Podcasts about Amazon Pay

In this episode of the Liquid Weekly Podcast, hosts Karl Meisterheim and Taylor Page welcome back Jan Frey, one of the greatest Shopify development teachers on the web with the incredibly helpful and popular YouTube channel Coding with Jan.The conversation covers a range of topics including the current landscape of Shopify development, strategies for finding clients, the importance of professionalism, and the evolving role of AI in web development. Jan shares insights on his new JavaScript training program aimed at helping developers enhance their skills, while also discussing the significance of soft skills in client interactions. TakeawaysFinding clients often comes from referrals and established relationships.Professionalism is key in differentiating yourself as a developer.AI tools can enhance productivity but should not replace human developers.Soft skills are just as important as technical skills in client interactions.Building a solid portfolio and online presence is crucial for new developers.JavaScript is essential for Shopify development and should be learned thoroughly.Understanding the Shopify admin and Liquid is vital for effective development.Networking and community engagement can lead to more opportunities.Creating content can help establish authority and attract clients.Continuous learning and adapting to new tools is necessary for success in development.Introducing the .dev Assistant VSCode Extension - https://shopify.dev/changelog/introdu...[action required] Checkout APIs will be shut down April 1, 2025 - https://shopify.dev/changelog/checkou...[action required] AMAZON_PAY enumerated in DigitalWallets - https://shopify.dev/changelog/amazonp...[action required] Metafield description input field removal - https://shopify.dev/changelog/metafie...New customer address capabilities in the Admin API - https://shopify.dev/changelog/new-cus...Timestamps00:00 Exploring Shopify Development and Educational Initiatives01:25 The Evolution of Development in 202504:23 Finding Clients and Building a Portfolio07:21 Soft Skills in Development and Client Interaction13:15 Navigating Cold Outreach Strategies17:30 Building a Professional Online Presence22:59 The Importance of Referrals and Networking31:52 Establishing Technical Knowledge in Development38:49 The Future of Development in an AI World40:47 The Role of AI in Web Development46:04 Essential Skills for Freelance Developers47:03 Mastering JavaScript for Shopify52:56 Shopify Updates and Changes01:01:35 Personal Highlights and Future CollaborationsFind Jan OnlineYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CodingwithJanLinkedIn:   / jan-frey   Twitter (X): https://x.com/Coding_with_Jan Website: https://codingwithjan.com/Freemote: https://www.freemote.com/Javascript Training: https://www.codingwithjan.com/javascr... ResourcesLuck Sail:    • The little risks you can take to incr...   Dev ChangelogPicks of the WeekKarl: Ruby on Rails and Web Assembly - https://web.dev/blog/ruby-on-rails-on...Jan: Working with Shopify Academy - https://www.shopifyacademy.com/Taylor: GoRuck Weighted Vest - https://www.goruck.com/products/train...Signup for Liquid Weekly NewsletterDon't miss out on expert insights and tips—subscribe to Liquid Weekly for more content like this delivered right to your inbox each week - https://liquidweekly.com/

In today's Tech3 by Moneycontrol, we dive into the top stories in tech and startups. Sachin Bansal slams WhatsApp Pay and Amazon Pay for not taking UPI seriously. Karnataka unveils a massive startup boost in its 2025 budget. LTTS CEO Amit Chadha bets big on Engineering R&D, saying it could outshine IT. Plus Nasscom's concerns on DPDP rules. Tune in now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Moneycontrol.com!

El comercio electrónico es una gran oportunidad para el crecimiento de los negocios. Con los métodos de pago adecuados y el apoyo de un socio financiero, es posible implementar soluciones que vayan más allá del carrito de compra tradicional, ajustándose a las necesidades específicas de cada empresa. En este podcast te contamos qué medios de pago utiliza la joyería online Pepe Dry. Cuando se venden productos online es fundamental elegir adecuadamente los métodos de pago para garantizar una experiencia de compra satisfactoria y maximizar el éxito del negocio. Estos métodos deben adaptarse al tipo de negocio y a las necesidades específicas de los clientes, especialmente en las pymes artesanales, donde el enfoque en el cliente es esencial. Antes de seleccionar los métodos de pago, los negocios deben considerar aspectos como las comisiones por transacción, la facilidad de integración con la plataforma de comercio electrónico, las preferencias de los clientes, la seguridad y la velocidad de procesamiento de pagos. Actualmente, las pymes artesanales cuentan con diversas soluciones para vender online. Además del tradicional carrito de compra, los socios financieros pueden ofrecer alternativas innovadoras que se ajusten a las necesidades de cada empresa. Acelera pyme -desarrollado por Red.es, de la Secretaría de Estado de Digitalización e Inteligencia Artificial- recomienda incorporar en el e-commerce una pasarela de pago. Este sistema permite a los compradores realizar transacciones de forma segura utilizando su tarjeta bancaria. Las pasarelas de pago permiten realizar la transacción de manera directa (con tarjetas bancarias) e indirecta con XPay (a través de plataformas como Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, entre otras). En este podcast te contamos el sistema de venta actual de Pepe Dry, una joyería online especializada en alianzas y anillos de compromiso, que se caracteriza por un servicio muy personalizado.

"My medium spicy take is that it takes a lot of pressure off of you. You can celebrate any holiday any way you want because taking the holiday and changing it to fit to your needs is truly traditional. The important thing is we take days off work, gather together, and spit in the face of a harsh earth." - Alex Falcone."Amazon is everywhere but so are we." - Varsha Gandikota-NellutlaAlex Falcone: https://alexfalcone.ninja/Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla: https://www.instagram.com/varshagandikota/?locale=en_US%252525252Cen_US%252525252Cen_US%252525252Cen_US&hl=arAmazon Protest information: https://uniglobalunion.org/news/map24/A reason to boycott walmart: https://www.al.com/news/2024/11/birmingham-activists-call-for-walmart-black-friday-boycott-after-dei-rollback.htmlAnother reason to boycott black friday: https://www.essence.com/news/protesters-plan-boycott-black-friday/DONATE:www.pcrf.netGet Involved:Operation Olive Branch: Spreadsheets + LinksGET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM FOR COOL CONTENT: www.instagram.com/mydbpodcastOR BE A REAL GEM + TUNE IN ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/MYDBpodcastOR WATCH ON YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/juliemerica The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On today's MadTech Daily: X Ad Revenue Down 24%; Judge Blocks Disney, Fox and Warner Bros Discovery Planned Bundle on Antitrust Grounds; Amazon Considers Creating Separate App for Amazon Pay in India 

GM cuts 1,000 software jobs as it prioritizes quality and AI; Amazon considers moving Amazon Pay into a standalone app in India; Could Trump's AI-generated Taylor Swift endorsement be illegal? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

07th Aug: Crypto & Coffee at 8

In den letzten zwei Woche hat vor allem ein Leak für Aufsehen gesorgt: Amazon springt auf den von SHEMU angeführten C2M Zug auf und plant einen eigenen Discount Store mit Direktversand aus China als direktes Konkurrenzangebot. Darüber hinaus sprechen wir noch über virtuelle Bandenwerbung, weitere Regulierungsbemühungen der EU Kommission in Bezug auf die sogenannten VLOPs (Very Large Online Platforms), den Prime Day, der dieses Jahr auf sämtlichen weiteren Shopping-Plattformen neben Amazon stattfindet, Rohlik's neue Finanzierungsrunde. Am Ende gibt es in unseren "Speed News" weitere Neuigkeiten von Meta, TikTok, Google & Shopify. Quellen > EM-Werbung von China dominiert https://retail-news.de/em-2024-virtuelle-bandenwerbung/ > Amazon kopiert Temu & SHEIN mit Discount-Angebot https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/26/amazon-plans-discount-store-in-bid-to-fend-off-temu-and-shein.html https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3268505/amazon-faces-uphill-battle-against-temu-and-shein-it-woos-chinese-merchants-analysts-say https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edsander_a-platform-providing-white-label-low-priced-activity-7212875105981345792-YPLB/  https://www.linkedin.com/posts/j0hnlin_temu-shein-ecommerce-ugcPost-7211953283723096064-cZWi https://www.onlinehaendler-news.de/online-handel/marktplaetze/140278-konkurrenz-temu-amazon-eigene-billig-sparte  https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-to-launch-temu-like-discount-section-with-direct-shipping-from-china > EU Kommission untersucht Mechanismen von Shein & Temu https://ecommercenews.eu/eu-requests-swift-clarification-from-temu-and-shein/ > US-Justiz verklagt Temu auf Basis von Schadsoftware-Vorwürfen https://www.onlinehaendler-news.de/online-handel/marktplaetze/140285-temu-gefaehrliche-schadsoftware-klage-eingereicht?utm_source=newsletter > EU Kommission leitet Verfahren gegen Meta's Pay-or-Consent-Modell ein ⁠https://www.zdnet.de/88416838/pay-or-consent-eu-geht-gegen-facebook-mutter-meta-vor/⁠ > TikTok launcht eigene "Prime Days" namens "Deals For You Days" https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/announcing-deals-for-you-days > Rohlik erhält €160Mio. Investment https://www.ots.at/presseaussendung/OTS_20240628_OTS0015/gurkerl-mutter-rohlik-group-erhaelt-170-millionen-usd-zur-beschleunigung-der-europaeischen-expansion-vor-dem-boersengang https://excitingcommerce.de/2024/06/28/knuspr-co-holen-sich-160-mio-e-vor-dem-geplanten-ipo-k52024/ > TikTok testet neue “Für-Enge-Freunde”-App “Whee” https://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/inhalt.whee-neue-app-tiktok-mhsd.07321a1c-e12c-4cf8-b639-ec411a8ae740.html > Instagram testet AI-Bots für Creator https://t3n.de/news/instagram-ki-bots-influencer-fans-1630187/ > Threads feiert 1. Geburtstag https://www.techopedia.com/news/threads-has-175-million-users-after-one-year > Google schafft Infinite Scrolling ab https://searchengineland.com/google-dropping-continuous-scroll-in-search-results-443529 > Shopify schafft Amazon Pay ab https://thepaypers.com/payments-general/shopify-amazon-pay-partnership-to-end--1268875 Time Stamps (00:00) Intro (02:50) Die EM Werbung der China-Riesen & technologischer Fortschritt (09:08) Amazon launcht Discount-Angebot als Antwort auf SHEIN & Temu (27:00) EU Kommission untersucht SHEMU's Mechanismen (28:52) Temu wird in den USA verklagt – Vorwurf: Installation von Schadsoftware (31:38) EU Verfahren gegen Meta's Pay-or-Consent-Modell eingeleitet (36:05) TikTok launcht Discount-Aktion “Deal for You Days” (40:35) Knuspr-Mutter Rohlik sammelt €160 Mio. Investment ein (42:55) On Another Note - Quick News Part (43:24) TikTok testet neue “Für-Enge-Freunde”-App “Whee” (44:18) TikTok testet externe Links in Feed-Posts (45:37) Instagram testet AI-Bots für Creator (46:55) Threads feiert 1. Geburtstag (48:17) Google schafft Infinite Scrolling ab (49:32) Shopify schafft Amazon Pay ab Credits Logo Design: Naim Solis Intro & Jingles: Kurt Woischytzky Fotos: Stefan Grau Intro-Video: Tim Solle

Paypal, Giropay, Klarna, SEPA, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Kreditkarte, Rechnung, Vorkasse – wer im Internet kauft, muss sich ständig zwischen Bezahlarten entscheiden. Über die Vor- und Nachteile reden wir mit c't-Redakteur Markus Montz. Wichtige Kriterien neben der persönlichen Bequemlichkeit sind der Schutz vor Angriffen von Dritten, aber auch vor betrügerischen Händlern, und auch die Händler wollen sich vor zahlungsunwilligen oder -unfähigen Kunden schützen. Einige der Dienste erfordern, dass der Kunde seine Kontozugangsdaten eingibt, denen muss man besonders vertrauen. Anderen möchte man vielleicht nicht einmal zugestehen, die Daten über die getätigten Käufe zu sammeln. Wir wollen einige Vorbehalte ausräumen und andere bekräftigen. Wir erklären, warum manchmal doch Klarna oder Paypal auftauchen, wenn man Überweisung oder Lastschrift wählt. Und wir geben Hinweise, welche Zahlart Sie wählen können, um Ihren Lieblingshändlern möglichst wenig Gebühren zahlen zu lassen.

Paypal, Giropay, Klarna, SEPA, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Kreditkarte, Rechnung, Vorkasse – wer im Internet kauft, muss sich ständig zwischen Bezahlarten entscheiden. Über die Vor- und Nachteile reden wir mit c't-Redakteur Markus Monz. Wichtige Kriterien neben der persönlichen Bequemlichkeit sind der Schutz vor Angriffen von Dritten, aber auch vor betrügerischen Händlern, und auch die Händler wollen sich vor zahlungsunwilligen oder -unfähigen Kunden schützen. Einige der Dienste erfordern, dass der Kunde seine Kontozugangsdaten eingibt, denen muss man besonders vertrauen. Anderen möchte man vielleicht nicht einmal zugestehen, die Daten über die getätigten Käufe zu sammeln. Wir wollen einige Vorbehalte ausräumen und andere bekräftigen. Wir erklären, warum manchmal doch Klarna oder Paypal auftauchen, wenn man Überweisung oder Lastschrift wählt. Und wir geben Hinweise, welche Zahlart Sie wählen können, um Ihren Lieblingshändlern möglichst wenig Gebühren zahlen zu lassen. Mit dabei: Markus Monz Moderation: Jörg Wirtgen Produktion: Ralf Taschke ► Der c't-Artikel zum Thema (Paywall): https://www.heise.de/select/ct/2024/10/2405214055604031853

Paypal, Giropay, Klarna, SEPA, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Kreditkarte, Rechnung, Vorkasse – wer im Internet kauft, muss sich ständig zwischen Bezahlarten entscheiden. Über die Vor- und Nachteile reden wir mit c't-Redakteur Markus Monz. Wichtige Kriterien neben der persönlichen Bequemlichkeit sind der Schutz vor Angriffen von Dritten, aber auch vor betrügerischen Händlern, und auch die Händler wollen sich vor zahlungsunwilligen oder -unfähigen Kunden schützen. Einige der Dienste erfordern, dass der Kunde seine Kontozugangsdaten eingibt, denen muss man besonders vertrauen. Anderen möchte man vielleicht nicht einmal zugestehen, die Daten über die getätigten Käufe zu sammeln. Wir wollen einige Vorbehalte ausräumen und andere bekräftigen. Wir erklären, warum manchmal doch Klarna oder Paypal auftauchen, wenn man Überweisung oder Lastschrift wählt. Und wir geben Hinweise, welche Zahlart Sie wählen können, um Ihren Lieblingshändlern möglichst wenig Gebühren zahlen zu lassen. Mit dabei: Markus Monz Moderation: Jörg Wirtgen Produktion: Ralf Taschke ► Der c't-Artikel zum Thema (Paywall): https://www.heise.de/select/ct/2024/10/2405214055604031853

In this week's episode, we take a look at direct selling for indie authors, and compare the pros and cons of Payhip and Shopify as platforms for selling direct. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and a Reader Question Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 197 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 19th, 2024, and today we are talking about the pros and cons of Payhip and Shopify for direct sales by authors. Before we do that, we will do Coupon of the Week and some updates on my current writing projects. I have some questions from readers and will discuss what I did to celebrate publishing my 150th book. First up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SPRINGELVES, spelled SPRINGELVES. As always, the link and the coupon code will be in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is valid through May the 14th, 2024, so if you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered. Now let's have a look at my current writing and audiobook projects. Wizard-Thief, as I mentioned in last week's episode, is done and is out on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited and is selling quite strongly. Thank you very much for that. Now that it is out, my main project is Cloak of Titans, the 11th book in the Cloak Mage series. As of this recording, I am about 34,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 7 of 24. I think the final book length will end up being about the length of Cloak of Embers, which was about 110,000 words. Once Cloak of Titans is finished, my next project will be Shield of Darkness, so I will finally be getting to the second book in the Shield War series, which will be a follow up to Shield of Storms from back in January. If all goes well, I think Cloak of Titans will be out in the second half of May, maybe towards the start of June. I'm hoping to have Shield of Darkness out shortly after that, probably towards the end of June. I have also started working on the sequel to Wizard Thief, which is Half-Orc Paladin. That will come out after Shield of Darkness is done, hopefully not too long after Shield of Darkness is done. So that will probably be around the middle of July or so. So that is what I'm working on for books for the next couple of months. In audiobook news, recording is underway for Ghosts in the Veils. That will once again be recorded by Hollis McCarthy. I have Brad Wills working on the Tales of the Shield Knight anthology, which once it's in audiobook, I'm going to sell it as a bundle on Audible and Amazon and all the other usual audiobook stores. I will also be giving away short stories individually for free from that collection in my newsletter, so that is once again a very good reason to sign up for my new release newsletter. Leanne Woodward has agreed to narrate the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series, Wizard Thief. If all goes well, that will probably happen in June. And also in June, CJ McAllister will be narrating the second book of the Stealth and Spells Online Series, formerly known as Sevenfold Sword Online. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects. Now we have one question from a reader that is not connected with our other segments. It's from Robert who asks about the Half-Elven Thief series: is this series available in paperback? I'm pleased to say that yes, it is. Both Half-Elven Thief and Wizard-Thief are available in trade paperback. Probably the cheapest place to get them is on Amazon, but I have expanded distribution for them so you should be able to buy it online from a variety of other stores. 00:03:43 Celebrating Book #150 As I mentioned previously on the show, Ghost in the Veils was my 150th book. Thank you for reading, everyone. Quite a few people asked how I wanted to celebrate, the implication being that I wanted to take a trip or something like a cruise, that sort of thing. However, with all respect to the cruise industry, if I wanted to catch norovirus, I could do it much closer to home for far less expense. However, I have established a precedent for celebrating major book milestones like this. Way back in 2019, Dragontiarna: Knights was my 100th book and to celebrate that milestone, I got a Nintendo Switch, which was the first dedicated video game console I had used since 1998 or so. Given that six months later COVID started, that turned out to be a wise purchase because suddenly I had a lot more time for video games. I got to beat a bunch of games I never had time to finish otherwise back in the ‘90s, like Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers 3, the original Castlevania trilogy for NES, the Super Nintendo Castlevania games, Super Metroid, and I finally finished Skyrim. It wasn't all a retro nostalgia trip because I did finish a few newer games on it as well, like Metroid Dread and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. I recently had one of those numerically significant birthdays that are divisible by a large number, so I commemorated that occasion by getting an Xbox. It is a fine game console, but the problem with the Xbox was unlike the Switch, using the Xbox monopolizes the television. I finished the original Halo trilogy on Xbox and Skyrim again, but the whole Xbox monopolizes the television thing was kind of a difficulty for finding time to play it. But then a new device came to my attention: portable monitors. Obviously, most monitors are portable depending on size, but this new sort of monitor is basically a laptop LCD panel with a kickstand. It runs off a USB-C connection for power and you can connect a device to it with a USB-C or mini HDMI. Overall, these portable monitors tend to weigh about as much as an iPad in a case. They were basically intended for business travelers, since they fit easily into a laptop bag and then you can have a dual monitor set up with your laptop while you're on the road. However, it also connects just fine to an Xbox. If you can hold a laptop comfortably in your lap, then a portable monitor is about one third of that total weight. I moved my Xbox over next to the couch, connected it to a portable monitor, and have been using the Xbox that way. It is really quite exceedingly comfortable. Since I've beaten Skyrim a couple of times now, I need to decide on a new long-term game, which is why Question of the Week will be what it is shortly. So the “too long; didn't listen” version was celebrated my 150th book with a sub-100 dollar portable monitor off Amazon. It's really quite enjoyable and thank you for coming along for all 150 books. 00:06:35 Question of the Week It quite naturally segues into our Question of the Week. This week's question: what Xbox Game should I play next? No wrong answers, obviously. The reason I asked this particular question is because I keep defaulting to Skyrim or Halo when I play an Xbox game and would like to try something different. My leading candidates so far are Starfield, Witcher 3, and Dragon's Dogma 1. As you might have expected, this inspired many comments. LG says: I'm glad to hear you're an Xbox player, too. I like to separate my work/study computer from my gaming space, so having the controller plus TV in another room works well for me. Revenant 2 is my new favorite game. It jumped forward in my “to play” list when Halo Infinite's campaign wasn't personally feeling right. This game has got fantastic narratives, brilliant variety, exciting exploration, and frequent boss fights, it's souls-like but forgiving, the level/combat/gear systems are great, and there's a totally viable offline/single player mode. Justin says: We are a Nintendo family. Not quite 30 years ago, the PlayStation came out. Amid whining, I had the kids vote on what platform we would stick with. There is no way our entertainment budget could handle more than one. The most complaints have been missing out on the Metal Gear franchise, so that's my vote. Malcolm says 150 books. What an amazing feat. Congratulations. I feel like I've been on the journey with you, having read every book you have written and every series. I particularly enjoyed any book with Ridmark and Calliande and like Dragonskull, the next generation of Arbans. I also thoroughly enjoyed all the Demonsouled books, wasn't so keen on the Cloak and Ghost crossovers, but still a good read. Whatever you do, enjoy this landmark. Have fun. To answer the question, I do not usually play video games, but one that did catch my attention and play through all of them is the Dragon Age games. MacKenzie suggests Red Dead Redemption. The graphics hold up remarkably well. It's astoundingly clear for a Rockstar game and has an amazingly authentic feel to it. I'm not even a huge Western fan, but there's something extremely relaxing about riding out of town into the desert to hunt varmints. I think that is probably why so many people will go hunting in real life. Michael says: Starfield is a great game, but no modding yet on Xbox. Perry says: I haven't owned a console in over a decade, nor have I played any of those games, but my preference would be for Witcher 3. James says: How does Baldur's Gate 3 not make the list? Best game I've played maybe ever. David says: Fallout 4 was fun. Mark says Witcher. Starfield, I found to be slow to start with. I play Skyrim over and over again. I kind of do that as well. You can always mod Skyrim if you have the anniversary edition and haven't already. Robb says any car racing game. Juana says Witcher 3. Martin says Witcher 3. Becca says Witcher 3. So there are many votes there for Witcher 3. William says Hogwarts Legacy. Jake says: I honestly can't recommend any games, no matter what platform they come in. Xbox, PlayStation, Atari…just not worth it anymore. So I'd skip the games and write a book, maybe continuation of the Silent Order series. That's my vote. Thank you for that advice, Jake, I suspect it might be a little self-interested, but I appreciate that. Next one is from Michael, who says next Xbox game is called: buy a PlayStation. Barton says: only played Witcher 3 out of those, but it was engrossing. Bobby says Starfield and Hogwarts Legacy are both enjoyable as well as Jedi Survivor. And finally, Jim says: Child of the Ghost. Wait…not a game….yet. Thank you everyone, for all the suggestions. I think what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to try Starfield because that comes with Game Pass and I have Game Pass already. If I don't like that, I will I probably start Witcher 3 because I got that one was on super sale like last year for something like 10 bucks and so it's been sitting in my account and I haven't played it. But if I try Starfield and don't like it, I will switch over to Witcher 3. If I don't like Witcher 3, maybe it'll be time for Baldur's Gate 3. 00:10:40 Main Topic: Shopify vs. Payhip for Direct Sales for Writers But as much as I enjoy video games, I enjoy writing more and this is not a video game podcast. This is The Pulp Writer Show, so I think we should segue over into talking about an actual writing topic. This week's topic is comparing Shopify and Payhip for direct sales or as a direct sales platform for indie authors. And before we dig in, I should have a disclaimer. As you may know from my frequent mention of it on this show, I use Payhip quite a bit and that's how I do my direct sales. That said, I am not sponsored by Payhip. I don't get any stuff from this, whether financial benefits or an affiliate program, that kind of thing. I haven't used Shopify, but we did look into it quite a bit for the show and any opinion I express on this podcast is my own and not influenced by either Shopify or Payhip in any way. All right with that out of the way, let's dig into the topic. First off, why do direct sales? We should probably define that first. Direct sales is when an indie author sells a book using an ecommerce platform like Payhip or Shopify or Gum Road or a bunch of others without going through one of the big stores like Amazon or Apple or Google Play. So why do this? You get a greater cut of the profit than through ebook stores, whereas on a platform like Amazon, you max out at 70% of the sale price is what you get as the author. On direct sales platforms, you can potentially get nearly everything minus credit card fees and platform fees, which is higher than any of the other stores offer. You get paid faster. If you make a direct sale from the author, the author gets the money almost instantaneously, depending on their payment setup. Freedom/control. This is the big one. There is a lot of freedom in doing your own direct sales. It is a lot of work, but then like all forms of freedom, it is often quite worth it. It's much easier to run sales or issue coupon codes, as you know if you listen to the show regularly. Every week I give out a different coupon code for a discount on my Payhip store. It's also very good for people who want to sell online courses or memberships, which is not something I'm interested in doing. People who are interested in doing that usually need to employ an online sales platform such as Shopify or Payhip rather than trying to sell it on something like Amazon or eBay. There are a couple of things to note about trying direct sales. There is quite a bit of learning curve since you have to set up the store yourself and that involves a lot of clicking and uploading and so forth. You also need to learn about things about like Value Added Tax, shipping, file delivery services, etcetera. And if you are selling in the United States, you also have to be careful you comply with whatever these sales tax laws are for your jurisdiction or for where you're selling in the United States. Direct sales don't count towards ranking on other platforms, if that's something that's important to you, if you want your book to be a number one category bestseller on Amazon, direct sales will not help with that. It does take a bit of time to set up and maintain, and it also takes time for readers to get used to it and will not likely be a large portion of your sales, especially at first, since users tend to stick to the platform where they already have built up a library. This is one of the reasons why the Steam game platform is so dominant, because it's been around for a long time and a lot of the users have very big Steam libraries, so they're not super keen on jumping to a different distributor. Readers will need a carrot not a stick to get them to try a new platform, which is one of the reasons why I do those coupon codes all the time. So now to the actual nitty gritty of Payhip versus Shopify. We can sum it up quite neatly by saying it this way: Payhip is primarily designed for digital products. Shopify is primarily designed for physical products, but both are capable of selling either physical or digital products. Shopify allows for greater analytics and customization, while Payhip has a great basic service that keeps the costs low. So in terms of pricing, which costs more? Payhip pricing has three tiers. There is the free tier, which you pay obviously $0 per month and then Payhip takes 5% of each transaction. There is the middle tier, where you pay $29 USD per month and Payhip takes 2% of the transaction. Then there is the top, most expensive tier, which costs $99 USD per month and Payhip takes 0% of the transaction fee. Obviously, you would only consider that tier if you were making more than $1,200 USD a year in direct sales. Shopify does not have a free tier. At the basic tier, it costs $39 USD per month and Shopify takes 2.9% + $0.30 USD per transaction. At $105 USD per month, Shopify takes 2.6% + $0.30 USD per transaction. At $399 USD per month, Shopify takes 2.4% + $0.30 USD per transaction. We can see that with Shopify, you are already going to be paying more out the door. If you're just starting with direct sales, it might make more sense to start with the free tier on Payhip and then look at more costly options on either service as your needs grow and if you need the additional, more expensive features. So let's look at the pros on Payhip. The biggest pro on Payhip is low bar to entry in both terms of cost and in terms of technology needed to create a basic storefront. I've been doing direct sales on Payhip since 2021, and it's a very simple platform to use. There's a little bit of a learning curve, but it's not a huge one compared to something like WordPress or Adobe Photoshop. As we mentioned, the lowest tier plan is free but with a 5% cut of sales. The Pro plan, the top tier that we mentioned earlier, is $99 USD but then there are no transaction fees. It can handle UK/EU Value Added Tax automatically unlike Shopify because Payhip is based out of the UK, so that is built into their platform. Payhip also has some handy features that Shopify doesn't or that Shopify doesn't offer without like a plug-in app, that kind of thing that Shopify offers: settings for selling online courses, memberships, affiliate marketing, and a referral system. When I have had to contact Payhip about some sort of tech issue, I've always found their customer support to be very fast and responsive. As I mentioned before, I'm not being paid to say that. That is just my own personal experience. The pros for Shopify are basically for more advanced users, I think. $29 USD a month for the lowest pricing plan and then plus a cut and plus a transaction fee, that can add up if you have a lot of transactions. I think Shopify is really aimed more toward more advanced users than someone starting out with the basic ebook store on Payhip. However, to be fair, you do get a lot of stuff for that money. Shopify has an advanced website builder feature with more customization options on the pages. It has much more advanced SEO and analytics tools than anything Payhip offers. It is very useful if you're selling physical products. It also offers features to support delivery of physical items, such as customized shopping options based on location. More third-party apps or third-party payment options are available through Shopify (for example, Amazon Pay or Apple Pay). Shopify does offer a lot of customization and it does have a pretty good app store, where if there's a feature that Shopify doesn't have, there's a pretty good chance you can find one of the apps in their store that will sort of offer bolt on functionality for the new feature that you are looking for. So, in conclusion, if you want to do direct sales as an indie author, should you use Payhip or should you use Shopify? And as so often in these cases there is no right answer, there is merely the tool that is best suited for your needs as an indie author and a small businessperson. If you want to be able to heavily customize the site, Shopify offers more options for that than Payhip. If you are primarily selling digital products like I am, then Payhip offers better value, because you can just go with the free tier and still make more money than you would selling for the same price off Amazon. Since I don't really at this time have any interest in selling physical products online, Payhip it is. That said, if you do want to sell printed books or your own merchandise direct, then Shopify is the way to go. But if you don't have any of that kind of stuff and you still want to keep your shop costs low, then Payhip is probably the better option for you since you can use their free tier. So that is a look at Shopify versus Payhip and if you are thinking about direct selling as an indie author, I hope you have found that helpful. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and a word of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to pull together all the research for this episode. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes of the show on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week. SPRINGELVES The coupon code is valid through May 14th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT  

