Podcasts about amazon hq

We got a brand new banger for all of you. We do a lot of Bill Maher talk in the beginning on this on (SORRY!!) and then we get into some crazy stuff. We talk about Twilight Princess, the State Capitol in Iowa, a Mall and the Amazon HQ as well as reviews for the Club Random podcast.  If you want to submit to the show you can email us at onestarcast@gmail.com  

This week we're going to tap into a topic that's been ignored to date - the excitement that surrounds the big three cloud services of Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP) and the market leader Amazon AWS. Are we getting ahead of our skies about what is another form of storage, or is this a truly game changing way that organisations can transform everything that they do? We're joined by Liam Maxwell and this conversation travels from the clouds above Amazon HQ in Seattle (where it rains all the time) to the rather different clouds above the Ukraine, where Liam played a pivotal role in securing their government's data. For more on Bubble Trouble, including transcripts of the show, visit us online at http://bubbletroublepodcast.comYou can learn more about Richard at https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-kramer-16306b2/More on Will Page at: https://pivotaleconomics.com(Times below correspond to the episode without considering any inserted advertisements.)In this engaging episode of Bubble Trouble, hosts Richard Kramer and Will Page welcome Liam Maxwell, former Chief Technology Officer for the British government and current AWS Senior Advisor, to delve into the transformative potential of the cloud. Together, they break down how cloud-based technologies are revolutionizing different sectors, from governments to private enterprises. Exploring clear cases such as the Ukrainian war situation or the everyday banking experience in Singapore, they highlight the impressive efficiency, flexibility, and speed offered by the cloud. The discussion also touches on the major productivity gains the cloud provides, the importance of building services centered on user needs, and how the digital economy is captured by government indices.00:00 Introduction01:14 Part One01:32 Interview with Liam Maxwell01:54 Liam's Journey in Tech and Government02:25 The Impact of Cloud on Government Services06:40 The Transition from Traditional IT to Cloud15:25 The Role of AI in Cloud Adoption19:24 The Ukraine War and the Role of Cloud20:35 The Process of Moving Ukraine's Data to the Cloud27:56 Reflections on the Impact of Cloud Technology29:33 The Power of Decision Making in Amazon30:26 Reflections on the UK Government's Test and Trace App30:58 Part Two31:27 The Impact of Cloud Technology on Productivity32:01 The Economic Value of Cloud Technology33:33 The Paradox of Technological Efficiency and Economic Growth35:38 The Invisible Contributions of Transformative Technology37:04 The Role of Cloud Technology in Government Services39:00 The Challenges of Measuring the Impact of Tech Jobs39:19 The Potential of Cloud Technology in Enhancing Public Services51:57 The Impact of Tech Neologisms on Service Delivery55:23 Closing Remarks and Reflections56:25 Credits Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, joins us on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast to talk about the company's latest warehouse robots, explaining how they represent the emergence of the larger vision that prompted him to join Amazon more than eight years ago. Our conversation at Amazon HQ in Seattle followed a trip by GeekWire's Todd Bishop to Austin and San Marcos, Texas, to see many of Amazon's newest autonomous robots first-hand. Related coverage: New robots are making Amazon's warehouses more efficient — can they also make them safer? Video: Amazon's Robots, explained Amazon's Sparrow is leaving the nest: Trailblazing warehouse robot is ready for a wider rollout Video: Up close with Amazon's Sparrow Robot  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Averages closed lower again. Richard Bernstein Advisors' Dan Suzuki and Vital Knowledge's Adam Crisafulli break down the market action. Jon is in Seattle at Amazon HQ for an exclusive interview with CEO Andy Jassy covering AI, the consumer, inflation, supply chain and much more. Plus, previewing tomorrow's important jobs report.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we're coming to you from our mobile recording studio, aka Todd's car, as he and John make the most of their time in a clogged parking garage to discuss the comments they had just heard from T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert at the Technology Alliance annual State of Technology luncheon. Topics include artificial intelligence, national security concerns over Chinese hacking, downtown safety, and getting employees back to the office. From there, we take an impromptu driving tour of Amazon HQ to see things first-hand. Stories discussed on this week's show: How T-Mobile plans to use AI to improve one of its most important business metrics ‘It's your responsibility': T-Mobile CEO exhorts tech industry leaders to return to the office Car and foot traffic data show impact of Amazon's return to office mandate on Seattle commutes Microsoft says critical U.S. infrastructure targeted by Chinese hackers Amazon responds to walkout plan: ‘We respect our employees' rights to express their opinions' With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook. Audio clips of Sievert provided by the Tech Alliance. See GeekWire.com for more coverage.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tech It Out is on the road – first NYC and then Seattle. At Amazon HQ, I catch up with Daniel Rausch, VP of Entertainment Devices and Services, about the Fire TV brandASUS held a recent media day, in which it showed off a ridiculously thin Zenbook and the ROG Ally handheld gaming PC. I sit down with Whitson Gordon, Senior Manager of Marketing Content at ASUSSmall Business Week just wrapped up, and so I share some highlights from my TV gig in New York on Tuesday, where I shared some recommended tech tools for small businessesLearn about weighted blankets with Hush – and a brand-new product they haveI also talk about VISA's anti-fraud efforts, and Western Digital/SanDisk external media, both of whom are huge partners on the show

Today on The Dominic Carter Show: Dominic talks about AOC being mocked on Twitter after the Democratic socialist bragged about squashing Amazon HQ in Queens, the NYC Mayor Adams saying Chicago Election Is a ‘Warning Sign' on Crime, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Friday / Weekend Edition AOC says she was right to keep Amazon HQ out of New York now that its Virginia HQ plans are delayed. President Biden says he'll announce that he's running for President when he "announces it." Remote work is here to stay say labor economists. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has new theory as to why 1/6 videos are being released to Tucker Carlson. Alex Murdaugh convicted and sentenced to life for double murders. If you like what we do on the program, please consider sharing it to your social media! We depend on listeners like you and appreciate your support! Thank you!

Semiconductor stocks have outperformed this year – why, why now and what it has to do with AI and ChatGPT. Amazon pausing further construction on its HQ2 in Virginia. PLUS – MORE crypto fallout, this time in the banking world and its hitting a publicly traded stock Silvergate

Amazon became the latest tech giant to make layoffs in its corporate workforce this week in the face of the economic downturn, but the manner in which the plan unfolded left some employees scratching their heads, at best. Foreshadowed in a Nov. 10 Wall Street Journal report foreshadowing cutbacks in Amazon's devices division, the scope became clear with a New York Times report Nov. 14, saying that the company planned to lay off about 10,000 corporate and tech workers. But that number was an approximation, not a precise count or a specific target, because Amazon is leaving the decisions to leaders in its divisions. It also took couple days for Amazon to officially acknowledge the layoffs, with a memo from Devices and Services chief Dave Limp, and later from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, explaining that the job cuts could extend into next year.  The reaction was a mix of frustration, fear, uncertainty, and also acceptance, as GeekWire reporter Kurt Schlosser discovered when he visited the Amazon campus in Seattle this week. Kurt joins us to share what he saw and heard. Also this week: the impact of the downturn on high-tech real estate brokerage Redfin, and our thoughts on a potential collaboration between Jeff Bezos and Jay-Z.  Share your perspective for next week's show: What are you thankful for in tech? Is there a technology that has changed your life, your job, or your company for the better this year? Or a trend in the economy or the industry that you're especially grateful to see? Send a message or a voice memo with your thoughts to podcast@geekwire.com for a chance to be included in next week's episode. With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's Daily Friend Show with Nicholas Lorimer, Mlondi Mdluli and Gabriel Crouse. They chat about the Transnet strike which is crippling our logistics. They also discuss the Amazon HQ and the various competing indigenous groups. Lastly they chat about a story from the weekend of how ministers don't need to pay utilities at their official houses. Subscribe on Google Podcasts · Subscribe on Apple Podcasts · Subscribe on Spotify

Today's Daily Friend Show with Nicholas Lorimer, Mlondi Mdluli and Gabriel Crouse. They chat about the Transnet strike which is crippling our logistics. They also discuss the Amazon HQ and the various competing indigenous groups. Lastly they chat about a story from the weekend of how ministers don't need to pay utilities at their official houses. Subscribe on Google Podcasts · Subscribe on Apple Podcasts · Subscribe on Spotify · Website · Facebook · Instagram · Twitter

