walmart

Showing posts with label walmart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label walmart. Show all posts

Thursday 15 May 2014

Univision taps T-Mobile to create Hispanic wireless service - CNET


Spanish-language entertainment giant Univision is getting into the wireless business -- courtesy of T-Mobile. Univision and T-Mobile on Thursday announced Univision Mobile, a wireless service targeting the Hispanic market with specific plans and Univision content. Univision is hoping to extend its entertainment brand into the mobile world, while the move could potentially net T-Mobile a larger share of the market for Hispanic consumers even as the competition for new customers heats up. Financial terms weren't disclosed. The service launches May 19.

Entertainment brands have attempted to get into the wireless business before -- ESPN and Disney famously tried to become wireless service providers before they both crashed and burned. But those brands struck a reseller, or mobile virtual network operator, agreement in which they would handle all of the work related to being a wireless provider.

Univision and T-Mobile are instead partnering together, which would allow Univision to focus on the promotion and brand while T-Mobile handles customer support, billing, and other logistical needs. Customers would get Univision ringtones and wallpapers, a sneak peak at Univision shows, as well as a Univision Mobile portal for access to news, sports, and entertainment, and access to its apps.

Univision's "exclusive" content will include quick access to Rodner Figueroa's "fashionómetro," showcasing the best and worst of Hispanic celebrities on the red carpet by one of Univision's fashion experts; or even deliver personalized horoscopes by Univision's clairvoyant Victor Florencio, also known as El niño prodigio.

Univision Mobile's plans aren't just a clone of T-Mobile's offerings. They specifically target Hispanic customers with families overseas, and all include 100 minutes to call a mobile or landline number from the US to Mexico, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. As with the typical T-Mobile plan, the Univision Mobile plans all include unlimited text messages from the US to select Latin American countries and more than 200 countries around the world.

There is also the option to pay an additional $10 a month for unlimited calls to landlines and 1,000 mobile-to-mobile minutes to Mexico. The plans start at $30 a month for just voice calls and text messages. A plan that includes 2.5 gigabytes of 3G data costs $45 a month, while one that includes 2.5GB of 4G data costs $55 a month.

Univision Mobile will launch on May 19 in Walmart stores and dealer locations in the US and Puerto Rico.

T-Mobile isn't the only carrier that has attempted to cater to the Hispanic market. Verizon Wireless partnered with Jennifer Lopez to open Viva Mobil, a Hispanic-focused retail store that sold Verizon phones and services. Verizon had previously called the market a key strategic growth platform. But T-Mobile believes it can do better with Univision.

"We've looked at all the offerings in the marketplace and we think others are getting it wrong," said Mike Sievert, chief marketing officer of T-Mobile.

Univision Mobile will launch in 1,000 Walmart stores and 3,000 dealer stores, with distribution expected to double by the end of June. Sievert said there might be an option to have Univision Mobile show up in T-Mobile's stores too.

"(Univision Mobile) will be on every platform available to us," said Rick Alessandri, executive vice president of Univision.

The Hispanic market represents the fastest growing demographic in the US, and tends to skew younger and more tech-savvy, Alessandri said.

"Obviously, building a product with them first in mind is what this has been about," he said.

Sievert said T-Mobile has a higher mix of Hispanic customers than the other national carriers.

While any T-Mobile phone would work on the service, the Univision Mobile packages will come with more affordable phones such as the Samsung Galaxy Light, Galaxy S III, and, as well the Alcatel Island and Evolve.
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Tuesday 6 May 2014

WalmartLabs Buys Adtech Startup Adchemy


WalmartLabs Buys Adtech Startup Adchemy, Its Biggest Talent Deal Yet

the retailer’s Silicon Valley-based innovation lab and R&D center, has now made its twelfth acquisition with the purchase of e-commerce technology company Adchemy, its biggest deal yet in terms of people. Founded in 2004, and backed by nearly $120 million in outside funding, Adchemy had experimented with a number of business models over the years. And though it had been making steady progress, CEO Murthy Nukala admitted as recently as last November, that it was not yet profitable.

Adchemy founder and CEO Nukala is not joining as a part of the deal, we’re told.

While deal terms are not being disclosed, we’re also hearing that Adchemy was mainly a talent acquisition for the retailer.

The team of 60 who are joining @WalmartLabs include a number of skilled engineers, including Rohit Deep, previously the Chief Architect and Engineering Lead at WebEx; Ethan Batraski, formerly the head of search innovation at Yahoo; and data scientist Esteban Arcaute, a Stanford Ph.D., also previously at Yahoo.

“They built an incredibly strong team of talented folks who understood product search, product relevance, SEO, SEM, and data scientists and Ph.D’s who could build this technology,” explains Jeremy King, who leads @WalmartLabs.