La quedada de diciembre es un monográfico sobre banca accesible. En ella varios usuarios comentan su experiencia con bancos españoles, mexicanos y neobancos. Todo ello desde la perspectiva de una persona usuaria con discapacidad visual o invidente. Se tratan experiencias como el uso de apps de banca online, la facilidad o dificultad de hacer operaciones típicas, la accesibilidad de cajeros y el uso de medios de pago por internet, así como el manejo de tarjetas de crédito y de débito. Caixabank e Imagin Bank, por parte de Jaime Franco. App y cajeros. BBVA España, por parte de Paqui Torres. App para iPhone y cajeros. BBVA México, por parte de Luz del Carmen y Francisco Fuentes. Kutxabank, por parte de Alba. Caixabank web y medios de pago PayPal y Amazon Pay, por parte de Juan Nuñez. MyInvestor, por parte de Pedro Sanchez. N26 neobanco, por parte de Enrique López. Revolut neobanco, por parte de Lucía Melchor. Paypal y Amazon Pay, por Juan Nuñez. Comentarios de más bancos de España y México, envíos de dinero mediante Bizum y Siri. Enlaces de interés: Web de BBVA en España: Enlace a la web corporativa de BBVA España App de BBVA En España en App Store: Enlace en la App Store de BBVA España para iOS Web de BBVA México. Enlace a la web corporativa de BBVA México App de BBVA México en App Store. Enlace en la App Store de la app de BBVA México para iOS Web de Caixabank: Enlace a la web corporativa de CaixaBank App Caixabank Now en App Store: Enlace en la App Store de la app CaixaBank Now para iOS App Caixabank Sign en App Store: Enlace en la App Store de la app CaixaBank Sign para iOS Web de Imagin Bank. Enlace a la web corporativa de Imagin Bank App de Imagin Bank en App Store. Enlace en la App Store de la app Imagin Bank para iOS Web de Kutxa Bank: Enlace a la web corporativa de Kutxabank App de Kutxa Bank en App Store Enlace en App Store de la app Kutxabank para iOS Web de MyInvestor. Enlace a la web corporativa de MyInvestor App de MyInvestor en App Store. Enlace en la App Store de la app MyInvestor para iOS Web de N26. Enlace a la web corporativa de N26 App de N26 en App Store. Enlace en App Store de la app de N26 para iOS Web de Revolut. Enlace a la web corporativa de Revolut App de Revolut en App Store. Enlace en App Store de Revolut para iOS Web de PayPal. Enlace a la web corporativa de PayPal App de PayPal en App Store. Enlace en App Store de Paypal para iOS web de Amazon Pay. Enlace a la web de Amazon Pay Web de Bizum. Enlace a la web corporativa de Bizum

Paul is the CGO of ⁠⁠⁠⁠6pillars.ai Paul was gracious enough to be our guest mentor for this episode of Mentoring Moments - thanks Paul! ------------------------------------------- Welcome to 'Mentoring Moments', a sub-series of the Podcast Mentoring Moments is composed of clips taken from Jason's Mentorship Sessions These sessions cover topics such as: digital, eCommerce, retail, SaaS, marketing, tech and business - plus so much more! The episode title outlines some of the topics covered in the episode for reference We also regularly feature 'Guest Mentors' to talk about their own areas of expertise If you'd like to join Jason's Mentorship Program ('The Mentor Sessions') for free and get answers to your own questions, head over to the registration page to apply for 1-1 mentorship on this page: https://bit.ly/3Ncui1c

