A prototype Moby Mart is being tested in Shanghai, China. Per Cromwell, the project's lead designer, says four to six additional mobile supermarkets are planned in the coming year. A prototype Moby Mart is being tested in Shanghai, China. Per Cromwell, the project's lead designer, says four to six additional mobile supermarkets are planned in the coming year. Browse the science fiction aisles and you can find all sorts of dystopian future visions -- environmental catastrophes, robot overlords, zombies swarms, triffids.

Over the course of the last few years, eCommerce has sprung up and put the brick-and-mortar side of the retail industry on notice. A growing number of eCommerce-focused merchants like Amazon have gradually increased their footprint in the physical store space. With the opening of the Amazon Go grocery store and bookstore in Seattle, Amazon is breathing innovation into the stodgy brick-and-mortar experience. It is also changing the retail game by eliminating the need for checkout stations through its artificial intelligence (AI) infused checkout system in its Amazon Go grocery store. In combination with its recent $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods, it may be safe to assume that merchants in the retail space will follow Amazon's integration of more technology into the in-store experience.

Whether customers feel good or bad about their experiences is ultimately underpinned by their emotions. This doesn't matter what context they are in -- every interaction is emotional. As consumers, our shopping experiences mean quite a lot to us. If we stand in ridiculously big queues or receive terrible customer service, we are most likely to stay far away from or never return to that store. On the other hand, however, if we are delighted with the store's customer service, the product range or even the floor layout, we are most likely to continuously purchase and build a relationship with the brand. Thus it is how we feel about and interact with a brand that drives our consumer decisions.

Probabilistic forecasting, i.e. estimating the probability distribution of a time series' future given its past, is a key enabler for optimizing business processes. In retail businesses, for example, forecasting demand is crucial for having the right inventory available at the right time at the right place. In this paper we propose DeepAR, a methodology for producing accurate probabilistic forecasts, based on training an auto-regressive recurrent network model on a large number of related time series. We demonstrate how by applying deep learning techniques to forecasting, one can overcome many of the challenges faced by widely-used classical approaches to the problem. We show through extensive empirical evaluation on several real-world forecasting data sets that our methodology produces more accurate forecasts than other state-of-the-art methods, while requiring minimal manual work.

The problem with regulating technology companies is that, faced with tough new rules, they can eventually innovate their way out, often by switching to newer, unregulated technologies. The risk of targeted regulation informed by little other than economic doctrines might even be fuelling a corporate quest for eternal disruption: instead of surrendering to the regulators, technology firms prefer to abandon their old business model. It's through this lens that we should interpret the likely fallout from the €2.4bn fine imposed on Alphabet, Google's parent company, by the European commission. It arrives after a lengthy, seven-year investigation into whether the company abused its dominance to promote its own online shopping service above search results. The commission's case seems sound; the sad fate of small online retailers, unable to compete with Alphabet over the past decade, suggests as much.

If you generate machine learning (ML) models, you know that the key challenge is exporting and importing them into other frameworks to separate model generation and prediction. Many applications use PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language) to move ML models from one framework to another. PMML is an XML representation of a data mining model. In this post, I show how to build a PMML application on AWS. First, you build a PMML model in Apache Spark using Amazon EMR.

Nothing is certain but death and taxes -- not even investing. There are no guarantees when you're putting your money in the stock market, and investors looking for a sure thing are bound to be disappointed. Yet there are a few things investors can look for to give them a better chance of finding a successful investment. Find a company that's tapping into an emerging trend and is the dominant player in that field. Seek out an innovator that isn't afraid to take calculated risks to leverage the future.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's monthly retail report, retail sales were up 4.5% year over year in April, but online sales grew 12%. Online retailers have long had an information advantage over their brick-and-mortar peers, as they are able to gather vital data about their customers (such as their age, gender, and location) as well as data on things like what people are looking at and how long they are staying on a page. For example, floor-level cameras can track traffic and where people are spending time in stores, and can predict information like age and gender by analyzing video of shoes. Nicholas has been a writer for the Motley Fool since 2015, covering companies in the consumer goods and technology sector.

This article originally appeared on the Motley Fool. Robots will take jobs formerly done by people, and that will hit the retail space pretty hard. That does not mean an army of robotic workers will eliminate the need for humans entirely. Instead, jobs that can be easily automated will be, according to ZipRecruiter's Chief Economic Adviser Cathy Barrera in an email interview with The Motley Fool. ZipRecruiter, which was launched in 2010, started as a tool to help small businesses distribute job postings affordably.

Amazon's Echo lineup of smart home speakers traditionally has looked the same as any traditional speaker, but its latest update significantly shakes up Amazon's popular product lineup. The Echo Show is the newest Alexa-powered speaker for the online retailer, and unlike past models, the Show includes a touchscreen and camera. Around the web, reviewers have generally been fans of the new hybrid smart speaker though some are hesitant about its major features. Apple HomePod: Which Device Do Consumers Want? Externally, the Echo is anchored around a 7-inch display that shows information like the weather, song lyrics and menus.