#Amazon To Let Shoppers Bargain For Lower Prices With New##Make An Offer##Option Amazon,
pushing hard to pick up more business during the holiday season, wants you to make a deal.
Taking a page from the likes of ebay and Priceline, it is introducing a new dutch auction-style feature.
Users can now ake an Offeron a product, suggesting a lower price to the vendor than the one listed on Amazon.
Amazon is rolling this out across about 150,000 items initially one-off products ranging from sports
and entertainment collectibles to art and it says that the plan will be to extend this to undreds of thousands of itemsby 2015.
The move seems to be a clear bid to compete against the likes of sites like ebay for more business for its marketplace from third-party vendors,
who can use this as a way of shifting items that may have more flexible pricing,
or for items where the value has not been established firmly because of their one-off nature.
Importantly, this gives also buyers somewhat more transparency on pricing, and keeps the negotiation within Amazon walled garden rather than being taken offline,
where Amazon would get no commission, or finished before a sale is made. The other person this is intended to help is the third-party merchant that sells on Amazon marketplace.
This is one more way to connect customers to a merchant and once you are on a product page the merchant may choose to recommend other items he/she is selling that you might like to buy.
Amazon says it was launched in response to requests from those merchants. he new ake an Offerexperience is a game-changer for Amazon customers looking for great prices on one-of-a-kind items,
and negotiate directly with customers in an online marketplace environment just like they do normally in their own physical store
nearly half of the respondents told us that the ability to negotiate prices with customers would be important to drive more sales on Amazon. ake an Offerdelivers that functionality
and makes customers feel confident they are getting an item they want at the lowest price possible.
what ebay does today. Amazon is clear to point out that this is ot an auction formatin that you are not actively bidding against others
and seeing the price creep up in the process, against a preset deadline where a virtual hammer will drop. ll negotiations are 1: 1 and private between individual customers and sellers,
The intention is to lower prices, and a customer negotiating with a seller will never pay more than the listed price.
Amazon says that sellers who want to offer an item under the ake an Offeroption add the feature
when they list the price. Prospective buyers who are interested in using the feature then send a price to the vendor
who then either accepts, rejects or counteroffers. If and when a price is agreed, a user will be able to add the item to his/her shopping cart,
at the negotiated price, to pay for it. The news comes at a time when Amazon is pushing ahead not just on holiday deals online
but also continuing to look at other ways of extending its sales platform. Recent developments have included adding private label home essentials, by way of Amazon Elements, restaurant takeout and delivery,
as well as bike messenger delivery trials t
#Didi Dache One Of China s Two Dominant Taxi App Firms Closes $700m Series D Round Another large sum of money is going in Asia taxi
app space following Softbank $250 million investment in Grabtaxi and Uber latest Asia-focused $1. 2 billion raise.
Singapore Temasek Holding which invested in Rocket Internet Lazada last month led the round, which included participation from existing investors DST Global and Chinese internet giant Tencent.
The company is not disclosing its valuation but this new funding round which is one of the largest ever for a Chinese tech firm is a huge jump on its $100 million Series C round from January this year.
Didi Dache claims to have over 100 million registered users and more than 1 million taxi drivers on its platform.
The company covers 300 cities in China and says that it processes 5. 2 million orders per day.
Didi Dache core offering is a taxi booking service. It integrates with Tencent Wechat, China hugely popular chat app,
to allow users to book their ride from inside the app itself. That partnership alone accounts for over 20 million bookings per month.
Uber doesn reveal data for China, but it is almost certainly seeing far, far less interest in its services in the country.
It offers its Uber Black and Uber X services as well as a nonprofit service called eople Uberwhich works much like a Lyft service.
The U s. firm pledged to spend much of its new $1. 2 billion funding round on developing its position in Asia.
But its battles in Asia are won far from. It is not likely that Uber will pour $700 million of that round into China
which means Didi Dache will have far greater resources in China to cement its already strong lead over the U s. firm.
It seems likely that Kuaidi Dache is also in the market for more financing. That would put Uber well behind its top rivals in China,
leaving it with a huge challenge to break their dominance in the country. idi will continue its commitment in providing mobile-based transportation services to more users,
The company believes in its mission of making transportation easier for everyone through mobile Internet
Stewart Butterfield s Slack is currently the talk of Silicon valley after the young company raised an additional $120 million at a post-money valuation of $1. 12 billion.