In today's episode of Welcome To Cloudlandia, Dan and I explore Ontario, Canada, alongside a discussion of groundbreaking research on an immortality gene. A doctor shares insights into pinpointing this gene's phenomenal potential for humanity. Lightheartedly, we touch on frequent flyer miles and a Buenos Aires stem cell treatment trip. Shifting to business, we analyse the impactful Working Genius model's six elements - Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanisation, Enablement and Tenacity. There are a lot of nuggets in this episode that prompt us to reevaluate what truly enriches our world.   SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discuss the fascinating exploration of an immortality gene found by a doctor, that has the potential to revolutionize human life. We touch on the effects of altitude on our bodies and share some anecdotes about our trips for stem cell treatments. We delve into the Working Genius model and its six elements that foster successful collaborations in business. Mark Lechance and Babs share their experiences with the Working Genius model, emphasizing its practical benefits. We share the thrilling story of Matt, a man of Discernment and Tenacity, who successfully navigated domain name issues to set up a project in real time. We examine the dynamics of travel and connectivity, challenging the notion that convenience and comfort are sources of happiness. We discuss the importance of purpose and meaning in achieving true happiness and explore the future of transportation, including the possibility of human-carrying drones. We analyze the psychological limits of convenience in our modern era, and encourage listeners to reconsider the value of real experiences over convenience. We explore the future of travel convenience, discussing how modern technologies have reduced travel friction and predicting the future of transportation. We discuss the concept of convenience, how it is interpreted differently by different people, and reflect on the emotional experience of convenience. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: Thank God, there we go. Dean: There we go. Thank God we're recording. Yeah, I don't like the sound. Dan: I don't like the sound. Dean: There was just an interruption, that's all I don't like the sound of that voice of yours. What's up? Dan: Well, I just got a cold, I got a head cold Friday, I think. And here I am. Here I am, though, and I'll use the capability that I have available to me to have a great podcast. Dean: There we go. I love it. Well, I missed you last week. I've had a great two weeks. Lots to catch up on. Dan: I'm sure you've had it in the last few weeks. Yeah, we did. We were at DaVinci 50 and Sundance. I've never been there before. Dean: How did you like? Dan: that. Yeah, it's a neat place, it's sort of a neat place, but Babs doesn't operate good at 7,000 feet. Dean: Oh, boy, okay. Dan: So she has some issues. But, she went and she got a. What's it called? It's an IV that you take that pumps your energy up. Dean: Oh, okay. Dan: I knew, yeah, so fortunately we had a lot of medical advice around us. A little bit, yeah and they were able to get right on it. She had it, but she wasn't sleeping well and I'm pretty good. I don't have that problem at altitude, but there was a lot of downhill climbing from our room to the. And my knee, which hopefully, and we're off to Buena Cerras, Argentina the first week of November to get stem cell treatment for my knee, so hopefully that'll be done. Yeah, yeah, we fly in overnight. They pick us up at the airport, take us right to the clinic and I get an injection in the first hour when I'm there and that's my stem cells coming back at me and the promise is that I will grow a new cartilage. Dean: And how long does it take for that to be noticeable? Dan: It's about six months until it grows back. That's what I'm told, and there's a protocol of not putting too much stress on it, not to go hog wild. Dean: Well, how perfect is that You'll have a new me for your AB of perfect I will Just about, and that's exactly right It'll be on. Dan: My birthday will be six and a half months and this will be six months. We go down twice more so that they can check on the progress, and so our frequent flyer miles are going to go up, and it's a long, long flight. Dean: Nine hours have you been to Plano Furniture before? I have not. Dan: I have not this is the first time and they're I think they're either an hour or two hours ahead of Toronto time. Yeah. Dean: One of the things. Dan: Yeah, no, they're an hour and a half Exactly. That's so funny, but it's sort of when you look at the map. It's always a shock to me how that, if you go to London Ontario, all of South America sits east of London Ontario. That's wild, isn't it? Yeah, it's amazing Because you think of South America being under North America but it actually curves around to the east and Ecuador. The west coast of Ecuador is the furthest point in South America and that lines up perfectly with London Ontario and, for those who are listening, it's sort of Columbus Ohio, if you think of Columbus. Dean: Right, right, right, there you go. Dan: Dream of Iowa. Yeah, and Americans, you know Ontario. Where's Ontario? Isn't that near Los Angeles? You? Dean: know they have an airport here. It's called Ontario yeah. Dan: Ontario Airport. You know. Well, that's great. Well, of course it's east of Ontario, california, but you know we're talking about a province that is basically the size of Western Europe. Dean: It's probably the size of Europe, but Ontario. Dan: Yeah, I was realizing the vastness. Dean: When I got to understand the vastness of Ontario I realized somebody pointed out that you could drive north in Ontario the distance between Toronto and Florida and still be in Ontario. That's pretty big right. Dan: And if you did east to west, from Cornwall to Canora, that's basically two cities in Ontario. It's the same distance as Washington DC to Kansas City. Dean: Wow, okay, yeah. Dan: Well, there we go. That is pretty much about all the Canadians huddled close to the border. 90% of the Canadian population is within 100 miles of the US border. Dean: That's great. Well, any big shares from Da Vinci. What's coming down the pipe? You got new me. Dan: Yeah, the biggest thing. First of all, richard is a phenomenally good chooser of great speakers. Yeah, and it's always very, very enlightening, if not shocking, some of the research that's being done, and I think we have a couple of doctors who were there. And one of the doctors, doctor doctor West, says that it's pretty clear now that there's a fundamental gene, if you will I'm not sure exactly what the terminology is- but, it's a gene, that's the immortality gene, okay, and they've been able to zero in on it because none of our genes die. I mean the body they're in dies, but none of the genes themselves actually die. They're immortal and because we all have them, so all humans have them, and every time a new human being is born, it's basically picking up on a couple of million years of genetic development. Yeah so they know that those are immortal. And but in each individual there's a turnoff, there's a series of turnoff mechanisms I'll just use a more understandable term here and they're zeroing in on this. For example, there are life forms that don't die flat, flat, flat, flat. Worms, for example, don't die. You know, they, they just never die. And you cut them in half and you can cut them in half, and doesn't matter which half, and they can regrow the other half back. So so you know, I mean, it's just really, it's just really interesting where all this is going. I mean, what's the time frame for this, to discover this? Well, they don't know that, you know. But the bare fact that they're they now think it's possible and that they're experiment way. I just find all that stuff interesting. Dean: Yeah, I find it very interesting too. Yeah, that's great. Dan: I mean, it's kind of the fact that we can know that DNA exists. Dean: I mean the fact that somebody discovered that and I mean it's just, how would you even know to look for something like that? Right, yeah, we take it, you know we're. It's so amazing, the things that I mean that's all happened in the big change from 1975 to 19. Dan: They're 2025, you know, I've been really thinking about that. Dean: That too, the you know the the biggest change If we take, if we extend out to 2025. I think that period of 1975 to 2025 is going to be, you know, civilization changing yeah you know scope of what's happened here. Dan: Yeah, but it's like yeah. Well, my redone it is, that it's the people who benefit from this. It's not going to be worldwide. The next 50 years let's say 2025 to 2075, I think that. I think what we're going to see is massive political and economic change, because there's a there's a point where you wanted to become a powerful technological country. And at this point not many have. I mean, if you think of all the countries in the world, the US is clearly, you know, in the lead, and the US has just so many other things going for it. You know, it's geography, for one thing, that's, it's really hard to invade the United States. I mean, first of all, 3000 miles of water one way and 5000 miles of water the other way, and then you have the Gulf of Mexico, and then you have Mexico. But Mexico in the 200 miles south of the US border is desert and mountain. It's not a it's not a populated area, and then the North North Canadians were always a threat, but now that they've nationalized pot, that's that's neutralizing that. Right and Canada. Weren't we going to invade the United? Dean: States. I think the US looks at Canada, the natural resource reserve tank attached to their northern border. Dan: You know well it's, it's. It's America's biggest gated community. Dean: You know right. Dan: You have to check in at the gate you know, they make you check in at the gate and you can't bring in guns and they want to know if you have any alcohol. They want to know if you have any tobacco. They're not interested in you if you have any new ideas. Dean: Yeah, so you'll love this. I've got four C's that I've observed here, looking for the next 25 years and the I observe that, but you're going to tell me about that in the next podcast, right? Oh, I can tell you about it right now. Here we go. Dan: All right. Dean: So the first is increase, and I love how you always say increasing, as taken this from you, but increasing connectivity with the farthest outposts of the mainland. That is going to be a big driver of the next 25 years. I think we can if we're guessing and betting. That's where that's what I was thinking about, if I'm guessing what's going to happen in the 25 years. What can I bet on? And I bet on increasing connectivity with the farthest outposts of the mainland and that I don't think you can go wrong and I think that, as the technologies are evolving, that will facilitate that connection. That's going to be a big thing. I saw something dance. You know I haven't really been so on board with the metaverse and then I saw and I don't know whether you saw it the most recent video of Lex Friedman and Mark Zuckerberg having a chat in the metaverse with the latest version of the Facebook Visual avatar development where it creates a photo, realistic version of you, three dimensional, in your inner three dimensional space, and you could tell I mean first watching it on the video it's stunningly realistic and impressive. But you could tell that that Lex Friedman even said he's having an emotional experience. This is so uncanny that he's got the you know, the new meta headset on, but his feeling is like he's 100% for real in the room with Mark Zuckerberg, like literally having a real conversation with a real person, and that I think that's the first I've seen of what potentially could be what comes here. You know, because it was really, it was really pretty stunning. When you're watching the video, I'll send you the, I'll send you the link, unless you've already seen it. Dan: No, no, I haven't. This is the first I've heard of it. Dean: Okay, so they have. They basically have a. They split the screen like a try screen where you can see Lex or Mark with the headset on, like where they really are talking and what they're saying. Then they show the middle version, which is kind of the digitized version of what's happening, like all the without the shell on it kind of thing, and then they show the final, the real thing, and it look, if you just look at the visual thing, you would never be able to detect that this is not real. And that's the first that I've seen where there's no latency, there's no, you know, telltale, you know mismatching of the mouth movements or the eye movements or anything like that. If you just saw the third version of it, you would think that's really Mark Zuckerberg in real time talking and that's really Lex Friedman, and so that was like that opened my eyes to and they were just kind of in a, you know, a black background kind of thing, like in almost this. They're in a black, like on the Charlie Rose show or something you know, just their things. But you can imagine in, you know, giving fast forward into 2025, the overlaid on any visual environment. You could place them in at table 10, at jocks, you know, or at the select bistro and they're surrounded and, having that experience, I literally. I would. I would put because you know what, I've said it and you've said it that I don't really have any interest in putting on the goggles because I haven't seen an environment that's real. You know, but if I could put on those goggles and have a real table 10 experience with you, I would put on the goggles. Dan: That was that impressive, you know so that means I have to agree. No, it's one of the things I you know I'm I'm taking your description of it as real, but yeah, I haven't had the experience so I don't really know, you know yeah. Dean: So, anyway, I'll check it, I'll check it out, and yeah so there's the first, that's the first C for guessing embedding connectivity, connectivity, that then that I think, if I'm guessing, embedding on the next 25 years our increasing capabilities, both on demand and on cap. You know, I think if we look at the capabilities that AI is going to provide for us, I'm starting, you're starting to see now the real applications of this. Where you take these, these avatar technologies of being able to create your own digital avatar. I fully believe, now that that is going to be in detect undetectable difference between the real, I mean a digital representation, the real video that I had performed, or a digital AI have done it. So those, all those capabilities on demand, along with and if those are not, capabilities on demand through connectivity with the farthest outreaches of the mainland to every other human that's out there, you know, for the special, for the special things you know well not every other human being, but just the one. You know, the ones the ones who are on the main, the ones who are connected in cloud land you know, because, because I believe in Dunbar's law, that we only have emotional capability for at most about 150. Dan: Yeah. I mean everybody. First of all, I can't comprehend what everybody means, you know. I know Dean and I know Joe and I know. And you guys use up all my time. You know I don't have time. Dean: I was just going to say thankfully, we're solidly entrenched in each other's top 150. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan: I mean the other, the other eight, you know eight billion plus right, I mean I, I'm told they exist, but they don't really have that much. They don't have a place in my future, that much. Dean: Yeah, right, right. Dan: Yeah. Dean: I love it. Dan: And then the number three. Dean: Number three, yes, yeah collaboration that's going to lead to better and better and better collaboration opportunities with both humans and technology. I can't wait to reach your how to treat technology like a well-trained dog or whatever. Dan: What is it like? Dean: Like a great dog Like a great dog. Dan: Yeah, I own owning technology like a great dog. Dean: When is that coming out? Dan: Oh, it's out. Dean: It's out, oh it is. Dan: Yeah, you should have gotten a notice in the email that you can download the ebook. Okay, I'll see you about that. Dean: Yeah, I think that's fantastic. I had on the collaboration front. I had a really amazing widget extension. I've had a great experience this past couple of weeks here. The widget, of course, the working genius model, I see how useful. This is now in collaboration. Dan: We've got three of our team members trained as facilitator or training other people to use working genius. The moment you told me about it, I looked it up. We have the same UNI or the same we have the same. We're inventors and we're discerners. Babs is an inventor, is that yours? Dean: No, I'm DI your ID. I mean, I imagine it's the same thing, but Babs is what? Dan: She's IG, she's a galvanizer. Okay, yeah, right yeah, and I'm proof of it. Dean: So that's great, that's the perfect thing. That's your secret formula, right there. Dan: Yeah, I'm proof of it. Yeah, she galvanized me. Dean: Yeah, and so I had a really great experience with Mark Litchett. Why don't? Dan: we explain to those who don't know what we're talking about Sure Okay. Dean: So Mark, of course, unless you want to Go? Ahead. Dan: No, go ahead. Dean: Okay, so this was introduced to me by James Drage and James introduced this working genius model and you can find it at workinggeniuscom and it's one of the most useful assessments that I've ever come across, right Right up there with Colby, because I think I would rank them. Probably I would rank widget at the top, colby second, and I also like I find Myers-Briggs very useful, but I know you're not as big a fan of Myers-Briggs as I am. But the way that workinggenius works is that we all have workinggenius, which are things that we find effortless, really coincides with our unique ability, really harmonizes with all the strategic coach concepts and the idea is that every team needs, every collaboration, needs somebody in each of the six elements and the six calls spell out the word widget. So W is for wonder, someone who can look at something and see all the ways that this could be improved or where could we go with this. Then I is invention, which is making stuff up. There's a lot of I's in strategic coach. It would probably be, you know. Also, they would correlate with being quick starts, I'm sure. G is for discernment, the ability to look at options and know what the right thing to do is, to have a highly confident ability in discerning that this is the right thing to do. G is galvanizing, which is someone who has a genius for gathering all the people and elements that are needed to get something accomplished. E is for enablement, which is someone who can support the people who are doing the thing to make sure that everybody has everything they need to complete the task. And T is for tenacity, and tenacity is someone who has a high follow through, who makes things happen and takes things all the way to completion, so fast forward. I'm in a boardroom in Boca Raton with Mark Lechance and some of his team and I had this amazing experience of Isn't that amazing. Dan: We just had a metaverse experience because I'm the one that started the call with the cold, but now you have the cold? Dean: Yeah, I think mine is. I'm out in my courtyard and I can tell that our pollen count is very high right now, but anyway, I'm sitting there and I noticed how there's one of the guys on well, there were six of us in the room, but Mark Lechance is a galvanizer with invention, a galvanizer invention and I'm starting to identify like the one sentence summary of what these things are. So, mark's like one word, one sentence, like super power is gathering people, gathering the capabilities that you guys are super smart. Here's what I think we could do, you know, like this inventing all the coming up with ideas or the things that could be done. Then there was a gentleman there, matt, who is a D, he's a, he's got discernment and tenacity and my observation of that is that he would see something and say that's a good idea, and then the next word out of his mouth were done and he, like we were talking about something, we, you know, I came up, I was, you know, discernment and invention is my thing and I came preloaded with this is what I think we should do. We were doing, we have a VCR, vision capability, reach opportunity with one of the projects that Mark runs, and I came in already preloaded with here's the ideas. Well, I think we should do, which was, you know, it's a really great, great idea and we, you know, came up with the domain name, the whole thing, and literally right there in the, in the meeting you know, matt went and bought the domain name, set up like all these things are happening in real time and getting making something real you know, and so it was really amazing to see that, that collaboration between you know, the widget experience there. And I see now, like I realized, galvanizing that I would have guessed that Babs is a galvanizer, because that has been. You know that. That's the, that's the main thing that drives your ability to get your ideas into real world things. It's galvanizing the unique ability, teamwork of everybody on your, on your team, yeah. Dan: Yeah, and she just knows how to create team. I mean she, she knows how to create team leaders, she knows how to create teams and the teams have their, you know, they have their projects and they have their goals. And you know they have their measure measurements and everything like that, but one of the one of the things I've noticed about Babs is that she doesn't really comprehend the impact that she has just by being in the room. Dean: Yeah, I mean, how do you observe that? Dan: How do? You see, no, no, things just happen when she's in the room. Yeah, and in any situation, if you were somewhere with Babs and they had to get something done and within about an hour or two hours she'd be, she would be chosen as the leader. Dean: Right. Dan: Without her saying anything. Dean: Right yeah, right, right, right yeah. Dan: I mean, I mean she's six foot two and that helps you know, because she has a core. But you know, often, frequently, she's the tallest person in the room, but she just has a, she has command in her strength. Yeah, Command is number one. Yeah, you know. She just basically says okay, let's get started, let's get something done here. And you know, and you know I mean that's my life is divided into two parts before I met Babs and after I met, after I was with Babs. Yeah, and you know, it's just real clear that I'm just always highly motivated when I'm around here. Dean: Yeah, what are you looking at? Yeah. Dan: I'm looking at you, I remember you telling me and we're in the 42nd year of AAMD. Oh, that's funny, yeah, yeah. Dean: Okay. Dan: You've done you've. You've gotten three. What's number four? Dean: Okay, so the fourth is convenience that we're observing less and less friction in day to day interactions and mainland to Plumlandia, you know communication. So convenience, you know. I remember I think in 2016 or something, I read that article that I've shared about the tyranny of convenience and how we start to see it's a never ending, you know, desire to make things easier and better and ratcheting those advancements without going backwards. You know, and that's really I think, if I were to guess and bet on things being more convenient, increasingly convenient, over the next 25 years, I think we're going to be. I think that's a good bet and you know, you start to see that. I think that, as we're, we're already seeing things like you know, one click ordering from Amazon. That's now gotten into. You know, apple Pay and Google Pay and Amazon Pay you never there's no need to ever type your credit card into anything to buy online. But I see how that's going If we chart out where the room in convenience is. I also see, I see companies like Rocket Mortgage, you know, foreshadowing where we're headed, that when we start seeing everybody's got access to all of the data we're all going to be, you know, pre-underwritten in background. For anything we're going to have some, you know, available capital or available credit, you know pre-assigned already. You know that we literally will be able to push a button and get approval instantly for whatever we want, and I believe that the blockchain and smart contracts and all of these things are going to make things more and more convenient over the next 25 years, and that's where I've gotten so far. Those, so the connectivity yeah Well, I think they're good. So connectivity- Number one ��로 liability Number two. Elaboration number three. Elaboration and convenience, convenience. Uh-huh, it's good, I think those are, and there's probably more. Well, you know those are the first, uh, first four. Dan: Yeah, I wouldn't push it beyond four. Make the others be servants of the first four. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah, yeah, you know. One of the things is. So what's the role of uh? Travel that takes time, it's the uh. I'm asking you a question here. Dean: Yeah, I think it's the. Uh, what's the? What's the? Dan: what's the role of travel that takes time? Dean: The physical, First of all. It happens? Dan: Travel happens in the mainland because if I can just, of course, if I can just click or have a thought and I'm so yeah and I'm meeting somewhere else, then it hasn't required travel. And it doesn't, it doesn't take time. So, and I think that that's where? Dean: Yeah, so the you know the inconvenience of travel is what is? Two things. That's inconvenient and it happens at the speed of reality. You have to move your, your, your meat puppet from one out. Dan: Yeah, I, I'm going to call you that. I think that's. I think that's a bad term. Dean: The meat. Dan: And I think it diminishes your body and the one thing I want to tell you about, about virtual reality. You're only using sight and sound. You're only using sight and sound. You're not using touch, you're not using taste and you're not. You know, and my sense is that actually, sight and sound make up about less than 10% of what the body actually uses to function. Okay, so, I can understand why my Mark Zuckerberg wants to be in another realm because he can't be speed. He's trying to find a place where he can't be subpoenaed. Dean: You know so. Dan: Right, right, yeah. And I understand that because he doesn't look like a human being who does well in terms of relationship and you know, and everything else, and I can understand why he wants to find another realm to do it, but we've got a million years of actually creating value out of things that take time and things that you know you have to travel over distance. Okay. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I don't think there, I don't. I can't sum up all that just as inconvenience, Right yeah. I mean learning doesn't. Learning doesn't happen instantaneously, learning happens over time. Yeah, so I'm just the American as you put the four things. As you put the four things together, I'm saying, yeah, but you know, when I go on a long trip, you know, for example, it takes two and a half hours for us to drive to the cottage. Okay, yeah, and I've been interested in plots during those two and a half hours that I wouldn't have if I just touched a button and I was in the cottage. Dean: Right, yeah, you think that part of the experience of it is the fact that it took a long time to get there. Dan: Yeah there was a price. There was a price for it. Dean: Yeah, you know yeah. Dan: And if I agree, yeah. So yeah, I'm, I'm. I don't have the answer to this. I'm asking the question. I don't have the answer. I have the answer to it yeah. But I'm noticing that convenience and comfort don't necessarily make people happy. Uh huh, I think purpose and meaning make people happy. You know achievement combined with purpose and meaning. Dean: And my experience is. Dan: That takes a bit of time. That takes a bit of time. Dean: And so yeah. Well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean there's so, um, yeah, that does it makes a lot of sense. And these are just uh. So I do, I'm looking at, no, I think they're they're available. Dan: I think what you're saying is that actually they all come under the heading of capability. You know it's obviously a huge jump in capability, because connectivity and um and uh uh, collaboration and uh and uh and convenience are great capabilities, you know, and I think people are always striving for greater capabilities. Dean: I agree, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's something there's always going to be real. There's always going to be a higher value on on real. Dan: Yeah. Dean: I believe that we're definitely missing out. You know, and it's not by an order of just a small percentage, I mean, it's exponentially different. I think you know um say say what? what I think in the convenience, yeah when I was going to convenience things is that I think that the ability to make that travel, which is still highly valuable, being present in in a place is still highly valuable, um, but the elimination of friction in in doing that To the extent that you can, is going to be, I think, a safe bet. Uh, when you look at I it was, it was funny, we were, I was having a conversation with someone about the the newest travel trend. Uh, in mainstream travel is the private terminals that are popping up now, like at LAX there's was the first one that I heard of where you can bypass the, the main terminal. You go to a private terminal where you pull up, they valet park your car, you go into a suite that's got, you know, just a food and whatever you allow Comfortable for you to wait for your flight. You go through security, everything that's necessary, checking in the whole thing, and then, when it's time they drive you in, you know a BMW or an SUV, they drive you to on the ramp, to those where the plane is, take you up and put you on your on your seat and off you go, and that level of friction, skipping from the curb to the gate, that's what everybody is. That's where all the the hassle of of mainland travel is once you're on the plane. Nobody's mad at the first class cabin of any airliner. It's comfortable, it's. The seats are great, the food is great, the you know the environment. Everything about it is is fine. You get to your, your destination. It's just all the inconvenience from the curb to the gate. You know that we're all the we're all the thing is now. Now, and I also think, like recently, as you start seeing, I think it's pretty clear we're going to end up in a human carrying drone world where that, you know, drone flight is going to be, you know, for shorter, and it's going to be a two hour drive into a 20 minute, you know, taxi, drone, taxi type of environment. I think we'll see that in the next 25 years. I think that's a that'd be a pretty safe bet. Dan: I'll let you bet that it doesn't happen, okay, yeah. Dean: Good and that's interesting. So why? What makes? You think that, that, that it won't happen. Dan: Well, first of all, I don't think the capital is going to be there over the next 25 years, because capital money is getting very, very expensive and it's a function of the fact that transportation is getting very, very expensive. So when you have transportation very expensive, it makes money really expensive, it makes energy really expensive and it makes labor really expensive. Dean: And I don't think. Dan: First of all, I've never you may be the first person I've ever talked to had that as an aspiration or as a future thought, and my sense is that the next things to get invented is where there's like an 80% aspiration in the marketplace. We'd like to have this, you know, and you know, and I think the Amazon has done well, because there's an 80% wish that last minute purchasing or last minute shopping could be eliminated. Dean: Yeah, there's, there's something. I think that's true. Dan: Yeah, but one of the ways I've gone in the opposite direction, I've just eliminated all need for meetings that require travel. Dean: Yeah, me too. How is the travel industry doing? So I would say that that's more of an aspirator. Dan: I would say that's more of an aspiration than making travel comfortable. I would say not traveling at all is more of an aspiration. And, yeah, traveling with the least amount of friction. Dean: I agree and that's what I think would fit in with convenience. Well, I think we started going down that path. That was, I think that in every, in every way, in every element, I think convenience is really a driver right. That that's kind of we're definitely looking for things to be here and less friction. Dan: Let's look at the word convenience, because I think everybody's got a different notion of what constitutes convenience. You know, and I think it's is entirely defined by your situation in the mainland. I mean it only has been in relationship to the, to the. To the mainland I mean that my Apple computer comes on. It takes me, you know, five seconds to get on and I could do it in a second. I really don't care. I really don't care, you know right the five no five seconds. The five seconds seems good enough for me, you know I don't, I don't need it. So first of all, I think there's a point where convenience, or the striving for convenience, has a diminishing return. You know, because even at your personal airport, you know your private personal airport let's say that pretty soon there's going to be a desire on the ideal jet that there's a first class and the second class Right, and people, people say, well, why are they up there and we're, we're back here and you've got every convenience in the world. But because it's all psychological I mean all everything we're talking about here is psychological. You know, pricey psychological. Dean: And. Dan: I just feel that my notion of convenience may be different from your notion of convenience, you know. I mean if we went down step by step and we took our daily life and we went through, and everything like having food delivered to my house doesn't interest. Well, first of all, by all, my food is delivered by house by one person. You know we have a caterer and yes, but, but I can name on two hands. A number of times we've ordered in from a you know a restaurant, you know so that doesn't fall in my area of convenience, right yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: The other aspect about it is that traveling not under compulsion, in other words, I'm not compelled to travel, but just getting out and driving around. I find that interesting. Dean: Yeah, even like going up to the cottage or going. Dan: yeah, yeah, I find it interesting and you know, we have a halfway stop at Tim Hortons where we've never eaten, but we've always peed. The restroom is always in the same place. It's always clean. It's great. My definition of Tim Hortons in Canada is where white people go to get whiter. Dean: Have you ever experienced webbers? No, we go up to 404. Dan: We're heading to the east. We're not heading to the east. We've been on 400 and I've passed it, but the line up looked inconvenient. Dean: Well, you know it was quite a thing that they did was because that was kind of like the official stopping point of the way up to Muscova. That everybody would, you know, friday night stop and get a burger at Webbers. And then they brought in a great extent an overpass. They bought the land across before the oh no yeah. They brought in a great expense on an overpass that you could. Dan: Well, they could put in another parking lot. That's why they did it. Dean: Yeah, it's now convenient to stop on your way home, because it was super inconvenient. Dan: It's really interesting the I just want to zero in on the idea that convenience is uniquely defined. I think you're right. So I think a lot of the technology people make a guess that everybody is going to enjoy a new level of convenience that they're creating and they're generalizing they have to generalize human nature, that everybody's going to like this. I think it's a form of projection on the part of the inventors that, because they find it convenient to everybody else, only 16% of technology startups succeed. The thing, so it means that 84% of them. Yeah, I would say that most technologies are created to satisfy some form of convenience. Yeah, I would say. Dean: There's some definitions of convenience. I would love to go to the source here and see. So. Convenience is the state of being able to proceed with something with little effort or difficulty. Dan: Well, you and I are great believers in that. Dean: Yeah, the quality of being useful, easy or suitable for someone. And then the third is a thing that contributes to an easy and effortless way of life. Yeah, and so? I think, that that's going, no matter what you're doing, to making. I would argue that the virtual division of Strategic Coach has made it, through convenience, a possibility for people in what would otherwise be inconvenient parts of the world to participate. Dan: Yeah, and I think that you may. Zoom has, zoom has. Zoom has Zoom has. Yeah, my sense is that they Do. They need much more than Zoom. Do they need to actually have the feeling that they're? Dean: there. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we're not going to be able to. Dan: I mean to be tested, yeah, to be experiment, tested. Dean: I was just like you know. You know just at what appeared to be what was literally appearing in this thing. So that was. I'm just reporting the news. Dan: Yeah and yeah, I know he seemed real, but is he real? Dean: Yeah, and I was only seeing a 2D. I'm only seeing the 2D example of it, right? So, yeah, I can't imagine what it would be like. If you Like Lex Friedman's response to it I don't know who he- is. Dan: by the way, I don't know who this person is. Dean: Lex Friedman is a very popular podcaster, similar in popularity as Joe Rogan, like that level, one of the top interview podcasters, very smart, intelligent guy. But yeah, this was His visibly, you know the visible reaction that he was having to. It was like he was having a hard time really describing the impact, the emotional experience that he was having of this and he's a pretty non-emotional guy. That's part of the you know the term he's of. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Yeah, well, I'm going to have. Dan: I'm going to have to have the experience I'm going to have to. The experience you know yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: By the way, that whole. Dean: You know us being able to. It's just so funny to think now of all of these things, like I just see the layering, of this constant improvement in understanding of both our unique abilities and the unique capabilities that are being presented to us and the convenience of collaboration. Did you watch 60 Minutes? Yeah, you don't watch any TV, so there was. Dan: I am innocent of the experience. Dean: Do you know who Rick Rubin is? He's a music producer. He's regarded as maybe the oh, no, no. Dan: I've watched his YouTubes. I've watched his YouTubes. Yeah, he's a great guy, yeah. Dean: Really, he plays guitar. Dan: He plays guitar right. Dean: No, he doesn't. He doesn't play anything, which is really. Dan: Which is really impressive. Somebody else that I'm thinking of he does a really great job of telling you why a song works or how a song works and everything. Dean: Yeah, yeah. Dan: Yeah, he's a white hair. Yeah, I'm looking at white hair. Dean: Looks like Nafuzela. He's the no. You're talking about Rick Beato. Dan: He's the guy you're talking about yeah, that's who I'm, that's what. Dean: I'm talking about. Yeah, no, rick Rubin looks like Nafuzela, he's got a beard and long hair, real zen kind of guy. But he was on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper and it was pretty. There's some great sound bites from it. Because Anderson Cooper was asking him well, what is it that you do? Can you play instruments? And Rick said barely Could you work a sound board? And he said I have no technical ability and I know nothing about music, like actual music things. And Anderson asked him well, what do you get paid for? And he said he thought for a second and said the confidence that I have in my case and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists. And I thought there's a guy, if we were to do a widget on him, I'm sure he's a GI, I'm sure he has discernment and invention as his two things. You can see, this is a good idea, this is the big idea here, and this is what I think you should do. Dan: You have a visitor in the recording. Dean: It's a crow. I think it's funny. Dan: Don't you know that you're sitting. Don't you know that you're occupying his space? I? Dean: must be. Dan: Yeah, he's trying to tell you to get out. This is my space, Anyway it's all interesting. I keep coming back to the whole concept of the difference between convenience and comfort, and purpose and meaning. Yeah because my limousine company that I have in Toronto oftentimes has these sort of elite lifestyle magazines that advertises places to go and none of the people look happy. Yeah they look true. They look like they look like they've got everything they want, and that hasn't made them happy. You know, they look. They look sophisticated, they're obviously wealthy and they have this, but it hasn't done the trick. You know, it's like models. It's like models you know like in Vogue magazine. Babs gets some of the magazines and the Wall Street Journal once a month has a style magazine that comes with one of the additions and they all look well. First of all, I could draw a thought bubble above all their heads and say what I would give for a burger and fries, right, I mean, they look just, you know, they just look so unhappy and yeah, but they're representing the top of the world in fashion. You know, the elite living there are the top and I said, yeah, but they're, it's absent. It's absent meaning and purpose. You know, you've achieved something but and and people will sacrifice enormous amount of inconvenience for purpose and meaning. So it's an interesting discussion, isn't it? No, I mean, I take it may. I'm not a cutting edge guy with technology, but when I hear enough of other people talking about things that seems to work, I said why don't we just include this? And you know, and. I'm really driven by productivity. I like getting a lot of stuff done easier and faster, you know. But it's the thing that is being achieved, that has meaning and purpose. It's not the means of getting there. So yeah. Dean: I think there's a good, no, it's an interesting this thing is you know, yeah, and we live in totally a lot of the world. Dan: We do. Dean: I think that's part of the thing is maybe the, the harmonizing of that is pointing convenience at the end of comfort or out of purpose and meaning. Yeah, to make speaking purpose and meaning more convenient there, there's a new special on Netflix called Blue Zones and it's yeah observation of Okay talk about it. Yeah, and those things, those people, inevitably. They live very simple lives about much adornment. They've got the if you guy, as the Japanese would say, the purpose, you know the meaning that, the thing that brings them joy, connection to people. They love Community, but that's all. Dan: But if you think of your six Right. Dean: Yeah, they're very simple. Dan: They get rid of the eye. They'd wipe out the eye people really fast. Dean: Exactly. A mill that's 150 years old. Dan: I found from their great great grandmother you know, yeah, yeah, there's a famous temple in Japan. This will be. I have to jump right now afterwards, but there's a temple in that every 20 years it's totally torn down and rebuild again. Okay, and this has been happening now for 2000 years. So every 20, that's 100 times, 100 times, wow, and, and, and they have to find wood that's exactly like the wood you know that, the original or the existing one they have to replace with the same kind of woods. There's no mechanical parts of the temple, it's all done with drilling, with ancient yeah and everything they use now. The light screws, yeah, everything like that, and and an American coming into contact with this experience would say why? Why do you do it? Why don't you do it the next time? Why don't you build something different? You know, and, and I said because they have created enormous meaning and purpose out of something that's always the same. Dean: Yeah. Dan: So you know, convenience is a capability, but it's not the really purpose. It's not the ruling me. Right, convenience is not the ruling me. That's a discussion I like you yeah, I really, of course. Let's have a four C's dual. Let's have a four C's dual one, okay, when you do your first free zone with you and I will have a dual in the front of the room between your four C's and my four C's. Dean: Okay, there we go. I like it. Dan: Well, one of them is the same because we have capability and common, and I think capability is the master one. Dean: Yeah, and you're not. You don't think collaboration there. You're putting collaboration as a capability. Dan: Yeah, yeah, I think the other three are actually, I think capability is the center of your four C's and the other three are enhanced capabilities. Connectivity, collaboration and convenience are always being developed new in the world. I love it All right. Dean: Okay, thank you. Well, always great, dan. I'll look forward to next week. Dan: Yeah, and I'll be on the way home from the cottage next Sunday, so I won't be able to so to be the Sunday after. Dean: Okay, no problem, two weeks Okay yeah. Dan: Okay, okay, okay, thanks have a great time, bye-bye. Okay, bye. Dean: Bye.

Conversations around AI and customer support, Amazon Pay, personalization and privacy in ecommerce and shipping trends.

Conversations around AI and customer support, Amazon Pay, personalization and privacy in ecommerce and shipping trends.

