Retail chain giant Wal-Mart is launching a tech incubator in Silicon Valley, focused on robotics, virtual and augmented reality, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Dubbed as "Store 8", the new incubator's name is a reference to a Wal-Mart location in Arkansas, where the company experimented with new store layouts. The new initiative was announced by Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart's U.S. e-commerce business at the Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas. Marc Lore is also the co-founder of Jet.com, the e-commerce startup that was acquired by Wal-Mart in 2016, for a sum of $3 billion USD in cash and $300 million USD in stock. According to Lore's statement, Walmart will invest in the startup businesses like a VC company and grow the group as a portfolio.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Japan recently announced a major robotics event for next year. The World Robot Summit will feature a series of competitions, talks, and exhibits.

While millions of people fearing a robot run world, it is Americans who should worry the most. A new report has found that 38 percent of US jobs will be replaced by robots and artificial intelligence by the early 2030s. The analysis, by accountancy giant PwC, has also revealed that it is financials service jobs that are at most risk of a robot takeover - 61 percent could be replaced by machines. While millions of people fearing a robot run world – it is Americans that should worry the most. PwC found that 4 in 10 jobs in the US are at risk of being replaced by robots.

The use of artificial intelligence has given Charlotte Russe an important competitive edge. With its online and mobile shopping communities growing larger and their expectations for flawless services increasing, the apparel retailer turned to IBM to prepare for the busy and critical 2016, five-day holiday shopping season kick-off. To get a jump start, Charlotte Russe launched IBM's Watson Customer Engagement solutions in seven months. And the technology immediately gave the retailer a wake-up call. Following deployment, the Charlotte Russe team analyzed its initial sales and transactions projections for the holidays with output from Watson.

Over 96% of Americans are shopping online, with an estimated 36% allocating their shopping budgets to e-commerce, spending an average of five hours per week making online purchases. Adweek reported that 81% of consumers conduct research online before making purchasing decisions, with more than half of shoppers spending over 75% of their time doing so. More notably, 36% of shoppers spend over 30 minutes researching online before making a purchase, with 65% spending at least 16 minutes searching the net before spending. In 2016, 93% of consumers in the U.S. also redeemed an online coupon or discount code, accounting for more than 126 million people. As traditional storefront shopping swiftly transitioned online, the personal experience slowly began to diminish, eliminating the engagement with associates to offer helpful information r assist with making smart purchasing decisions.

The new Nintendo Switch game console is displayed at a pop-up Nintendo venue in Madison Square Park, March 3, 2017 in New York City. One of the first post-launch shipments of Nintendo Switch is coming into GameStop this week, offering us not only an important measure of how well launch momentum is keeping up, but also how well Nintendo is able to keep producing units and getting them out to retail. This is a shipment for brick-and-mortar stores only, and instocknow still doesn't show anything available on major online retailers save eBay. So if you're looking to buy one, don't expect to do so from your computer. I've spent a good chunk of the morning calling GameStop stores in random parts of the country, and I've found that things are a bit all over the map.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. Our picks and opinions are independent from any business incentives. Alright, so you got yourself an Alexa-enabled device--an Echo, Echo Dot, or Amazon Tap. I'm sure you've already spent plenty of time fooling around and getting to know your new smart assistant, but there's a crazy amount of possibilities you might not have even known about. Keep reading to discover my list of the strangest, most useful, and all-around best things you can do with Alexa.

Hot on the heels of its addition to the Amazon app on the iPhone, Alexa is looking to make its presence known on Android, too. Huawei has announced that the virtual assistant is on its way to the Mate 9, making it the first Android phone to receive Amazon's AI aide. With Alexa on the Mate 9, you'll be able to do many of the things the Echo and Dot can do, including control your home automation devices while you're away. Huawei is touting its smart home capabilities as the flagship feature of Alexa on the Mate 9, but it can also handle many of the other skills Alexa has on Amazon's devices, including the ability to play games, shop at Amazon.com, get news updates, track your workouts, and play podcasts. Furthermore, you can use it to get information about people, places, and events, check your Google or Outlook calendar, find local businesses, and get weather and traffic updates.

On Monday, Walmart said that it's launching a tech incubator to invest in robotics, augmented and virtual reality, machine learning, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. Walmart has invested in or bought other startups in the past, but the company said the latest initiative is about "making big bets on the ideas that will transform the future of retail." The innovation hub is called Store No. 8, after an early experimental store Walmart founder Sam Walton used for new ideas. "We are creating an ecom incubator and budgeting capital to build startups," Marc Lore, president and CEO of Walmart.com and founder of Walmart-acquired Jet.com, said at the Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas. "It'll be wholly owned by Walmart but made of independent companies."

Dipayan Dev Dipayan Dev has completed his M.Tech from National Institute of Technology, Silchar with a first class first and is currently working as a software professional in Bengaluru, India. He has extensive knowledge and experience in non-relational database technologies, having primarily worked with large-scale data over the last few years. His core expertise lies in Hadoop Framework. Dr. Hadoop has recently been cited by Goo Wikipedia in their Apache Hadoop article. Apart from that, he registers interest in a wide range of distributed system technologies, such as Redis, Apache Spark, Elasticsearch, Hive, Pig, Riak, and other NoSQL databases.