EP296 - Guardian Baseball Co-Founder Matt Kubancik  Episode 296 is an interview with Matt Kubancik (@mattkubancik), CEO and Co-Founder of Guardian Baseball. Matt is a serial e-commerce entrepreneur who was the founder of Street Moda, Co-Founder of SKU Vault, and most recently Co-Founder and CEO of Guardian Baseball. Mark is an experienced Marketplace seller, and his current business Guardian Baseball is a hybrid seller selling both wholesale and owned brands direct to consumer from a Shopify site, and via multiple marketplaces including Amazon. Guardian Baseball is an early adaptor of Buy with Prime, and shares in the interview, that they would migrate off Shopify if necessarily to keep using Buy with Prime. He also discusses a number of the current limitations with the Buy With Prime offering. Episode 296 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Friday September 23, 2022. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 296 being recorded on Friday August 23rd 2022 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:38] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott showed listeners today we have a fun interview this is kind of a both a TBT a throwback for me and then also modern discussion around by with Prime but to set it up we are very excited to welcome mat kubancik to the show welcome mat. Matt: [1:00] Thanks Scott and Jason have my own. Scot: [1:02] Matt what's your what's your current title you have you have 50 things you're always doing so I never know what to say other than. Matt: [1:08] Always doing but Maine. Scot: [1:10] Entrepreneur genius. Matt: [1:11] Yeah sometimes sometimes a genius sometimes but that's the life of an entrepreneur I co-founder and CEO of Guardian baseball.com or multi-channel hybrid direct to consumer and brand partner of you know some of the biggest. Brand names and Sporting Goods retailer so predominantly in the baseball and softball market and we're on Amazon Walmart eBay and on our Shopify site. And we were named the fastest growing e-commerce retailer by ink magazine in the Inc 5000 and number 180 overall this year. Jason: [1:48] Amazing that congratulations I definitely want to jump into it but before we do you know our listeners always like to get a little bit of a gist of our guests background and so I'm imagining you you went to college and got a degree in baseball e-commerce is that how you started. Matt: [2:05] No not at all actually spent six months in in college dropped out was one of the original I started selling on eBay 1999. Um during think my first year of high school sold baseball cards ironically and then. Started selling fashion and store stock Closeouts Retail Arbitrage early days of eBay and then when I was 18 years old. I met an executive that was retired from the Footwear industry and him and I started a company called Street motor together, and we were a early on 2000s multi-channel retailer and I met Scott through signing Channel advisor when I was 19 years old I remember signing my contract, verbally over the phone like a grain to the contract and then I went into school and said hey I'm going to withdraw after six months of Indiana University so. Dropped out and did 100 million over, 10 11 years mainly thanks to the a lot of connections Channel advisor helped me create you know Market places like Amazon eBay buy.com back in the day, a lot of the shopping channels like Shopzilla and sites like that and we exited that business in 2017. And been involved in e-commerce and various other companies and degrees. Jason: [3:30] That's an amazing story for a couple of reasons first of all I love everybody that that helps helps fun they're beginning through Retail Arbitrage have you seen the latest version of we Retail Arbitrage kind of making the rounds right now. Matt: [3:46] What is the what is the latest version of I probably have but I'm wondering what it would lose. Jason: [3:50] It's dudes buying Walmart frozen pizza and then selling it as a ghost Kitchen on doordash. Matt: [3:56] I love it yes I actually posted that somebody needs to hire that guy with the tick tock video yeah. Jason: [4:01] Yeah that that was amazing and then one thing that's that I found peculiar about your background is most people tell me they even back then Scott was too fancy to actually talk to customer so it's kind of impressive that you were able to meet Scott in person back then. Matt: [4:16] Yeah the I would think I was like 18 and I was a channel advisor conference and I had a beer in my hand and he walked up to me and I remember he was like are you are you 21 I was like I don't think so. Jason: [4:26] So it was mostly a liability concerns. Scot: [4:30] Yeah yeah Matt Matt's a brilliant marketer and he would bring these t-shirts to the shows he did he did Wingo as my homeboy and then was a twingo made Millions so those are some of the best best marketing gimmicks, and I will show up at the show and I was wearing this this t-shirt with a picture of Miss really weird. Jason: [4:49] I feel like it's even it's gotten increasingly true and more much more true in the last month that you could sell more of those t-shirts the Wingo made me Millions. Matt: [4:59] Yeah it was a it was a lot of fun so. Scot: [5:04] And then so then that was your primary thing so then you did you guys realize that you needed to build you look at all the software for shipping and inventory management and build your own and then you, tell the story of that. Matt: [5:19] Oh yeah so it was like 2012 or 2011 and kind of the only inventory platform out there other than like something on the level like sap Oracle custom build for like larger retailers or Manhattan, a red Prairie was what was it called Scott like Stone Edge or something what was it was on Old access bit database yeah and I remember, they actually got bought out by a former competitor of Channel advisor so and there were so many Channel advisor clients on there so we tried to launch that in our warehouse and my childhood friend and he says who got an engineering degree and eventually became the CEO of skew vault, tried to implement that and then him and a programmer who was programming a bunch of stuff Slava who's the co-founder skew vault try to implement that system and it just didn't work properly for us so they came back to me a few months later and they were like hey we're just going to build it and I was kind of like okay if you guys can really do that and you know it worked we built a skew Vault version 1 out of Street Motors warehouse and then eventually I help those guys kind of get the business off the ground. [6:25] Was original co-founder Andy just exited the business lat ironically a week before Channel advisor so, to a company out of the UK and you know still work with Andy on a daily basis and good friends so really proud of those guys and yeah it was it was a great thing we did up having, thousands of customers and help them with their fulfillment needs and help a lot of the big direct to Consumer and Shabba fine Amazon retailers on a SAS, like platform manage their inventory and cycle counts and you know all that kind of stuff. Jason: [7:00] And so was q v predominantly like a order management system or I guess I always thought of it as kind of like a almost like a dim and a CMS and a way am I thinking of it wrong. Matt: [7:12] Predominately a warehouse management system you know we never we had a really good partnership with people like Channel advisor and, and other channel listing tools so Andy was always very adamant on not disrupting those Partnerships I think you saw a lot of, a lot of our competition would eventually move into the channel management and then disrupt those Partnerships so we always relied on and Scott was a huge part of that, and driving force and then Channel advisor folks were always a huge you know big partner of skew vaulting especially in the early days of really driving that home so we never really got into the listing. Pain management we really tried to rely on our. Excellent capability of functioning in the warehouse so providing quality control integrating with the shipping carriers like ship work shipstation. Companies like that and and then integrating with the channel Partners like a channel buzzer. And providing all the quality control Pick Pack you know scan in audits inventory sinking buffers all that type of normal WMS type of functions. Scot: [8:17] Cool so you you were a e-commerce entrepreneur so you've done that then you did software-as-a-service so you get the check that off the box and then I saw on LinkedIn you've also been working with a turbo host so that's actually getting into my world of cars now tell me tell me how you got into that one. Matt: [8:34] I just really like nice cars and you know I started renting them on Taro and I was down in Florida which is like a second home for me and I had one of my best friends move down there and from Louisville, and we just started buying cars it started with one so I didn't have to like rent Ontario anymore and then you know the turo market got really flooded so what I started to concentrate on was more mid-tier Exotics, so we bought cars like Porsches and Ferraris and then Terro raised there, they used to have a lower like coverage they would do like 150,000 and it was something that I was used to you know Scott on very well versed in the marketplaces I think if somebody looks at my. You know in between companies I've always consulted and I've always been brought in by big Brands to be on marketplaces Amazon eBay and how to really run and function those within a larger organization, so I really adapted well to the turo marketplace because I felt it was much like an eBay or an Amazon type of, mentality where they provide the customers you provide the inventory and then provide the service, and then you don't have to worry about all the legal jargon and a lot of the compliance and you know worrying about marketing spend, and Roi so you know we had three or four cars and and still working with my partner on that. Scot: [9:57] Cool it's a as I got into this Mobility space myself I was poking around it's like otter oh and then I saw the CEOs name is Andre Haddad and he's actually an eBay guy and it rang a bell and I had met him a couple times in eBay meetings so it's funny you've already kind of made that correlation there's a lot of, e-commerce people in the mobility world that I run across and then so my big question is if a Ferrari is a mid exotic for you what what's up there about already like Bugattis here like. Matt: [10:29] Like it in your old Ferrari California so it's something like a hundred and thirty thousand dollars and then we drop you know 20,000 into it to fix it up and it's running. You know we run it at like 750 to 1,000 a day where I would consider a more like. If you look at a competition like in Miami or Vegas they're generally running in the you know the Uris has or the Bugattis of the world so that would I would consider kind of the luxury like Newark here. Scot: [10:57] Got it where's and Lambo is kind of in the middle. Matt: [11:00] I would say Leo Lambo Huracan would be kind of be in the middle mid-tier luxury. Scot: [11:05] What's your daily driver their ass. Matt: [11:07] I have five kids now so it's a Ford Expedition in Louisville Kentucky but I have to I have two choices in Suburban or yeah there's no. Scot: [11:15] Low exotic low exotic yeah a lot of gold fish floating around in the car there I'm a that's our bread and butter here at spiffy is the five kids think you guys are Jim. Give them and give them lots of food to throw around back there. Matt: [11:33] Applesauce back and everything yeah I'm the Costco dead. Jason: [11:37] Spiffy spiffy charges extra for apple sauce stains just so you know. Side note I just got back from Vegas from grocery shop a grocery e-commerce show in the big news in Vegas is they just announced that formula one is coming to Las Vegas. Scot: [11:54] Yeah yeah that's gonna be awesome. Jason: [11:56] They're doing a track that's going to be on the Strip their clothes in the strip for a week it's going to that could be pretty cool. Matt: [12:03] Who's at that shop talk conference that they're involved in. Jason: [12:06] It's put on by the same people that started shop talk yes but it's more focused specifically on the like Grocery and Food Industries. So you've got all this Marketplace experience you got your fashion experience through shoot Street Mota. How'd you get there. Matt: [12:39] So I started the business with a friend of mine he owns the largest travel baseball organization in the state of Kentucky it's called The Wolves baseball organization he's around my age, Jewish kid from l.a. got recruited to play baseball in Kentucky so moved here were both only children both the same age both outside of Kentucky so we got along real well, he started training my kids he's really good with people really good people skills, really good with developing children and just teamwork and a lot of stuff and so we just started Guardian as a as honestly. It was supposed to be a lifestyle based business he was paying full retail from a local sporting goods store, for all his equipment and uniforms and I was this is when I was Consulting for the company that had bought Street mode and I was like hey, you know why don't we just go direct to the brands will sell some stuff on Amazon you know we'll have a little half a million dollar business. [13:35] And so we started working with like the wrongs and the Wilsons of the world and the Maru cheese and when I got into this business you know coming from the fashion business and when I consulted I consulted a lot of direct-to-consumer apparel Brands and launching them on. Amazon and helping with them their Logistics and health and beauty and those are very. Competitive Industries in the direct-to-consumer world right and they're very Advanced and a lot of their metrics and there's just heavy competition and there's a new direct-to-consumer player subscription boxes which is very competitive market and there's always something new. But in the Sporting Goods industry and you know Jason if you play baseball growing up is the same Brands like the same Louisville Sluggers Easton's. Of the world and you are having some direct-to-consumer. Brands that are kind of infiltrating the baseball and softball world but it's very much like an accessories like they might be a Brandon sunglasses or a bad brain and batting gloves but there's not really a big brand kind of doing it all, and there's almost no direct-to-consumer penetration so it's something that. [14:34] As we started evolving the business we started by buying just equipment then we would go to the brands and we started making our own equipment with them so we go to them and say hey. [14:44] You guys do black pink bags for girls that's really cool but like a lot of the girls are sick of black pink so we're going to make black Tiffany we're going to make black rose gold. How about we do these like new colorways kind of relating into the fashion business so you know I was still active in fashion and Consulting for and working with a lot of Brands like Puma, Steve Madden and Brands like that so I know kind of the colorways that are clicking and women's heels or Footwear and sneakers so I would and apparel and I would kind of put those over, and say okay maybe baseball and softball is a year or two behind so we kind of started doing that and that worked really well. And then we started producing our own cleats which are an Amazon bestseller so we're you know we out sell some of the biggest brands on the market came from Footwear so we started making kids cleats, our Guardian one of our Guardian kids please says over 6 700 reviews on Amazon it's one of the top sellers, we had inventory we have more inventory coming in so we just started started with cleats and then we started making sliding Nets bat bags. Um and then we released a baseball bat with a huge kind of direct-to-consumer startup brand that's taking over a lot of the market in the BB core which is high school and college is called stinger, bad company and we did a collab with them and it was called The Guardian bat by stainer and standards whole thing is basically the traditional direct to consumer. [16:07] Where they're you know the normal high school and college bats are costing three to five hundred dollars and they come in around 250 price point, 260 price point it's the same quality most of their sales are direct they do have a few retailers, and we came in and did a brand collaboration and we we had over 120,000 views 130,000 reviews on bat Bros which is the independent bat testing and they rated as a top five bat, and then when it came out for three or four months it was a top five bad on Amazon in terms of sales so. You know that's kind of what we're doing now and kind of evolving the business into more of a direct-to-consumer and making our own equipment and then working on with brand collaborations like a supreme would in the fashion business where, putting a guardian and going to a traditional brand and saying hey instead of just doing black and navy and red catching equipment let's do a kid's shark-tooth let's do a camouflage but like blue and green camo or something so we're kind of making it fun. And it's been good you know it's been a fun ride we're growing rapidly we, closing investment with Matt Joyce this year he came on as an owner so my business partners Evan I own the business along with a 14-year major Leaguer who just retired, and he was kind of a good Target for us we didn't want somebody that was just just going to sign a check like a really really big guy that was a Hall of Famer something and wasn't want to be active we wanted somebody that. [17:36] Was very entrepreneurial and Matt owns a line of gyms and Florida he does a bunch of real estate Investments and he's had kind of a blue-collar dad you know family raised him type of hard-working mentality and we wanted somebody like that. So he came on this year and we're really glad to have him and he's kind of helped line out a hole. Roster of athletes with us so we're very early on in The Cutting Edge of Ni El marketing and yeah so we're just kind of a cutting-edge retailer. Jason: [18:06] Interesting so a couple of quick questions jump to mind when you first got in the the baseball business, I would call that the sporting goods in general and I'm kind of assuming you'll correct me if I'm wrong baseball in particular is a little bit of a digital lagger right so, like you don't think of like Rowling and Wilson as kind of digital first companies. Matt: [18:31] No I would say the industry overall is is very traditional and they don't like a lot of change in the industry I think that's the baseball and softball equipment baseball in all I mean you see baseballs really losing out to Big sports like football and basketball and they're trying to figure out how do we become more engaged with the fan so I don't just think it's. Just necessary the equipment Brands I think it's overall as a sport but we definitely do see that in the baseball and softball equipment you know I think they don't really. They get they hand me these 500-page catalogs and there's 498 pages that are literally dedicated to male athlete ages 14 and above. And what they really forget and they do make equipment for him but it's not a focal point of their business and that's what Guardian kind of focuses on, is the softball Market is very underserved and then the youth market and if you think about the under 8 years old that's the most kids Everybody Plays little league right ever played buddy place, t-ball and coach pitch and then as you kind of Rise through the ranks then maybe you get more involved in swimming or maybe you get more involved in Lacrosse and that's your sport, or basketball or football and then you stop playing baseball so we are our cleats actually really Market to a 12 and under, and that's where really really kind of honing in the market and then the softball markets been huge you know two of our biggest influencers are Bella Dayton and Jasmine Perez chica they play for Arizona and Texas. [19:56] Their videos on Tik-Tok and Instagram we've done on marketing as and IL marketing have. Gotten hundreds of thousands of views and actually get more views than Major Leaguers we work with, and softball NCAA softball I think it was last 2021 surpassed college or viewership, for college men's baseball in the world series for the first time ever so college softball and softball in general is a very underserved Market by these Brands and it's something that, we're working with them on to develop more items and we're also working on ourselves of really kind of dressing that market and putting women at the Forefront. Jason: [20:33] Yeah that's super interesting I want to come back to the influencers but I'm just trying to make sure I understand so you started Guardian. In a lot of categories like a bunch of the aspirational Legacy Brands it's really hard to get a license to sell them right so you know. You do you want to start new footwear company you're not getting a Nike license you know it's really hard to get get a wholesale agreement with Oakley folks like that was it easy to get like Wilson in drawing to sell to you. Matt: [21:02] Yes it because of my business partners. The 14 travel teams he has the largest so those companies were already knocking down the door to be his uniform. Facility and and that sort of thing and at that time we started the business 45 years ago and like you said they're kind of behind the times of e-commerce so they hadn't started to clean up the marketplaces like a lot of the fashion brands or Electronics Brands had, on the Amazon and eBay world yet now they're starting to make a lot of those and they've kind of grandfathers as they in and putting those in those contracts. Where we've been able to do some special stuff like a lot of Brands we have you know brand registry with are able to come and do viral videos on the Amazon Marketplace and do a lot of things like that. Jason: [21:43] Yeah well you you anticipated my next question which is like it's often for those Brands controversial if they want to be on marketplaces and particularly on Amazon so with do I was that part of the discussion where they already on Amazon was it a foregone conclusion that they were okay with their products being a marketplaces or is that something you had to kind of evolve into. Matt: [22:03] Some of the brands are receptive to it you know I think there's three buckets there's you know brands that are like hey you can sew on your own.com but you can't sell in marketplaces then we've had brands that are like, hey you can be an authorized retailer but you have to kind of like follow these guidelines and fall in line you can't change product items we're not going to make smu's for us, and then we have a third brand the third option where a lot of and these are I would say these are more of your up-and-coming Brands and more of your brands that are, maybe number two that are really trying to take the market share of number one, you know like what's the car rental company that always said we're number two were working going to work harder so those type of brands are the brands that we really have the best relationships with like a stainer that's, kind of said hey go ahead and take not only can you be on Amazon but we're going to give you the keys to the kingdom here's brand registry go run with it, and you know do video ads do all type of editorial marketing handle all that for you so we're kind of acting like an agency in that type of a relationship, more were handling that and following all their guidelines working when it with ownership working with the executives, and then carrying their core merchandise and also making exclusive merchandise for the Amazon Walmart type of marketplaces. Jason: [23:16] Gotcha so not only are you doing it but you're helping them get better at it and is that controversial at all like are you potentially enabling them to go direct and not need you as much. Matt: [23:27] I think yeah I think we you know that is controversial right I think you know I spent. Six figures on an event in Florida last year hosting all the top equipment Brands and was very adamant on here's our vision you know I think we're going to be like a Target or a Costco where. This industry is a little unique because you're always going to have. The traditional brands on the Major League field and in the college's so this is not a. An industry where people are just going to say okay now I'm going to wear all birds instead of Cole Haans right where so there's always going to be elements of the industry like people are always going to want to use a Rawlings glove or you know a little Slugger bat right. Or a Marucci bat so. Working with those vendors and carrying that type of merchandise that the people demand kind of creates the ability for us to make our. Merchandise that we make. You know advertised more and have more effect in the market because we're carrying both so and we kind of have always said that that we're going to be like a Costco or a Target and carry our own private label but we always want the Best Brands and the best equipment in there. Jason: [24:38] Yeah so then that brings me back to the influencers because in my mind the world is slightly changed a little bit like hey. But influencers have become a much more effective comment marketing tactic in almost every category but but in Sporting Goods particularly like, Sporting Goods that have a significant College element like baseball historically the influencer wasn't the player it was the University because the players we're not allowed to be in for answers but the the team's I'll sign contract so you so if you were super rich you could go buy a bunch of colleges they are would use your gear and then you were the de facto market leader but you know for the last couple years it's been legal for those individual players, to be their own brand and in some sports a lot of those players had then. Opted out of using the team sanctioned equipment is like and I was curious is that happening in baseball at all and is that going to open the door for more brands or have they figured out how to keep it locked down pretty well. Matt: [25:41] Yeah so not so much on the latter part of the equipment I'll kind of get into that in a minute but the obviously we were very. Early on as soon as that IL law came out we were one of the first, people to start signing College athletes and we've kind of been at the Forefront as a retailer and especially even outpacing a lot of Brands a lot of brands are asking actually asking us for advice and how we run the program so we have it, about 15 College athletes now between baseball and softball signed to our roster and we utilize them and. Not so much in a sales standpoint you're seeing a lot of traditional retailers out there big box stores are signing these college athletes and they're having them like take a picture in a shopping cart, like in their store and it just looks very like hey use my code at the checkout for 10% off. And what we really try to do if you check out our Instagram or Tik-Tok as we do a little a lot of viral like videos of Just interviewing them, we fly them in or will fly out and do a lot of photo shoots with the video team and will do videos of them using different equipment Guardian Brandon also non Guardian Brandon some of our brand partners, which they're really appreciative of and will leverage that content not only on social media but on our website email marketing but also on the marketplaces, and it's you know, I think the new wave of Amazon you've had this wave of Scott seen the different cycles of e-commerce retailers out there and I think direct to Consumer brands are really going hard. [27:06] Are really coming hard on the Amazon Marketplace so I think really the private label companies you know that are strictly just trying to create a commodity product on Amazon, are really going to be forced out by brands that are really bringing really good content and really good marketing on the Amazon platform much like the direct to Consumer brands of the last five years did on social media. Scot: [27:28] Got it so one way of reframing Guardian is you know there's some percentage of your stuff that you sell that the bread and butter its existing Brands but then you're also inside of their building a DTC brand to fill in the holes that by selling other people's stuff you realize hey maybe there needs to be a bat that's kind of like you know it's BBCOR this and we'll all that jazz but it needs to be at a lower price point is that a is that a fair. Matt: [27:51] That's exactly that's a yeah. Scot: [27:54] Cool so you're like a delicious d2c doughnut or a yeah with a with a good feeling so, so one of the reasons I wanted to get you on the podcast is you've been out there pretty vocal talking about by with prime so maybe explain for listeners who don't know what that is what it is from your perspective and then then how you guys got looped in on that. Matt: [28:18] Yeah so by with prime is a new offering from Amazon and it integrates into. Platforms like Shopify and Bigcommerce. And it allows a e-commerce retailer to pool their FBA inventory if they're on Amazon or they can send in inventory into Amazon. And there's a button on the Shopify site or the Bigcommerce site that bypasses the normal checkout process and it's just a one click buy now with Prime and then that item is fulfilled by Amazon, and that can choose and what type of box or whatever and you can actually deliver it in very competitive pricing compared to UPS FedEx you know a lot of the mail consolidators in one to two business days. Scot: [29:06] Got it and then if I. Matt: [29:08] It's a lot like it's a dressed-up it's like a gastropub version of their original like multi what was it called mer multi-channel fulfillment service. Scot: [29:17] Yeah yeah but with a consumer front end to it. Matt: [29:20] Yes with the consumer and actually some of the people in that department are like. Hey we had this originally for like five or ten years but they just dress it up and gave it a good logo so and some more front-end technology but you know it's a very compelling offer. Scot: [29:35] Yeah so the user consumer is I go to your website and I see I'm in the checkout process and it says hey you're a prime user you can just you've already got your payment and everything with Amazon and you know you're familiar with the prime promise which is the fast free shipping and then I just essentially press a button in her my Amazon credentials and I'm good to go is that. Matt: [29:56] Yeah and it's actually before the checkout process so if you it actually supports variation so, if you were selling red dresses and you had extra small and small and FBA but you were sold out and medium and you I'd meet him in your Warehouse then, it would actually if you chose the extra small or small would populate that button on the checkout before you click or on the item page before you added it to check out. Scot: [30:17] So you need you need to make it an inventory aware that it's in a FB a kind of thing okay interesting yeah alright but then the you know so, so this has been another reason this was topical is you know if we kind of rewind I like five years I think there's been this kind of started this got on my radar well first of all shopify's Mantra is arming the rebels right and so that folks being a Star Wars fan that invokes a Star Wars kind of thing and then you're kind of like well who's the Death Star and it turns out Amazon's the Death Star and their arm the rebels so then they've been poking Amazon. Jason: [30:52] Oddly Kylie Jenner is Luke Skywalker in that metaphor but yeah. Scot: [30:56] Sure yeah and and then and then the Shopify social media started to really poke around Amazon it made fun of Jeff Bezos was in some tabloids for some pictures that surfaced and they were making fun of that and then his divorce and all that and then I was sitting there watching that you and I have seen other companies kind of poke the Amazon Baron it hasn't gone very well for him sitting there watching as like this is not gonna go well for these guys and then sure enough you know flash word to hear Shopify has hit some issues with growth rates they over-invested in the post covid world and then famously Toby the CEO was talking about he got asked on a conference call a Wall Street conference call what he thought about by with Prime and he's like oh we love Innovation and we would we would love to adopt it well then they had to backtrack that so are you guys caught up in that like are you know because they basically are now telling Merchants that if you use it, it's pretty hard language they're saying you're probably going to be open to fraud and we can't protect you and so they're definitely heading down this path I think of, trying to make it very hard for you to use this feature. Matt: [32:13] In terms of like are you asking what would I do as a business or in terms of where do you think the industry will kind of go. Scot: [32:19] We'll have has you know I'm assuming you're tracking this pretty closely because you're all you always are yeah. Jason: [32:25] Did you get the threatening letter from from Shopify. Matt: [32:27] Yeah it's we didn't get a threatening letter but we've seen all the pop-up of the terms of service and are account that popped up. Scot: [32:33] Yeah yeah it reminds me of the early days of eBay where they were like there's this thing PayPal we think it's very suspicious and we're not really sure you should use you should use our crappy payment thing that takes 50 clicks and rarely works but it's so super secure, yes so that that's interesting do you where do you think that you know as a merchant, you are on this platform and you want the flexibility to do everything how does it make you feel as from a business perspective to. Matt: [33:00] From a business for so personal and then where the industry is heading I mean where the industry is heading I think you have to look. Amazon is going to rule the world of logistics you know you've seen FedEx come out with the reports where they've had one of their biggest messes ever and I think. You're seeing Amazon trunks more and more and it's the more reliable you know delivery than a lot of the common carrier so. And I've seen you know Scott we've seen what GSI and eBay and Walmart I mean Rockies Han launched of a competitor try to take out FBI I mean these are huge companies that really tried to take on Amazon and Logistics front. And I can tell you I've used what is now I guess Shopify Logistics or whatever they're going to rename it but deliver and, it it did not really work for our business you know I can't speak for other people but it had a lot of bugs in the integration it's there's a lot of flaws with the delivery process and I don't know if that was the best egg acquisition for deliver and I don't know if it'll really work out. For a merchants and so I think there's a lot of there's a lot of progress that Amazon has made to really out do a lot of everyone in the logistics world. [34:14] And I just don't know if other people are going to be able to keep up and I think Innovation is always going to you know fee if Amazon is able to deliver things in one to two days for a Shopify, at prices than most Shopify Merchants can negotiate directly with UPS or FedEx or USPS for standard shipping then you know. [34:35] I understand what's good for Shopify and they want him to go through the checkout but what's good for their merchants on their platform than somebody might actually start to. Take that business platform because I know as as a business owner and as a CEO I would I would make the Assumption if Shopify came in and said that. And we saw by with prime become successful as we've seen in some initial few weeks of launching it, then we would probably consider re-platforming maybe to a Bigcommerce or maybe somebody that Amazon had a really good relationship with. And maybe that's not you know the smartest move at this point but in the future when you know we can deliver Goods because part of our selling feature to people to outdo the box stores, is not you know because people can go to a dicks or Academy, and they can have the much better selection they VIP programs and everything so something we instituted on Guardian baseball.com is when I set out to start the business is I wanted to offer a free 6-month extended warranty, on all bats and equipment. [35:35] Because the Brand's only offer a year so we're a year and a half and I said if we compete with these brands in a world of price monitoring and price mapping and the price is the same everywhere if we're going to have a pair of cleats listed on Amazon and F ba and then we're selling them with standard shipping on our website then the only thing we really have to do is play with price and discounting, and enduring a world of price parity that's impossible so for a d2c Merchants that plays on the Amazon space you have to able to offer that same offering, of that one to two day shipping like Amazon does on your own D2 seeing if you. [36:06] Then you can't really expand in the Amazon because you're just going to cannibalize your own sales on on your own d2c site so I think you have to offer it both so I think Innovation will always continue to succeed, in the market and I think Brands will start to partner with people that are going to partner with Amazon. Scot: [36:23] Yeah often kind of war game did this Jason I'm pretty sure we've said this on the podcast a couple times if I was personally Amazon and I got the job of disrupting Shopify, you know what I would do is I would leverage FBA and I would go and I get as many Shopify people using FBA and then then that would give me the hook to then say well let's say they came out with a competing platform or or they just. They wanted you to go to a, friendly third party platform like let's say it's Bigcommerce or something then then you just kind of proved to me that that is enough hook for the merchants to to make a front-end switch because that that, that fast relatively inexpensive shipping is so important to most companies and because customers expect. Matt: [37:09] And I think Amazon has the war chest to say if Java does come out with that I mean. And I go to the by with prom team and say hey look I have to lever I have to change the Bigcommerce it's going to cost me X you know if you want me to continue using by with prime what can you guys do for me I mean you know. Scot: [37:26] Yeah so you hinted that it's going really well are there any stats you can share with us so like I guess there's one thing would be you know you can only show it so many times because there's going to only be a surface area of inventory that's an FBA but then when it's shown is that got higher conversion than other things anything you can share there would be interesting. Matt: [37:46] So it does have some cons there's a lot of things that are on the road map with by with prime but I mean the obvious obviously the successes are, we're seeing a slight Improvement do the familiar with the prime badge and also the estimated shipping dates the Fulfillment costs are generally 25 to 30 percent less than we can currently negotiate and I'm with a lot of mail consolidators, you know resellers a post office obviously you know I've been in this world so I know that different ways to negotiate with FedEx ups and a lot of the mail consolidators. In the quicker delivery times are generally seen 24 to 48 hours max we're seeing is 72 hours and the a big con of that as you can keep the customer data unlike regular FBA sales. Um and they're also offering you know obviously I was doubted accelerate I spoke at by with Braun conference prior to accelerated Amazon HQ, last week and it accelerate they announced that they're you know offering a bunch of different initiatives that are kind of new for Amazon where they're offering. Brands are participating by with prime the ability to actually mark it on the Amazon platform but back to their d2c site. [38:53] So there's a lot of compelling offers out there that they're kind of opening up the amazon Universe to which is kind of unique and I was actually surprised about. But one of the big issues that they're working on is the conversion tracking so our marketing pixels don't record purchases made from the by with prime button which is something that they're working on. And the akan that they're working on other are releasing this is you can purchase you can only purchase one bearing at a time so it's not like a checkout experience, where you can group a bunch of different items you actually have to like physically buy one item go back to the site so we have a lot of multicart, on our website unlike Amazon which is a lot of single item you pts and so we're seeing you know on a lot of those bulk they're still going to do the traditional checkout process because I don't think it's like it's hard to really explain that to the customer we're like hey if you want to buy the single item go with by with Prime. So we're seeing at limited success with a lot of 10 items. [39:53] If we don't currently with the current integration with Shopify it doesn't have the inventory transparency so we have to double up with an mcf integration. So it's something. You know it's kind of a unique situation with our business model because we have a separate FB a skew so there's some you know quarks in there, and there's some different things that they're really kind of coming out so with but it's I call them cons but it's really things that are calling the roadmap and right as they kind of said at the conference to me and a large group of you know. Agencies and sellers is we wanted to get it out there in the marketplace and I said that's smart and then we want to work on these as opposed to having a perfect program and releasing it a year later. Jason: [40:38] Yeah so I actually just realized we didn't. We didn't articulate a couple things for visitors to just make sure everybody is tracking Guardian baseball is running on Shopify. And you are an early adopter by with prime so and you even you promoted on the homepage right so you've got like very distinctive branding by with prime which is Amazon's program that you know if you're already a Prime member gives you that, that Prime service level of fulfillment and the prime wallet even when you buy it on Guardian baseball so. A couple of things kind of jump out at me there. You hit one that is a big problem for me is the multi skew problem but I think of the by with prime checkout flow is being very similar to the traditional shot PayPal flow. In that the checkout button shows up on as a separate button on the pdps but PayPal also let you. Like use PayPal as the payment method in the cart for the multi skew purchase so you Amazon doesn't have a solution for that today but you could imagine that they would enable by with prime both on the product level and at the cart levels. Matt: [41:54] Yes and that's what they're working towards. Jason: [41:56] Yeah so so that's always one big problem because you know side note most e-commerce sites are not very profitable if the if the, if the average items per order is 1 so so we definitely we need to sell more stuff in most cases to make this profitable the threatening letter I would add to is not Shopify saying hey you're not allowed to accept by with, it's simply them saying in our opinion their security flaws in, doing this kind of thing and we might not be able to indemnify you if there's a fraud problem as a result of that right like that's that's the kind of passive-aggressive, approach shopify's taken to date on it and it is funny to me because all of those same security holes would also be true of PayPal by the way and Shopify has never really complained about PayPal before. Um so that gets me to the other big problem I see for both Prime and I'm curious if I'm wrong or if you're seeing it by with prime only works for existing Prime members there's no onboarding experience so if I'm not a Prime member and I go to Guardian baseball.com I see this huge well go on the homes thing that says by with prime which I don't have Prime and then when I'm looking at an individual skew I want to buy there's a by with prime checkout button, and I could click that button but I won't be allowed to check out because I don't I don't have Prime and so if the only. Scot: [43:21] Who doesn't have Prime. Matt: [43:23] I'm glad it's got Evans. Jason: [43:27] Nobody listening to this podcast but there's 100 million Prime members in the world so even if we assume, 70 million of them are in North America 80 million if you want to be really aggressive are in North America there's 240 million households in North America so two-thirds of the households in the United States of America would be the answer like can't click that button right and so I guess I went like you've got this fragmented inventory you have some of your inventory you can you can fulfill through the the Shopify check out some you can only fulfill through by with prime but then like you have no way to give the non-prime members access to that is that a am I making up a problem and that hasn't been a problem for you or do you think you have, have non-prime members that are kind of in the whole right now on that. Matt: [44:16] I think that's something to Amazon can better communicate we are obviously limited to what they can do on the side but a normal customer can still do the normal checkout process of adding the cart. But I think yeah that's obviously something Amazon can do and then also doesn't support discounts which is a big not only the conversion tracking but discount so obviously a lot of direct to Consumer sites. Like us are offering discounts or first-time customers or email you know pay 25% off with this code or Black Friday Cyber Monday so the currently does not support so it's very limited, but we really feel it's kind of right now in its use and this is going to change in the next three to six months but right now it's kind of like a fast lane, you know where you're paying like at Disney World for the fast ticket or whatever the top-of-the-line and we really feel that hey you can go through your normal checkout process. But we also have this ability we're going to a fast pass you know if you want it now you don't want to Discount you know you want it quicker and you want that problem delivery. Jason: [45:13] Yeah so it's weird like here's how I like I totally agree with how you're thinking about by with prime you also take shop pay on the site and I would argue there's a different set of pros and cons to shop pay for different customers in different circumstances it seems like the solution to all these that none of these companies are willing to do is you ought to be able to just expose the by with prime button to known Prime members and you ought to be able to just expose the shop pay check out to known shop pay holders. Matt: [45:46] I love that idea. Jason: [45:47] Yeah trust me when you suggested to Amazon they're not going to like you because they, because they want that logo everywhere but yeah so that that seems like the, the state of by with prime right now it's super interesting and it's super interesting you're saying like man if Shopify ever said we it's a it's a hard know then that would make you reconsider the platform like that you know like that speaks volumes that's interesting. Matt: [46:14] I think you know I think Amazon's coming out with this program in there. [46:19] I think everyone say okay is is a lot of these direct-to-consumer Shopify Brands going to adapt Amazon FBA and I think a number of them are but I think what also this is going to help. A lot of Amazon Brands a lot of Amazon DTC brands that are really executing well like a guardian on marketing, on creating good content in there not just these Dropship Private Label Amazon sellers, that are out there and you know let's go Source one or two products on Alibaba and sell them under some name and compete with the Chinese but really people that are building a brand you know the brands that are getting acquired by the aggregators and those type of brands. And those brands that may be. Our and expanded into Walmart expanded into other categories but are scared to kind of make that big investment into a Shopify site and hire the marketing team and really become like a full-fledged direct-to-consumer I think. What Amazon's doing on the marketing front. And the Fulfillment front is going to help these Amazon d2c Brands and I think what's going to happen is going to create a rise of the next wave of d2c or the next kind of. Trendy type of companies that come out there so you've seen obviously a lot of trends like 2010's as flash sales and then you saw direct to Consumer Brands and subscription boxes, and the direct to Consumer Brands predominantly grew on social media Instagram Facebook when the iOS changes you know weren't adapted and traffic was still cheap so. [47:44] I think you're going to see a lot of these the next wave of cool direct to Consumer Brands will come from Amazon and they will adapt on the data see sites with the help of Amazon. Scot: [47:54] Prick. Matt: [47:55] And I don't think you're going to see as much D to see big brands that are adapting the Amazon by with Prime at least initially and I think eventually that you'll see a lot more adoption once a lot of these quirks are worked out. Scot: [48:09] Yeah a lot of d2c Brands got born off Facebook but apple and the atti DFA of kind of crushed that so now Amazon used is kind of the way to go so I think what you're saying right. Matt: [48:20] Yeah I think so and I think that's going to create a next wave of either the brands are going to adapt from a t2c over to Amazon or you're going to see these kind of Amazon native people that have kind of running this world like I have for the last two decades that really know how to master the marketplace know how to assemble the teams of marketing customer service and everything and use the right technology stocks, for those businesses and really adopt and really grow really Innovative brands. Scot: [48:47] I know you need to go and like four minutes so we could wrap it a fire this. Matt: [48:50] You're good you can tell Ron few months if you. Scot: [48:52] About dying dying to know what do you think about all the FBA Roll-Ups they were all quite the fashion and now they seem to be hitting some hard times did you ever buy into that trend. Matt: [49:03] I think anyone in this market I mean you look at a lot of our outspoken people on social media of those, you know it's tough to acquire that many Brands and I think there are some people that are successful with it that are more going in The Tortoise and the Hare that you know we all I'm hearing some successful people where there's let you know. By maybe they own 15 brands or they own 10 brands but obviously the big big aggregators that everyone talks about are obviously struggling you're seeing layoffs so. I wasn't really you know how to directly opinion on it I thought it was there's no way they could acquire that many Brands and with it with the market model of not keeping the entrepreneurial on because I think there's always an art form to e-commerce you can have all the analytics you want you can have all the data scientists and, and all the formula but you know when you hire College grads and to run these businesses that don't have experience you it's always a touch and feel there's always 20-30 percent art right, that somebody needs to know and the older I get I realize that I have that on the marketplace of how to really build the brands and how to adapt Brands to that, and that's why I've been successful and I'm realizing that's my strength so I think some of those aggregators really didn't have that kind of DNA of the entrepreneur and keep that intact and that might have been a downfall of some of those. Jason: [50:21] Yeah it's it is interesting I can certainly see companies kind of being born direct-to-consumer on Amazon having their first customers come from Amazon and then outgrow Amazon over time where you want your own URLs or move to other things which like I mean I think, anchor is kind of the Prototype. Matt: [50:42] That yeah that was that's a really good. Jason: [50:45] But I do think I think it's really risky whether you're a rollup or an individual brand or whatever it's really risky to think I'm Amazon is always going to be my exclusive, acquisition Channel because the problem is Amazon Super efficient at getting the maximum, fee for each customer you acquire and so yeah you can buy some of those you know customers at first to get started but you're always going to be paying the highest price and you know the big news that came out this month is I forget what their new name was but Pharma packs which has been a top five, seller on Amazon for like 10 years, and exclusively sell through Amazon they just they declared bankruptcy and they're like one of the biggest most successful Amazon sellers of all time and to me that's a cautionary tale for, like at some point you need to diversify your customer acquisition you can't solely rely on Amazon as that is that source for you. Matt: [51:42] I think yes I think it's a part of a Playbook and you have to adhere to other channels and grow in other channels but you know obviously. Amazon's one of the biggest places to acquire customers one of the most successful so I think it's always going to be in a portfolio but it needs to be part of a whole portfolio. Jason: [51:58] Hundred percent that's why they robbed the money from the banks right because that's what, that's where the money is but man I think that's going to be a good place to wrap it because we have used up our lot of time as per usual if you got value out of this episode we sure would appreciate that five star review on iTunes. Scot: [52:16] Matt we really appreciate taking time to tell your arterial story and share with us your thoughts about both Prime if lister's want to look you up online other than going in and buying some stuff that Guardian baseball what should they do. Matt: [52:29] I'm on LinkedIn Instagram and it's (2) Matt Kubancik