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Episode Description On this episode Shawn and Joe discuss how to use those lucrative Amazon Pay with Points deals that surface around Prime Day. They also discuss another devaluation, new Chase spending offers and exactly what is happening with the Chicago Seminars plus where you can see Shawn speak. Episode Notes 0:00 - Summer travel updates and discussion 11:35 - Chicago seminars 19:13 - Amazon pay with points is back! 23:09 - Cathay Pacific devaluation 26:32 - Chase spend bonuses 29:24 - Dealing with travel disruptions Enjoying the podcast? Please consider leaving us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform! You can also connect with us anytime at podcast@milestomemories.com.  You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Sticher, Spotify, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, or via RSS. Don't see your favorite podcast platform? Please let us know! Music: Rewind by Jay Someday | https://soundcloud.com/jaysomeday Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Szegedi független színházak: évtizedek sikerei nullára ítélve – indoklás nélkül Telex     2023-06-10 23:26:27     Belföld Csongrád-Csanád Szeged Színház Pályázatok Nagyon nehéz pénzügyi helyzetbe került három szegedi független színházi műhely, mert az idei évre nem kaptak a működésükre állami támogatást a legfontosabb ilyen célú pályázaton. A döntéseket nem indokolják meg, nincs átlátható pontrendszer, és a pénzekről határozó testület tagjainak névsora is titkos. Hogyan vált Kelet-Európa a globális migráció központi szereplőjévé? G7     2023-06-11 04:34:05     Gazdaság Bevándorlás Migráció Magyarországon annyira féltették az emberek a saját jóléti pozíciójukat, hogy inkább migránsellenesek lettek. Nyuszis kávézó ellen tüntettek Kaliforniában Prove     2023-06-11 05:45:03     Állatvilág Akik el sem tudnak képzelni jobb párosítást, mint hogy a reggeli kávéjukat bolyhos nyuszik társaságában költsék el, azok pozitívan nyilatkoztak az élményeikről. De sokan úgy gondolják, az üzlet tulajdonosa kihasználja az ártatlan állatokat, akik számára elengedhetetlen a nyugodt és biztonságos környezet. Alig két hete, hogy beszámoltunk az Egyesült Veszélyesek a méhekre az ázsiai lódarazsak Sokszínű vidék     2023-06-11 05:05:05     Utazás Németország Olaszország Kína Méh A faj 2004 környékén érkezett meg Franciaországba egy kínai teherhajón áttelelve. A kelet felé is terjeszkedő ázsiai lódarázs Olaszországban és Németországban már elszaporodott. Ha nem jó tuberkulózis elleni gyógyszernek, jó lehet szuper gyomirtónak Agroinform     2023-06-11 05:44:00     Gazdaság Mezőgazdaság Gyógyszer TBC Az új szer több millió dollár megtakarítását és nagy mennyiségű növényi termék megmentését teszi lehetővé. A City a második angol klub, amely triplázni tudott Rangadó     2023-06-10 23:05:25     Foci Spanyolország Bajnokok Ligája Anglia FC Barcelona Katalónia Pep Guardiola Guardiolának ez a Barcával már összejött, a katalán szakember pályafutása harmadik BL-sikerét aratta. Vége a nagy kamatversenynek? Privátbankár     2023-06-11 05:58:00     Gazdaság Kamat Állampapír A szocho kamatjövedelmekre történő kiterjesztése megadta a kegyelemdöfést az állampapíron kívüli kockázatmentes lakossági befektetésnek. Vagy mégsem, és most jön el a tartós befektetési számla (tbsz) aranykora? Hiszen arra nem terjed ki az új szocho adóelvonás. Bárhogy lesz is, a bankok a legmagasabb fokozatba kapcsolták a lekötöttbetét-kamataikat, Hogyan választja ki zsákmányát a szúnyog? A férfi, vagy női vért kedvelik jobban? Szeretik a kókusz illatot? Magyar Mezőgazdaság     2023-06-11 04:09:00     Életmód Mezőgazdaság Szúnyog Milyen érdekes, hogy míg az egyik embert egy egész szúnyogcsapat ostromolja, a másikat inkább elkerülik, vagy legfeljebb néhány csípésnyi szenvedést kell eltűrnie. Vajon mi az oka, hogy nem vagyunk egyformán kívánatosak a szúnyogok számára? 10 lazulós, hangulatos piknikezőhely Magyarországon Startlap Utazás     2023-06-11 06:03:45     Utazás Életmód Összegyűjtöttünk 10 kedvelt helyszínt, ahova érdemes ellátogatni és tartani egy kiadós pikniket a nyári napsütésben. Hétköznapi dolgok, amiket Észak-Koreában betiltottak Startlap Vásárlás     2023-06-11 06:33:15     Külföld A világ legszigorúbb országában számos olyan tárgyat, használati eszközt, vagy éppen ételt, italt, netán frizurát és divatcikket tiltanak, ami számunkra teljesen természetes. Megérkezett a BNPL az Amazon Payre Fintech     2023-06-11 04:37:00     Modern Gazdaság Cégvilág Az egyik legnagyobb "Buy Now, Pay Later" szolgáltató, az Affirm jelentős mérföldkövet ért el. A maga nemében első vállalatként sikerült integrálódnia az Amazon Pay rendszerébe. Puskás Ferenc viaszszobrát is felkereste a Real Madrid kapusa Sportal     2023-06-10 22:48:00     Foci Spanyolország Real Madrid Puskás Ferenc Legénybúcsúra érkezett Budapestre csütörtökön, és a főváros megnézése mellett szombaton a Madame Tussauds Budapest vendége volt. Djokovics előzhet, a Nadal-akadémia növendéke állíthatja meg Magyar Nemzet     2023-06-11 06:40:00     Sport Szerbia Tenisz Novak Djokovic Rafael Nadal A szerb klasszis ma megszerezheti huszonharmadik Grand Slam-trófeáját. A hét lezárultával a zivataroktól is búcsúzunk Kiderül     2023-06-11 05:15:51     Időjárás Csapadék Vasárnap még több helyen lehet zápor, zivatar, majd délutántól időjárás-változás veszi kezdetét. A jövő hét első fele jóval kevesebb csapadékot tartogat, azonban sok helyen megerősödik a szél.

Szegedi független színházak: évtizedek sikerei nullára ítélve – indoklás nélkül Telex     2023-06-10 23:26:27     Belföld Csongrád-Csanád Szeged Színház Pályázatok Nagyon nehéz pénzügyi helyzetbe került három szegedi független színházi műhely, mert az idei évre nem kaptak a működésükre állami támogatást a legfontosabb ilyen célú pályázaton. A döntéseket nem indokolják meg, nincs átlátható pontrendszer, és a pénzekről határozó testület tagjainak névsora is titkos. Hogyan vált Kelet-Európa a globális migráció központi szereplőjévé? G7     2023-06-11 04:34:05     Gazdaság Bevándorlás Migráció Magyarországon annyira féltették az emberek a saját jóléti pozíciójukat, hogy inkább migránsellenesek lettek. Nyuszis kávézó ellen tüntettek Kaliforniában Prove     2023-06-11 05:45:03     Állatvilág Akik el sem tudnak képzelni jobb párosítást, mint hogy a reggeli kávéjukat bolyhos nyuszik társaságában költsék el, azok pozitívan nyilatkoztak az élményeikről. De sokan úgy gondolják, az üzlet tulajdonosa kihasználja az ártatlan állatokat, akik számára elengedhetetlen a nyugodt és biztonságos környezet. Alig két hete, hogy beszámoltunk az Egyesült Veszélyesek a méhekre az ázsiai lódarazsak Sokszínű vidék     2023-06-11 05:05:05     Utazás Németország Olaszország Kína Méh A faj 2004 környékén érkezett meg Franciaországba egy kínai teherhajón áttelelve. A kelet felé is terjeszkedő ázsiai lódarázs Olaszországban és Németországban már elszaporodott. Ha nem jó tuberkulózis elleni gyógyszernek, jó lehet szuper gyomirtónak Agroinform     2023-06-11 05:44:00     Gazdaság Mezőgazdaság Gyógyszer TBC Az új szer több millió dollár megtakarítását és nagy mennyiségű növényi termék megmentését teszi lehetővé. A City a második angol klub, amely triplázni tudott Rangadó     2023-06-10 23:05:25     Foci Spanyolország Bajnokok Ligája Anglia FC Barcelona Katalónia Pep Guardiola Guardiolának ez a Barcával már összejött, a katalán szakember pályafutása harmadik BL-sikerét aratta. Vége a nagy kamatversenynek? Privátbankár     2023-06-11 05:58:00     Gazdaság Kamat Állampapír A szocho kamatjövedelmekre történő kiterjesztése megadta a kegyelemdöfést az állampapíron kívüli kockázatmentes lakossági befektetésnek. Vagy mégsem, és most jön el a tartós befektetési számla (tbsz) aranykora? Hiszen arra nem terjed ki az új szocho adóelvonás. Bárhogy lesz is, a bankok a legmagasabb fokozatba kapcsolták a lekötöttbetét-kamataikat, Hogyan választja ki zsákmányát a szúnyog? A férfi, vagy női vért kedvelik jobban? Szeretik a kókusz illatot? Magyar Mezőgazdaság     2023-06-11 04:09:00     Életmód Mezőgazdaság Szúnyog Milyen érdekes, hogy míg az egyik embert egy egész szúnyogcsapat ostromolja, a másikat inkább elkerülik, vagy legfeljebb néhány csípésnyi szenvedést kell eltűrnie. Vajon mi az oka, hogy nem vagyunk egyformán kívánatosak a szúnyogok számára? 10 lazulós, hangulatos piknikezőhely Magyarországon Startlap Utazás     2023-06-11 06:03:45     Utazás Életmód Összegyűjtöttünk 10 kedvelt helyszínt, ahova érdemes ellátogatni és tartani egy kiadós pikniket a nyári napsütésben. Hétköznapi dolgok, amiket Észak-Koreában betiltottak Startlap Vásárlás     2023-06-11 06:33:15     Külföld A világ legszigorúbb országában számos olyan tárgyat, használati eszközt, vagy éppen ételt, italt, netán frizurát és divatcikket tiltanak, ami számunkra teljesen természetes. Megérkezett a BNPL az Amazon Payre Fintech     2023-06-11 04:37:00     Modern Gazdaság Cégvilág Az egyik legnagyobb "Buy Now, Pay Later" szolgáltató, az Affirm jelentős mérföldkövet ért el. A maga nemében első vállalatként sikerült integrálódnia az Amazon Pay rendszerébe. Puskás Ferenc viaszszobrát is felkereste a Real Madrid kapusa Sportal     2023-06-10 22:48:00     Foci Spanyolország Real Madrid Puskás Ferenc Legénybúcsúra érkezett Budapestre csütörtökön, és a főváros megnézése mellett szombaton a Madame Tussauds Budapest vendége volt. Djokovics előzhet, a Nadal-akadémia növendéke állíthatja meg Magyar Nemzet     2023-06-11 06:40:00     Sport Szerbia Tenisz Novak Djokovic Rafael Nadal A szerb klasszis ma megszerezheti huszonharmadik Grand Slam-trófeáját. A hét lezárultával a zivataroktól is búcsúzunk Kiderül     2023-06-11 05:15:51     Időjárás Csapadék Vasárnap még több helyen lehet zápor, zivatar, majd délutántól időjárás-változás veszi kezdetét. A jövő hét első fele jóval kevesebb csapadékot tartogat, azonban sok helyen megerősödik a szél.

All the cool kids are filling out the Equity listener survey. We want to hear from you!It was a hectic week, with little in the way of the traditional Summer Slowdown making itself known. So, here's what Alex and Mary Ann covered with some help from our dear friend Jacquie Melinek:WWDC in a nutshell: In case you missed it, Apple had a big event this week. On tap were the usual run of software updates, and improved computers in both laptop and desktop format. And, you know, that other thing.Affirm partners with Amazon (again): This is not Affirm's first tie-up with Amazon, but investors are pretty excited that the pair of companies are once again linking arms. As we continue to wait for mega-unicorn Klarna's IPO — more notes here — we are keeping our ears close the BNPL ground.Cava's IPO continues to delight Alex: What has an IPO coming up and has this little podcast in a tizzy? Yep, it's Cava, the fast-casual chain that, thanks to a dollop or two of venture capital money, we get to cover!All things SEC and Crypto: The SEC broke into its hammer closet so that it could go play whack-a-mole this week with crypto exchanges both foreign and domestic.Sequoia does to itself what regulators want to do to Google: What has three parts and is now competing with itself? Sequoia. Think of it like an inverse Google, if you will.How real estate will affect the climate crisis: It turns out that construction is not so good for the planet. And with a commercial real estate crisis brewing, can we add one to one and get five?Next week, Equity is on vacation! We're taking a breather before launching into another massive run of shows, but we'll be back before you know it. For episode transcripts and more, head toEquity's Simplecast website.Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us onApple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. TechCrunch also has agreat show on crypto, ashow that interviews founders, one thatdetails how our stories come together and more!

Microsoft ofrecerá los modelos GPT de OpenAI a los usuarios de su servicio de computación en nube Azure Government, entre los que se encuentran varias agencias federales estadounidenses. Adaptive Checkout de Affirm Holdings estará disponible en Amazon Pay en todo USA. $MSFT $AFRM $AMZN $GME

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq closed negative, near session lows. BofA Securities' Jared Woodard and BD8 Capital's Barbara Doran break down the market action as investors wait next week's Fed decision. GameStop reported a Q1 loss and announced it was firing its CEO; Ryan Cohen was named executive chairman. Wolfspeed CEO Gregg Lowe discusses his company's strong stock performance and why silicon carbide is key to its growth story. Affirm shares rallied on news of a partnership with Amazon Pay; MoffettNathanson analyst Eugene Simuni on why it doesn't change the macro headwinds facing the industry. The WSJ reports Amazon is planning an ad tier for its Prime Video streaming service; the reporter behind the scoop Jessica Toonkel joins to discuss the broader implications for the streaming players. RBC Capital's Helima Croft on the impact of the Saudi output cuts and where oil goes from here.

India's state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp. (ONGC) has announced plans to invest Rs. 1 trillion ($12.1 billion) by 2030 to increase its renewable energy capacity and reduce direct emissions. The company aims to scale up its renewable energy capacity to 10 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, a significant increase from the current 189 megawatts. The world's biggest AI experts have captured in one sentence the risk of AI. Blackrock, the world's biggest money manager, has slashed the valuation of BYJU'S by 62 percent. Also in this brief, the C919, China's challenge to Airbus-Boeing takes flight. Notes: Some of the world's top AI experts, including Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, have signed a short statement to make it easy for everyone to understand that the risk of extinction of the human race due to artificial intelligence is very real. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement reads, published by the Center for AI Safety. Among the other signatories on the list, which runs into a couple of hundred experts from around the world, are Geoffrey Hinton, Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto, A pioneer in the field of deep learning and neural networks; Yoshua Bengio, Professor of Computer Science, U. Montreal / Mila, a leading researcher in the field of deep learning and co-founder of the deep learning framework, "Theano"; Demis Hassabis, CEO, Google DeepMind, an influential figure in the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and deep reinforcement learning; and Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic. India's state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp. (ONGC) has announced plans to invest Rs. 1 trillion ($12.1 billion) by 2030 to increase its renewable energy capacity and reduce direct emissions. The company aims to scale up its renewable energy capacity to 10 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, a significant increase from the current 189 megawatts. ONGC's chairman, Arun Kumar Singh, said that while fossil fuel demand in India may continue to grow until 2040, the company is committed to balancing its portfolio with green energy projects. Amazon India has launched a limited introduction of bill payments at select restaurants using Amazon Pay. The feature, currently available in certain areas of Bengaluru, allows users to make payments using various methods such as credit/debit cards, net banking, UPI, Amazon Pay Later, TechCrunch reports. China's domestically built passenger jet, the C919, completed its maiden commercial flight, on May 28, marking a significant milestone in the country's ambition to challenge the aircraft manufacturing duopoly of Boeing and Airbus, Quartz reports. The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) developed the C919, which flew from Shanghai to Beijing with approximately 130 passengers on board. Despite facing delays and design flaws, Comac has signed contracts for 1,035 C919 jets with several dozen customers. Blackrock, the world's biggest money manager, has slashed the valuation of BYJU'S by 62 percent to $8.4 billion in the March quarter, down from its previous valuation of $22 billion, The Hindu Business Line reports. This marks the second markdown by Blackrock, which holds a 0.9 percent stake in the company. The funding winter and worsening macroeconomic conditions have prompted private investors to reduce valuations of several start-up unicorns, with cuts ranging from 30-50 percent, according to the report.

Hoy vamos a hablar sobre el mercado de los medios de pago online y cuáles son los que mejor funcionan, sobre todo con el cambio que ha habido en los dos últimos años en términos de regulaciones y en cambio de consumo por la pandemia. Hablamos sobre el último informe elaborado por Confianza Online y Adigital donde salen a la luz datos muy interesantes sobre la cuota de mercado que tiene cada solución de pago en el sector ecommerce, cuál es el porcentaje de fraude y cuáles son los métodos de pago más utilizados. Destacar por ejemplo que Bizum ya se encuentra en el puesto 4 de todas las soluciones disponibles, y es una de las opciones que ponemos encima de la mesa que puedes implementar en tu ecommerce. Hablamos sobre las comisiones de Stripe, la necesidad de incorporar Paypal o de otras opciones menos comunes como Amazon Pay o el pago fraccionado como Klarna o Sequra, entre otras, para poder reducir la tasa de abandono de carrito. Newsletter: https://ecosistemaecommerce.com/newsletter/ Web: https://ecosistemaecommerce.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/javierlopezrod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ecosistemaecommerce Twitter: https://twitter.com/ecosistemaecomm Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE2zroaDzTVZRwNOh5Ma9cg

