Looks like Walmart is leveraging the new talent in their leadership fold, Marc Lore formerly of Jet.com and diapers.com, to launch a skunk works in Silicon Valley dubbed Store #8 after the store Company founder Sam Walton used to try out new retail strategies.
Feels like less of a moonshot factory then say how Bell Labs, Xerox's PARC, Amazon's Lab126 or Google's X were set-up. But then one can ask how many of those great inventions did AT&T or Xerox actually leverage (the stuff Apple ended up launching don't count!) versus languishing on shelves. And exactly how many of X's moonshots have been commercialized? Maybe, if Store #8 is less rabbit and more turtle in the race to capture Consumers wallets. And in that scenario, Walmart can point to a whole list of competitors it has slowly but surely ground into dust.
http://www.chainstoreage.com/article/walmart-launches-store-no---its-not-really-store?tp=i-H55-Q5S-341-4rp50-1u-14Qs-1c-iuA-4rjD4-27Eehq&utm_campaign=Daily&utm_source=Experian&utm_medium=email&cid=11781&mid=71933082
Facebook opened its first volley in the Content Wars (see: Apple vs Amazon vs Netflix vs AT&T/TimeWarner vs Comcast vs Disney vs FOX vs Verizon/Oath). Okay, it wasn’t THAT big of a shot in its bid to broadcast the Indian Premier League (Indian cricket matches) which it lost out to Rupert Murdoch’s Star. What’s interesting to note is that Facebook was looking at live content. Live content, the rule-of-thumb goes, is highly unskippable. Meaning that Consumers will watch the ads for fear of missing something that occurs. Additionally, the content is something that is preferred to be watched in that moment (no one likes to really see a replay of a game or have to avoid ESPN so as not to see the score of a game that they recorded). It also can be cheaper than building content for sitcoms or movies. Could their bid have been a primer for moving in on NFL broadcast rights that come up next year when Verizon’s mobile rights expire?
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