Others that immediately spring to mind include Atlassian s Hipchat Cotap a messaging startup co-founded by two ex-Yammer executives
and funded by ex-Skype employees and IMBOX. me backed by ex-Nokia President and CEO Olli Pekka Kallasvuo to name but a few.
Therefore you d be forgiven for thinking there s little room left for a new enterprise messaging entrant.
because modern companies use an increasing amount of specialized tools for specialized services like Trello for Task Management Github as a Code Repository and Google docs for online collaboration.
and data that is scattered across different cloud services.##This is where Chatgrape comes into its own.
#We ve built a type of search engine that indexes every tool/service you connect with Chatgrape (so far we ve got Github Bitbucket Google Drive Google Calendar
Now by typing#you trigger Chatgrape s smart autocomplete that allows you to add attach
#In a demo given to me over Skype and in my own testing I could grok immediately how much time this feature alone could potentially save.
As naturally as it is for all of us to tag a friend on Facebook only that it s no longer about the pages you ve liked
but the files and data you work with every single day.##Meanwhile the company is working with SAT (Research Studios Austria)
and most recently The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial intelligence (OFAI) to develop Chatgrape s chat#intelligence even further.
and nail the required User interface#make the likes of Slack et al. look long in the tooth almost over night.
To date Chatgrape has raised around 440000 Euros led in part by angel investors and in part by the The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG.
It s currently fundraising a larger seed round (with a number of VCS/co-investors already committed) based off the back of its technology
and an invite-only beta that s seen it sign up 300-plus companies comprising 1500 active users who have sent over 100000 messages.
This same API will also allow outside developers to integrate their tools and data to the#autocomplete.
A large hardware reseller obviously handles different internal data than say a large furniture manufacturer. We aim to have at least five large enterprise customers by summer 2015
#Mesosphere Announces First Data center OS And $36m In Funding Mesosphere, the commercial entity built on top of the open source Apache Mesos project,
announced some major milestones today, starting with $36m in Series B funding along with the early release of
what they are calling the first data center operating system. The round was led by new investor Khosla Ventures with additional funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, SV Angel and other unnamed investors.
The latest funding brings the total investment to date to $50m. Besides the funding though, the bigger news was the announcement of their first data center operating system (DCOS.
This is a new kind of operating system that operates on the scale of the entire data center, which means instead of controlling a single machine,
the operating system sits on top of the data center and enables administrators to treat all of the resources in the data center as a single, virtual entity.
This allows for much simpler management and lets administrators spin servers and software up and down as needs require much more quickly than with current methods.
The virtual machine allowed you to make the best use of your resources on a single machine
but Mesosphere wants to take that concept a step further and allow you to apply that same principle to the entire data center.
Because today applications tend to work across multiple servers, no matter how many ways you break down a single machine resources,
it just not going to suffice anymore. By applying this virtual machine concept across the entire data center,
you create a single pool of resources that you can manipulate any way that you like
and this could be a powerful capability for system administrators. What more, this ability to virtualize the entire data center dramatically speeds up the time it takes to spin up server clusters from days or weeks to hours or even minutes
depending on how large the cluster is you are trying to create. The virtual resource pool is designed to span thousands of machines.
In fact, Mesosphere mentioned a reference customer running 50,000 nodes on DCOS, and they believe they can scale to 500,000 nodes by the end of next year.
or use a graphical user interface to quickly drag and drop resources from a library to the command line panel.
This gives administrators the ability to start multiple instances of any software in the library very quickly.
The library includes popular open source products by default such as Apache Spark Apache Cassandra, Apache Hadoop and Google Kubernetes,
or customers can add internal software packages. DCOS is compatible with several versions of Linux including Redhat, Centos, Ubuntu,
and Coreos, as well public cloud infrastructure services from companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Finally, you can use it with private cloud infrastructure services including virtual machines, bare metal and Openstack.
Administrators can also set up triggers with a scheduler tool so that when certain conditions are met, the system will automatically run a predefined set of commands.