Theme: How can NFT buyers detect wash trading on a project Detecting wash trading on an NFT project can be a challenging task, but here are a few things NFT buyers can do to help identify potential wash trading: Check the Trading Volume: High trading volume on an NFT project is generally a positive sign. However, if you see a massive amount of trading volume that doesn't align with the number of active traders, that could be a red flag. Analyze the Transactions: Analyzing the transactions on a blockchain can provide insights into the activity of an NFT project. Look for large numbers of transactions between the same accounts or transactions occurring at irregular intervals. Check the Token Holders: Reviewing the list of token holders can reveal suspicious activity. If you notice a high concentration of tokens held by a small number of addresses, that could be a sign of wash trading. Research the Team: Do some research on the team behind the NFT project. Check their track record and reputation in the community. If they have a history of creating similar projects that were involved in wash trading, that should raise some red flags. Check for Social Media Activity: Watch out for excessive social media activity around the NFT project. If the team is constantly hyping up the project and there's little substance to back it up, that could be a sign of wash trading. News: At Least $37M Worth of y00ts NFTs Migrate to Polygon From Solana in One Day Ticketmaster Tests NFT-Enabled Pre-Sales With Avenged Sevenfold Tour Real Estate Investors Buy Solana NFT Home for $246,800 Amazon's NFT Plans Teased in a Receipt Mailed Friday Afternoon Amazon NFT Marketplace Could Feature Beeple, Pudgy Penguins - Blockworks NFT collector accidentally destroyed a $129k CryptoPunk            ROugh Transcript [00:00:00] Day. You sound good. I'm leaving that in. I know. I sound good. Thanks. Oh, this we are, we live. We're rolling in, like I think this is what popular podcasts do. All right. Yeah. This week you sneaking how, how NFT buyers can detect wash trading on a given project. We know it's happening, but is it happening to us? [00:01:07] I'm excited to get there, but first, I don't know. What are we seeing in the news right now? Andrew? Oh man, George, thank you. You, you put the, the news headlines together for us this week, so man, so I'm trying to earn my keep. Yeah, this is, this is big, but, ah, man, I, I've definitely been, been keeping pace with some of these. [00:01:27] You got a couple that I, uh, didn't, didn't notice earlier, but man, we'll start off with Utes. Utes have migrated to Polygon 37 million worth. So this is, we talked about this a little bit, like what does it take to actually migrate and it does take active holder, you need to do something and. We've seen a, a large percentage, uh, of holders actually do that. [00:01:55] Uh, I don't know. I'm trying to, I'm trying to formulate like what this means. It seems like you should just do this out of value. Of course. Is there something that we should be looking at in terms of a platform usage or, or network usage that you're seeing? What, what's your take on this? One is that I kind of see this almost like an N b A draft or whatever, N f NFL draft, right? [00:02:20] Where, where projects actually can and are being lobbied by these L two L one s, what have you to, to move over and you better believe there's like somebody paying somebody for, for this. But you know, I. Think also, this is on the second hand, a vote of confidence or lack thereof when you are moving off of your main, uh, platform like Solana is Oh, yeah, yeah. [00:02:46] Honestly, not the home of the largest projects. And if you want to become one of the largest projects is there. And then the other thing I'll say is it gives me a lot of faith actually in some of those, uh, tezos bets that we made with regard to artists there. Because one risk frankly is like, I'm betting both on this artist, this piece of. [00:03:06] And Tezos in the future of that, something that, look, I haven't dug into enough, but if they're using these wormhole bridges to move from one to the other. That's interesting. Yeah. It, it is interesting here and I'm, I'm curious to see how this plays out. I, you know, as I mentioned, did not, uh, put the, the news headlines together here. [00:03:25] Did notice one project that's actually migrated from, uh, ETH to Polygon and now to Arro. And I'm curious to see how much of this is sort of chasing the, the, the hot, uh, the hot L two. And you know, I hope that it is not that you know, I, I think that Polyon has a lot of features that that will sustain and. [00:03:50] I can see that there's going to be a lot of attention on, on zk Rollups, on, on Arro just other L two s in, you know, in the nearby future. Yeah. Well, I wonder if also there's in the future where Ordinals are like, oh no, we've broken and been dis disinvited from the party at over, at, uh, at Bitcoin Central. [00:04:10] So, overall, I'm bullish on these wormholes, though in the back of my mind. I do know that whenever you build a bridge, you. A hole for attack. And we've seen a lot of bridge based attacks. So I'm a little absolutely concerned of signing any contract like that. I'm not the first penguin in that pudge water. [00:04:30] I'm skeptical and of, of the, uh, security of bridges in general. All right. Getting onto the next one. This one, man, this one's interesting. So we got Ticketmaster testing, NFT enabled presale. So this is this. Ticketmaster actually selling NFTs. This is a Ticketmaster allowing artists to use NFTs to grant access to. [00:04:55] Pre-sales to early access to, to tickets. This has been, Ticketmaster has been in the headlines a lot recently with, uh, some of the problems with specifically Taylor Swift's concerts and how fast they sold out. I think most of them sold out before, uh, the, the actual public sale. They were all sold in the public, uh, in the, uh, pre-sale. [00:05:16] And there were a lot of questions about how. The people that were deemed, uh, somewhat led longtime fans. I can't remember what the, the term was, but they used the term, there was a lot of questions about how they were determined. So I think there's, you know, ticketmaster's least responding here. It definitely not a company that. [00:05:36] Would be, you know, that's, that's web three first. And it is interesting to see that they are, uh, dipping into nft Enable sales. So this is a Avenge seven full tour. Uh, was a little surprised to see that this band was touring. But then again, uh, you know, don't, don't pay that much debt to it. I dunno, what's your take on this, George? [00:05:55] What do you, what do you see in here? I'm so excited by this, and it was like kind of floated under the radar a little bit. But think about it with regard to functionality for just a second. The question of why an artist actually can produce an N F T that has value is through the roof. Now, that one use case, the fact that frankly, ticket Master is a wash with freaking front running, little arbitrage monster. [00:06:24] And guess what? If you wanna front run my favorite band, cuz I've been a fan for a decade and then upsell me cuz they charge too little at the right, wrong price and then make a vig all the way. Guess what? You have to be a holder like I was cuz I found my band. I bought the N F T and I can be rewarded like. [00:06:43] What a ruthlessly pragmatic use case, and it's exciting. I'm shocked. I am shocked. Do that band early. Show it. Come on. Yeah. But then the band can offer value directly to those, those users. Absolutely. This is freaking perfect. Look, I, I don't expect this rollout to. To be perfect. No, and it's going to and it's better. [00:07:07] We're moving in a good direction. Well, no offense to Avenge Sevenfold, but I think they're the lower bar of maybe not Taylor Swift in terms of testing, so Right. Hey Steve, it works. It's a great way to test. Yeah. Again, no, no, no offense to the band. I don't know much about them. I think it's great that they are, you know, they're definitely willing to test this out. [00:07:29] I imagine that they had to, to agree to this. I hope they did. But very cool idea and I'm, yeah, definitely keeping tabs on this one. All right. This is, man, this is another one that has, this sparked a lot of headlines. This week. We've got a new real estate N F T platform. Uh, this is. Uh, home base. So they sold a home this week or this past week in Macallen, Texas for about 245,247,000 via N F T. [00:08:04] So it's not the first N F t, it's not the first home sold via N F T, but this is, I believe, the first on. So, Well first on Solana, I believe also the first, that was actually the first platform was solely dedicated to that. I could be wrong, I thought the other platforms were more dedicated to non NFT sales and this, and those were sort of, uh, I don't know, like, you know, side project, uh, sort of acquisitions. [00:08:35] But definitely interesting here. It's, it's, I've had a few people bring this up to me, uh, in the past week. You know, you mentioned the, I mean, even the feature of being able to be, uh, purchased in a a digital currency is a big, is a big thing. What they're doing here, I believe is actually owning the house with an LLC and then selling the N F T cause we still have the problem of. [00:09:05] Legal ownership of a, of a home. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know that that can't be done. You can't change that on the blockchain yet. I, I, you know, I don't expect that to change anytime soon. And there are still ways to sort of incorporate existing laws with, you know, again, this is with trusted intermediary, so you know, there are problems. [00:09:26] It's not perfect and it's interesting. Yeah, I mean, we see fractionalized ownership as a other possibility here when you have that N F T to be able to, to chop that up and, you know, in the good old traditional real estate fiat world we had. Mm-hmm. You know, I think it's like what Picasso trying to do that among others who are like, all right, you 10 people own this thing. [00:09:48] This may be a bit different if you have like 10,000 owners. I don't know if you all. 20 seconds of home ownership, but probably works differently. Stop by, take a picture. Use the bathroom. You have, you have bathroom rights on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. [00:10:06] All right, so we've got some news about Amazon's NF t plans. We discussed this recently that Amazon has n F T plans. There's been a bit more that has come out recently. Uh, there is basically a leaked email saying that there will be the potential to resale, uh, to resell the tokens or these, these digital assets that you have. [00:10:31] There's not a ton of information here as it. I mean, it, it legitimately looks like a, a leaked email here. Did you have a read of this one, George? Yeah. They're just saying like, the opportunity to like resell is being like limited, something's being locked. So there's kind of be some sort of, it seems like initial drop, so maybe there's like an access token. [00:10:53] I am complet. Way, way, way overreading into this. But what we are seeing is like snapshots into like Amazon Pay with transactions built into it seems like the interface and integration with Amazon Digital, uh, pieces. So, Look, I am not throwing the party for mass adoption, even though this article is like really hoping for it. [00:11:15] Fine. Yeah, I don't see that. But look, it, it's not getting stopped. It's certainly not taking the path of like Facebook's metaverse that is no longer doing metaverse, but still is meta. Right? So one thing I note, uh, you know, I've noticed about Amazon is if you try to get a, if you, if you were to return, you get the option to either get the refund in. [00:11:39] Amazon balance or back to your credit card and you know it's equal value and they will give it to you a lot faster. If it's Amazon balance. There's similar things with if you get the delivery At a later date, you know, they'll give you a dollar credit or, or, or something, you know, digital media of credit. [00:11:58] But they are definitely trying to do these things where you have credit within their ecosystem. I can absolutely see a play here towards making that more of a unified ecosystem where those credits can be valued across, uh, multiple platforms where they are. Right now. Right now it's, it's, it's a single pla, like it's a single usage. [00:12:23] Most those incentives take. Gotcha. Yeah. Well, the last one I found, I mean, I saw it. I saw it on Twitter. It made my heart hurt. I felt so bad. But here, here's why I'm pulling this out. An N F T collector accidentally destroyed $129,000 crypto punk. Oh yeah. And. This is particularly sad because frankly this is like being run on like cnbc.com and so right now, like this is the kind of thing that brings N F T into the mainstream. [00:12:55] Like the, the, the articles we're talking about are like coming outta like. Coin desk or out of, you know, like, uh, you know, decrypt in our ecosystem, this C N B C, not our ecosystem. This is what the public's view of NFTs really is. It is a hot mess where even people that know their stuff lose their stuff. [00:13:16] So this is just the sort of like cold water on frankly, anybody who thinks like, Hey, the user. Experience is fine the way it is. Like it's just not, it's not the one it, [00:13:29] yeah, that's a good point. W w I just don't even know what to say. There's so much to be done for user experience in web three. It's, oh, man. It's, it's frustrating. There's a lot of potential. I guess I should look at it that way, right? Yeah. Lot of upside. And you know what? Frankly, if you are, you know, a holder of crypto punks, you just got that much more rare. [00:13:55] I'm like, at this point, how many get accidentally burned? You know, if you're moving stuff. Well, I mean, with crypto, if you doing stuff, test something with a different wallet, a different, like, I mean, I don't play at that level, but I mean, I have a couple NFTs that I would be, I wrapped in, I had a punk, I wrapped a. [00:14:12] It scared. I mean, it scares me thinking about that. And I also don't quite understand how you, uh, you don't understand how you burn into it. Address book. It's, it's, it's really too bad. I, I, you know, peop you know, mistakes happen. That sucks. Yeah. There it is. Right? Like, and at certain point, like, you're like, oh, it's on you. [00:14:29] You made a mistake. It's on you. Like, how many times are you gonna say that? You're like, no, it's really on the ux. It's, it's just not where it needs to be for people to be moving around this level of asset. So heart goes out to you fella. Yeah. Start with, look, if you're listening to us and considering purchasing your first N f t that is a punk, I'm gonna say reach out to us. [00:14:53] We'll help you. Don't do that. We'll buy something else. I'll sell you something for a lot, a lot less. Okay. Hit me up. Buy a moon cat. How about that? Discord And wrap the moon. Cat. Go wrap that moon cat. I got a deal for. Yikes. This is not financial advice brought to you by, we don't have an affordable project this week. [00:15:15] We're, uh, they're all affordable. They're actually some, I'm, I'm looking at that recent art blocks thing. I think there's like some shopping to be done coming up. I think, oh man, this is actually one other piece of news art blocks coming out with their own marketplace. This is, this is big. I. For the, the generative art marketplace. [00:15:33] So we've seen all the problems with not even problems. We've seen the, I should shouldn't say, just problems. We've seen the wars with royalties, with, with platform fees. Art block is coming out their own, their own platform for secondary sales. I think this is going to take a good percentage of the, uh, art block sales. [00:15:56] We'll see what happens. Archipelago. Another attempt at being a marketplace for, uh, generative art, sales, never fully caught on. I think this has more potential because it is from PL and there's a really dedicated community there. It's sort of where I. Was able to get a lot of traction with my dashboards early on, and I know how feverish that community can be. [00:16:21] So I am, I'm, man, I'm definitely watching this one and, and curious to see how this goes, to see what, uh, what sort of fees develop there. Open sea. Is not focusing on those fees right now. I mean, even talking with people there, they are focusing on minting fees. So, you know, there's a platform that's trying to, to, to do something a little bit different. [00:16:47] I, I, I'm, I'm curiously where these platform wars end, I think we're far from, from settled. I'm still skeptical of blur being the, the, the king as everybody seems to be, to, to be crowning it right now. And man this. Uh, I think it'll be more, uh, more of a shake up than, than maybe people are letting or, or people are, uh, predicting right now. [00:17:11] Yeah. I, I think you have a much better pulse on the art blocks marketplace opportunity. Uh, I just, I just dunno how you compete with zero fees, but maybe there's, Additional experience elements. Maybe there's like a custodial holding where you protect somebody's assets. I, I, you know, I don't know. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't look, I don't know entirely how it's gonna go, but I think there will be incentives and look, a lot of people do things with the, the promise of maybe something happening in the future. [00:17:46] All right. Yes, the scene, oh, that in mind there was a rumor of a mask token going around this week. A a meta mask token that has been dispelled, unfortunately. Didn't see a few dashboards pop up. I don't know if, if anybody's still hoping. It seems like those have been dispelled, so I think we can move on now to our, to our project. [00:18:08] Would you have for us this week, George? The pro. I mean, I don't have any projects. Here's what I was gonna say. I'm watching these recent, uh, I'll say like one ETH projects that Kevin Rose was highlighting on his podcast. Mm-hmm. And he was like, his affordable is one eth mine is like Hmm. Point two, 0.1. [00:18:26] Yeah. But I'm curious, anything that he sees sort of value in at this point and then sort of watching the, the normal hype cycle go up and come back down. So far, every time we have talked about. Wait, watch and see it drop. Like it, it happens. So. Oh. Huh. We haven't been wrong. No, we haven't been wrong. We haven't been wrong in our estimates that you should wait and watch the number, number go down and then go shopping. [00:18:54] So, uh, I'm kind of like waiting on a couple of those. I'm like doing this sort of like picking up the trash of like two weeks later off of Kevin Rose's recommendations to see like price and luon. Because there's quality somewhere in there, certainly with artists, and if he's hyping that artist once, they may have it again. [00:19:09] But, uh, yeah, that, that's like my, my current thought. Anyway, we are talking about wash trading, how to identify it. And just to be clear, yeah. We've talked about recently, right? It's what we discussed this recently, like what is actual wash trading? I think it's, man, this is, Good, good topic here cuz we, it has come up in recent episodes and it's hard to define. [00:19:40] Yeah, well you know, it depends on who you talk to cuz I don't even know, like technically they say like, you know, in February we had that huge bump and it was up 126% versus the previous in terms of activity happening on X two. Why do blur looks rare And we, we saw and have speculated. Potentially, you know, according to certain researchers, like what one in five transactions I've seen anywhere from 20 to 40% quoted as being wash traded. [00:20:09] I think it can be difficult. Technically what we're talking about, it's market manipulation and it's when, uh, you know, someone basically trades with themselves to like one wallet to another, to artificially inflate the price, give this illusion of liquidity. Of a little bit of that FOMO drive up. And then once at a certain point, everyone, you know, gets the signal, then they begin to, to dump on the public once they think it is a, a project on the run, and it's. [00:20:39] It seems very hard to stop and we see a lot more of it. So here's the question, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm looking at a project, someone listening is looking at a project. Mm-hmm. What are some of the elements that we're looking for to identify wash trading, to set off a little pattern recognition for us. [00:20:59] You mentioned earlier volatility. Volatility in general, spikes in activity are a pretty good, uh, indicator. I, if you see something that shoots up abnormally from where it was, that's a pretty good indicator that there's something inor abnormal going on now. I can't say that that's, you know, a hundred percent true if there is something, you know, if something shoots up, you know, we also know that there's a lot of cases in NFTs where there's a news of, if you own this, you'll get X airdrop whatever, you know, some something of that sort. [00:21:37] So there are cases where it just happens, you know, but definitely it's worth looking at when there's volume spikes. There's a, one of the issues that I see. That the reliance on volume as a metric of, of, of, of leaders, of dashboards, uh, is very easy to to game, especially when you have, when you can do these wash trades that really don't cost much, especially if you put the, when we've got 0%, uh, platform fees. [00:22:11] If you can put in 0% royal. Uh, you know, you're not really. You know, really it doesn't really cost anything to do this wash trading, and it can get you to the top of many different leaderboards across different, different platforms. Crypto Slam recently did a, uh, did analysis of the wash trading that is happening on blur and found, found much more than what was being at attributed to wash trading than some of the. [00:22:42] Some of the other researchers out there, and it's not saying those researchers are wrong, I think it's just that their methodology was maybe outdated compared to what was being done on blur. There's things change over time and incentives definitely drive, uh, behavior and I think that we have to keep that in mind as you know, as these incentives are put out. [00:23:07] The behavior will change and adapt to, to maximize their, those rewards. Yeah. So you're mentioning here like what, what we can do here is like check the trading volume, and so here are the triggers. You have high trading volume, fine. However, if you see a lot of volume that doesn't match with the number of active trader. [00:23:30] That's a flag. So you're looking for not just high volume, but high volume of unique wallets as far as you can tell, and you're absolutely right. This is on the rise too right now because frankly, back when we started this podcast a couple years back, you know, the gas fees would chew you up. And so if you're out there thinking you're, oh, I'm totally scamming got, you're paying a per a hundred dollars triple digits all the time. [00:23:57] That was what the norm was, right? And now we're seeing, oh, I got excited when I saw something under like, oh, $90. I'm pulling the trigger 20 right now. I'm like, when I see 80, I'm like, man, there's something crazy going on. And that. My, my gas fees used to be on current affordable projects. Ency crashed regularly anyway, that way. [00:24:21] So there you go. Here's your trading volume. So it's volume versus unique traders. Here's another one. You can analyze the transactions. A bit and just like look at the activity of the project and you are looking for those large number of transactions between the same accounts. And you can kind of eyeball this almost, right? [00:24:39] Like, is there a clever way to do this, Andrew? [00:24:41] I mean, I know you've created dune dashboards, right? Where you could put in a project and you can kind of look at the, the top traders. Is there a way to see like, oh, it's between these two? No, honestly, folks more clever. Openly has really good, uh, mm-hmm. Charts on this at this point. Open C'S Incorporated Great charts right in there. [00:24:59] Gem has some different ones and, you know, gem being owned by openly, it's actually different, but I found that those are so much more, uh, accessible and useful. There's so much more accessible than, than many that are platforms Now, I don't go to a lot of the dashboards that even I set up and, and created, uh, because most of the information I, I need is right there at this point, and. [00:25:24] That's, I mean, it's, it's great. You can look at things like, so when we're looking at those, when I look at those, I'm looking at things like how many, you know, at, at the top holders, at the, uh, how many are owned by the top holders? What those, like who are those top holders? Looking at the recent activity there's. [00:25:43] Yeah, if you haven't played around with that, that, that, uh, tab definitely check into that one a bit more. It gives a pretty good overview of, of the, uh, collection at this point. Yeah. And another one here is look for, and we talk about this, the, the weighted distribution of ownership. So if one wallet owns more than. [00:26:07] A number of percent. Like as soon as you start talking about owning like 5% or more of a project, like massive alarm bells should be going off. Especially if there's a cause that person can move that market very quickly. The team being paid, I think that's, again, they're holding like, like that's lockup. [00:26:24] Like, you know, I think there's a different thing there that can actually be good. I'd say if they aren't selling, but the second they start selling, that's, that's a bad sign. Right. Yeah, it's a very bad sign. Uh, alrighty. Uh, you can research the team. You mentioned the team. You wanna understand who they are, their track record. [00:26:47] We have talked about this ad nauseum when you're analyzing a project, but again, if they are that anonymous team, which we do not love, and you can't tell whose wallet is, who's in there, uh, they probably have a, his, you know, a history of creating these project. Have a strategy behind wash trading that hypes and then drops on the public market, right? [00:27:08] Because their job is to design something that looks good off the bat, has confidence, but is anonymous and they have enough wallets to move things around. And you know, it's a i, I think it's a rinse and repeat. I think there are digital teams running this play again and again and again. Right now. I think there are, and I think there are plenty. [00:27:30] Named agencies, teams, backers doing this as well. I've, I'm, unless I'm, unless against the, the AAN teams, if they have a track record, if you can prove that you've done something I've seen plenty of cases of, of non and on teams being yeah, like here's my, my reputation in a, an adjacent area like trash removal, and now I can do crypto NFTs. [00:28:00] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I wanna see a track recording crypto. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways, I know there are a lot of ways to prove yourself without actually, you know, operating, you know, operating a contract that. You know, millions of funds or even hundreds of thousands. There are ways to prove without doing that as the first step. [00:28:22] Alright, a final one here. I don't know if you have others beyond it, but I really like this one because it is the anti signal. Basically, check social media for the project, and if you see it pumping on like Twitter, not even pumping, but just a lot of chatter on Twitter. About the project that's like just excessive or spammy and like, you can tell now, which sort of like profiles are, are junk. [00:28:50] Like if you see that type of hype on social, like give a search for, I'd say run, don't walk, follow, see people you follow, keep that that filter in mind when you do these searches and see if it's actually people that you're, that you're confident in. And if they're talking about it, you know, maybe that's. [00:29:07] Story, but see what they're saying. I have definitely found that, oh, I found that I get a lot more dms from people pumping things and then look at like, who they're, you know, almost, they're not followed by anybody that I know. Like that's a pretty good rule, even though they have a good following. But. [00:29:27] Ah man. There's always new scams out there, right? Yeah. Well, it depends on the day, but I think that's a good, I think that's a good way to look at it with those different options, you know, as we, uh, get to the end here. I don't think we're gonna have time for Vitalik again this week. I know, I know. [00:29:43] He's been waiting in the waiting. He's waiting. He's like on the line right now. I just, you know, uh, maybe I'll send him a moon cat M&M's only and I just dunno if we can do that. No, I can't. I don't have the technology for that. All right, well, I will see you out there and leave a, leave a rating. Leave a review. [00:30:04] We love those things. Later, later.

The Reserve Bank of India approved 32 entities, including Google and Amazon Pay, to operate as online payment aggregators, Tile announces a new “anti-theft mode,” and Tencent reportedly abandons its extended reality hardware plans. MP3 Please SUBSCRIBE HERE. You can get an ad-free feed of Daily Tech Headlines for $3 a month here. A specialContinue reading "India Approves Google and Amazon Pay As Online Payment Aggregators – DTH"

「ふるさと納税でAmazon Pay限定キャンペーン。ギフトカード支払いで最大3%還元」　Amazonの決済サービス「Amazon Pay」は、対象のふるさと納税サイトでAmazon Pay＋Amazonギフトカードで支払うと最大3%を還元する「2022年Amazon Payふるさと納税キャンペーン」を12月1日から開始した。期間は12月31日 23:59まで。

DC joins global protest against one of the most exploitative companies on the planet.    Today's labor quote: Our Revolution.   Today's labor history: 10,000 New Orleans workers, black and white, participate in a solidarity parade.    @wpfwdc #1u #unions #LaborRadioPod @AFLCIO Proud founding member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network.

DC joins global protest against one of the most exploitative companies on the planet.    Today's labor quote: Our Revolution.   Today's labor history: 10,000 New Orleans workers, black and white, participate in a solidarity parade.    @wpfwdc #1u #unions #LaborRadioPod @AFLCIO Proud founding member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network.

For the third consecutive year, a global coalition of trade unions and political organisations, including DiEM25, will stand together against Amazon on Black Friday. This day of action will see strikes and protests take place around the world calling for an end to Amazon's squeeze on workers, communities and the planet. It once seemed like Amazon was simply too big to be fought effectively by workers and the Left. But recent initiatives such as Make Amazon Pay, and this year's successful union drive in the US, have slowly but surely started to make dents in the giant corporation's armour. How can we use Amazon's global presence against them to support these campaigns across borders, and what does the fight against Amazon tell us about our struggle against capitalism more broadly? Our panel, including Yanis Varoufakis, Dusan Pajovic and Amir Kiyaei, debates. Join us live and send us your questions and comments! Support the Make Amazon pay campaign: https://makeamazonpay.com/

Global day of action planned for November 25, “Black Friday.” Hear more at RadioLabour. Today's labor quote: Nick Rudikoff. Today's labor history: General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York founded.   @wpfwdc #1u #unions #LaborRadioPod @AFLCIO @nickrudikoff @uniglobalunion @radiolabour   Proud founding member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network.