Join the conversation on LinkedIn https://bit.ly/3Q3rRN0Fortune article: https://lnkd.in/ge454K9pNews: Amazon is getting desperate, here comes Prime Day 2 in 2022. Leaked documents show they are planning the event for October. This will cheapen the made-up holiday and will mark the end of its success in my opinion. At least for 3rd party sellers. Amazon however will sell more echos for sure. Inflation and weak sales lead to a death spiral of discounting.Can't wait for the next 50% off MSRP sale... (Which is really 10% off last week)#amazonnews #primeday #primeday2022 00:00 Leaked Documents from Amazon HQ hint at another Prime Day Sale00:42 United States of America is in a Depression state right now00:53 The Real Inflation rate is 25%, and our COGS are up!01:46 Second Prime Day this year is gonna cheapen the Holiday01:49 Not good news for Amazon Sellers01:51 Sellers should be raising their prices now instead of discounting01:58 Consumer does not win either on Prime Day because of the made-up discounts02:22 Amazon and its stockholders are the only ones winning02:39 Sellers do not need discounting when inflation is happening03:04 If Prime Day 2.0 gets the Christmas shopping early, it'll be best for sellers.03:15 Black Friday has always been the kick-off for holiday shopping03:22 Cyber Monday has always been the best day of the year for every seller, ever!03:58 Join the conversation on the related topic posted on LinkedIn

