be really interesting.

Portable Benefits

Since 2017 when I started following some of the 2nd order impacts of the gig economy, I began to recognize the importance of portable benefits for 1099 workers. I wrote more about portable benefits in my post on the future of work (section 2.1). At the highest level, portable benefits allow 1099 workers, who may have multiple streams of income and no full-time employer to easily manage and contribute to their healthcare-related benefits. The idea here is that many people are working multiple contractor jobs that provide multiple income streams, but no fringe benefits and easy way to manage their benefits. Companies like Etsy have proposed ideas such as enabling tax withholding for 1099 employees, streamlining flexible spending accounts, or creating a “Federal Benefits Portal, which would tie all benefits (retirement, health insurance, paid leave, tax-advantaged savings accounts, disability, etc.) to the individual, providing a single marketplace to view, choose and pay for their benefits, regardless of where or how they earn income. Companies like Catch Benefits are working on this now and I expect to see them continue to grow or for additional players to pop up in this space. What I would be really impressed with would be seeing an association of companies with the largest gig workforces (Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Amazon, Etsy, etc. etc.) getting together to come up with an agreed-upon standard and then propose legislation for being able to also contribute directly to their workers’ portable benefits accounts.

Remote Work:

Tighter Spending Practices Accelerating Remote Work

Moving forward, a lot of companies will have much tighter rein on their spending. This could mean hiring CFO/VP Finance much earlier for many companies. Or it could mean a boom for outsourced tech/human in the loop firms.

Companies are realizing (1) they have a lot of headcount they did not need (2) they pay a lot of money for talent and office space in SF/NYC/Boston/Seattle/LA.

This, in combination with companies realizing how effective their workforce can be when remote could be the push that remote work needs to become the default for a lot of companies. There are many downstream impacts of remote work becoming the norm.

Hire/Retain Talent: Competition for software engineers in the Bay Area is competitive and shows no signs of cooling off. This makes it harder to get candidates in the door and raises salaries. Even when you make a great hire, “San Francisco [has] the shortest average job tenure of any metro, and [is] well below the national average”. High turnover winds up costing companies a lot in the form of retraining, lost productivity, and decreases in morale that comes with turnover (especially for small companies).

Save Money: Besides high salaries, Silicon Valley also has some of the country’s highest office space prices, health care costs, corporate taxes, food prices, utility costs, and transportation costs.

Higher Quality of Life: Residents in the Bay Area also have higher taxes and general cost of living expenses (gas, food, etc.) than virtually anywhere else in America. If a company allows employees to work from less expensive geographies, it can become a competitive differentiator in the hiring process. This opens up the potential to hire experienced candidates who live in cheaper geographies because they want to raise a family, own a home, and save most of their income.

Reset of Commercial and Residential Real Estate Prices

In geographies like San Francisco, some other impacts that could have are a reset of commercial and residential real estate prices, making the Bay Area more affordable for the people and companies that do choose to stay in the area. Unfortunately, small businesses will likely be going out of business at alarming rates, this means even more commercial real estate opening up. As Steve points out, this could be a massive reallocation of CRE towards CloudKitchens, CloudXYZ, accelerating the trend toward a retail apocalypse.

Other Trends

Increase pace of Automation

Many manufacturing facilities that rely on large in-person staff are facing a lot of difficulties right now. While there may be skyrocketing demand for their products, they are stuck between keeping manufacturing running while also keeping their personnel healthy. I predict that post-COVID, many facilities will invest more in automation to prevent personnel issues in the future. In the first section of an older post I highlight data from Ark Invest that states, as the cost to manufacture robots has come, demand has steadily increased, and projections for future sales of industrial robots are steady across most, if not all, forecasts. This trend is already in motion, but I expect to see it sped up as companies want to preserve their resilience and decrease dependence on people in the future.

Tangent: In an older, unpublished post, I highlighted some of the other reasons why companies should invest in automation:

"In the warehouse environment, for example, one insurance professional said that in terms of cost and efficiency robots always beat humans (uh, duh). Some second-order effects invoked that I had not given consideration to are: 1) In a factory/warehouse environment where workers are subjected to dangerous work conditions are/or regularly lift heavy objects, the worker compensation costs are significant with humans, and are obviously 0 with machines. I am sure there are a number of other fringe benefits that robots eliminate. Also, if you've seen the Amazon machines moving through factories, their slim size can allow for smaller aisles and, in turn, better overall facility utilization.

