Smart home gadgets have no limits these days. You can control everything from a garage door to every single light bulb in your house … if you have enough gusto to replace them all. Front doors have had smart accessories added to them over the years--smart door locks, video doorbells, sensors to tell you whether the door is shut--so why not make the door itself smart? Home Depot's newest smart door, made by Feather River and powered by Home Depot's smart-home Hubspace platform, incorporates a smart glass window, and starting today you can purchase it on Home Depot's website. It'll require either a USB-C power connection or using the included battery to power that smart window. That's still not cheap, but it isn't a terrible price for a front door with a large window, let alone a window you can control.

Amazon Prime Big Deal Days is back this year, returning on October 8 and 9. The "fall Prime Day" of sorts has served as the online retailer's unofficial kickoff to the holiday shopping season for the past few years. We expect most of the deals to be Prime exclusives, meaning you must be an active Prime subscriber to get the discounts. There are always a couple of deals available for everyone, though, so it's worth perusing Amazon's site even if you don't pay for Prime. It's also worth doing so now because we've found a number of solid early Prime Day deals already available.

Another Amazon Prime Day event is set to run on October 8 and 9, but you don't have to wait another week to bag a bargain. After trawling the world's favorite online store, aisle by digital aisle, we've found the best early Prime Day deals for those looking to get a jump on their shopping. The WIRED Reviews team tests products year-round and uses multiple price-tracking tools to filter the noise. Our deals coverage is different because we begin by cross-referencing our buying guide recommendations. Throughout our Prime Day deals coverage, we only recommend products that someone on our team has personally tested and would recommend buying.

Amazon Prime Big Deal Days is back this year, returning on October 8 and 9. The "fall Prime Day" of sorts has served as the online retailer's unofficial kickoff to the holiday shopping season for the past few years. We expect most of the deals to be Prime exclusives, meaning you must be an active Prime subscriber to get the discounts. There are always a couple of deals available for everyone, though, so it's worth perusing Amazon's site even if you don't pay for Prime. It's also worth doing so now because we've found a number of solid early Prime Day deals already available.

Since 2022, Amazon has held a second Prime Day of sorts in October and that sale event is coming back this year, too. Prime Big Deal Days returns on October 8 and 9, but we're already starting to see some decent deals pop up across Amazon's site. As per usual, most of the deals we expected to see on October Prime Day will be exclusively for Prime members -- and some of the early Prime Day deals we're seeing now have followed suit. If you don't have a Prime membership, don't fret too much -- there are always a few discounts available for all shoppers. However, if you pay the 139 annual fee for Prime, now's the time to put it to even better use.

Supermarket thefts could be a thing of the past thanks to an'ominous' security robot that looks straight out of Doctor Who. Tesco has confirmed it is using the Dalek-like machines, which detect the presence of thieves thanks to 360-degree cameras. Placed near the entrance of Tesco stores in the small hours, the bot shouts at any intruders in an'angry Northern Irish accent' and sends alerts the authorities. It's hoped the robot does a better job than human watchmen because it can't fall asleep on the job, as long as it's been sufficiently charged. However, at 100,000 per month to hire, the robot doesn't come cheap.

From artistry to political economy, philosophers of Ancient Greece already discussed the meanings and ramifications of the idea of luxury (Berry, 1994). Over the last several decades, the luxury industry has morphed into a global market, one of the most valuable sectors in France, and an important sector in Europe. Nevertheless, based on aesthetic values of artistic directors, this sector has been difficult to map network effects, to quantify relevant signals, and understand optimal strategies. For many years, economists, theorists and scholars have been passionate about the pricing of luxury goods based on scarcity (Smith, 1776), on the mechanism of value according to wealthy buyers (Ricardo, 1817) (Marshall, 1890), on the social aspect of consuming luxury goods (Veblen, 1899), and on the psychological effects such as the scarcity principle, formalized in the "Commodity theory" (Brock, 1968). The economic theory of "Design Innovation and Fashion cycles" (Pesendorfer, 1995) and the response "Fashion Cycles in Economics" (Coelho et al., 2004) brings those observations to the economic field by quantifying the complex buyer interactions and the importance of branding, over the quality of raw materials, or craftsmanship. Similarly, in the socioeconomic sphere, Jean Baudrillard explained that in postindustrial societies "Sign value" (Baudrillard, 1968) has surpassed the other economic values based on production cost, and pure market value. To understand the value of luxury goods from a consumer perspective in 2024, "the Distinction" (Bourdieu, 1979), the sociology research on the cartography of social structure to understand logic of taste are no longer relevant due to the complexity of modern consumer paths, with the power of network effects with social media platforms (Rohlfs, 1974), the digital identity at the age of hyperreality (Baurdillard, 1981), and the luxury goods, as an asset class for investment strategy.

Lawson and its owners, major trading house Mitsubishi and telecommunications carrier KDDI, said Wednesday they will open convenience stores of the "future" that utilize digital technology in Tokyo next spring. The new stores, to be in the Takanawa Gateway City complex in Tokyo's Minato Ward, will feature robots that can stock shelves and cook, as well as artificial intelligence signage that recommends products to customers. A booth will also be set up where customers can remotely consult on topics such as nursing care and asset management. The project aims to reduce the workload of store staff by 30% by fiscal 2030. Labor shortages are the number one issue that needs to be address, Lawson President Sadanobu Takemasu said at a news conference on Wednesday.

This paper presents Text2Traj2Text, a novel learning-by-synthesis framework for captioning possible contexts behind shopper's trajectory data in retail stores. Our work will impact various retail applications that need better customer understanding, such as targeted advertising and inventory management. The key idea is leveraging large language models to synthesize a diverse and realistic collection of contextual captions as well as the corresponding movement trajectories on a store map. Despite learned from fully synthesized data, the captioning model can generalize well to trajectories/captions created by real human subjects. Our systematic evaluation confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed framework over competitive approaches in terms of ROUGE and BERT Score metrics.

We knew Amazon would revive its Prime Big Deal Days sale event this fall, but we didn't know the exact dates until today. The online retailer announced that the sale event will return this year on October 8 and 9, giving us all the more reason to call it October Prime Day as we have done in years past. This is the third iteration of the fall sale event that Amazon has used as its (un)official kickoff to the holiday shopping season, and there are already discounts to be had as we see early October Prime Day deals pop up. Prime Day in July remains Amazon's marquee sale event for Prime members, but ever since its debut in 2022, October Prime Day provides subscribers with thousands of exclusive deals to shop during the two-day window. In turn, it also provides Amazon a way to boost sales during the same time period and, arguably more importantly, increase the number of overall Prime subscribers.