Tune in to discover how Emilie left Amazon HQ and scaled to a multiple 6 figure business in less than 2 years. In This Episode You'll Learn » You don't need a business degree to build a successful agency. Education comes in many different ways. » Tips on building your influence and positioning yourself as an expert in your field (and identifying what you are an expert at). » When it's time to scale to agency vs freelancer. Emilie Given is a successful online entrepreneur and virtual assistant agency owner who has been featured in Business Insider, Scary Mommy, and The New York Post. She founded She's A Given, a Seattle-based virtual assistant company in 2018 to be able to spend more time with her family after a near-death experience. A year after leaving her 9-5 at Amazon Corporate HQ, she built a thriving six-figure business. Through coaching and course creation, Emilie's primary focus is to inspire other women to create a career that allows them to focus on passion over paperwork and family over familiarity. Connect with Emilie: Website - www.shesagiven.com Facebook - www.facebook.com/shesagiven Instagram - www.instagram.com/shesagiven_ LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/shesagiven Learn more about the FamilyPreneur Business Accelerator and join today at »familypreneur.co« I'm committed to building an inclusive and anti-racist business. I support LGBTQIA+ rights and the rights of all intersectional identities. I believe that business should be a force for dismantling systems of oppression and actively invest in my own learning to fulfill this role. »Read My Full DEI Statement HERE«