People will Save more Money

Thanks to how my parents raised me, I am extremely cost-conscious and a big saver. Unfortunately, I notice many of my millennial peers like to spend basically all of the money they make. I predict that the shock that COVID sent through the system will turn saving into a more ubiquitous habit as people are now more conscious of downturns and layoffs. Saving money, investing money, and earmarking money for something other than short-term spending is a good habit that benefits people long-term. Apps like Acorns, Wealthfront, etc. that encourage savings and earmarking funds for e.g., trips will benefit from this change. My friend Charles Rubenfeld points out that interest rates could be zero for a very long time. This raises an interesting point of where people go to save money? This could lead to an inflow of dollars into passive and active investment strategies. It’s also a good argument for some of the crypto applications like Dharma that offer high (2-6%) interest rates in a “savings” account that takes advantage of crypto-lending on the backend. While the risk profile of an app like this isn’t == to a Wells Fargo savings account, it provides a consistent return on cash holdings.

2020 Presidential Election:

It’s easy to forget that this is a Presidential election year. I can’t see the democratic and republican national conventions taking place in person this August. A couple questions: which candidate benefits more? If Trump continues to dominate tv screens and Biden gets no coverage, it could benefit Trump. If Trump botches COVID, it could benefit Biden, etc.

As far as a quick search could tell me, US presidential elections have never before been delayed and there isn’t a process for trying to delay them.

If elections do take place, you know the results will be extremely contested.

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neptunecreek · 5 years ago

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Mint: Late-Stage Adversarial Interoperability Demonstrates What We Had (And What We Lost)

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2DNYjQL

#Deeplinks

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topicprinter · 6 years ago

Link

Article URL: https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/safeway?ref=hn

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21250421

Points: 9

# Comments: 1

#hacker news

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letdepankri · 6 years ago

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Savoir se vendre sur internet

En 20 ans à peine, Amazon s'est rapidement diversifié pour devenir l'une des plus grandes sociétés d'internet du monde, allant de téléphones et meubles à l'alimentation en passant par Kindle Fires. Quatre-vingts millions d'Américains visitent Amazon.com chaque mois - chaque personne désirant acheter quelque chose - faisant d'Amazon le 9ème site le plus visité aux États-Unis: quantcast.com/top-sites/US/ Et Amazon fait également un excellent travail dans ce domaine. Ils sont expédiés rapidement, les commandes arrivent à temps, les prix sont excellents et le service après-vente est excellent. Pas content de ce que tu as acheté? Aucun problème. Amazon va le reprendre. Leur politique de retour en toute simplicité facilite les achats chez eux. Ma famille et moi venons d'emménager dans une nouvelle maison. Nous en avons fourni environ 80% via Amazon.com. Tout livré directement à notre porte. Il n'est donc pas étonnant que de grands magasins traditionnels comme Wal-Mart, Sears et KMart s'efforcent de rajeunir leurs ventes atones. Il n'est pas surprenant non plus que les détaillants de toutes tailles s'adressent à Amazon et demandent comment ils peuvent exploiter son volume de clients et son expertise opérationnelle - comment ils peuvent être les petits oiseaux blancs sur le dos de l'hippo. Amazon peut-il servir de centre de vente au détail florissant pour mes produits? Et Amazon peut-il m'aider à faire plus que des ventes? Comme vous pouvez l'imaginer, de nombreuses entreprises aimeraient vous aider à chaque étape de votre cycle économique. Ils aimeraient vous aider à trouver de nouveaux clients (et à les conserver!), Augmenter les ventes, exécuter les commandes et fournir un support après-vente. Amazon est l'un d'eux: Vous pouvez revendre n'importe quel nombre de vos produits sur Amazon. Vous pouvez utiliser Amazon Payments pour traiter les cartes de crédit à partir de votre site de commerce électronique autonome. Vous pouvez envoyer des conteneurs de produits à Amazon pour qu'ils emballent, expédient et exécutent les commandes dès leur arrivée. Complète, clé en main. En fait, Amazon propose désormais une solution de commerce électronique appelée: http://webstore.amazon.com/. En gros, c'est une plate-forme pour vous permettre de créer et d'exploiter votre activité en ligne. Le coût est de 75 $ / mois, plus 2% de frais de traitement de carte de crédit. Amazon fournit les outils nécessaires à la conception, au marchandisage, à la gestion des catalogues, à la gestion des stocks, au paiement, au traitement des paiements et au service clientèle. Les caractéristiques que j'aime particulièrement Intégration avec des moteurs de comparaison gratuits comme Google Shopping et TheFind.com Intégration avec des programmes de publicité d'affiliation tels que Commission Junction et LinkShare. API pour l'intégration avec les systèmes de planification des ressources d'entreprise (ERP). Parmi les principales marques utilisant Amazon Webstore, citons Fruit of the Loom, Spalding, Black & Decker et Samsonite. Nous avons récemment aidé Hawaii Hurricane Company à lancer un nouveau site de commerce électronique sur Amazon Webstore. Jetez un coup d'oeil: hawaiianhurricane.biz/ Mark Doo en est le propriétaire et il exploite son entreprise sur Amazon depuis 2 ans maintenant. Avant de migrer vers Amazon, Mark exploitait 3 sites Web autonomes. Il trouvait cela fastidieux et finalement coûteux de les gérer. Ce qui a attiré Mark dans la solution d'Amazon, c'est sa facilité d'achat, ses politiques de retour respectueuses et son engagement en matière de service à la clientèle. Il a également salué l'hébergement d'honoraires forfaitaires d'Amazon, le traitement peu coûteux des cartes de crédit et la sécurité renforcée. Le produit le plus vendu d'Hawaii Popcorn est l'ouragan Popcorn:hawaiianhurricane.biz/3pk-Hawaiian-Hurricane-Microwave-Popcorn-Gift/M/B0000D8Q90.htm J'aime Mark parce qu'il garde les choses simples et se concentre sur les bases. Il ne vend qu'une poignée d'articles, tous des produits gagnants, il utilise Amazon Fulfillment pour rationaliser ses opérations et il est fanatique de qualité et de service à la clientèle. Mais il ne néglige pas le commerce de détail conventionnel. Vous pouvez trouver son maïs soufflé dans plus de 20 lieux à Hawaii, notamment Long's, Safeway, Times, Costco et Walmart. Plus tôt cette année, Mark a commencé à vendre son pop-corn dans tous les Costcos au Japon et a toujours été classé parmi les dix articles les plus vendus de Costco au Japon! Alors, quel est le résultat final? Si vous vendez, vous devez vendre où sont vos clients. S'ils sont en ligne, alors vous devez également y être. L'expérience en ligne de votre magasin doit être rapide, sans douleur et professionnelle. Et il faut se sentir bien à chaque étape. Il y a beaucoup d'entreprises qui veulent vous aider à faire exactement cela. Amazon Webstore est une bonne solution offrant plusieurs avantages uniques. Cela vaut vraiment la peine de vérifier. Retrouvez toutes les infos sur spécialiste en formation SEO.

