Pick up any good bargains on Cyber Monday? Amazon has just announced it to have been the single biggest shopping day (in terms of number of items sold) in the company's history, with millions of people hitting its site to make the most of the day's discounts and offers. In the U.S., the best-selling item at Amazon.com on Monday was the all-new Echo Dot smart speaker, with "millions" sold, though Amazon declined to offer a specific figure. Other top sellers included Bose QC 25 noise-canceling headphones, the multi-use Instant Pot Duo, Michelle Obama's autobiography Becoming, and the Jenga game. Across the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, Amazon said customers ordered a staggering 180 million items via its U.S. site alone.

Google Home ($129 at the Google Play Store) is one of our favorite smart speakers, but its dependence on power from a wall outlet limits its mobility. Ninety7's Loft aims to solve that problem: It's a battery that attaches to your existing Google Home to provide on-the-go power, so you can easily take it with you from room to room, or into the garage or yard--or even on the road if you want to use your Google Home as just a Bluetooth speaker. The Loft costs $49.95, but Ninety7 slashed that price tag to $29.95 for Black Friday/Cyber Monday, and it was still available for that price as of press time. When I first pulled this base out of the box, I was surprised by how light and sleek it is. Its simple design seamlessly integrates with the look of the Google Home, with a hard plastic outside and a smooth form that doesn't get in the way of sound quality.

Until this fall, Chintan Maniar managed nearly 200 employees at a Target store in San Jose, California. Now, after 20 years at the big-box retailer, he manages a much tinier storefront in San Francisco. It's staffed by many more cameras than people, and shoppers can walk in, grab a bag of Doritos or a pump-bottle of Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day hand soap, and just walk out. Standard Store, operated by a San Francisco-based startup called Standard Cognition, is open to the public and meant to showcase the company's autonomous checkout technology. When you enter, you use an app to check in.

For retailers launching a new product or looking to break into a new market, autonomous vehicles with delivery capabilities can reduce the cost of being in a physical retail store, a mall kiosk or a pop-up shop. Additionally, autonomous vehicles can provide accurate insights into where a product is gaining traction and where it is being sold. The vehicle can then efficiently move between low and high trafficked areas. From the perspective of the lean startup methodology, autonomous vehicles applied to retail could reduce production costs and overhead and could minimize the risk of product failure before mass distribution.

Amazon is set to test its cashier-less checkouts in bigger stores, according to the latest report. The firm is already testing the Amazon Go system in small convenience stores which are less than 2,500 square feet (232 square metres) large in Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago. However, reports suggest the firm would like to start implementing the checkout-free system in Whole Foods stores, which are typically 40,000 square feet (3,700 square metres) large. In September it was revealed Amazon was looking to open 3,000 of its cashier-less stores by 2021. Amazon is set to test its cashier-less checkouts in bigger stores, according to the latest report (file photo).

Walmart is set to unleash AI controlled floor scrubbing robots at its stores. The autonomous janitors can clean floors on their own, even when customers are around, the startup behind the smart bots said. The world's largest retailer will roll out 360 autonomous floor-scrubbing robots in some of its stores in the U.S. by the end of the January, it said in a joint statement with San Diego-based Brain Corp., which makes the machines. The autonomous machines are equipped with sensors to scan for people and obstacles nearby. The floor scrubbers need a person to map an initial training route, but can then follow the route on their own.

Gazebo is the actual robot simulator.

No one is immune to products with shiny packaging, newfangled features, and high list prices--even when you're paid to be a skeptical reviewer of these things. At my last job, I welcomed a constant parade of lotions and socks and blow dryers into my apartment. The goods with fancy logos and trendy colors were the ones that made me thrill at my work. They felt nice to unwrap. They felt glamorous to take selfies with. Some nice things turn out to be duds. A $200 bright yellow hair dryer that I reviewed was slower and heavier than the ones you could find at a drugstore. After consulting several dentists, I learned that a luxury light-up teeth whitener works as well as Crest White Strips. There was a brand-name leather briefcase that my colleagues liked, but I found it was too skinny to tote around my personal essentials, like gym clothes and a bottle of wine. A pair of dog boots that cost as much as shoes for a small human being had trouble staying on my petite beagle's feet for more than 10 steps. More often, nice things can prove exactly as useful as their cheaper counterparts: the high-end treadmill made with the same parts as the version sold at Walmart, the sunscreen bottled and sold like a rare and fancy potion with identical active ingredients to much of the stuff available at the drugstore in bulk. There is simply an upper limit to how well a thing can work, which is why you're reading this, our list of holiday gift ideas that are good--and more importantly, Good Enough.

As the 2018 holiday shopping season approaches, the retail sector will once again take center stage. Brick-and-mortar retailers haven't had it easy in the past decade, as more and more consumers shift their shopping habits as a result of ecommerce. However, despite some predictions that brick and mortars are doomed to become mere memories of the days of old, many retailers continue to turn a profit in an ecommerce-dominated market. Many successful brick-and-mortar retailers aren't just brick and mortars; they aggressively pursue omnichannel strategies that blend ecommerce with traditional commerce in a way that puts customers' needs first. The IoT (Internet of Things) is playing a key role in keeping retailers up to speed with consumers' wants and needs.

Encouraged by media portrayals of AI, a widespread myth is that AI simply learns by itself. For example, a common misconception represents AI as a digital brain that can be plugged and played into a given scenario, learning to solve X, Y, Z challenges on its own. Such representations are based on fiction, not fact. While AI is a robotic brain that can learn, it learns in a different way than a human brain. AI uses mathematics and pre-classified data to learn.