Guest: Leslie London, Chairperson of the Observatory Civic Association, speaks to Mike about whether there has been any movement in its battle against the construction of Amazon's new headquarters on the old River Club site in Observatory. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ivo Vegter joins the team this week as they have a candid conversation about Zuma, and the figureheads of fractionalisation within the ANC. Can coalitions topple the party? They also delve into the Digital Vibes scandal regarding Zweli Mkhize's absolution by the ethics committee, and how it just doesn't make sense. And who is behind the Amazon HQ development in Cape Town?

Ivo Vegter joins the team this week as they have a candid conversation about Zuma, and the figureheads of fractionalisation within the ANC. Can coalitions topple the party? They also delve into the Digital Vibes scandal regarding Zweli Mkhize's absolution by the ethics committee, and how it just doesn't make sense. And who is behind the Amazon HQ development in Cape Town? The Burning Platform

Guest: Lesley London,  Chair of Public Health Medicine in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine  at the University of Cape Town See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Guest: Saya Pierce Jones, Eyewitness News Report   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We get market and economic reaction to the ongoing situation in Ukraine, as US stock markets staged a surprise rally late on Thursday. Looking at what it means for global economies and inflation with Khatijah Haque of Emirates NBD. And what it says about cryptocurrencies suitability as a safe haven asset with crypto expert Bitcoin Matt. Plus, we talk e-commerce with one of the top bosses from Amazon HQ in Seattle. Paul Misener is Vice-President for Global Innovation – he's in Dubai for the Step Conference, and he joins us live. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

An 'organic' Friendzone in which the lads discuss What Words Want and which sound in the English language they'd love to land on after a fall from on high. We've got friends from Switzerland, West Australia and everywhere in between, featuring delightful stories, like when Bezos propaganda runs at Amazon HQ and what Tim thinks of your ordinary, run of the mill, garden variety reviewers.JOIN US ON FACEBOOK: (facebook.com/WorstIdeaOfAllTime)SEE GUY: (guymontgomery.co.nz)SUPPORT US ON PATREON: (patreon.com/TWIOAT) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

John Mozena is an expert on crony capitalism, better known as “economic development subsidies.” He is the President of the Center for Economic Accountability, and joins to discuss the abysmal economics of throwing money at corporations to attract them to states and towns.  Reason TV's Amazon HQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_eG7leM6ew Mostly Weekly: Stop Subsidizing Sports! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=652fdt5Razg&feature=emb_title

South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa visits West Africa +++ Music to fight HIV/AIDS stigmatization in Uganda +++ Marthe Wandou of Cameroon, Right Livelihood Award laureate +++ Ghana #FixTheCountry +++ Indigenous San community fights Amazon HQ

Colleen is the founder and president of Intreegue Design, Inc., she is a licensed Landscape Architect in the state of MD, DE, VA, PA, as well as an ISA certified arborist and forest conservation planner and a LEED AP BD+C. With over 19+ years of experience, Colleen has worked for a variety of well established firms along with her tenure at Intreegue. Currently, her firm is working a projects that include: Port Covington, the Amazon HQ in Virginia, Cylburn Arboretum Nature Education Center, and Community Master Planning with Lennar Corporation. Her experience ranges from master planning, estate planning, high-end residential, institutional, forest conservation, botanical garden, children's garden, healing garden, pollinator garden, workshop facilitation, horticultural, and installation. Colleen started in the field early on playing in sawdust piles at her father's saw mill. Later in highschool she worked as a foreman at his contracting company. Colleen holds a double degree in Landscape Architecture and Horticulture from the University of Maryland (UMD). Her passion for the field of Landscape Architecture has taken her near and far. She has lived and researched in other countries to garner new cultural connectivity and hone her design skills. Presently, Colleen is active in continuing her education and providing education to others. She began teaching at the Catholic University of America for the Graduate Architecture Department in 2010. Since then she has come home to her alma mater to join the faculty as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Landscape Architecture Department. She teaches 3 different courses and mentors students along the way. When time allows, Colleen teaches students the art of Landscape Sketching and Graphics for the Study Abroad Program in Italy. Recently, Colleen served as President for the Maryland Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects and has worked with legislators on Capitol Hill regarding green bill efforts. She is also an alumni of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, which helped her have the acumen to buy her first bosses company in 2019 and bring it under the Intreegue umbrella. She is a recent recipient of the ‘Bridging the Gap' award, The Daily Record's Top 100 Women Honoree, and a Baltimore Business Journal 40 Under 40 Honoree. Mentoring is a major part of Colleen's life. She serves as a mentor for Heartsmiles, the AWE Project, and CREW on the national level. More than anything, Colleen cares about her children and the world they will grow up in. She “walks the talk” in her role as an environmental steward, both as a designer and citizen. On her property she raises chickens and bees, and grows veggies. https://www.intreeguedesigns.com/our-team/

Why is it that so many people say they "want" to make a change, but never do? We all have a vision of a better life. One that is more inspiring and fulfilling. The difference between visions that come true and visions that don't is consistent & bold action. Taking the final shot(s) to win the game instead of not taking the shot because you're afraid to mess up. In this episode, I reflect on the last 3 years since my last day at Amazon HQ and why I prefer shooting too many shot than too few. ------------------------------------------------ Listen to other top rated podcasts: Ep 43 - Have an Alpha Mindset with Sam Tooley Ep 3 - Live Better Co "Retired at 34" - Eric Hinman is an IRONMAN athlete, investor, and entrepreneur Subscribe to catch every episode. ----- Coaching - https://www.elementalcoachingproject.com/onlinecoaching Website - https://www.elementalcoachingproject.com/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/elemental.coaching.project

This week, Google's adding some Fuchsia to its home, Valve is bringing Linux to your palm, and a lion roars at Amazon HQ.

This week, Google's adding some Fuchsia to its home, Valve is bringing Linux to your palm, and a lion roars at Amazon HQ.

* Amazon has announced that will establish its South African headquarters in the City of Cape Town, a project that has the potential to create up 19 000 jobs. * ABSA CEO Daniel Mminele has been axed, with Absa Group Chairman, Wendy Lucas-Bull saying that a separation deal had been reached with Mminele - a former Reserve Bank deputy governor and Absa’s first CEO. * South Africa may soon have a Johannesburg-listed cryptocurrency ETF. * Already lagging behind the rest of the world in its Covid-19 inoculations, the wave of vaccine skepticism -- made worse by a lack of trust in local governments and misinformation on social media -- threatens to set Africa back even further, reports Bloomberg.

* Amazon has announced that will establish its South African headquarters in the City of Cape Town, a project that has the potential to create up 19 000 jobs. * ABSA CEO Daniel Mminele has been axed, with Absa Group Chairman, Wendy Lucas-Bull saying that a separation deal had been reached with Mminele - a former Reserve Bank deputy governor and Absa’s first CEO. * South Africa may soon have a Johannesburg-listed cryptocurrency ETF. * Already lagging behind the rest of the world in its Covid-19 inoculations, the wave of vaccine skepticism -- made worse by a lack of trust in local governments and misinformation on social media -- threatens to set Africa back even further, reports Bloomberg.