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mccullytech · 8 years ago

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Adobe Enhances Retailers’ Workflows to Power Personalization

With heightened shopper expectations and 2017’s challenging retail climate, retailers must deliver a shopping experience that delights and differentiates. Consumers demand fluidity and personalization across every digital and physical touchpoint, raising the bar for retailers. Thanks to innovations in areas like AI, machine learning and voice interfaces, cutting edge retailers can leverage technology to reinvent the shopping experience to differentiate, delight shoppers and increase revenue.

At Shop.org, we’ll feature an Adobe Experience Cloud-powered demo showing how retailers can leverage experience-driven commerce to deliver more timely, relevant experiences with the power of Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework. Picture this: As a consumer progresses through the shopping journey from awareness and discovery to conversion, the experience is personalized and adapted based on her preferences and real-time context. Using Fluid Experiences, which integrates Adobe Sensei personalization features, the scenario delivers a frictionless shopper journey that engages with consumers on their terms, in the channel of their choice. Shoppers can seamlessly engage their favorite brands across chat, voice, mobile and in-store touch points. Retailers can create and manage this experience from a single platform.

Insights into conversions must inform retailers’ strategies. For example, social networks’ visit share volume to retailers’ website more than doubling from social networks since January 2015. This quickly growing channel presents an opportunity to reach shoppers. We’re announcing our Retail Industry Report based on aggregated and anonymous data from Adobe Analytics, providing insights for retailers.

Additionally, Adobe Experience Cloud is unveiling new capabilities that help retailers:

Create fluid, personalized experiences that adapt to consumer context: It’s critical that retailers create and manage personalized omnichannel experiences across all touchpoints. By combining Experience Manager’s ability to deliver content across channels with Adobe Target for personalization and testing, retailers can easily test and personalize content at scale. This new capability, Fluid Personalization, removes the bottleneck to personalization at scale by leveraging Adobe Sensei technology to automatically deliver and optimize the experience based on situational context. Based on where the shopper is in the journey and situational context, the message will adapt. A fashion retailer may email customers to promote its fall fashion line, for instance. The content leveraged for email marketing could automatically be leveraged for Instagram, its mobile app and in-store screens, providing personalized information such as an invitation to its local runway event and targeted offers. We’re unveiling Fluid Personalization on the heels of our one-click personalization release.