Interested in the metaverse and need to know how to get started? Meet Alan Smithson, founder of MetaVrse, multiple TED Talk speaker, and builder of “The Mall” in the metaverse, but not just any mall! If there were a hundred-page encyclopedia of the metaverse, Alan would fill every page but you'd still need more room to cover his vast knowledge of all things metaverse. It's season 2, episode 4, and we're continuing our Retail Transformers series – you'll see why Alan Smithson is truly more than meets the eye!Alan tells you what you need to get started with the metaverse, but takes us on an even deeper journey that touches on the future of jobs in digital technologies, how education needs to change to keep up, how the metaverse could make the world a better place, and of course, why shopping should be fun again! Plus, we'll learn why asking children what they want to be when they grow up is the wrong question to ask. The real question is …News alert! We're back at #20 on the Feedspot Top 60 Best Retail podcasts list, so please keep those 5-star reviews in Apple Podcasts coming! With your help, we'll move our way further up the Top 20! Leave us a review and be mentioned in a future episode! https://blog.feedspot.com/retail_podcasts/Meet your hosts, helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:Ricardo Belmar, a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer for 2022 & 2021, RIS News Top Movers and Shakers in Retail for 2021, a Top 12 ecommerce influencer, advisory council member at George Mason University's Center for Retail Transformation, and director partner marketing advisor for retail & consumer goods at Microsoft.Casey Golden, CEO of Luxlock. Obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, now slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech!Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring E-Motive, and Overclocked, from the album Beat Hype, written by Hestron Mimms, published by Imuno.The Retail Razor ShowFollow us on Twitter: https://bit.ly/TwRRazorConnect with us on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/LI-RRazorSubscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/RRShowYouTubeSubscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/RetailRazorShowRetail Razor Show Episode Page: https://bit.ly/RRShowPodHost → Ricardo Belmar,Follow on Twitter - https://bit.ly/twRBelmarConnect on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/LIRBelmarRead my comments on RetailWire - https://bit.ly/RWRBelmarCo-host → Casey Golden,Follow on Twitter - https://bit.ly/twCaseyConnect on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/LICaseyRead my comments on RetailWire - https://bit.ly/RWCaseyTRANSCRIPTS2E4 Retail Transformers - Alan Smithson[00:00:00] Pre-Show Intro[00:00:00] Alan Smithson: Good morning. Retail Razor. No, maybe too much. [00:00:05] Ricardo Belmar: actually we might, we might use that at the, in the intro beginning. [00:00:07] That was pretty [00:00:08] Good. ..That [00:00:09] Alan Smithson: like bit connect . I wanna go to a crypto conference and start doing that. Bit connect[00:00:17] Ricardo Belmar: Now that would be fun to see. [00:00:19] Alan Smithson: Too early maybe. Okay. We'll just start now. [00:00:21] Ricardo Belmar: Okay. All right, here we go. Here we go. [00:00:23][00:00:23] Introduction[00:00:23] Ricardo Belmar: hello, and welcome to season two, episode four of the Retail Razor Show. I'm your host, Ricardo Belmar.[00:00:49] Casey Golden: And I'm your co-host, Casey Golden. Welcome Retail Razor Show listeners to retail's favorite podcast for product junkies, commerce technologists, and everyone else in retail and retail tech alike.[00:01:01] Ricardo Belmar: And we have a truly special treat this week. Following up from our season debut episode on the Metaverse, we are back to talk more metaverse this week, aren't we?[00:01:10] Casey Golden: Yes, and I'm excited. Our listeners and viewers should be excited because this week we're not only talking Metaverse, but we're continuing our Retail Transformer series with special guest, Alan Smithson, founder and CEO of the company, Metaverse.[00:01:24] Ricardo Belmar: Yes. Our faithful followers will learn exactly why Alan is 'more than meets the eye'.[00:01:31] Casey Golden: Aww, you're gonna use that line, every time for these series, aren't you?[00:01:35] Ricardo Belmar: Absolutely, a hundred percent. I am totally here for that.[00:01:39] Casey Golden: Okay, so let's talk about Alan. There are few people in the early days of the Metaverse that can talk in depth about what retailers need to look at when building their metaverse strategy.[00:01:49] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, when we first talked to Alan, you know, when he first came to one of our clubhouse rooms, I was really impressed. And just like you said, he's got the knowledge about the metaverse. We'll also hear about his solution, the mall, that he's building, that will really change how retailers look at the metaverse.[00:02:03] And listeners or viewers are gonna come away with a really smart plan on, on how to attack the metaverse and get experimenting right away, just like we predicted back in season one episode four.[00:02:13] Casey Golden: And experimenting, and experimenting, trying things out is a matter of showing up and learning how to experiment. Alan hits on all of these topics and more honestly, each episode this season has been incredibly informative, but our guest energy is solid, true innovators. I don't know how we keep doing this from one episode to another, but keep those notepads handy.[00:02:35] You'll need it.[00:02:37] Ricardo Belmar: That's right. I mean, we could go on and on about all the juicy details Alan will talk about, but I think I can sum it up by saying if you were gonna write a hundred page Encyclopedia of the Metaverse, Alan would be on page one all the way through page 100, and you'd probably be asking for more pages after that.[00:02:54] Casey Golden: Agreed, so let's get to it then. Our interview with Alan Smithson co-founder of MetaVrse. [00:03:04] AlanSmithson Interview[00:03:04] Ricardo Belmar: And we are here with our very special guest, Alan Smithson, co-founder of the company MetaVrse, whose mission is to enable creation in the Metaverse for everyone. Following from our clubhouse session in our season one opener on the Metaverse and one of what's likely to be many more discussions we'll have on the metaverse going forward.[00:03:23] Alan, welcome to the Retail Razor Show. [00:03:25] Alan Smithson: Thank you so much, Ricardo and Casey. Thanks for having me. This is so, so exciting. You know, we we got to meet in person before these things, which is super cool, you know, and normally it's the other way around. You do all these podcasts and things, and then you finally meet somebody, you're like, Oh, yeah.[00:03:38] So it's really great to see some familiar faces and, and dive into the, the Occam's razor of retail .[00:03:46] Ricardo Belmar: exactly[00:03:47] Casey Golden: I'm so glad to see you Allen and having you here with us this morning. I'm just really excited to catch up and learn what's been going on since the last time we saw each other. [00:03:59] We're [00:03:59] Alan Smithson: many things. [00:04:00] Casey Golden: right. We're not casting from the, the metaverse yet. But who knows? This time next year, a seismic shift is taking [00:04:06] Alan Smithson: time next week we're gonna be releasing some cool stuff and we built in full video chat capabilities into our project. So we'll get into that later. But yeah, the three pushed some technology that will allow us to do this inside of virtual world.[00:04:21] Casey Golden: Interesting. Yes. Experiences on the internet are expected to be more immersive, three dimensional and virtual with the realization of web three . I believe the metaverse will will play , an integral role in product discovery and brand experiences.[00:04:36] Some people are saying it's dead and now it's like coming back. Some people said it's, this is just natural traction. So I mean, I think we're all here for the dips and we're all here for the eyes.[00:04:47] Alan Smithson: I really love the articles that say, you know, the Meta versus Dead or, you know, these are the same articles that in 10 years from now, people will look back and go, Oh yeah, you, you're the guy who wrote the internet as dead article. Good for you. You know, that really inspired a whole generation of people to build the internet, so, [00:05:04] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, it's like how many years ago when everybody was saying physical retail was dead,[00:05:09] Alan Smithson: I mean, yeah, like you can say everything's dead. Look, when we invented tv, people said, Oh, this is gonna replace radio. Every car still has a radio in it. [00:05:20] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. [00:05:21] Alan Smithson: like, radio didn't go away. It just changed and morphed. And you know, now we, now we have Spotify. Okay, maybe radio is not the primary thing, but it never died.[00:05:32] You know, TVs didn't go away when we got the internet. You know computers didn't go away when we got mobile phones. And, you know, mobile phones aren't going away anytime when we get VR and, and AR glasses. So, you know, adding new mediums does not necessarily mean that you, the other one fades away and dies, you know, it just becomes another medium.[00:05:51] There's, , let's say 10 years ago you had, I don't know, a billion people on the internet. Now we have 4 billion people on the Internet. Like, you know, the, the time right now is, is explosive growth. I mean, companies are raising, hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, tens and then hundreds of millions of dollars for internet technologies and metaverse technologies and web three technologies.[00:06:14] You know, this is just the money going in to invest to the future. So, I mean, we're in for a, a really, really interesting next, I guess, eight years now that we're almost kind of at the end of 2022. , By the end of this decade, the world will look very different than it does today,[00:06:30] Ricardo Belmar: Oh yeah. Yeah,[00:06:31] Casey Golden: I agree with that a hundred percent.[00:06:33] Ricardo Belmar: so, [00:06:34] Alan Smithson: none of the things will be dead.[00:06:35] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. No, none. None of it. We're just keep adding more and more I think as we're gonna get [00:06:39] into [00:06:39] Alan Smithson: more people coming on the[00:06:40] internet and more [00:06:41] Casey Golden: I'm [00:06:41] all [00:06:41] Alan Smithson: I like reading. [00:06:42] Casey Golden: web, like 6.0 already, right?[00:06:45] Alan Smithson: Why don't we have six G? I mean, my 5G phone doesn't really do anything for me. I'm like, 5g. I still have no signal. What the heck?[00:06:55] Casey Golden: It's still a marketing boy.[00:06:57] Alan Smithson: I bought a big phone that folds in half so that I can have all the things[00:07:02] Ricardo Belmar: And you're still waiting. And you're still [00:07:04] Alan Smithson: That's the wait. I still[00:07:05] Ricardo Belmar: so [00:07:06] Alan Smithson: but the technology's getting super fast. The the one thing that's exciting that. Most people are consuming the internet on a mobile phone now. Mobile phones and computers are the kind of dominant, but mobile phones kind of leapfrogged and it's places like Africa. They, they just bypass computers altogether and just went straight to phones.[00:07:22] Same with China. And so the phone technology is[00:07:25] Casey Golden: say, with 10 year olds,[00:07:27] Alan Smithson: exactly. 10 year olds in the Chinese, they, they just bypass computers all together.[00:07:32] Ricardo Belmar: Right. [00:07:33] Alan Smithson: But yeah, the, the world is using mobile phones to access the internet, and the mobile phones are getting so good. You know, the iPhone 14 came out y. These things are super, super computers now.[00:07:45] I mean, if you, One of the people that I, I really think highly of is a guy that runs this company called Otoy. They're a rendering engine and I can't remember the guy's name, but they came up with this concept of the render token. This was way before the whole crypto craze, and they said, What if we could tap into everybody's phone and computer and do batch rendering around the world?[00:08:06] So let's say Disney as a project, right? And they, you know, they need 500 servers to, to run this, you know scene of a Disney movie. Well, can't we then just push it out to a thousand phones, Have everybody, you know use the GPUs that are bit, you know, kinda sitting idle for most of the time on your phone.[00:08:22] Can we leverage that and then pay people for, for using this idle time on their phones?[00:08:27] seem to take off because I think it was a bit early, but that ability to tap into the billions of smartphones and computers out there and the processing power that is sitting idle, I think is going to be a key part of the metaverse moving forward in, in kind of the long term strategy. I mean, this is not, it's not an overnight thing. Nobody's really figured it out yet. But if we can do that, you think of how many computers around the world we could tap into for ai, for modeling, for protein folding for, you know, the good of mankind.[00:08:55] We can really use these these idle devices that are sitting idle for, you know, let's say most people, their phones are only sitting idle while they sleep, but[00:09:04] you know, it's, eight hours of sleep, depending on who you are. Casey, who only sleeps four hours a night,[00:09:12] What is MetaVrse & The Mall[00:09:12] Ricardo Belmar: Right. Well, Alan, so, diving into this space a little bit more, tell us a little more about what Metaverse is in your company and what you're doing and what you're and what that means for retailers and brands.[00:09:24] Alan Smithson: So we we started a company called Metaverse back in 2016, spelled M e t A V R s E, you know, for the vr idea, we built all sorts of projects in, in virtual, augmented, mixed reality, and 3d. We've done over 160 projects now but we've done everything from building retail locations virtual stores.[00:09:43] We've done virtual showrooms for automotive. We have built virtual training for, for medical, for consumer electronics. We did a lot of work for Samsung where we took their their new phone models, actually including this one, and then we animated them opening and you could turn it around and, you know, look inside and all this stuff.[00:09:59] We did a bunch of stuff for Samsung. We built virtual showrooms for MasterCard, but all of these things were actually built on our own engine. And so over the years we actually were building and working on our. What you would call a game engine or a creation platform. So similar to Unity and Unreal we have our own base, you know, rendering technology that allows us to render directly to the internet, directly to a web browser on a mobile phone.[00:10:24] So one of the, the claims to fame for us is that we have a low code, easy to create platform that bypasses the app stores. We actually don't have to go through Apple or Google. We just hit publish. It goes to a browser and works on any device. So this is super powerful and we really set up a goal in mind to build a platform that would let anybody participate and create in the Metaverse.[00:10:47] And so our mission is Metaverse creation for every. That's you know, that's always kind of been our ethos. It used to be XR creation for everyone, and then the whole world moved to the word metaverse. So we're like, Okay, well I guess we should jump on the bandwagon. Even though we started the bandwagon,[00:11:01] Casey Golden: What was xr [00:11:02] Alan Smithson: virtual augmented mixed reality or XR or extended reality is like a[00:11:06] Ricardo Belmar: yeah,[00:11:06] so it mixed, all of it[00:11:08] Alan Smithson: Yeah, I mean, we, we were all in on xr. We did the XR for Business podcast. We did the XR for Learning podcast. We did XR collaboration, which is a whole thing on, you know, collaboration platform. . We really, truly thought the whole world was going to xr and then outta nowhere Zuckerberg said, Hey, we're gonna be called Meta.[00:11:24] And the whole world went to Metaverse and we're like, Oh, well it's a good thing. We called our name That, and applied for the trademark before then[00:11:30] Ricardo Belmar: Ha. Good thing.[00:11:31] What moment led to creating MetaVrse?[00:11:31] Casey Golden: What was that one moment? Where you're just, cuz you've had some other businesses, you've had some worked in some other spaces. But what was that, that moment? Was there a special aha moment or something where [00:11:44] Alan Smithson: yeah. [00:11:44] Casey Golden: you're just like, I'm gonna build like the next version of the world,[00:11:48] Alan Smithson: It was a combination of things. Casey, honestly, it we owned a, a DJ product company called Emulator where it was a big glass, see-through touchscreen that you could play on and you could perform, but the crowd could see what you're doing cuz it was a see through piece of glass that you were DJing on.[00:12:01] We worked with, you know, infected Mushroom and Morgan page. And actually just recently a year ago Jean Michelle Jarre did a huge New Year's Eve virtual New Year's Eve party. It was huge. 7 million people attended and he used our emulator on stage in the virtual world as well.[00:12:15] So, I mean, we built this piece of tech.[00:12:17] We brought it to the world. We were working with big artists. And then we unfortunately brought on the wrong investor and so we lost that company. But right before that happened, I got invited to perform at Curiosity Camp by Eric Schmidt. And Eric Schmidt is, you know, obviously the former CEO of Google and he has this camp that everybody goes to called Curiosity Camp.[00:12:36] And so you go there and it's like camp in the middle of nowhere. I performed, it was kinda like a mini burning man for like 150 entrepreneurs, investors. AI nerds and a bunch of really smart people getting together just to have an UN-conference about what's coming in the world and, and, you know, new economic models and new technology models and these types of things.[00:12:55] So I got to perform. And then after that, I tried the R for the first time in this tiny little tent. And I remember putting it on, it was like a giant brick putting on my head. It was the DK one, the Oculus, and this was in 2014. Put on these giant headphones. And I sat there and they turned it on. And I remember sitting there going, Oh, like having this gasp of, Oh my God, this is amazing.[00:13:14] And I remember staring and I was looking at a concert, but it was so visceral that I felt like I was at the concert. The sound sounded right and, and I just sat there and I was like, Wow. And I remember somebody taking their hand and putting them on my shoulder, and I was on a swivel chair and they turned me around like this, and I realized that I could look everywhere. I was like, Oh my God. I could see the ceiling and the lights and the floor, and I just looked every. Then they hit a button and put me on stage, like I was up in the crowd. And then all, I was standing on stage next to Beck, looking at the artist, hearing it from my ears, looking up the crowd. And I thought, Oh my God.[00:13:49] And as a DJ myself for 20 years, I had this kind of moment where I was like, Holy crap. They just put me on stage in a place where nobody in the world gets to stand. Think about that. You know, like only the artists and the band or the DJ and maybe his manager get to stand on stage. Nobody gets to see this . And by transporting me in vr, I was there and I was like, This is gonna change everything, everything.[00:14:13] And that's, you know, right after that, we kinda lost the company, the, the DJ company. And I said, Well, let's just get into this now. And so in 2014 we started working in VR and we 3D printed our own cameras. We, we had 360 cameras built out of GoPros. We did everything. We did 360 videos. We did AR apps.[00:14:30] We did projection sandbox where you, you had connects and you, if you dug the sand out, it actually projected different things like topography of the sand. Did a VR photo booth for Samsung, which is super cool. We use their camera and you could take a picture with you and your friends and would Photoshop you into space, so you jump outta the machine and you could look at yourself in space with your friends in vr.[00:14:50] Casey Golden: That's great. So like as soon as you got like that one exposure hit, [00:14:54] it [00:14:55] Alan Smithson: that was it. That was.[00:14:56] Casey Golden: we're going this way,[00:14:57] Alan Smithson: Oh yeah. You know, I, I kind of had this thought that this is the future of human communication. This was like, okay, if I'm gonna communicate with somebody from long distance and we can stand there and like put these glasses on and be in the same room, this is gonna be the future of human communication.[00:15:11] And that was my whole ethos. I've since expanded that because, you know, and even if you go on our website, metavrse.com, we say that the Metaverse engine is the future of human communication, collaboration, commerce, and culture, because if you kind of take all of those four, that's really where we are right now.[00:15:29] The metaverse is impacting these things. So yes, we can communicate better, we can have a sense of presence, we can collaborate. You know, the, the new Bugatti was just designed in nine months rather than three years because they used VR to collaborate. You know BMW's been using VR to calibrate all the automotive companies are using it, not just to sell things, but to create.[00:15:47] Ricardo Belmar: yeah, to build,[00:15:48] to help them build faster. [00:15:49] Alan Smithson: so you know, collaboration is gonna be a big part. And then commerce, obviously 3D retail, duh. I mean, you know, Shopify's already showing in 96% improve, you know, uptick in conversion rates when using 3D on a site versus just 2D images and videos. So we're gonna go to 3D for sure.[00:16:09] Everything in the world, every brand, every company in the world will need all of their products and assets. Converted to 3D into 3D worlds, and over the next, you know, by the end of the decade, let's say. And that's a challenge because, you know, how do you convert them? Do you take CAD models and change them into 3d?[00:16:27] Do you take photographs and try to use photogrammetry? Do you use the scanners that are coming in the phones now? Do you use AI just using photographs to convert to 3d? So I think the biggest challenge over the next, you know, eight years or 10 years, end of the decade, This technology is showing massive upticks and, and conversion rates and all of the things from training to marketing to retail to e-com.[00:16:48] All of these things are being impacted positively, really positively, but it's still hard to make them. It's still hard to create the 3D worlds, the 3D environments avatars, clothing for avatars, these types of things. And so I think we're only just scratching the surface of what's possible. But AI is going to fill in a lot of the blanks over the next decade [00:17:07] Casey Golden: That's great.[00:17:08] Nexus of Three Technologies[00:17:08] Alan Smithson: I recently wrote an article called The Metaverse is the nexus of these three technologies. And the article, it, it's kinda like you have to read halfway through the article before I talk about them, because you know what, A little leading thing there. But the idea is that you have three technologies in addition to the internet we have today.[00:17:24] So the internet today, we have the ability to have video and audio and record and all these things that we're doing now, but then you wanna have depth, you wanna be able to walk around a virtual world. So it has 3D or XR vr, right? So you've that 3D component we call xr. Then you've got ai, which is gonna be, you know, natural language processing for maybe you wanna talk to a character, maybe you wanna get help in the store.[00:17:44] You can have conversations. Then computer vision, maybe you wanna see a product and you're like, What does that look like in my house? I hit a button, it changes the camera. Now I can see that couch in my house because the camera itself is using computer vision to understand my living room. Actually, IKEA came up with this really cool thing.[00:18:00] A quick video of your house and it blocks stuff out. Like it'll take your existing couch out and put the new one in for you. You're like, Whoa, this is crazy. So[00:18:08] computer [00:18:08] Casey Golden: love AR for home goods, like for furniture. I mean,[00:18:12] Alan Smithson: So you've got, you know, this 3D ar and then you've got ai, which, you know, kind of enables all that. And the new AI algorithms are allowing you to we have one called in World where you can talk to characters, and the other one that we're looking at right now is anything world.[00:18:26] And the idea is that, Use a text description and it will build a 3D environment for, you can say, I, I need a room with four walls, five windows, a tree in the corner, and a couch over here, and it will build it for you. Now it's very low poly and it's, it's not, you know, it's not perfect, but it's, it's automatic.[00:18:44] It's kinda like, you know, Have you seen Mid Journey and Dall-e yet[00:18:47] Casey Golden: I love Mid Journey. I've been playing on there until like I ran out of [00:18:52] Alan Smithson: credits [00:18:52] Casey Golden: could play [00:18:54] Alan Smithson: I was like,[00:18:55] What the amount of credits, Here's my credit,[00:18:57] my [00:18:57] money, [00:18:58] Casey Golden: do it again. I was having so much fun with it. [00:19:01] and it. [00:19:02] Alan Smithson: and licensing. So like, why would I ever go to a stock photography site ever again? Because I say, Okay, I need, the other day I said I needed a metaverse, whatever. I typed in whatever I, you know, description. It gave me a couple. I was like, not happy. I did it again. I was like, Oh, that one's nice. I up resd it and now that's the image for my article.[00:19:20] Casey Golden: Yeah,[00:19:21] Ricardo Belmar: it's exactly what you wanted. [00:19:22] Casey Golden: I, actually think that it's brilliant that if I could just go ahead and create one. and then it would create like 500 versions.[00:19:31] Alan Smithson: Oh, I'm sure that's coming. I,[00:19:33] I'm sure. [00:19:33] Casey Golden: I'm just like, okay, I like this, but like, don't gimme one now I want like a set of four. Well, you know what, just gimme a set of 500.[00:19:41] Alan Smithson: Yep. You know, this was a really good processing power at that point[00:19:45] because these images, so you know, instead of four it can generate 400. It's, this is the thing with ai, if people don't understand, it's just raw processing power. That's why if we can tap into the phones around the world, You know, use some of this idle processing power, then you just have more power available to do it.[00:20:01] Because right now it's kind of expensive, right? You, you put in a request through mid journey, it goes up to their cloud. Somebody's gotta pay for, you know, an actual computer to process that. Create these four or five or 400 images for incident em back. Anyway, the last technology that we didn't touch on, so xr, ai, and the last one's blockchain. know, how do you have a decentralized ownership of assets? How do you have a record of maybe, you know, maybe you just want something simple like a record of your employment or your record of the things you took for training. Cuz right now you go to university, you have a degree, right? That degree is held by, let's say, you know, let's just use Harvard, right?[00:20:36] Harvard holds your degree. You now put on your, on your LinkedIn, Hey, I went to Harvard at, you know, there Now does, do employers go and verify that? Do they go to Harvard? Chances are, or they. a lot of times. So maybe having a, you know, verified way to not only take your degree, but all the courses that you took.[00:20:53] Maybe you took a course on Udemy or Udacity or you, you did a side course. The side courses are really the skills that you're gonna need, because that's why people are taking, that's why people are learning on YouTube, because right now the world's moving faster than the universities, colleges, and high schools can keep up, and so the curriculums have to go through rigorous vett.[00:21:13] By the time they go through that, it's maybe two, three years, the technology's already passed and like moved on. So we're kinda in this weird technology meets, you know, learning model. And actually I did a TED talk called the, the Marriage of Technology and Education and where I just said, Look, we should be using all these technologies that are, that we're inventing not only to train people on those technologies and how to use them, but use them for this, for for learning.[00:21:39] So we should be using AI algorithm. To do this, and actually something I read yesterday, you know, the company Striver s Str r ivr, they do all the training in VR for Walmart. They've trained over a million people for Walmart. And one of the things they said in their early Stanford hit Human Interaction Lab, the, the early study they did was a teacher, very simple study.[00:22:00] They had a teacher and two students, and they were all represented as avatars in VR. Now the teacher is looking at a student, right? So they have eye contact with the student. But imagine the avatar can look at both students equally. So even though the teacher may not be looking at either student, maybe looking down the middle, the avatar looks like it's looking right at you.[00:22:19] And so you have this personal one-on-one connection, even though it's one to many. And so you imagine if a, a class of a hundred people, everybody feels like you're looking directly at them, and this is super powerful.[00:22:31] Casey Golden: That's [00:22:31] interesting. Yeah, I think that, you education versus application. It's definitely behind. I don't feel like we're, we're really preparing kids for work or to understand what the career opportunities are because it's just so antiquated of yet you don't have to do that anymore. Like, these are all the new jobs in that space, under that topic that literally nobody's talking about.[00:22:58] So I think it's very interest. I asked a, a nine year old before the pandemic, which I'm like, So what do you wanna do? Like when you grow up, right? The, the, the number one question. And she just like, shrugged and pushed back on the pool and like, went backwards. 11. She's like, It doesn't really matter.[00:23:19] It's not like they'll ex, they won't exist anymore by the time I need it. [00:23:25] I just mind [00:23:27] Ricardo Belmar: Hmm. Wow.[00:23:28] Yeah. [00:23:28] Alan Smithson: think that the key to this is asking a different question. The different question is, is this instead of what do you wanna do when you grow up? Or what job do you want to get? Because we don't know what the jobs are gonna be. We don't, we're inventing them as we go. And something like, I read a stat, something like 60% of jobs over the next decade won't exist,[00:23:45] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, that's right.