For instance, administrators could run a set of commands based on cost so the job would only run
if the cost threshold were met. What more, administrators can take advantage of the API to build applications against the single pool of data center resources available from Mesosphere DCOS.
Mesosphere said DCOS will be generally available next year, but there is an early access program now w
#Fashion And Tech Companies Merge Online And Offline Sales Editor Note: Stephanie Chan is a freelancer who writes for Renegade
and contributes weekly to art & culture magazine Beautiful/Decay. With online sales up 17%and physical retail down 11%,it no wonder retailers large and small are increasingly living online.
An alternative to simply shuttering the windows, though, is to experiment with new technologies to integrate the showroom, the storefront,
and the web. in November, fashion and tech entrepreneurs and experts gathered at the Decoded Fashion New york Summit to discuss integrating technology,
Nordstrom and ebay. According to ebay Inc.,the Rebecca Minkoff partnership marks the company continuing expansion into the physical marketplace and not simply a ne-offdeal.
The company has filed several patents for the new technology, and according to head of Innovation and New Ventures Steve Yankovich, his is not a pilot for us.
but ebay is hoping for a deeper integration with the retail experience. In the past, ebay has released a transaction eat mapfollowing Thanksgiving
which shows online buyer-seller activity in a real world context. The new high-tech store Minkoff launched in Manhattan Soho neighborhood aims to capitalize on that kind of big data knowhow
and bring the convenience and personalization of online shopping to the brick and mortar space.
It an extension of work ebay has done with other retailers, like Kate Spade. Minkoff and her cofounder (and brother), company chief executive Uri Minkoff explained their thinking
Recognizing the increasing role mobile is playing in retail, Minkoff decided to integrate the smartphone into the showroom experience.
The customer can enter her phone number and then walk away to enjoy a drink while a store associate curates their personalized fitting room.
Once that customer receives a text alert, she enters a fitting room, equipped with another interactive mirror that allows her to summon the associate for new sizes
and items like designer-specified recommendations based on her selections. f youe looking at a leather jacket,
A customer can also save her fitting room session. It another function translated from online shopping specifically the online shopping cart.
The amount of data gleaned from this kind of real-world tracking has implications not just for the costumer,
lingerie and adidas lines through a large touch screen display on the shop floor. It goes beyond just the boutique scene:
An Ugg store in D c.-area mall Tysons Galleria now enables customers to browse touch screen catalogs
and check out using their phone instead of a cash register. In fact, the entire Tyson Corner Center mall is attempting to go online with a designated smartphone app, virtual concierge services,
and other functions r
#Separating The Opportunities From The Obstacles In Open-source Networking Open standards have driven the networking market since the earliest days of the Internet.
While the use of open source for networking is a more recent phenomenon, it is no less important.
A major industry transition to open source for software-defined networking (SDN) is under way, and users and vendors stand to benefit.
Some expectations, however, may need to change. While the original idea behind SDN separating the control from the data plane in network switches has turned out to be just one of many architectural approaches that have emerged
it did catalyze massive interest in software and open source within the networking world. Things like APIS and Devops tools became relevant to network engineers,
and open source movements emerged to fulfill the need for increased automation and flexibility as organizations moved deeper into the cloud.
Most recently the conversation has shifted to how open-source policy frameworks can hide the complexity of networking
and make interacting with networks easier and faster for application developers. Suddenly, networking is not just about the next generation of ASIC technology.
It now about innovating at the speed of software. While some of these open-source technologies are still maturing
they already show promise as a way to simplify network operations and reduce both operating and capital expenses.
Networking vendors have moved aggressively to support open-source orchestration, network controllers and even software-based appliances to drive higher levels of interoperability.
While these projects require operators and developers to get their hands dirty, they offer a critically important venue for collaboration between vendors,
as well as a way to drive standardization ahead of slower-moving standards bodies. Many different open-source projects have evolved over the last few years that affect networking.
Originally a collaboration between Rackspace and NASA, the Openstack cloud computing software platform is the most prominent open-source project to emerge in recent years.
Openstack serves as an open source network orchestrator that lets users describe what they want from a network through a set of logical network abstractions.