Intelligently adjust images based on bandwidth:With Experience Manager, retailers can easily author and deliver rich, dynamic imagery and video for any screen at scale. Today, we’re introducing a new feature in Experience Manager for Dynamic Media: Smart Imaging. During delivery, Smart Imaging intelligently adjusts imagery based on bandwidth, screen pixel density, and browser version to deliver expertly optimized images at a smaller size with zero loss in visual fidelity. Focused on mobile, Smart Imaging dramatically reduces page size and ensures fast loading, high quality experiences regardless of bandwidth. This increases shoppers’ engagement, conversion and satisfaction. A user may begin researching a new purchase on a high bandwidth network in the office, then continue browsing later while on-the-go via a mobile device with lower bandwidth. Smart Imaging assures that experiences load quickly and images maintain the same high quality in both scenarios. This capability will be available later this year.

Obtain insights and inform recommendations from voice-based interfaces: Voice-enabled devices and digital assistants are being integrated with retail apps to order dinner or replenish laundry detergent via delivery, for example. Today, Adobe Analytics Cloud is helping retailers advance voice-driven customer experiences with robust audience insights that inform recommendations. Rather than requiring cumbersome, manual analysis, Analytics Cloud automates the analyzation of voice data from all major platforms so retailers can unearth actionable insights. Integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud ensures the data insights drive action, informing automatic personalization on channels such as voice, mobile app and the connected car. Analytics Cloud is also introducing powerful workspaces that build on Analysis Workspace to help retailers discover meaningful insights faster with pre-built product and merchandizing templates.

Increase conversions with UGC: With Experience Manager Livefyre in Marketing Cloud, brands can already integrate authentic social content on owned channels. New innovations enable retailers to:

Seamlessly connect products with UGC by syncing catalogs in Experience Manager Commerce with Livefyre or through a simple file upload with other e-commerce solutions. This helps retailers incorporate product-specific UGC into purchase experiences. They can embed photos, videos and comments from social channels directly into product pages to influence purchase and place customizable call-to-action (CTA) buttons alongside product-related UGC surfaced on Livefyre Media Walls, Mosaics and Filmstrips to drive customers into the purchase path. By early 2018, Adobe will open the Livefyre API, enabling retailers to incorporate websites leveraging any commerce platform, beginning with Google Shopping.

Optimize and personalize UGC experiences with Experience Manager Livefyre and Adobe Target, the personalization engine of Marketing Cloud. Retailers can test static content versus real-time UGC, or test to learn which source, presentation, and location is best— for example, Instagram or Twitter, a Media Wall or Mosaic, the center module or right rail. To further increase engagement and conversions, retailers can personalize the best UGC experience for each visitor based on a combination of behavioral, contextual and offline data. This new Adobe Target capability is powered by Adobe Sensei, our AI and machine learning framework.

Personalize ads with more product details: Adobe Advertising Cloud offers product catalogue-driven campaign creation, management and ad personalization. Enhanced Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) capabilities for retailers can incorporate catalogue data directly into ads to drive purchase intent and personalized experiences across the customer journey. By performing multivariate tests, brands can algorithmically determine the most effective creative elements and messages to serve a consumer. These ads contain detailed sku-level information about individual products, such as price, model, description, rating and more, and are targeted to consumers to drive conversions. For example, a retailer can retarget a person searching online for a Viking oven featuring an image and detail of the exact model and a 10 percent discount offer – or deliver an up-sell or cross-sell offer. Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager integrations also allow for even deeper personalization of the ad.

Retailers leveraging Adobe Experience Cloud include 80 percent of the top 100 U.S. retailers. Adidas, Dior, Jet.com, John Lewis, Kao, Nissin Foods, Safeway, Sephora, Shop Direct and more, are among Adobe Experience Cloud’s customer base.

The post Adobe Enhances Retailers’ Workflows to Power Personalization appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/adobe-enhances-retailers-workflows-power-personalization/

#Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe

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euro3plast-fr · 8 years ago

Text

Adobe Enhances Retailers’ Workflows to Power Personalization

Additionally, Adobe Experience Cloud is unveiling new capabilities that help retailers:

Increase conversions with UGC: With Experience Manager Livefyre in Marketing Cloud, brands can already integrate authentic social content on owned channels. New innovations enable retailers to:

The post Adobe Enhances Retailers’ Workflows to Power Personalization appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/adobe-enhances-retailers-workflows-power-personalization/

#Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe

0 notes