- How does remote work affect wages? - Why do most of us prefer remote work? - Why are cities competing for remote workers? In this episode I breakdown why remote working and Relocation Incentive Programs like Tulsa Remote are the clear winners of 2020. Movement Places (Relocation Incentive Programs) - Tulsa, OK - Antikythera, Greece - Chile - StartUp Chile Predictions - The cost of living in remote, but desirable, places will increase. Lake Tahoe doesn't need an Amazon HQ to attract location-independent workers. SHOW SPONSOR: MYOSYTE: https://myosyte.myshopify.com/ Let's Connect InstaGram: https://www.instagram.com/joealexlemon/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joealexlemon/ SC LinkedIn Sales Culture Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sales-culture Personal Website: JoeAlexLemon.work Sales Culture: https://witty-architect-3210.ck.page/4dc0d1f356 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sales/message

Although the North Texas Tollway Association is in the Dallas area, it’s an organization impacted by the entire nation. We had the honor of sitting down with James Hofmann, Executive Director and CEO for NTTA, to learn about this organization that we all use every day. It was amazing to learn all of the touch points and huge topics that are on the road map for organizations like NTTA. It’s not just about how to build roads and collect tolls, but they’re thinking about and planning for some of emerging technology’s biggest issues including IoT, AI, Autonomous Cars and so much more. We dove deep into their organization, how they’re addressing some of these large issues we’re going to see as technology advances, and what are some of the things that consumers should know about this organization. We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we loved recording it because it was truly eye opening to learn about everything this organization does to keep the roads flowing and a top-notch user experience. 4:30 - What exactly is NTTA.org - is it a government entity, or is it privately owned? Plus the history of the toll roads and the organization. 8:00 - How exactly are new routes chosen, and how do this cities work with the organization to plan more roads. 8:58 - How much more demand is there for roads with the growth of DFW exploding? (This answer may surprise you.) 12:31 - Why is it that tolls are no longer an ‘in-vogue’ thing? 13:39 - Why was I-30 is no longer a tollroad, and will we see that in the future with the other toll roads? 17:06 - Why isn’t NTTA part of the new dual toll roads? 19:10 - The reason why we have one streamlined tag and bill when it comes to the tolls. 21:15 - How do all of the operations work when we have one integrated billing 23:06 - Going more into the agreements and the requirements to work with these other regions with their tolling. 24:02 - What technology is required to make all three different tagging systems work together. 26:54 - Is there a revenue sharing program set-up with the different regions? 27:48 - Smart cities is a huge topic, and what NTTA is considering and planning when it comes to this initiative. 31:40 - What kind of technology including application requirements are on the horizon for NTTA and connected vehicles? 33:20 - What type of safety features are on the toll way, that we, as drivers aren’t even aware of? 35:10 - Are cameras used for any other purposes? 36:40 - When new projects come up with non-toll roads how does responsibility of building and payment get determined? 37:56 - What will the introduction of Autonomous Vehicles change the tollway as we know it? 40:20 - Does NTTA need to adjust for the increased use of ride-sharing programs and upcoming generations not valuing having their own car as much? 45:00 - What kind of integration opportunities are companies like NTTA looking at when it comes to toll tags? 46:10 - Should companies like NTTA even care about ride sharing apps and trying to accommodate them? 49:46 - What part did NTTA having in helping in trying to bring Amazon HQ to Dallas? Want to reach out to NTTA - NTTA.org - you can also register your business here —> https://www.ntta.org/procurement/Pages/default.aspx

If you know nothing about investing, that's perfect - you're in the right place! Meet Danielle Town, author of "Invested: How I learned to Master my mind, my fears, and my money to achieve financial freedom and live a more authentic life." She went from fearing the stock market...to writing this finance book, co-hosting a podcast, contributing on CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Money Magazine, and speaking at Amazon HQ and TEDx. And now she wants to teach YOU, the person who didn't think investing money would ever be possible for you. Investing isn't just for the super wealthy, it's for you and me too! Danielle will make you feel like you understand a bit about investing, maybe for the very first time, and you’ll certainly feel empowered to try it for yourself.

Kane hosted the MUXL: Voice innovation 2019 Meetup on October 24th 2019 at Amazon HQ, and this is the opening talk. It covers the most recent smart speaker adoption rates for the UK, debates the 'voice first winter' and shares some recent behavioural trends from Code Computer Love.LinksGartner AI hype cycle, July 2019UK Smart speaker adoption stats from Voicebot.aiChinese smart speaker adoption, CanalysCode computer love UK smart speaker usage Survey, October 2019 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We have two very special guests who share their experience with the Prove It Challenge. Matthew Heneghan, also known as A Medic's Mind. Also, Martin Kavanagh a great friend of Matt's who daringly took the challenge without knowing really what he was getting into. These to men have lifestyles that are not what you would call the normal day to day routine. Matt used to be a medic in Edmonton and is used to working through the night. Also struggling with trouble sleeping due to nightmares and struggling with PTSD, making a good nights sleep a challenge at the best of time. Martin works shift work which means he also has an inconsistent sleep schedule, working many nightshifts at the Amazon HQ in Toronto. Both share how the Prove It Challenge was able to help them feel more alert and coherent with sleep schedules that are wonky. Also how cravings were deminished and the best part they didn't have to do a drastic lifestyle change to feel the benefits. We also corner Matt to share a little bit about his book release and what he is doing to improve and shed light on PTSD and empowering others to speak up about their stuggles and to not suffer in silence.

Ocasio Cortez Could LOSE Her Seat In Congress, New Moderate Democrats Announces Primary Challenge. Ocasio Cortez won her seat through the tactic of "primarying."With just less than 17,000 votes she outed Joe Crowley to become the Democratic nominee for her district. Because her district is so heavily Democrat winning the primary was all it took.Many republicans have stepped up to run against her but it is extremely unlikely these republicans can win the safe blue district. But now we have a new city council member with strong ties to the democratic party announcing a 'pro capitalist' challenge.Fernando Cabrera denounces AOC's socialism and said only a democrat can beat her, a moderate democrat.We know from the data that moderates performed substantially better in the 2018 mid terms than the far left and socialist candidates. Though some did legitimately win Ocasio Cortez got in via the primary. After losing the Amazon HQ jobs it is possible her district revolts and ousts her with a new more moderate candidate.We know AOC's funds are coming from outside her district as well. Perhaps she is not as popular locally as people think. Perhaps she has spent too much time courting national level activists instead of her own constituents. Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)

In this episode, we interview Alisher Bazarov, co-owner of Island Blends Acai food truck in Seattle, WA.  Alisher gives his expert insight on starting a food truck business and discusses: planning, start-up costs, fees, and other considerations.  Opened in 2016, Island Blends Acai has grown to not only serve food to its individual patrons - Island Blends Acai has also catered for the biggest companies and events in the area, including: Microsoft, Amazon HQ, Starbucks, and Seattle's Annual Brasilfest. Island Blends Acai's website: http://www.islandblendsacai.com   If you've considered starting a food truck, don't miss this episode!