This project, led by the Linux Foundation, focuses on the control and management of network resources,
has defined host/virtual machine/container interactions for networking. Critical portions of OVS are included now directly in the Linux kernel,
and it has become an important building block in extending the network into the operating system. Open source projects have performed also significant work on open protocols,
including: Openflow. Now managed by the Open Networking Foundation, Openflow kicked off the SDN movement in 2008 by promoting the idea of programmability in switches.
While it has offered not the magic bullet SDN advocates were looking for, it did advance the science,
A relatively new protocol proposed to the Internet Engineering Task force (IETF), Opflex was designed to offer a highly scalable architecture that works across a broad range of hardware devices to enable multivendor innovation.
The Open vswitch Database Management Protocol. OVSDB was conceived to handle management tasks on network devices not originally included in the Openflow protocol.
It is used heavily in Open vswitch and Opendaylight and is supported even in some physical switches, as well.
For example, the Open Compute Project was formed to help drive low-level innovation in open hardware and software.
using open source to define an intent-driven policy language that can help application developers easily describe networking requirements.
As users look to make a broad range of cloud technologies interoperate, open-source networking is benefiting from being a natural extension of existing community efforts.
Vendors haven always been quite so supportive of open source networking. Some networking vendors initially viewed the rising tide of open-source projects as a threat.
and associated user demands for openness became too strong to resist. Most vendors have since come to embrace the trend.
and around open source projects even as they look for synergies with their own product lines. The industry is now going through the process of deciding on
The work, however, is far from complete. Open-source communities don always build finished, enterprise-ready products and likely will not obey any vendor roadmap.
so it up to vendors to meet those customer requirements by filling in any gaps in their own distributions of the open-source software.
Testing and quality control in open source also may not be up to the network vendor standards for enterprise-ready products.
Indeed, many open source projects have been year awayfrom being operationally ready for a long time. However the consensus-driven process behind open-source projects moves much faster than that of traditional standards bodies like the IETF.
Many people don understand that open source takes a long time to mature. By accepting open source into the product development cycle, vendors give up some control over product delivery schedules.
If the community can agree, timelines will slip, and vendors who rely on open source for their own products will be forced to extend release schedules.
Customers may expect vendors to build and release products at the same pace as they did before,
But these initiatives are establishing new standards for software components at a much faster pace than the traditional standards process ever did.
Open source networking stakes out the middle ground between the traditional, slow-moving standards process and the rapid pace of product development and innovation possible with more proprietary designs.
and build differentiated products that better meet user needs. Vendors should also contribute some of those innovations back to the community to help promote new standards that will help the market continue to grow.
Over the next few years, users can expect to see the continued evolution of all of these projects,
and users will see increased collaboration between web scale companies, cloud operators and vendors to ensure that open-source tools meet the needs of the user community.
The result will be a win-win scenario for both network vendors and users h
#Data From Alibaba E-commerce Sites Is Now Powering A Credit-Scoring Service Alibaba Group affiliate Ant Financial services has unveiled a new credit-scoring system that uses data from the e-commerce giant sites to gauge userscreditworthiness.
Dubbed Sesame Credit the new service is an example of how Alibaba reach in China goes far beyond online shopping.
Sesame Credit scoring system which is currently in beta looks at data gleaned from the 300 million registered shoppers
and 37 million vendors that use Alibaba Group marketplaces including Taobao and Tmall. com as well as payment histories from Alipay an Ant Financial subsidiary and China largest online payments platform.
Sesame Credit then applies customer behavior analytics to figure out whether or not an applicant is eligible for a loan.
For example credit history can be measured through a user history of credit card and utility payments through Alipay.
Data used from shopping websites indicate how often a buyer or vendors follow through on transactions and the quality of their interactions with other users.
Ant Financial says that it will supplement data collected from Alibaba sites and Alipay with information from public agencies financial institutions and other merchants.
Sesame Credit users can check their scores which range from 350 to 950 points through Alipay Wallet a mobile wallet app
or shopping sites that accept Sesame Credit scores. The idea of using shopping transactions to measure creditworthiness may be off-putting to some consumers after all it like having your FICO score determined by your ebay feedback or Amazon rating.