[00:23:46] Yeah. [00:23:46] Alan Smithson: So what are we training people[00:23:47] for? [00:23:48] We don't [00:23:48] Ricardo Belmar: Right. We don't [00:23:48] Casey Golden: a nine year old to tell me that.[00:23:50] Ricardo Belmar: we, We don't even know. That's why we need better tools, Right. To be able to do [00:23:53] What problem do you want to solve?[00:23:53] Alan Smithson: so here's the better question to ask in my opinion, is what problem do you wanna solve in the[00:23:58] world? [00:23:59] Ricardo Belmar: That's the [00:23:59] Alan Smithson: know, technology can be used. It doesn't matter if you have a problem you wanna solve, like climate change, I want to solve, I wanna stop sharks from being harvested for their fins. Okay? If you take that, that singular cue, you can use all sorts of technologies to disrupt supply chains to, you know sink ships. You could do everything in your power to people from fishing for sharks, cutting their fins off and throwing them back. I mean, imagine just one person had a singular vision on that and used every piece of technology to disrupt that industry. Of course, you do [00:24:32] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. It, it's like the, the number one thing, right, the technology brings is agility to do these things quickly. [00:24:37] Alan Smithson: we're not teaching people. that, one, they have all the technology at the fingertips as long as you have access to the internet and a phone or a computer. Two, you can make a big difference as an individual. And three, we're not teaching people to set goals and look at long term horizons. So when Julie and I got into Metaverse, this was actually not our long-term goal.[00:24:59] Our long-term goal is to build a new education system using this technology. But we're in year seven of a 30 year plan. mean, literally, you know, we started in 2014, we're now in, you know, 2022 and we're going out to, you know, 20, I think it was 2048 or something, was our kind of goal. So imagine looking 20 years out as a student instead of saying, What do you want to, what kinda job do you wanna get?[00:25:22] Well, I'll get a job and then six months later, my employer will lay me off and then I'll go through this thing. And once you get into the the rat race of having to pay rent, your opportunities to dream huge and solve world problems really diminishes. Because you just need to pay your bills. And I think this is one of the one of the things that we can do better as a society is, is give people a bit of a safety net so they can start to try to cha to take on big problems in the world.[00:25:47] But you have to tell them what the problems are and what are some of the solution opportunities, and then say, here dedicate your life to one, solving this problem.[00:25:55] Casey Golden: Yeah, no, I agree. And I think that that's a much better way of looking at it. And I think it's just gonna be inevitable. Like I will never ask that question again after I got that answer because I too realize that like, it's a wrong question.[00:26:09] Alan Smithson: You know, ask me, what are you gonna do when you grow up? And I'm like, Well, I don't know. I, I have been in my life, I, I graduated with a degree in molecular biology. I was a pharmaceutical rep. I owned a medical billing company. We owned a hostile, We we had a nutraceutical company.[00:26:26] We had a DJ business. I was a DJ for 20 years. We had a technology company and now we own a game engine. So who knows where life will take you. But now we have a, a singular vision and, and mission to, to create a new education system for the world using the technologies that we're talking about today.[00:26:41] And we, we actually settled on retail as a model to focus on that because all the technologies we need for retail at the highest levels. So, you know, we're building a virtual mall, which is insane, but we're building the world's largest virtual mall, and all the technologies in there are actually being built in mindfulness of what we're gonna need for education.[00:27:02] So the hundredth floor of the mall, each floor of the mall is a million square feet, so it's a hundred floors tall. Each floor is a million square feet, so you have a hundred million square feet of virtual space to build retail. Experiences and entertainment and all these things. But the hundredth floor is actually owned by the Unlimited Awesome Academy, which is Julie and i's trust to build this new education platform.[00:27:23] So the hundredth floor of the mall will benefit from the entire mall. The 20th floor of the mall is an education floor, so we have, you know, floor one to 20 is owned by the mall and leased to brands. So we've got like a luxury floor, automotive floor, consumer electronics, all these things. Floor 20 is actually reserved for education.[00:27:39] So we're gonna put education systems in there and let them have the, the floor, There's no charge for that. So we really do have this kind of long term vision of how we can leverage the, the retail world for the technology. Cuz we're, we're working with our partners to build insane amounts of technology, like crazy stuff.[00:27:56] We can, We built a technology recently called Infinite, l o d, or infinite level of detail that allows us to have an infinite virtual world. Meaning the mall's one building, when you leave the mall, it's vast. I mean, you could build anything you want in as far as you see. And it could be out in space like we designed it so that it doesn't, it, it loads on any phone fast and you can load and go anywhere in the world and walk around and it's just vast, right?[00:28:22] So that technology, I think is gonna revolutionize how. Build these things, because now what it typically happens is you build a scene and the scene is a fixed map, like, you know, Decentraland, a fixed map, sandbox, it's a fixed map. And then what you do is as you walk around the map, it's kinda loading different parts of the map.[00:28:40] Well, we don't have a fixed map. We have the fixed mall, but then the map is completely open to the world and what they wanna build. And so this is kind of our way of saying, okay, what does an open and unlimited metaverse look like? You know? And because that's really what people want. They want a persistent. Is never ending. It's kinda like Second Life, but you know, at a much, much larger scale available. And then Second, Life is still successful. They still have probably a million people a year on Second. Life doesn't work on mobile, Decent land, doesn't work on mobile Sandbox doesn't work on mobile. Roblox barely works on mobile.[00:29:11] So you know, having the ability to onboard billions of mobile phones into the Metas is gonna be the key. And then of course, we'll move to glasses over the next decade as well. You're seeing Oculus moved over to Meta now. Meta is introducing a new a new headset. So we're gonna see vast improve improvements of this. And then I would, I'd venture to say Apple makes their entrance into this space probably in the next year, would be my guess. We've been waiting for years and there's been lots of rumors over the years. I remember somebody in 2014 saying, Apple's gonna come out with VR glasses this year.[00:29:43] And I was like, I don't know about. Now, here we are, seven years [00:29:47] later. It's still [00:29:48] Why are brands coming to the mall?[00:29:48] Ricardo Belmar: So, so Alan, let me ask you more about the mall. I'm curious, when you talk to retailers and brands about the floors in the mall that you've got set aside for them, what, what's, what's your pitch to them? What, what's the selling point for the retailers to, Is it, for example, because you'd run on mobile where so many of these other platforms either barely do or, or don't what, what's the big selling point for the retail on the brand to, to be in the.[00:30:10] Alan Smithson: sure. I think it's, it's being part of something bigger. First of all, you know, you look. Brands are jumping into De Central and because it's, it's there and it works and it's bigger, right? It's a bigger community and there's gonna be more chance of eyeballs falling on. The problem is there's just not a lot of users there because the graphic fidelity is ma and there's a lot of barriers to entry.[00:30:27] If you wanna buy something physical, you cannot, If you want to use your credit card to buy something digital, you cannot, You have to buy with Manna, which is their in world currency. So we took a lot of the ideas from what these other platforms were doing. We said, Okay, well, how. Specifically make that for retail.[00:30:46] And really it was less about what we thought. And we've just had a lot of meetings with a lot of brands in the hundreds. And so when we, when we show them the mall, when we walk around, when we show them stores, when they say, Oh, well can it do this? Can it connect to our backend order management system?[00:31:00] Yes, it can because we use JavaScript. Can it, can we connect our loyalty program? Yes, absolutely. We have a, a backend system. And so it's just a really, a combination of. Having this idea for 'em all because we were building virtual showrooms for all different brands, and they were saying, Oh, I want a video chat on this one.[00:31:18] And this one would say, I want to dress the avatars and I, I want something over here. And so all these different disparate virtual showrooms that we're building, we built one for MasterCard, we built one for, for Samsung. We built all these things and they were asking for the same thing in different ways.[00:31:30] So we said, What if we built in a persistent mall so that if,[00:31:33] if we build a new piece of tech for one, one person, one brand, it now everybody in the mall. So you have the central part. Now brands can start driving people into their stores. So the mall.io/brand, it drops you right into the brand store. You can walk around, you get the full brand experience, but you can walk out the door as well. [00:31:52] So we've been meeting with, with hundreds of brands, and the brands that have interest in the mall, they want to get into the metaverse. And now here, here's the thing is it's a big cluster. You know, everybody's like, Oh, talking about the metaverse, the buzzword of the year. You know, do I make NFTs, do I not?[00:32:06] NFTs are kind of got like a, you know, negative connotation now that they've lost half their value. So it. Do we build our own virtual store? Do we go into Decentraland? Do we build something over here? Do we go into Roblox? And you know, the question or the answer's probably you gotta try all of the things, right?[00:32:23] And so you know, what we recommend is, look, take a budget, you know, whatever it is, 50 grand, a hundred grand, 200 grand, whatever your budget is, that's discretionary. You know, don't invest too much in this right now because nobody knows what's gonna work and whatnot. So we have like a 50 grand entrance package.[00:32:37] You get lease, you get, you know, kind of all the things included. We build everything out for you.[00:32:41] We have a full studio. And so the idea was how do we just get rid of all of the barriers to entry for a brand and then just get them into the mall. Because it's, it's all new for all of us, right? You know, people are saying, How are you gonna get any traffic in the mall?[00:32:53] Well, you know, of course we're the mall. We have to get traffic in there. But we're coordinating that effort with the brands. With the brands that we're working with, because really we don't have the brand gravitas of a, you know, of a, of a large shoe company or a, a large electronics manufacturer. You guys have, they have hundreds of thousands or millions of consumers. [00:33:12] And we're working with a candy company. They're gonna put QR codes on the candy, so that's gonna drive people directly into their store in the mall. And, they have multiple stores in the mall, so it's. It's really intriguing how, we've kind of realized that the marketing and getting people into the mall is, is less our responsibility is more of the brands, but where our responsibility is to have the right brands there and encourage them to build cool stuff because it's really less about, you, know, a store and it's more about an experience. And so, you know, one thing that I think the mall replaces or, or at least adjuncts is that, or not replaces, but adjuncts is that Amazon and Mall Walmart are the two largest retail stores on earth digitally, right? amazon.com and walmart.com. But you wouldn't invite your friends to go shopping on amazon.com.[00:33:58] You'd be like, Hey, we're gonna have a shopping date on, Go on Amazon. See what I'm ordering in my cart. It, it's taken the fun out shopping it, it's taken a front out. It's, it's just ruthless procurement of goods. Casey we'll go Amazon shopping[00:34:12] Buying vs Shopping - it should be fun![00:34:12] Ricardo Belmar: Yep. It's buying versus shopping. [00:34:14] Alan Smithson: it is. Procurement of goods versus shopping and shopping should be fun.[00:34:18] There is a reason why malls aim the cultural center of communities, and we wanna do the same thing. So our, our mall is multiplayer. You can invite your friends, you can go walk around. It's super fun actually. And we're putting little mini games in there. There's daily games that change every day so you can win prizes.[00:34:34] Just super cool stuff. So. [00:34:35] Casey Golden: That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, I think that big, that big benefit at the end of the day of participating. It may not necessarily be a conversion rate because that's not necessarily the goal Right. [00:34:48] now. What would you say is that roi? Because I don't feel that it's going to be money, like sales revenue, but I might be wrong.[00:34:59] Like today, if somebody wanted to go and have their first Metaverse experience with you, what is that main transformation or moment that you expect that that brand is going to be mentioning in the meeting to a hundred thousand or 800,000 next season? There?[00:35:19] Alan Smithson: I think you nailed it. Is, is really up to the brands to build some cool stuff and, and look, right now we made the mall look like, like a mall. It's got stores you can walk around. It doesn't need to look like a mall. It could be a, a field, it could be a space, it could be anything, right? So when you walk in your store, , Yes.[00:35:34] It looks like a store from the outside. And then when you walk in through the barrier of the door, it changes and, loads a new project. And the new project is like, Oh, now I'm in a, you know, basketball court, or now I'm like sitting court side watching you know, Nicks and nets, right? So it's one of those things that right now there's a term called skew amorphism, meaning we kind of tend to take what is already existing and build things like that.[00:35:56] So we. A mall. Looks like a mall. We put it into digital format so it feels and looks like a mall. Like you're walking around. You don't, it just feels right. It just looks like a mall or, Okay, great. I get it. I understand it this, really understand it. But that doesn't mean we can't push the absolute limits on the other end.[00:36:09] But what we need to do, and we need to do this for everybody, is make people feel comfortable in these virtual spaces and, and skew amorphism or, or bringing kind of the traditional world into the virtual world for now seems to. The right path. We've done some crazy, crazy stuff on the, on the, you know, way out there, NFT galleries and stuff. [00:36:30] And it doesn't really resonate with people. They don't know how to navigate it. They, they don't understand it. They're, there's a bit of a mix mix mash, so I think it's really gonna be up to the brands to build cool experiences that engage with their customers that. Really drive brand awareness. You look at Samsung's 8 37 store in New York. I think it's a prime example. And even Nike Store in New York City, I mean, yes, they sell shoes, but it's really about the experience of experiencing the brand. You go into Nike store and the whole first floor is the history of Nike. You can look at the old shoes, like it's just really, really cool. Yes, you can buy some shoes on, you know, one of the other floors, but it's not about that. It's about the experience of, oh my God, I was in New York and I went to this crazy store. And it, it, made me realize how how much research has gone into the Nike shoes and then like, you can really build these experiences and Samsung 8 3 7 in New York as well.[00:37:16] You go in there, you can't buy anything. You can literally just, you can look at the fridges, you can look at the kitchens, you can look at the, the mobile phones. You can, there's all these really cool experiences. There's lots of places to take selfies, which is fun. And you, you know, people's new selfie flex is gonna be, Hey, I gonna dress up my avatar.[00:37:33] And dripping in Gucci and and take a picture. But I think people's online personas are going to start being more important than their in-person personas. We're already seeing that. I mean, like, you know, people in virtual worlds are spending billion, billions on skins. [00:37:49] Ricardo Belmar: Oh yeah. Oh [00:37:51] Alan Smithson: You know, night skins.[00:37:53] I mean, I think Fortnite did something like $9 billion last year, Something [00:37:57] Ricardo Belmar: Hmm. [00:37:57] It's crazy. Yeah. So, Alan, let me ask you this. What, what would be your top advice right now for, for, let's say for this over this next year for retailers, DTC brands, I mean even retail tech businesses who are all looking at the metaverse and kind of thinking, Okay, how do I get in? What, what, what are my first steps?[00:38:17] What do I do to get started?[00:38:19] Alan Smithson: Sure. Find a, a decent partner who understands retail, who's done with this. There's, you know There's a company called Max, a Maxent. They do a great work on kind of, you know, for furniture companies, a bunch of retailers. [00:38:30][00:38:30] Alan Smithson: Marxent [00:38:31][00:38:31] Yeah, they, they do a great job. Converting things to 3d, you're gonna have to have teams that understand 3d.[00:38:36] And 3D is not easy. It's not as easy as creating a JPEG or a video. It's quite complicated. There's. You have a 3D model, then you've got layers and layers of of images that go on top of that to make it look realistic. You've got a bumpy one that makes it look bumpy. You've got texture files, all these things.[00:38:51] It's not, it's not really that easy a technology. Now, it's getting easier and we're getting there, but I think by starting now and starting small, taking a, you know, let's say 50,000 to a $500,000 budget, building something and then starting to have your teams internally. Understand how the sausage is made. How do we go from an idea or a concept or some photographs of a store to a fully, 3D environment with avatars, with products in there and everything, and, click to buy everything.[00:39:19] And so one of the reasons we did the mall is because we've done this a bunch of times for individual clients and it, it ended up becoming kind of rinse and repeat, right? We're like, Okay, well this, this client wants, and now we can build a virtual showroom in. Oh man, the last one we built, we took three days and it was beautiful. Just because we're getting really good at that. So I think the first thing is understand, learn a bit. So there's lots and lots of . I don't know how many guides to the metaverse there are, but there's probably at least a hundred that I know of. So go read some of those. You know, have somebody in your team dedicate somebody in your team to be the head of Metaverse, you know, and it's not just about, you know, 3D and that sort of thing, but you have to understand the crypto world as well.[00:39:58] People are gonna start buying in cryptocurrencies. What does that mean for you? How. How do you get paid in cryptocurrency and convert that to fiat because brands don't have accounting systems that that can take into account crypto. Right. So we have a, a partner named BitPay. So anybody can pay in any crypto they want using 95 different wallets.[00:40:16] It automatically takes their money, converts to U s D on at the end of the day and then settles with the brand at the end of the day. So you, the brands get settled in USD. . And, and the client doesn't know any, any difference in between and it's actually cheaper. So a stripe is like 3% for, you know, paying with credit cards or whatever.[00:40:34] With fiat and BitPay is only 1% because, and there's no chargebacks. Cuz once a crypto payment's paid, it's, there's, you can't reverse it. So I think there's gonna be a, a combination of. Onboarding customers or guests, we call them guests in the mall. Onboarding guests into, the crypto world slowly, but allowing them to pay in anything they want.[00:40:52] You pay credit card, PayPal, Amazon Pay, you know, it doesn't matter. We will, we will take any form of payment for physical and or digital goods in fiat and or cryptocurrency. And so from a brand standpoint, something like the mall kind of gives you. A boost because you don't have to reinvent the wheel.[00:41:10] If you're going into Decentraland again, there's a platform already there, there's people there. Roblox is great if, let's say, for example, you're a brand and your, your target customer is 25 to 30, well, your next target customer is, you know, 15 to 25. Right? Like that block. So if they're playing Roblox, and then I think something like 62% of Roblox players are under the age of 16. So if that's your next target demographic, like Gucci wants to be in the next, you know, they wanna be generationally relevant. [00:41:39] So if you're a brand that wants to be generationally relevant and be put in front of millions of people, go Roblox, you know that, that's a great starting point there. But it's, it's hard to get people's attention in there too. You've got, something like 10 million games on Roblox or something, or 4 million games on Roblox. So and then with the mall, it is a dedicated retail experience. You know, people are going there for that. They know what they're getting, and there's, there's gonna be a lot of, malls, digital malls, metaverse malls and these sorts of things.[00:42:06] But I don't think a lot of the startups that get into this realize the true depth of what's required. I mean, we spent seven years building a game engine for Enterprise. So when a, when a client says, What are your security protocols? We, we have a SOC two compliance and SOC two is not an easy thing to do.[00:42:23] It's, you know, it's eight months of, they basically take everybody on your team rip apart of their computers and you know, digitally [00:42:31] inside, make sure you don't have anything hidden. You gotta go through all these security protocols. So now that when we go to our clients, we say we are of SOC two, we also have Kronos compliance.[00:42:40] So Kronos is a 3D standard so that if you have a 3D model that you use on walmart.com, you can just pick it up and drop it into the mall and it will look the. This is important. Your product is not gonna look real in Roblox. It's gonna look like it's made out of Lego. You go, same thing with Sandbox, same with the Decentraland.[00:42:58] And they use a technology called voxels. So it's, very gamey looking like, like it's made out [00:43:02] Ricardo Belmar: Very [00:43:03] blocky. It's very [00:43:04] Casey Golden: of a standard of visual aesthetic that a lot, the higher end the brand, the less familiar that feels. And it's, but it's being adopted and it's, You don't have to be photorealistic all the time, [00:43:21] Alan Smithson: Yeah. You can have fun with it. And that's what I tell brands. Look,[00:43:24] You can use Unreal Engine for your commercials, your, your Hollywood movies. You know, they, they high, super high end. Maybe you want to build a film, a car, you know, driving through things. You can use the Unreal Engine for that. Then you can take the same asset. Down res it put it into Metaverse Engine. And now you can use it on the web, on, on the mall, right? You can use that same thing now it's interactive. You can drive it, you can, you know, on a mobile phone. Then you can take that same thing, pixelize it, and throw it into, into Decentraland or sandbox or, or Roblox or Minecraft.[00:43:51] And the idea is that you're using one asset to create several experiences and brands are gonna start doing this. I mean, it's just very few brands are doing it. [00:44:00] But I predict that you're not gonna be in one metaverse. You're gonna be in a bunch of different things, try different things, and some will be successful, Some won't.[00:44:06] Try things on your own website as well. I mean, our system. When you b build a store in the mall, you can actually build a hit, copy, paste, make a separate one and put it on your website as well. Now it'll link over to the mall, but it can reside on your know your brand.com website. We, we've taken out as many barriers to entry for brands as possible from, from our standpoint. [00:44:26] Casey Golden: Yeah. [00:44:27] Alan Smithson: We just, we've done so many meetings and it's been, I mean, our FAQ page is 50 questions long now for the mall [00:44:33] Casey Golden: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's hard enough to wrap your brain around it. At least once you make the decision. Let me take you right to it. [00:44:44] Alan Smithson: Let's just get it done, shall we? [00:44:46] And shouldn't be like one year thing. Oh my God, we're gonna build this thing in a year. Like what? No, man. If you can't build it in a, you know, eight weeks. [00:44:53] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. you'll be too late. [00:44:55] Alan Smithson: Yeah. maybe. Maybe. [00:44:58] Ricardo Belmar: You might be too late. [00:44:59] Alan Smithson: It's a crazy world we live in. It's moving so fast. That's why, one of our benefits of the engine is that it's low code.[00:45:04] We can build these things in in hours, you know like building the whole thing from scratch takes three days. You imagine how long that used to take? Six months ago, that took three weeks.[00:45:14] Ricardo Belmar: There's definitely a magic to to low code for sure, to really speed things up.[00:45:18] Alan Smithson: Yep. [00:45:19] How to reach Alan?[00:45:19] Casey Golden: what's the best way for someone to get in touch with you and follow the journey? [00:45:23] Alan Smithson: Sure. I, I, there's a couple ways. Metaverse Engine, which is, you know, the creation platform that is powering the, the mall. You can go to metaverse.com, m a t a v r s e.com. The mall is simply the mall.io. You can go sign up there, and if you sign up now for the mall, whether you're a brand or a guest, or an investor it'll ask you, you know, a dropdown for that.[00:45:43] You'll get put into a, an email funnel. So you'll have, if you sign up now, you'll have all early access to everything. So, for example, we're launching a new website for the mall, And that new website is fully built as a 3D world. So you scroll down the mall and you actually walk in and you end up inside of 3D website walking around.[00:46:00] It's not the mall, it's the website for the mall. we used our engine to build a revolutionary new website. So go to mall.io, the mall.io. And then you can just add me on LinkedIn. I can't add anybody from that, but you can follow me on LinkedIn. Cause I hit the limit of LinkedIn. Just use this my name alan Smithson. And you'll see fireworks above my head. I, I took a picture at the Formula one and that's my profile pick now [00:46:22] Casey Golden: Oh, [00:46:22] Ricardo Belmar: Oh, nice. [00:46:23] Alan Smithson: was like, this [00:46:24] Ricardo Belmar: cool [00:46:24] Alan Smithson: awesome. [00:46:25] Ricardo Belmar: Very cool . [00:46:26] Alan Smithson: Yep. [00:46:27] Ricardo Belmar: Well, I, I, I know I have really learned a lot today, Alan. Thank, thank you for that. I'm sure all of our listeners and, and viewers did too. Casey cause, you're already a, a Metaverse and, and web three advocate, so I'm sure a lot of this was old news for you after your debut event. Right. [00:46:40] Casey Golden: Yeah, I mean, we just had our second successful brand activation with Lux Lock on the 12th for New York Fashion Week. So with five brands everyone is enjoying. The experiences and looking forward to the future of commerce, like the brands are excited, the con consumers are excited. Making these early experiences is just critical into understanding like what these channels could potentially mean to your company.[00:47:06] Just do something And see what happens. [00:47:11] Alan Smithson: Yep. No, it's absolutely true. And look, one other thing that I, I didn't really mention is set some KPIs. What, what is it you want to get out of it? Because a lot of times, you know, for the last five years or six years, we've been building all sorts of marketing things, and they never really set KPIs.[00:47:25] They're just like, Hey, let's do this cool thing over there. And you're like, Yeah, I'll take your money and we'll do it. No, there's no measurement of success. So then you don't get a subsequent budget. And, and marketing teams are, they, they sometimes do this a lot, you know, they'll, they'll do things without measuring it, and that's fine.[00:47:41] Then maybe they want the media hits or whatever it is. But you have to have some metrics of success. Is it conversions? Is it time spent on platform? Is it, is it the number of visitors? What I, is the metric that you're measuring for success?[00:47:52] Because then, you can measure that. We can make changes. You can change completely everything or just some things, and you can get to the successful metrics. If you're not measuring it there's no point. So that's why actually one of the things in our mall is, complete analytics dashboard with, with everything from time spent on how much time somebody spent on a product. I mean, looking at it did they invite a friend? Did they convert from there? You know, these things are all really important.[00:48:15] And so we built, built this cool dashboard so that you can kinda look at your store and, and see a heat map of where people walked. Cause if somebody walks in your store and they all go right, and you want them to go left, well you can put a little display. [00:48:27] Casey Golden: they always, always go right. [00:48:29] Alan Smithson: Do they[00:48:29] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. [00:48:33] Casey Golden: apartment? Buildings. We'll go right[00:48:38] Alan Smithson: love it? Well, you know what? The heat map data will tell us where people go. [00:48:42] We'll find it. Yeah. Once we have this segregated data in the mall, we'll be able to tell, you know, okay. 57% of people went that way. 37 went that way. [00:48:50] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. And then you can keep adjusting, right? I mean, that's kinda the whole point is you want to keep adjusting and adapting to what, What's gonna work? [00:48:55] Alan Smithson: Yeah, you could put a plant there to make them sure. They go around it the other way. You just literally, and this is the other thing, you can re-merchandise your store for every day if you wanted to, you could be like, Hey, today we're gonna do, you know I don't know. It's October, so we're gonna do a Halloween theme, and for the month of October, it's Halloween theme.[00:49:10] And then, you know,