How can you leverage new tech to ride the personalization wave into a best-in-class swell of engagement? Taylor "The Creator" Gibb and Jaz "Personalization Queen" Noble join me to discuss the future of personalization and how to make it work at scale.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ: Hi again and welcome back to Brace for Impact, your martech industry discuss digest and today I have two very, very esteemed colleagues with me both from the Success Org to my right Taylor Veronica Gibb and to my left Jaz Victoria Noble. It's good to have you guys here with me.   [0:00:37] Taylor: Well it's great to have you here as well. PJ, the Victor Jay-   [0:00:44] Jasmine: Let's give him a V, yeah.   [0:00:45] Taylor: Maybe a V, to fit in here.   [0:00:45] PJ: You guys missed it, we opened with talking about the origin story of both these lovely women have V middle names and so we were just kind of like hearing a little bit about their ancestry.   [0:00:54] Taylor: Absolutely. As we start every podcast with deep personal questions to the guests in the room really gets those creative juices flowing.   [0:01:02] PJ: Exactly. Tries to get us in the zone.   [0:01:04] Jasmine: I'm real excited to be here, you guys.   [0:01:06] PJ: Yes, Jaz is back. She was on our very first podcast, which was merely a hackday project about six months ago and now finally we have her back for another one.   [0:01:17] Jasmine: I'm micced up. I have headphones. It's official.   [0:01:19] Taylor: Much more official.   [0:01:21] PJ: It's official.   [0:01:21] Taylor: If I remember correctly, the first podcast, everyone was kind of talking very close to PJ's laptop.   [0:01:26] Jasmine: Yes.   [0:01:28] PJ: No headphones. Didn't know what we were doing.   [0:01:30] Taylor: Nope.   [0:01:30] PJ: Picking up a lot of ambient noise. We've gotten a little bit better and it's good to be here.   [0:01:34] Jasmine: Hilarious, though. I was very funny in that.   [0:01:36] Taylor: Hilarious. That's a great one.   [0:01:37] PJ: You were very funny in that one.   [0:01:38] Jasmine: Yeah.   [0:01:38] Taylor: I think we need to release that someday. Like a little bonus track.   [0:01:42] PJ: For all you listeners out there. Our listeners will receive a special Easter egg treat of the hackday first ever podcast.   [0:01:49] Taylor: For those of you who pledge a certain amount of money we'll be sending to you with a set of Ginsu knives.   [0:01:56] PJ: Absolutely. Well, you know we're a big family.   [0:01:58] Jasmine: Make those checks out to Jasmine Victoria Noble.   [0:02:01] PJ: It has to be in full. It's the only way they'll pay it out.   [0:02:03] Jasmine: Get the V.   [0:02:04] PJ: Well, we're fresh off a 4th of July break. Hope you guys had a lovely time. Go America, Women's national team winning the World Cup. A lot of cool things have happened, but today point break personalization. I mean, I'm thinking of the movie obviously because I loved it and not only that, this week is the 28th anniversary of when Point Break was released.   [0:02:26] Taylor: Oh my God.   [0:02:27] Jasmine: Oh really.   [0:02:27] PJ: It is.   [0:02:27] Taylor: Point Break could rent a car. Point Break, you know is getting settled in the world, like Point Break is-   [0:02:33] Jasmine: Finally making some money.   [0:02:35] Taylor: ... 28, yeah, 28 years old is a good time to be around. But I was actually just asking PJ before we got on the air here. I'm like, I love Point Break. I love personalization. What does Johnny Utah have to do with Braze and personalization here?   [0:02:50] PJ: I'm so glad you asked. So really we're thinking the movie fantastic, but we're thinking more about the concept of point break and what point break is, it means the wave, it gives you enough time to spend the most possible time on the board standing up. So a point break is what surfers really look for because it gives you the perfect ride, and that's what we're talking about. Personalization being the perfect method because as you move forward with your marketing initiatives, there's going to be more and more competition. People get overloaded in their inboxes every day. How can you stand out amidst the crowd and make your message heard? Personalization is the number one way and it doesn't have to be perfect today. It doesn't even have to be perfect next week, but a more perfect campaign will help you stand out amidst the crowd and call out your users by name and let them know that you know them.   [0:03:41] Taylor: I'm glad you cleared that up. I actually came in a president mask today ready to rob a bank with my surfboard. For those of you-   [0:03:49] PJ: Are you Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter?   [0:03:50] Taylor: Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter.   [0:03:53] PJ: And if you haven't seen Point Break for the love of God, please go see it. We won't really talk any more about Point Break during this podcast. It was just kind of-   [0:04:01] Taylor: That's a you thing.   [0:04:02] PJ: But yeah, I mean what the first thing and last thing that I'll say about Point Break is it was really lauded for the relationship between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. This like, you know, bros for life. It was a heterosexual chemistry that could only have been created during that time, if it was accompanied by guns and waves and all these manly things. It's like through that atmosphere, it's okay to show a nice heterosexual close, intimacy between two men.   [0:04:32] Taylor: The origin of the bromance is what I'm hearing. All right.   [0:04:37] PJ: Yeah, jeez.   [0:04:37] Taylor: All right, well I think we've got to spin off podcast at the ready.   [0:04:40] PJ: I think we do.   [0:04:40] Taylor: But let's talk a little bit now about personalization.   [0:04:44] PJ: Actual personalization. When we say personalization, my God, you must've heard it a million times already just in the-   [0:04:50] Jasmine: It should be a drinking game at this point.   [0:04:51] PJ: ... Last five minutes.   [0:04:51] Taylor: Yes.   [0:04:51] PJ: Yeah, exactly. If you're following along at home, you should be wasted. But personalization at Braze, it means being able to email out a huge campaign to all these individual people and within the campaign have texts, call out users by name or reference specific things about those users based on their behavior in app or on the website. The way we use personalization is through a template language called Liquid. And this was created by Shopify and it helps us input things like first name, the very common one that I'm sure you've all seen. Hello Taylor, hope you're having a good day. Here's some deals relevant to you. And those deals can be in a specific category that Taylor has been known to search very often. More complicated examples is like dynamically pulling in content or materials or thumbnails based on information that they're collecting about how you interact with the brand. Do you guys have any examples of really smart personalization that you've seen? You know, being in the Success Org, these two are in the weeds of campaign creation day in and day out.   [0:05:54] Taylor: We're in the trenches as you mentioned, and it's kind of fun be able to be a part of a lot of our client's planning, about getting strategic about the personalization that they use. I'll probably bring up a couple examples as the podcast goes on, but off of the top of my head, I work with a dating app and they started using personalization with Braze using Liquid and connected content. By the way, shameless plug, go check out the lab course on this, if you guys are interested in learning more about these things. PJ is featured as well. But they use this to essentially customize the version of an email you get based on if you're a man or a woman, based on if you're looking for a man or a woman or maybe none of the above, you'll get a different personalized email for you with different content and different styling. So they're doing a little bit of this kind of micro personalization and getting really down to exactly what you're looking for and it's something that's so simple and seamless. You may not even realize that it's personal to you, but it just feels like you.   [0:06:56] PJ: Jaz, do you have any?   [0:06:57] Jasmine: I definitely do. So we talked about how Liquid allows you to insert dynamic variables. The simple example of the first name, we also touched on how you can pull in dynamic URLs, right, image URLs, things like that. One of my favorite ways to use Liquid is actually what we call conditional logic. So I can start saying within my message, if X equals Y, send this message to my user. If A equals B, send this other message, right? So I can start to build these conditional statements, if you will. And one of my favorite ways to use this is actually with weather. Braze is really flexible in that we can connect to external weather APIs. And quite literally say if it's raining right now, send this email and this is one thing, one of our customers does, is send out an email to say it's raining, why don't you order it. Or it's sunny, so get outside and make that reservation, I should say. So I really appreciate the conditional logic and think weather is a cool example of that.   [0:08:00] Taylor: And Jaz for all of you listening in is actually the queen of connected content here at Braze. Taught me everything I know, but she is your-   [0:08:08] PJ: Is that official?   [0:08:08] Taylor: ... Personalization wizard. She is. She doesn't always wear the tiara, but for special occasions she will dawn the crown and connected content queen.   [0:08:17] PJ: Where's the sash though?   [0:08:19] Taylor: Ooh, next time.   [0:08:20] PJ: Scepter?   [0:08:21] Taylor: Scepter, we'll see. We'll see.   [0:08:23] PJ: Conditional logic, that's all happening in the same campaign. Even in the same like text field. Right?   [0:08:29] Jasmine: Exactly. So quite literally you're putting in the different versions of the copy depending on what variables you have in place. So using that example of weather the conditional Liquid statement in the Liquid logic language would say, if degrees equals below 50 send, "hey, it's cold, grab a coffee." Alternatively, if the weather is higher than 50 degrees, send this generic message that I was planning to send to the user anyway.   [0:08:59] PJ: Cool. That's just a little sample of what you can see as far as personalization in the Braze platform. Conditional logic using Liquid. If you have access to Lab, please check out our Liquid course. Also, there's plenty of free resources on Liquid online, so just do some searching. Now let's jump into some other articles that are going to help us understand a little more about personalization in terms of what the future looks like and how you can do personalization at scale. The following articles were provided to us by McKinsey. McKinsey, thank you so much for your research and all you do. So this first one, let's jump off Tay Tay. What do you got?   [0:09:34] Taylor: Oh, hey there. Well, not only do I have this article, but I went ahead and brought along my crystal ball here cause we're going to be taking a look into the future of personalization. That was a terrible dad joke, but moving on. First-   [0:09:48] PJ: I can add like kind of like...   [0:09:50] Taylor: Like crystal ball.   [0:09:50] PJ: Sound in the background.   [0:09:51] Taylor: Ooh, I love that. All right, well then perfect. Well we'll edit it in the future of personalization. Physical spaces will be digitized. We've seen this a little bit. Jaz, you and I, I think are both Sephora fans, so you may be familiar with this already, but essentially the fact that when you walk into a physical store space, brick and mortar, what you see is going to be personalized to you. Some of the examples pulled out in the article were places where you could try on makeup or clothes just by standing in front of a mirror. In the future it could be that you'll see on screens around the space, places where you can try on clothes just by looking in the mirror, things that recommend a color for you based on your skin tone or things that you like. And I thought this was particularly interesting because I feel like just a few years ago we were talking about the fact that brick and mortar is on its way out, especially with the rise of Amazon. So can you see this as being maybe the resurgence of brick and mortar just by using this idea of personalization?   [0:10:48] PJ: I mean, you hit the nail on the head with the rise of Amazon and all this stuff, it seemed like physical is on the way out. But with all of these things, fad or not, it always feels like there's some sort of pendulum at play, where the pendulum goes to one side as we do more and more online purchasing. I'm not going out of my apartment. I don't need to go try things on. Like I know this brand, I know their sizes. And now I think we're starting to see the pendulum go the other way because physical storefronts are still going to be a part of the business, especially living in New York City, what is it, Sixth Avenue that's just a mecca for storefronts and for a brick and mortar businesses. So I think the secret sauce is being able to capture all that information in the store front and tether it to all these other touch points and this is not my idea or a nuanced perspective on it, this is something we've all been talking about for awhile. So I don't think brick and mortar is on the way out. I think this is a way to bolster or supercharged that brick and mortar experience when you're in front of one of those mirrors and you have that try-on experience probably makes you want to go back again.   [0:11:55] Taylor: How about you, Jaz.   [0:11:56] Jasmine: I actually just recently had an opportunity to visit Amazon HQ and hear from some of their panel of leaders that work there. And one of them was brought on to bring Amazon back into the brick and mortar space. You guys have seen these Amazon stores popping up.   [0:12:11] Taylor: The Four Star Store.   [0:12:13] Jasmine: He admitted, they're not necessarily profitable yet, but the company that really closed down a lot of brick and mortar spaces is now recognizing, realizing the value of bringing these experiences to your point outside of someone's apartment and off of their couch and in physical spaces. I think the challenge that Amazon and other companies who are rethinking about how they approach brick and mortar is in what ways do the digital and the traditional shopping experience play together and how do they play nicely and where does digital enhance. I mean, Taylor you mentioned Sephora, by the way, I just became a rouge member.   [0:12:46] Taylor: Oh, congratulations.   [0:12:47] Jasmine: Which means-   [0:12:48] PJ: What does it mean.   [0:12:48] Jasmine: It means I spent a lot of money at Sephora. But anyway, I was in the Sephora store and online you have the opportunity to kind of, they have some new technologies that we can try on different shades, but one of the hard things as a women is, especially with summer, we're trying to tan right? And now my foundation color has changed because my face color has literally gone several shades darker. Thank you Bahamas. And so I had to go into the store because I trust them to kind of match that. And they have face matching software, like a program where you sit in the chair and they quite literally scan your face and then tell you, okay, here is your color profile and here are the different foundations that match that and they direct me to the place in the store where those are found so I can pick them up, hold them, look at other aspects of marketing. Right. The bottle, is it pretty, right? There's a lot of things that go into that purchase decision, but it started with a digital experience, a technology coming into play to, essentially pull out where I should start.   [0:13:45] Taylor: And you brought something up earlier. Maybe a quick segue into another point that the article made. Talking a little bit about both with Amazon and in your Sephora experience, kind of that end to end personalized experience. And it's interesting to think, I would hope in Sephora, we'll see this some more, it sounds like Amazon's focusing in on it, that your experiences in the store don't end in the store. So if I go in on the store, I try on a certain shade of lipstick, maybe that will follow me and I'll see an ad later or I'll see an in app message that says, you looked really great in this shade of lipstick earlier. Would you like to order, there's a sale. Things like that that make you feel like you're understood and you're seen as a person both in and outside of the store. That's all personalization at work. And one other thing that I wanted to kind of bring up in this article before we transition over to Jaz's article that she looked at, is something I thought was interesting. They pointed out that empathy will scale within personalization. Now at Braze, our favorite besides personalization drink, our other favorite hot button topic is humanization, right? Making it feel like a brand not only knows you, but that they understand you as a person, that they empathize with you. And it sounds like brands again, like Amazon, are starting to think about becoming more human. One thing that was brought up in this article was the fact that they've patented technology. We're in the future. Voice recognition devices. We'll realize if you sound different than usual, so let's say you've got a stuffy nose, you can begin getting deals or outreach for brands of cough drops, for chicken noodle soup recipes, things like that, that it'll know that you're not feeling well. It's interesting and something that I want to hear from you on, first of all, is that creepy or caring?   [0:15:33] PJ: I don't know if it is creepy just because you know what is creepy is when you say something out loud amongst your friends and then you look at your phone and there's an advertisement for something you said audibly, that creeps me out, right?   [0:15:44] Taylor: Oh, big time.   [0:15:45] PJ: But, to introduce this intuitiveness into technology, I think it's definitely going to be considered creepy to some people and it's going to be a learning curve, I think for us. But that is the exact kind of humanization in technology that I want to see more of. That doesn't feel like they've captured something that I've said, or they've captured an action that I've done and it's like, we all know it, right, when you see something in your phone like, oh, I know exactly where this came from.   [0:16:09] Taylor: Right.   [0:16:10] PJ: Either something I said, or something I clicked on. But then when a computer program offers you cough drops because it can hear your voice a bit hoarse, you're going to have a moment of like how, you know. And I think that almost introduces a little bit of magic until the whole relationship with the brand. That's one that I'm really excited for. Jaz hot takes?   [0:16:28] Jasmine: One thing I will share is we were just talking about Sephora, still top of mind, because did I tell you guys, I'm a rouge member.   [0:16:35] PJ: You said rouge, right?   [0:16:36] Jasmine: Oh yeah, rogue, in case I didn't already mention it.   [0:16:39] PJ: That's like red.   [0:16:40] Jasmine: Yeah, red, rogue. So a recent experience I had shopping with them to actually, this is the experience where after I did it, I got the confetti lipsticks that said I made rogue, right? I shopped for several things, I needed a new makeup brush. I needed like setting powder, a few things, right. Sent them all to my house. One did not arrive.   [0:17:03] Taylor: Nightmare.   [0:17:03] Jasmine: And each item is north of $50 so I wasn't going to just let that go. And this is, I think, where companies, we haven't seen a huge shift necessarily is when it comes to customer service, right? So I missed this brush and instead of being able to, like right now with an Amazon app, I know we're talking about Amazon and Sephora quite a bit, but clearly I shop there a lot. With Amazon, if something didn't come in my order, I just like go through this tool where I say, I select options from a list. It didn't arrive, what didn't arrive, it gives me the list of things in the order. I click that. I click the one it wants. Where do you want it shipped? I click my address. I'm never talking with someone, or it doesn't feel like I'm talking with someone. With Sephora, they encouraged me to send an email to a customer service representative and that might never be their real name, but like a Stacey B emailed me back, right. To say that she was so sorry that I had that experience, wanted to make it right, like using words like that and that's where you feel the human piece of that brand as well. Both are good experiences. I think with Amazon it happened instantaneously, within five seconds, within five clicks, I was able to get that piece that they had missed sent to me. With Sephora, I had to talk with someone, but at the end of the day I kind of felt like Sephora was sorry about what happened.   [0:18:15] PJ: That's a really great point. Like when does the initiative bubble up where customer service has to meet the same high standard that our personalization tech does?   [0:18:25] Taylor: Well, and that's where personalization tech can shine, right? Because it makes empathy and it makes humanization scalable so everybody can feel like Stacey B is paying really close attention to them. That knows is exactly what you're talking about. I mean to avoid a bit of a Her scenario if those, if you guys have seen that movie. Maybe there's a point where it goes too far, but I personally really love the fact that when you have a customer support experience, when you have a shopping experience and it feels like they know you, exactly. That's that hyper personalization.   [0:18:59] PJ: Well, until it does go too far. Stacey B, thanks for all you do.   [0:19:03] Taylor: Stacey B this one goes out to you.   [0:19:05] Jasmine: Shout out Stacey, pour one out.   [0:19:07] PJ: Jaz. What do you got from me?   [0:19:09] Jasmine: We've talked a lot today already about the tools that Braze has, right? Which are really just vehicles for providing the personalization. Taylor touched on strategies and why you'd actually want to use some of these tools to put those programs in place, but now we need to talk about a team that's actually going to action on them, right? If a company decides they want to care more about personalization, they want to provide more personalized experiences, how do they do that, particularly if their tech stack isn't in a super fluid place where everyone's playing nice in the sandbox. And one of the ways that McKinsey talked about it and one of their most recent articles called Marketing's Holy Grail, Digital Personalization at Scale really talked about building a war room of people. Because at the end of the day, this is going to be a marketer, this is going to be a data engineer, this is going to be a software engineer that's going to help you bridge these gaps, get the data where it needs to be to ultimately action on things like including first name, including previous shopping behavior. All of the amazing examples that we walked through today would be nowhere without having the data and infrastructure in place. And so that's one of the things that this article touched on and it kind of reminded me of some of my own client experiences working here at Braze, as a CSM, I got a chance to see the types of teams that our customers are bringing together to ultimately action on this. And I would say it's interesting how some are very nimble and small, while others more at maybe enterprise sized corporations are thinking about, no, it's actually doesn't end here. Let's pull in an agency, right? Let's outsource some of this. Let's fill our stack with a bunch of tech partners including a Braze who can help us achieve all of these things. Like creating that right lineup of a team doesn't necessarily have to be someone at their own company. It could be outsourcing some of that talent, bring it in to be able to action on it.   [0:20:56] PJ: And also even with the enterprises, right? They think, you know they have agencies, they got a really souped up tech stack. They're outsourcing a lot. But I think the key here is having that small group of decision makers. So even though you have this monster stack and you have all these different moving pieces, you still have that core group of decision makers that can move quickly. So even though you have this big group and you have all these resources, you have the right people that can flip a switch, shoot out a campaign and do something. Because that, you know, I'm sure we see that right, the bigger the company, the more red tape, the more approvals. So how can you stay nimble as you expand?   [0:21:34] Taylor: Absolutely, and interestingly enough, this kind of very digital idea of this digital marketing personalization takes a lot of humans to make it run and to make it feel human. So maybe the robot uprising is farther off than we thought.   [0:21:48] PJ: Skynet we're looking at you.   [0:21:51] Jasmine: I mentioned kind of pulling together this team of specialists that could be people within your own organization with the ideas. You could also be bringing people outside from agencies, et cetera to for that strategy, right? The core group of people who are deciding how do we actually action on this, provide personalized user experiences. One of the things that you have to think about is what stack do you have in place? What technologies do you have at your fingertips to be able to action on this? And one company that I think did an excellent job at this and I actually had the pleasure of working with closely is Burger King. Fernando, their CMO talks extensively about this in an AdWeek article about how he assembled a stack. He knew that when they wanted to do and roll out this detour campaign that they were going to need someone to be the action layer. That's Braze actually getting these messages out to people. They are going to need someone to do location. That's Radar. They were going to need someone to connect their POS purchasing to user profiles and making sure that brick and mortar restaurant data actually got to a place where they can see the conversions, right, that's mParticle. And then they also have Branch, encouraging people to get those app downloads from an attribution standpoint. There are others obviously who played a piece in this tech stack that allowed detour to happen, but I think it started with Burger King saying, we can't do this alone. We need to assemble the right players who are flexible enough to play nicely with each other to allow that data to come back and forth and ultimately deliver on this user experience, which ended up being people downloading their app, going to a McDonald's, saying they were at McDonald's, and then getting a one cent whopper. How do you deliver on all of that? And that's one of the things that I thought they did a really good job at was actually thinking about rewiring and hard-wiring.   [0:23:37] Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. And I would hope that the great success and the story of working together with this Avengers of a stack that you just mentioned, will kind of help other large enterprise size companies to realize that they may need to take another look at what they've set up over time and do a little bit of reworking. So many of the teams that Jaz and I work with are working with outdated software. Something that was best in class 10 years ago for this personalization to really work seamlessly and to make these great experiences. You need the best in class right at the bat.   [0:24:10] PJ: Right on the money. So take advantage of personalization tools at your fingertips.   [0:24:15] Taylor: That's us.   [0:24:16] PJ: Pay attention to the tech, to the team. Make sure it's the right people that can move nimbly. As far as the tech, always be reworking, always be focusing on the right tools that allow your teams to move faster. And that's about it for Point Break Personalization. Taylor, Jaz, thanks so much for being here.   [0:24:34] Taylor: Hang loose.   [0:24:35] Jasmine: I thoroughly enjoyed my time with you both.   [0:24:37] PJ: And thank you as well for being with us. Take care. [0:24:40]