But Ant Financial says that Sesame Credit can give more consumers in China access to financial resources like home loans
and phone contracts even if they don have a credit history. In a press statement Sesame Credit chief data scientist Yu Wujie said the service is targeted toward users who ay have obtained never bank loans
or applied for credit cards. However they might be active Internet users who shop online a lot e-pay their utility bills on time have a stable residential status
and have been using their mobile phone numbers for a long time. We will take these and other factors into consideration when assessing consumerscreditworthiness. esame Credit says it will protect user privacy by collecting an individual data only after they sign up for the service.
The credit-scoring system is an example of how the user data collected by Alibaba Group e-commerce business can be used to power other verticals.
In addition to financial services Alibaba hoard of data is used by its cloud computing subsidiary logistics and even health tech that organizes patient information for hospitals f
#Secret Media Makes Ad Blockers Useless To Display Those Sweet, Sweet Pre-Roll Video Ads Chances are installed that you an ad blocking extension to skip Youtube pre-roll video ads.
But now, many media companies suffer from these ad blockers and have no choice but to switch to a freemium model
or find a way to shove some ads down your throat. Meet Secret Media, an advertising technology startup specialized in advertising encryption
so that even the most sophisticated ad blocking software can block your ads. e only work with top premium publishers,
cofounder and CEO Frédéric Montagnon told me in a phone interview. very time a publisher distributes a page,
we deliver a different advertising tag. There are a bunch of redirections, re-encryptions and anonymizations.
When I talked with Montagnon, I felt like he didn really want to go into detail to tell me the company secret sauce.
And this is key to understanding Secret Media complicating industry. The team is starting a cat
-and-mouse game between ad blocking contributors and Secret Media. Montagnon, Julien Romanetto and the rest of the team have been flying under the radar for the past few months not to raise awareness.
But it doesn mean that the company hasn been active on the business side. Secret Media is already working with European publishers. here is a bit of animosity around
what we do, Montagnon said. ur clients want to remain anonymous, but, as of today, we deliver 5 million video ads per day.
Secret Media focuses on video ads for now. This is where publishers suffer the most today,
as video ads tend to be more expensive than your average banner ad. Moreover, the startup gets a cut for every ad it unblocks,
so unblocking these ads could end up generating more revenue for Secret Media. Based in New york with a few engineers working from France,
the two cofounders invested $1 million of their own money from their previous venture. am absolutely sure that there is no credible alternative to online advertising,
Montagnon said. But, according to an Adobe study, 26 percent of U s.-based Internet users installed an ad blocker.
And there is no end in sight installing an ad blocker takes 2 clicks after all. Many publishers complain about revenue loss from ad blocking,
but few companies are working on a solution. Secret Media is the first interesting alternative I have seen so far.
While hardcore ad blocking users might complain, advertising is the necessary evil of the web.
So get ready to see some pre-roll video ads again s
#Elemental Path Debuts The First Toys Powered By IBM Watson A company called Elemental Path is developing a new line of smart toys for children
which will be powered by the super computing system IBM Watson, enabling the toys to engage in real and personalized conversations with kids,
and evolve with the child as he or she grows. Cognitoys, as the toy line is being called,
with a smart dinosaur toy that supports full speech recognition and can chat with kids, tell them jokes
Co-founded by Donald Coolidge and JP Benini, previously of software development shop Majestyk Apps,
which allowed them access to the IBM Watson technology, making them the first toy company to be able to tap into the system.
explains Coolidge. ids are using iphones and tablets much more than most parents would like them to,
when the benefits are not very clear, he says. With Cognitoys, the technology is instead inside the device and the toy gets to know the child,
texturized rubber similar to that of a Leapfrog tablet. On the toy front, there a big button that,
There only a speakerphone, microphone, battery pack, and a small piece of hardware that connects to the cloud. s a connected device,
wee really doing all the processing in the cloud. The benefit of that is that we can launch a more affordable toy,
With the IBM Watson-powered system, the toy is able to listen and respond to questions and return its answers quickly within a second or much less,
For the toy younger users, the system offers activities like jokes and storytelling, while older kids can ask it more specific questions,
The software could be used in other applications as well including kidsapps. Based in Manhattan, the startup has a small amount of funding from friends and family,
but will likely raise a seed round in the future. The toys are expected to begin shipping on November 1st u
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