The Adchemy team’s combined skill sets overlap with many of the same things Walmart itself is working on today, including improvements to its product search engine and product classification systems, for example.

We also understand that Adchemy’s technology and IP is not going to replace Walmart’s existing infrastructure, but instead it will be about enhancing the talent pool in three specific teams working at @WalmartLabs today.

For starters, Walmart has been working on improvements to its sites’ search engines (e.g., Walmart.com and SamsClub.com) over the years, having acquired semantic search company Kosmix back in 2011 for $300 million to help it build up its team.

Though Kosmix’s founders later left the company, the engineers remained. Together, they built on top of Kosmix’s “social genome” technology to launch a new version of Walmart.com search, dubbed “Polaris” in 2012. Those changes immediately improved conversions on Walmart.com by 20%, the company now tells us. With the Adchemy buy, a number of that company’s engineers will now be tasked with continuing the efforts started by that team.

Another area where Adchemy’s engineering talent will help in product classification. Walmart added 6 million products to its site over the last year, and plans to add millions more in the months ahead, we’re told. Walmart, like other online retailers, has to classify items using the data provided by the manufacturer, reseller, or marketplace provider, to determine what the item is, how it should be categorized within Walmart’s own product database, how it should be tagged, and more.

Adchemy’s engine was a bit different from Walmart’s in this case, however, as it was focused more on ad targeting. That is, it would determine if a page was about shoes or electronics, for instance, while Walmart’s tech goes deeper, trying to determine things like “which shoe,” or “which gadget.”

Finally, Adchemy’s in-house expertise in SEO and SEM who will also be joining the @WalmartLabs’ team.

Adchemy had a complicated history, detailed here on Business Insider last winter. The company began with six products but killed off five of them over the years, including its lead gen business, sold to XL Marketing in November 2013. Its most recent efforts had focused on semantic search technology, which why it ended up with the high-caliber talent that attracted Walmart’s interest. The idea was to extract the “meaning” from a retailer’s catalog, so it could respond with better product listing ads in Google based on that deeper understanding, rather than just keyword matching.

It customers included Macy’s, ModCloth, Overstock.com, American Eagle Outifitters, Finish Line, Resolution, and a couple dozen others. Those customers were alerted about this deal, and will have their contracts terminated when it closes. - by Sarah Perez

Monday 28 April 2014

Amazon steps up US lobbying for Indian FDI, Walmart on halt


After supermarket giant Walmart, it is online retail major Amazon which appears to be lobbying hard with the US lawmakers to seek their support for facilitating its "foreign direct investment in India". According to the latest lobbying disclosure reports filed with the US Senate, Amazon lobbied for a second straight quarter in January-March this year on issues related to FDI rules in India. 

On the other hand, Walmart has halted its India-specific lobbying for the second consecutive quarter during the same period, although it continues to lobby on issues related to "Walmart operations in international markets". According to the Amazon's lobbying disclosure report for the first quarter of 2014, matters related to "foreign direct investment in India" figure among numerous specific lobbying issues discussed by Amazon Corporate LLC and its registered lobbyists with the US lawmakers. Amazon, which is aggressively expanding its presence in the Indian online retail market, lobbied on issues related to Indian FDI during the October-December quarter of 2013 also, shows the Congressional records of lobby disclosure reports. 

The other matters on which Amazon lobbied during the last quarter include issues related to mobile payments, unmanned aerial vehicles, free trade agreements, high-skilled immigration, online wine sales, taxes and cyber security. Amazon is discussing issues related to Indian FDI, among other matters, with the members of the US Senate, the US Trade Representative, the Department of Commerce, the Department of State and the US House of Representatives. 

According to the lobby disclosure reports, Amazon.com and its group entities including Amazon Corporate LLC have been lobbying on various issues since 2000, but it was only in the quarter ended December 31, 2013 when its lobbying issues included "foreign direct investment in India". Earlier, Walmart had been lobbying very hard among the US lawmakers for their support on its FDI plans for India. However, a number of roadblocks including probes ordered by the Indian government seem to have tempered its ambitions for India, which has been projected as one of the biggest growth markets for the retail sector across the world. 

As per Walmart's latest disclosure, it spent close to $1.84 million on its overall lobbying activities in the US during January-March 2014, but there is no India-specific matters listed among the "specific lobbying issues" disclosed in this 18-page quarterly report. While India did not find a mention in the previous quarter (October-December 2013) lobbying disclosure report as well, "discussions regarding Foreign Direct Investment in India" used to be one of the 'specific lobbying issues' quite often in Walmart's earlier quarterly lobbying reports. In its latest quarterly disclosure, Walmart has however listed "discussions regarding Walmart operations in international markets" as one of the nearly 45 specific issues that Walmart and its lobbyists discussed with the lawmakers and the government departments in the US during January-March period this year.