In today's podcast, we are talking with Mike Karlsven, about the new report “In It To Win It” which is a collaboration between Bobsled and Analytic Index. The report was launched just last week, and Kiri and Mike discuss the basis of the report, what they found out while doing the research, and more. Make sure you tune in to find out more!

Listen in on the steps needed to get approved for the Amazon Pay By Invoice Account! Join My Private Facebook group here: https://graceandglamour.shop/products/airbnb-with-me?_pos=1&_psq=facebook&_ss=e&_v=1.0

Support: PositiveSarcasm.com/Donate Intro: I get pretty tired sometimes and I take a moment to talk about it. Segment 1: Hospitals across the country are experiencing major staffing shortages...Hmmm WONDER WHY!?!?! Segment 2: Amazon is adjusting their compensation review scales after recent scrutiny. Segment 3: Q&A

In a move that could have huge ramifications for India's fledgling Buy Now Pay Later market, the RBI has asked non-bank prepaid payment instrument (PPIs) issuers to not load these instruments through credit lines.  Issued in the form of wallets or prepaid cards, PPIs facilitate purchases against the value stored on them. They can be loaded by cash, debit to a bank account, credit and debit cards. Fintechs in the pay later card business like Slice, Uni, LazyPay, PostPe etc make use of bank-issued PPIs and partner with NBFCs to offer credit lines to customers. In some cases, the credit line is provided by the NBFC subsidiaries of the fintech companies. For example, Slice's prepaid cards are issued by SBM Bank while Uni's cards come from SBM and RBL Bank.  According to RBI, there are 37 non-bank PPI issuers, including Amazon Pay, Ola Financial Services and Bajaj Finance -- one of the biggest NBFCs. RBI rules say that PPIs are permitted to be loaded or reloaded by cash, debit to a bank account, credit and debit cards, PPIs, and other payment instruments issued by regulated entities in India but do not permit loading from credit lines. RBI's move has given rise to some confusion even as the industry is still evaluating the impact of its clarification, which is not in the public domain yet.  Macquarie Capital said it could impact credit card challengers like Slice and Uni, who were adding lakhs of customers every month.  PPI is meant to act as a payment instrument and not a credit instrument, it said, adding that many customers were also unknowingly taking a line of credit through their wallets at the point of check-out and some of these practices may not have gone down well with RBI. But given that RBI's letter is addressed to non-bank PPI issuers, Nomura analysts believe there will not be any restrictions on such pay later players unless a similar letter was also sent to bank issuers.  Fintech startup RedCarpet's Founder Sandeep Srinivasa said that all BNPL products in India work on PPIs and the fintech lending ecosystem works on the principle of credit lines through wallets and built on top of PPIs.  Jaikrishnan G, Partner & Head of Financial Services Consulting, Grant Thornton Bharat says, this will impact everyone in the BNPL space. Banks are allowed to top up PPIs through credit line, he says. With PPI out of equation, borrowing experience for customers will be impacted. This is a clear shock to the industry, will have a heavy impact, he says.  Macquarie said that risks are increasing for the fintech sector, for which regulations have been light-touch so far. With the regulatory arbitrage now being plugged slowly, it is expecting a slowdown in growth and profitability prospects for the fintech sector in India.  According to the brokerage, RBI has been coming down heavily on fintechs. Given the increasingly dominant role of fintech companies in the payments ecosystem, RBI's Payments Vision 2025 states that a discussion paper on the need for proportionate regulation for them encompassing domestic incorporation, reporting, data use, etc., will be published. It also talks about looking at the various charges for payments in such a way that it further encourages digital adoption. Nomura also says the RBI may want the underlying lender to formally issue a credit card by tying with card networks instead of creating a quasi-product for which customer ownership, and the responsibility of ensuring data privacy and security, are not always clearly defined. Jaikrishnan G of Grant Thornton Bharat says RBI strives to address regulatory arbitrage between banks and non-banks. We must not be under the impression that fintechs are not regulated by RBI, he says.  With RBI not keen on the idea of issuing licences for digital-only banks, Grant Thornton Bharat's Jaikrishnan G said that neobanks and fintechs are under pressure to reinvent their business models, as they were hoping to even

Amazon recently announced that it was opening its prime shopping experience to third-party online stores.They are introducing the ‘Buy with prime' option to sellers outside Amazon.This is big news as it will allow sellers to take advantage of Amazon's FBA, free shipping, and returns checkout with Amazon Pay, among many other benefits that customers enjoy with Prime Membership.There is no doubt that sellers will value using Amazon's vast fulfillment and logistics network.But there are some serious questions about this move by Amazon.- What does it mean for Shopify?- Should Shopify allow the Buy with Prime in their stores- Did Amazon do this to nip Shopify's threat in the bud?- How will sellers be affected by this move?To find some answers to these questions, I am joined by my good friend and an Amazon expert, James Thomson. He recently stepped down from the company he co-founded, Buy Box Experts.He helps us understand how this move by Amazon means and how it might impact you as a seller.This is a fascinating discussion that you don't want to miss. Tune In!Key Takeaways- Meet James Thomson (01:13)- The interesting evolution of Amazon over the years (03:25- Why EVERY brand MUST understand the Amazon language (08:22)- What the Buy with Prime feature means (14:33)- Is Amazon trying to counter Shopify? (22:19)- Amazon Pay option at checkout for third party stores (24:50)- The billion-dollar question (26:31)- Do brands need a Shopify store (35:40)- Why Amazon is a necessary evil (47:47)Additional resources:- Schedule a FREE consultation with the Ave7 team- Grab the FREE Amazon Seller Central Checklist- Get the book “The Amazon Jungle” book by Jason Boyce- Learn more about Avenue 7 Media----Day 2 Podcast has a goal of helping Amazon sellers learn how to launch, grow and protect their brand on the world's largest online marketplace (and beyond).Follow us on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode!

ICICI Bank's Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Sandeep Bakhshi was chosen as the Business Standard Banker of the Year 2020-21 for turning around the private sector lender both in terms of performance and perception during his tenure of the past three and a half years. A jury of five members chaired by former RBI Deputy Governor SS Mundra unanimously chose the 61-year-old as the winner. Bakhshi took charge of India's second-largest private sector lender in October 2018 amid controversy surrounding his predecessor Chanda Kochhar, who had to step down over corporate governance issues.  Only 10 banks qualified under the criteria used to select the contenders. The jury took into account matters such as governance, recent events, HR practices, the regulatory stance, innovative practices, and technology prowess to arrive at a conclusion. When the choice finally came down to two large banks which had registered strong performance under both the leaders, what clinched the decision in favour of Bakhshi was turning around the bank after inheriting a difficult legacy. “He inherited a difficult legacy but steadied the ship over the course of the last few years with a mature leadership as against the other contender who took over a stable organisation during the year. The bank showed an improving trend on most of the parameters over the past three years. This is against almost a status quo in the other case,” says jury chair SS Mundra.   Jury chair SS Mundra said Bakhshi steadied the ship over the course of the last few years with a mature leadership while the bank improved on most of the parameters.   Bakhshi is credited with reviving the organisational morale also and bringing in collaborative management leadership, the jury members concurred. The bank rewarded 80,000 frontline employees with an 8% pay hike during the Covid-19 pandemic year. One of the jury members highlighted that the turnaround under Bakhshi was not just in the banking business, but also in the subsidiaries. The banker has been with ICICI Group since 1986 and handled assignments across the group in ICICI, ICICI Lombard General Insurance, ICICI Bank, and ICICI Prudential Life Insurance. He received a two-year extension last year, until October 2023. The media-shy business leader, who prefers to keep a low profile, accepted Business Standard's award but declined to comment further. Its gross and net NPAs and bad loan ratios have consistently declined in the last four years while return on assets has almost doubled. (VO 10 to go with graphic and chart above) ICICI Bank is well capitalised, has strong ratios, adequate provisioning, and low bad loan ratios. For 2020-21, ICICI Bank reported a net profit of Rs 16,193 crore, against Rs 7,931 crore in the preceding financial year. Its loan portfolio grew 13.7% year-on-year to Rs 7.34 trillion, while deposits went up by 21% year-on-year to Rs 9.33 trillion. ICICI Bank shares are up 130% in Bakhshi's tenure so far. Under Bakhshi, the bank is guided by two principles. The ‘One Bank, One RoE' principle emphasises the need to maximise the bank's share of profitable growth opportunities across all products and services. Whereas, The ‘Fair to Customer, Fair to Bank' principle emphasises the need to deliver fair value to customers while creating value for shareholders On the product side, feedback was given priority over targets, which meant that certain products were withdrawn because, while they were good for the bank, they not have been so for clients. ICICI Bank increased its presence ra­pidly in the credit card segment too. Co-branding and new launches have boosted credit card sales. Its co-branded card with Amazon Pay has been a huge success in the market.  The bank believes leveraging digital technology is core to its business. Its iMobile Pay app is a testimony to the bank's execution in this area. The app has seen 5.3 million activations from non-IC

Ian Leslie, Senior Director of Retail Advocacy at Bolt, joined Retail Refined for a live chat at NRF 2020. Bolt is a San Francisco-based one-click checkout solution powering checkout across e-commerce merchants across the internet.“We're trying to bring one-click checkout to all merchants whether they're big or small,” Leslie said. “Give them a best-in-class experience, and also allow them to be able to identify their customers and allow their customers to checkout as seamlessly as possible.”Once Bolt gets installed on a merchant's website, they have immediate access to the millions of shoppers on the Bolt Network. When a Bolt customer comes to that merchant's website for the first time and has an existing Bolt account, having shopped on another Bolt site, they can quickly check out with a code they receive via text message or email they are in and out fast.Many of the trends Leslie saw the industry heading towards involved more effortless online shopping experiences. And Bolt's commitment was to help these merchants from enterprise to SMB make those easy purchase experiences possible. And with the growth of installment plans and APMs such as Apple Pay or PayPal check out, these are expectations the shopper has, and merchants need to deliver. “What's great about Bolt is we're gateway agnostic, so whether you check out via credit card or you check out via Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, or Klarna, it doesn't matter to us,” Leslie said. “We just want the checkout to occur.”

Welcome to the Balanced FI Podcast, episode 34 - Amazon Hacks for Making the Most of Your Account - even if you're not a Prime member. Amazon has taken over so many areas of life, but some of those features are super helpful. Although some of the things we discuss require a Prime membership, some are still available to non-members. Taking advantage of all the features of your Amazon account just makes good sense.  FIND US:Balancedfi.com -- Podcast -- Facebook -- Instagram -- Pinterest -- Hello@balancedfi.com RESOURCES:Read: Amazon Hacks for Making the Most of Your AccountResource: CamelCamelCamelRead: 5 Tips for a Frugal ChristmasRead: 4 Unexpected Ways to Save Money SOURCES:Source: AmazonSource: ‘I'm not a robot': Amazon workers condemn unsafe, grueling conditions at warehouse

In this episode I covered the USE CASE OF UPI- TRANSACTION What is Clustering? Clustering or cluster analysis is a machine learning technique, which groups the unlabelled dataset. It can be defined as "A way of grouping the data points into different clusters, consisting of similar data points K-means clustering is one of the simplest and popular unsupervised machine learning algorithms. ... In other words, the K-means algorithm identifies k number of centroids, and then allocates every data point to the nearest cluster, while keeping the centroids as small as possible. You can think of an N-gram as the sequence of N words, by that notion, a 2-gram (or bigram) is a two-word sequence of words like “please turn”, “turn your”, or ”your homework”, and a 3-gram (or trigram) is a three-word sequence of words like “please turn your”, or “turn your homework” check the episode on various platform https://www.instagram.com/podcasteramit Apple :https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1544510362 Huhopper Platform :https://hubhopper.com/podcast/tech-stories/318515 Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/2fdb5c45-2016-459e-ba6a-3cbae5a1fa4d Spotify :https://open.spotify.com/show/2GhCrAjQuVMFYBq8GbLbwa

2021 may well be summed up as the year of startup IPOs. They finally came of age, mostly because of unexpected windfall during the pandemic. The markets saw eight startup IPOs last year. But the clear leader of the pack, Paytm, turned out to be a lame duck. While it was India's biggest IPO ever as it looked to raise Rs 18,300 crores at an issue price of Rs 2,150, the fintech firm's shares plummeted soon after its public market debut.  Market experts, brokerages and investors were spooked by the company's long-term financial prospects and timeline for attaining profitability.  Two months later, the negative sentiment around Paytm stock hasn't abated. On January 17, the company's stock was trading at Rs 1,099, more than 50% lower than its issue price of Rs 2,150. The stock hit a high of Rs 1,961.05 on November 18, but has failed to touch its issue price since listing.  Macquarie's previous target price for Paytm was Rs 1,200 in November. But last week, retaining its lowest rating for One97 Communications Ltd, Macquarie further cut its target price to Rs 900, implying a 25% downside from current levels. Macquarie explained its reasons. The RBI could curb wallet charges as it reviews the charges levied on customers across various digital payment modes. Prepaid payment instruments (PPIs) and wallet companies like Paytm, Mobikwik, PhonePe, Freecharge, Amazon Pay, etc., charge customers anywhere between 2 percent and 2.5 percent. The payments business still forms 70% of Paytm's overall gross revenue and hence any regulations capping charges could impact revenues significantly. Also, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India's recent decision not to grant an insurance license to Paytm could affect the fintech firm's chances of getting a banking license. Senior management attrition and a fall in the average ticket size of loans disbursed to Rs 5000 are other factors that impact the company's long-term financial prospects. JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have however set a one-year price target of Rs 1,630-1,875 on Paytm. The three were among the lead bankers for the Paytm listing and have cited the company's strong network effect and cross-selling opportunities are strong levers for growth.  “Macro factors like quantitative easing, free money due to US monetary policy and other parameters led to a spook in the market in terms of pricing the IPO. Paytm's shares have received a similar response to that of global peers in the last six months…But that is not a complete reasoning. What happened to the IPO is still a question,” says Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma has said that the company's share market performance has been in line with that of global peers in the sector over the past six months due to macroeconomic factors. On the question of small ticket size of loans, Sharma has said that it is by design to ensure better quality of loans.  While Paytm has made its presence in digital payments, going forward, its execution in financial services and cloud segments will be watched closely. Investors will also look at how Paytm will monetise its bevy of services in a highly competitive industry. Watch video

In this episode of SaaS Connect by Cloud Software Association, Jamie Tharp, vice president of partnerships and business development at Justuno at the time of the recording, and now head of partnerships, Americas at Amazon Pay, provides a high-value presentation on how to understand your ideal agency profile in order to be more effective at marketing and sales in the SaaS space. Ideal agency profiles are the companies looking for the solutions you offer; they're a fit for your products. Jamie provides a roadmap to understand your ideal agency profile: Critical foundational elements, such as barrier to entry, agency-friendly set-up, and so on. An ideal agency profile; you need to know which companies are the best fit for you so that you can more easily find them. How Justuno found their ideal agency profile, and what they all had in common. Why it's important to define your ideal agency profile. Six valuable tips for SaaS companies to think about when creating their ideal agency profile. Know who your ideal agency profile stakeholders are. Understand what your ideal agency profile stakeholders care about. How to make your first sale through an ideal agency profile. Tips for your next steps. Thank you to our amazing podcast team at Content Allies. Want to launch your own B2B revenue-generating podcasts? Contact them at https://ContentAllies.com

Hoe ga je om met veiligheid en wek je vertrouwen online. Waarom minder stappen meer is. Inloggen of een account aanmaken, wat zijn de verschillen? Hoe ge je om met de check-out procedure en wat kun je met vinkjes? Dries: We gaan het vandaag hebben over de betaalmethodes op je webshop. We hebben het natuurlijk over online betalingen. Dan hebben we het over Ideal, bancontact, Giropay en zo voort. Je hebt kaart betalingen zoals Credit Card, American Express, Visa, Mastercard en noem maar op. Tegenwoordig heb je ook wallet betalingen. Je hebt Paypal, Amazon Pay, Ipay, Google Pay en dan heb je nog Payconiq. Dat zijn allemaal tools waarmee je met je telefoon kan betalen via de wallet apps. Dan heb je nog bankbetalingen, dat gaat gewoon via overschrijvingen. Achteraf betalen heb je ook nog, dat verhoogt waanzinnig de conversie. Denk aan Billing, Afterpay en Klarna. Dat zijn grote bedrijven die deze mogelijkheden aanbieden. Dan heb je tegenwoordig ook nog gespreid betalen, daar heb je allerlei verschillende mogelijkheden voor. Zoals In3, Credit Clicks en noem maar op. Daarmee kan je online een bestelling doen en achteraf gespreid betalen. Verder kan je nog betalen met vouchers. Allerlei bonnen waarmee je kan betalen. Telefonische betalingen dat kan tegenwoordig ook. SMS betalingen heb ik ook al voorbij zien komen. Wat je eigenlijk moet doen als webshop is zoveel mogelijkheden aanbieden. Maar let wel op dat ze niet verdwalen in al de mogelijkheden. In Nederland is bijvoorbeeld Ideal waanzinnig belangrijk. Als je Ideal niet aanbiedt in Nederland dan tel je eigenlijk niet mee. In België als je geen Bancontact aanbiedt dan tel je niet mee. In Duitsland als je geen SoFort aanbiedt dan tel je ook niet mee. Maar waarom zou je Bancontact of SoFort op een Nederlandse website laten zien? Nergens voor nodig, daarmee verdwaal je. Hoe meer payment mogelijkheden die je aanbiedt, dat vergroot de kans op conversie. Dus ik zou zoveel mogelijk aanbieden. Maar probeer het wel overzichtelijk te houden tijdens het afrekenproces. Alexis: Helemaal mee eens. Wat uiteindelijk wel van belang is, zoals heel veel dingen in de marketing, de klant is leidend. Klant is koning wordt heel vaak gezegd. Je kan kijken als je een website hebt die al een tijdje actief is dan kan je gewoon zien bij de betalingen hoe de klanten betalen. Je moet zoals Dries zegt, heel breed aan mogelijkheden aanbieden. Dan kan je zien welke betalingen gebruikt worden en welke niet. Dan kan je in ieder geval kwa volgorde de meest gebruikte bovenaan komen te staan. Wat je soms met Ideal ziet, is dat het soms alfabetisch gesorteerd wordt en soms staan ING, ABN en Rabobank bovenaan omdat het de drie grootste banken zijn in Nederland. Zo kan je ook helpen mensen het makkelijk te maken. Volledige Show Notes op onze website: https://ecommercelessen.com Volg onze Linkedin pagina: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ecommerce-lessen Op Instagram vind je nieuwe en leuke achtergrond informatie over onze lessen

Despite their bad reputation over some business practices, Amazon is an important and powerful  tool that you can use to test your wholesale or retail strategy without having to dive into the deep end before you've learned how to swim. The searches on Amazon are very purchase-intensive, the vast majority of user who look for an item aren't looking to read reviews or how-to's of that product, they're looking for the product itself with intent to buy.   This means you can use the platform to focus your strategy around how customers search for your product, and products like yours, among a large and competitive market with a diverse user base who can be intensely loyal to  brands they find there. Here are the three most important basic steps to getting your products selling on Amazon Build and use your email list: chances are some of the consumers on your listing  are avid Amazon users,  who should be alerted that their favorite brand is now available through the mega-market. Using a contest, sign-in poll or promotional code give-away to gather the contact information of Amazon users, then target those emails with exclusive offers. Increase your sales velocity: Invest in sponsored search results, that is those handful of options Amazon always comes up with near the top of any list, watermarked with "sponsored result".  These are pay-per-click products that retailers have tagged  with a variety of relevant keywords, that show up whenever those keywords are searched, regardless of other parameters.  Keep an eye on your expenses with this method, as it is pay per click, not sale, costs can quickly run-away if your item ends up competing with a bigger named brand that gets hundreds of thousands of searches a day, or more.  Use negative keywords to avoid being lumped in with major name brands you can't compete with. Use automatic targeting:  Expand your keyword association vocabulary , and find out how customers are most likely to search for you.  Chances are, how you search for your brand and products isn't quite the same way your consumers search for them, due to your closer familiarity with the items. You'd be surprised how many ways a customer, with wildly varying degrees of understanding of the product, will describe what they're looking for, and it will pay to include some of the more often used search terms you and your team may never have considered. Our Sponsors https://www.omnisend.com/rolledup/ (Omnisend) - https://getshogun.com/ (Shogun) - https://www.shipbob.com/rolledup (ShipBob) - https://gorgias.grsm.io/pitstop (Gorgias)      

Amazon wants stores, restaurants, and gas stations to accept Amazon Pay. Is this the latest push to oust traditional credit cards like VISA and MasterCard as the primary form of consumer non-cash payment? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/dtns.

  Tracey Wallace has a unique perspective on eCommerce.  As Editor-in-Chief at BigCommerce she has the distinct privilege of rubbing shoulders with the top eCommerce brands on the BigCommerce platform.  And the BigCommerce is home to some pretty impressive eCommerce stores such as Skullcandy, Cargill, Sharp, Camelbak and more….   In this podcast we talk about some key eCommerce success factors and how some of the best and brightest store owners on BigCommerce are winning.  We dive into important topics such as:   Why you need to spend time perfecting your Product Detail Pages (PDPs).  As a reference see what companies like Bliss World Cosmetics, Kelty and Solo store have created amazing PDPs.   How to build community by leveraging micro influencers and by creating amazing content. Payments! How understanding Amazon Pay, Apple Pay and Consumer Financing can help you improve checkout and increase conversion rates.   Plus more!