2017-01-07

TechReview | 2017 Will Be The Year Of Amazon $AMZN (video)

Domain Mondo's weekly review of technology news:

Feature •  This will be the year of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN):

Amazon: The Case For A $1 Trillion Market Cap & Debunking The No Profit Misconception - Amazon.com, Inc. | SeekingAlpha.com"2018 revenue and operating cash flow are on pace to hit $200B+ and $35B+, respectively, paving the way for a $1T valuation."

Introducing Amazon Go and the world’s most advanced shopping technology:

Amazon Go is a new kind of store featuring the world’s most advanced shopping technology. No lines, no checkout – just grab and go! Learn more at http://amazon.com/go. Video above published Dec 5, 2016, by Amazon.com, Inc.

NYU Stern marketing professor Scott Galloway’s 2017 predictions:
Loser: subscription based businesses--despite the hype only three percent of U.S. shoppers have signed up for a subscription program and fifty-nine percent say they're not interested. The most overhyped acquisition of 2016: Shave Club for which Unilever paid six million dollars per employee. Subscriptions are not the disruption we'd all expected.
Winner: Amazon--the move to open stores [see Amazon Go video above] puts pressure on brick-and-mortar retailers to rethink the checkout experience. This will be the year of Amazon--a third of all batteries and  of all baby wipes sold online are from Amazon's private label. This is the end of the brand era, people now shop by category not by brand, especially with voice search devices such as Alexa, removing price and brand from the equation. Amazon has brought together artificial intelligence, fulfillment, your purchase history, and now it's going to be the first trillion dollar market cap company, offering you click ordering, and even sending you your stuff before you even ask for it. This is the year of Amazon. The pecking order of  in terms of market cap was 1. Apple, 2. Google, 3, Amazon, and 4. Facebook, but as Amazon leapfrogs Siri with Alexa and Google loses traction as consumers spend more time in mobile apps, the new order will be 1. Amazon, 2. Facebook, 3. Google, and 4. Apple, with Amazon becoming the most valuable company in the world.
See also: Apple Doesn’t Hear The Echo | Lefsetz.com: "... you’re gonna control your music via voice, you just don’t know it yet. And the first mover here is Amazon."

Other Tech News:

 CES 2017: These are the 7 big trends everyone will be talking about | CNET.com"... the main topic of conversation this year will be the incoming administration of Donald Trump, who takes office later this month [Jan. 20]. That means a huge swath of laws and regulations that directly affect the global tech industry -- everything from trade policy, tariffs, information security, network neutrality rules, tax policies, encryption, financial regulations and immigration, to name just a few -- could well be changing, some radically ..."

•  Layoffs announced at Medium.com: "... it’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet. It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to. The vast majority of articles, videos, and other “content” we all consume on a daily basis is paid for — directly or indirectly — by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period. As a result, we get…well, what we get. And it’s getting worse ..."--Ev Williams, Renewing Medium’s focus | blog.medium.com  (emphasis added).

•  T-Mobile added more than 8.2 million new wireless customers in 2016. T-Mobile's larger competitors, AT&T and Verizon, haven't grown their phone customer base according to T-Mobile CEO John Legere who added that T-Mobile has been responsible for most of the industry's growth in new phone subscribers over the past four years--CNET.com.

•  Information Overload, Chaos Syndrome, Smartphone Addiction: a recent study reported young adult mobile smartphone users were using their phones five hours a day, at 85 separate times. Most interactions were for less than 30 seconds, and the users weren’t fully aware of how addicted they were, thinking they picked up their phones half as much as they actually did, the technology had seized control of around one-third of the young adults’ waking hours--blogs.cfainstitute.org

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