Podcast Episode Details

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Episode 60

Amazon just won't leave us alone (healthcare?!). Plus we talk cell phone free zones, taking back control of personal data, and an open source voice assistant.

Future Commerce featured in retail TouchPoints:

• We were wondering where all our new listeners came from. It came from this review in retail TouchPoints.

• Klaudia Tirico shoutout. Thanks for featuring us!

• Either we've elevated ourselves to Jason and Scott and the official NRF podcast level, or we've brought them all down to our level.

• We're currently in Seattle for a live show with Merchant to Merchant. We'll be joined in a panel with merchants from Filson and Mervin Manufacturing.

• Buzz Marketing alert! Filson's got a dope flagship store: it even manufactures products in store. (And Filson's been around since the Yukon Gold Rush).

Amazon's a for-profit venture now to the tune of 1.9 Billion last quarter:

• Washington Post reports on their profits for Q4.

• Amazon attributes a good portion of the profit and gross sales to Echo device demand.

• Bezos: "Expect us to double down." Watch out, people.

• AWS drove profits. 26% of operating margin in Q4. AWS sales rose 45% to 5.1 Billion.

• Charlie O'shea: "Growth, growth, and more growth."

• Buzz Marketing! Amazon's Super Bowl commercial.

• Could they be teasing replacing Alexa's voice? Maybe a user configurable voice? (Please let it be J.A.R.V.I.S.)

• Brian's "wouldn't it be weird" moment: what if we could record snippets of our voice and turn them into audio assistant voices?

• Phillip geeks out and shares a Star Trek anecdote: Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, the original voice of the Star Trek computer, had every part of her voice phonetically captured before she died. Now they could embody her posthumously into a device using this data.

• CIA and FBI shout out!

• Another shout out! We were just on Kiri Master's podcast, Ecommerce Brain Trust. Check it out. We talked a lot. Thanks, Kiri!

Hot take: Amazon is killing Whole Foods:

• (Brian says it's fake news)

• Is Brian ever going to say anything negative about Amazon? Probably not.

• Business insider reports on new procedures for Whole Foods that make people cry.

• Brian's take: Actually, Amazon is the savior. Whole Foods rolled out OTS before the merger and it didn't work. Amazon wants to fix the problem.

• Phillip's take: millennials now have to operate like an actual business. Sadness.

Amazon again? Alexa added voice activated texting as a feature:

• Retail TouchPoints says <

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  Published on 7 years, 10 months ago