The Jeff Bezos playbook works something like this: sketch out a big, audacious goal in a fledgling market, launch with a modest yet fine-tuned project and build incrementally over many years until you're the 500-lb. This is playing out right now with Amazon's cloud services. An experiment that began a decade ago to offer startups access to its tech infrastructure has turned into the dominant player in the cloud sector, with $13 billion in revenue. Amazon Web Services will have added 1,000 new features this year, including artificial intelligence technology like speech and image recognition. More famously, it happened with Amazon.com,

Consumers'Couch Shopped' On Black Friday: Here Are The Likely Retail Winners And Losers The future of retail for marketers was supposed to be merry and bright: armed with their smartphones, consumers would walk into a store and pass a geofence, which would then alert the consumer of stores offering discounts and coupons for various products via their smartphone. The consumer would buy discounted product and then go home and be happy. Except, this is exactly how no one shops. This isn't to say that in-store shopping isn't already an online experience. It's just that the idea of locally offering deals to consumers based around a particular item or brand is very old school.

Few industries are as competitive as ecommerce. Not only are online retailers competing with other online stores and brick-and-mortar locations, but also the overall noise that is the Internet. We live in a world where consumer attention span is getting shorter and shorter: 40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load, and the average shopping cart is abandoned more than 68 percent of the time. I'm hard pressed to find an ecommerce site that is not constantly scrambling to engage more and drive more sales. Technology is finally helping with those efforts in a big way.

Shoppers can literally grab and go without paying for their goods at a cash register at Amazon's new smart grocery store in Seattle. SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon is testing a grocery store in downtown Seattle that lets customers walk in, grab food from the shelves and walk out again, without ever having to stand in a checkout line. Customers tap their cell phones on a turnstile as they walk into the store, which logs them into the store's network and connects to their Amazon Prime account through an app. The service is called Amazon Go. It uses machine learning, sensors and artificial intelligence to track items customers pick up.

Imagine grocery shopping without lines, cashiers and registers. That's what Amazon Go customers will experience soon, Amazon announced in a trailer Monday. Amazon Go is not your typical supermarket. Instead, customers use the Amazon Go app to shop and all they'll need is an Amazon account, a supported smartphone and the app. "Amazon Go is a new kind of store with no checkout required," Amazon said on its site.

Since the small UAVs were released for commercial use, drones have been a popular gift amongst tech enthusiasts, photographers, videographers and teens alike. Retailers from Best Buy to B&H have become completely saturated with a variety of drone makes and brands, making the selection process not so simple for those who are looking for the ideal model for someone on their shopping list. Whether you're shopping for a first-time drone user or looking for the best-ranked model of 2016, there is a selection of drones to search for by category for the holiday season. Best Drones Under $200: While these models likely won't be as durable as, say a Phantom 4, moderately priced drones are great for someone who is just starting out with a drone or for someone who enjoys flying them for fun. The U45 Blue Jay WiFi FPV Quadcopter Drone received good reviews on Amazon as easy-to-use and good in-flight for its price.

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Shoppers can literally grab and go without paying for their goods at a cash register at Amazon's new smart grocery store in Seattle. SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon is testing a grocery store in downtown Seattle that lets customers walk in, grab food from the shelves and walk out again, without ever having to stand in a checkout line. Customers tap their cell phones on a turnstile as they walk into the store, which logs them into the store's network and connects to their Amazon Prime account through an app. The service is called Amazon Go. It uses machine learning, sensors and artificial intelligence to track items customers pick up.

Investors poured a record high $1.05B into artificial intelligence startups in Q2'16, and AI is already affecting more areas of our lives than many people realize. Even retail and e-commerce companies are increasingly integrating the technology. Recently there's been a rush of AI announcements and acquisitions by major retailers: Just this week, Etsy acquired Blackbird to enhance its search functionality through AI, followed the very next day by Amazon acquiring Angel.ai And earlier this month, e-commerce unicorn Houzz (see our full unicorn tracker here) announced a deep learning initiative to help users find and buy products by clicking on images. Using CB Insights data, we dove into the wide array of AI startups focused on retailers and e-commerce businesses, including AI-powered personal shopping apps, natural language processing and image recognition tools for shopping websites, predictive inventory allocation tools, and more.

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