“He likes to do his “high IQ” meetings before lunch because that’s when he’s sharpest, and he knows by 5pm he’ll be wiped. Anything that’s important that pushes late into the day gets rescheduled for 10 a.m. the next day. He recognizes that he “only” needs to make a few key decisions a day, not thousands of small ones. If he can make three high quality decisions a day, that’s plenty good.”

October 16, 2018 | Financial Times | Alistair Gray and Pan Kwan Yuk in New York.

Doug McMillon said at an investor meeting on Tuesday that the Arkansas-based company was experimenting with technology ranging from floor-cleaning robots to augmented reality and biometrics as he urged Wall Street to “challenge your thinking about Walmart”.

Walmart superstores have transformed shopping habits and became a dominant force in American retail. The bricks-and-mortar model, however, has been upended in by the rise of ecommerce.

“Looking back, we had a proven model, and we naturally focused on execution. As the numbers grew, we . . . unintentionally became risk averse,” Mr McMillon said at a meeting for investors.

“But today we’re getting to reimagine retail and our business. To do that we take risk — try quite a few things and learn from our failures. That type of behaviour’s in our DNA, and we’re waking up that part of our culture.”.....Online sales, in which Walmart has been investing aggressively as part of its response to Amazon, are expected to increase around 35 per cent for the fiscal 2020 year, compared to the expected 40 per cent for 2019.

Walmart also on Tuesday struck a partnership with Advance Auto Parts, allowing it increase its presence in the car parts business. Under the tie-up the companies will offer home delivery, same-day pick up at each other’s stores and installation of some parts.

Rclone is a command line program to sync files and directories to and from:

Amazon has hired UW computer science and engineering professor Siddhartha Srinivasa as director of robotics.

Amazon has become an official retail partner of the TV show "Shark Tank,” launching a Shark Tank Collection of past and new products featured on the show on its Amazon Launchpad platform, the e-commerce giant announced in a press release.

The collection, featuring more than 70 products that received funding from the "Sharks" during the first nine seasons of the show, is being unveiled as "Shark Tank” begins its 10th season on ABC. Products from this season and beyond will be featured on Launchpad in the future.

Amazon said all start-ups and entrepreneurs that have been funded via the show will be considered for placement on Launchpad, the portion of Amazon’s site dedicated to showcasing products from start-ups and helping entrepreneurs find funding for their product plans. In addition to selling Shark Tank-funded products, Amazon is also offering a $15,000 credit for Amazon Web Services cloud computing services to each eligible "Shark Tank” entrepreneur.

If the first stage of competition in consumer technology was the race to be the computer users went to (won by Microsoft and the PC), and the second was to be the computer users carried with them (won by Apple in terms of profits, and Google in terms of marketshare), the outlines of the current battle came sharply into focus over the last month: what company will win the race to be the computer within which users live?

I'm not convinced at the 'spy-chip' claims, but the tale helps illustrate the complex security challenges enterprises face.
Apple and Amazon have strenuously denied Bloomberg’s claims of a sophisticated hardware exploit against servers belonging to them and numerous other entities, including U.S. law enforcement  

"Our internal investigations directly contradict every consequential assertion."
Apple isn't relenting in its attacks on last week's Bloomberg story claiming that tiny Chinese chips had compromised the security of Apple and Amazon data centers. In a Monday letter to Congress, Apple wrote that the claims in the Bloomberg story were "simply wrong."
Bloomberg's story, published last Thursday, claimed that the Chinese government had secretly added spy chips to the motherboards of servers sold by Supermicro. According to Bloomberg, these servers wound up in the data centers of almost 30 companies, including Apple and Amazon. But the three companies featured in the story—Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro—have all issued broad and strongly worded denials.

After more than a year of fanfare, competition and city government prostrations, Amazon’s announcement of its second headquarters location is imminent.

What if you could store and deliver goods as easily as data? Amazon, Walmart and others are using AI and robotics to transform everything from appliance shopping to grocery delivery. Welcome to the physical cloud