President Trump says he approved military strikes on Iran planned for last night – but that he called them off with ten minutes to spare. This is the latest move in the rocky relationship between the US and Iran, and it has the world’s attention. We’ll explain the complexities here. Meanwhile, dozens of police officers in Philadelphia have been put on desk duty after a group uncovered public social media posts that were racist, Islamophobic, and misogynistic. But Philly isn’t the only city where police are under fire for this. We’ll explain. Also on today’s episode: puppy love at Amazon HQ, and your Hogwarts acceptance letter is finally en route.

* Warning - lots of "Alexa"s being spoken in today's episode *  Phillip Chalker is back to bring us a brilliant demo of a monthly A-lady skills round-up podcast direct from Amazon HQ. Not available here in the UK, but hopefully where you are.

I just got back from a trip to the Amazon HQ in Seattle. Chris Tyler, our Director of Amazon Services, and I were there visiting with our Amazon DSP reps (more on DSP in a minute).  We recently found out we were the fastest growing agency in 2018 in terms of DSP spend. We got to preview new audience targeting options, discuss new ad options coming soon to the Amazon ecosystem and more…Blow your mind kinda awesome stuff. If you're not familiar with it, Amazon DSP (stands for Demand Side Platform) is a way to run display ads on and off Amazon targeting Amazon shoppers.  With DSP you can run retargeting ads targeting people who've visited your product listings on Amazon but didn't purchase. You can also target people who've visited your competitors' products on Amazon but haven't purchased.  And there are a TON more audience targeting options to consider. Here's a quick look at what we cover on the episode: Highlights from our Amazon trip including dogs, domes, and, of course, great coffee! What about Amazon DSP makes it “blow your mind awesome?” What are the top audiences to target with DSP and where should you start? What kind of return can you expect from DSP? How to use DSP to build loyalty with Recapture, Reorder and/or Cross-sell/Up-sell campaigns. How does Amazon DSP compliment Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands - the core of Amazon advertising? Plus more!

Slim and Tiff are back in the building to gab with Gwen about Cory Booker, AOC, Al Franken, Kamala Harris, Ilhan Omar with some controversial HOT TAKES! As real New Yorkers, Gwen and her friends break down the whole Amazon HQ pullout debacle and how it affects our livelihood and futures. We keep it all the way funky about how all aspects of daily life are political and the importance of finesse.

Chris sits down with Brandom Gengelbach, Executive Vice President of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. They discuss what chambers do, how they help businesses, what he sees for the city of Fort Worth as well as cities around the country. Enjoy! Connect with The FORT by emailing us at thefortpodcast@gmail.com For more information on Chris Powers and Fort Capital, visit www.fortcapitallp.com  Follow Chris on twitter! @fortworthchris 2:06 - What do you do at the Chamber? 2:35 - what are businesses asking for today thats changed? 5:35 - how do cities differentiate in terms of what they can offer? 7:55 - What do people love about Fort Worth when visitng for the first time? 10:15 - whats the process of a company making a deal with the city 13:27 - What did the Amazon HQ 2 deal teach chambers around the country?  16:11- Did Amazon help you learn more about the city and did Amazon bring more attention to these cities? 21:51 - Why do suburban cities have the ability to make these “better” offers than larger cities 29:03 - Is city growth dependent on bringing in large established businesses or growing internally existing businesses in the city?  32:15- for small businesses, when is it the right time to go to the city chamber for the next move? 34:28 - What is Fort worth doing to be progressive in furthering economic development?

25,000 jobs is not enough. Maybe it was ten years ago. Today, the general public is aware that complex problems aren’t solved with easy answers. If we’re not publicly talking about how systems organize to turn an economic cash cow, like Amazon HQ, into real opportunities for the communities where the cow will drop, we’re having the wrong conversation.

French president, Macron, has urged world leaders to sign-up to cybersecurity pact that would develop an international set of norms for internet behavior. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/dtns.

In episode 23, Bob & Kevin discuss a weight loss challenge they have created together and the technology that each of them will use to achieve their goals! They discussed My Fitness Pal and some other apps along the way. You will have to listen to the episode to get the details of the challenge, the rewards, and the penalties! We also discussed Amazon HQ 2.0 and signalR technology.

What did Liran Hirschkorn learn at his recent visit to the Amazon Headquarters in Seattle, WA? We give you an inside look at that, as well as some of the rumors floating around in regards to some changes on Amazon that might be taking place.

238 cities are putting in a bid to have the new Amazon HQ built in their cities. That's a lot of competition for Hamilton to go up against but the most interesting thing about this bidding war is that so many of these cities are willing to do some rather unusual things to win Amazon over. What do you think is the weirdest thing a city is willing to do for a company?-Could this finally be the end of the JFK assassination? Within the next few days, the papers about JFK's assassination will be released but the question is, will these documents tell us anything that we don't already know? It's possible that we may be getting more fuel for conspiracy theorists but we could also debunk some conspiracy theories. Could this finally be the end of the JFK assassination? Guest: Randy Owen, JFK Assassination Researcher-Boxing has been around for a very long time but in Hamilton, it's a really big challenge to organize a professional boxing card. The huge amount of money it takes to pay everyone involved is just one of the many problems an organizer faces. Another issue is how do you put on a fight that can be done safely? These challenges haven't turned the people at Three Lions Promotions away from organizing a professional boxing card this Saturday at the Hamilton Convention Centre, are you going to go? Guest: Dan Otter, Sports Promoter at Three Lions Promotion

Open Lines this hour discussing Las Vegas shooting and Amazon HQ coming to Denver - say it ain't so!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Basil and Gonz talk about Jeff Bezos' race to build Amazon HQ 2.0 and his buddies working on a Global Village where all new upcoming tech start ups are under the watchful eye of the current technocratic controllers.  Bezos' Amazon Race! https://goo.gl/UyTLZw Billionaire Tech Buddies Building the Global Village http://goo.gl/JPf2Vu