GigaOM » Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart to try out locker system to let customers buy online, pick up offline

Jordan Novet — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:37:17 +0000

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. executives know that more people want to buy stuff outside of stores. As part of its multi-pronged Wal-Mart eCommerce strategy, the retailer with 4,000 stores in the United States and 10,000 worldwide has been taking orders online and letting customers pick up their purchases in store for the past few years. Now it’s adding another option that other large online retailers have been working on, too: pick it up from a locker at the store, with no Wal-Mart employee to go through.

The locker method will debut this summer at fewer than a dozen stores, probably in one geographic region in the United States. “Really, it’s to test and learn,” said Jeff McAllister, senior vice president of Wal-Mart U.S. Innovations, during a media day at the company’s Wal-Mart eCommerce facility in San Bruno, Calif., on Tuesday. It’s also a way that retailer can match its online rival, Amazon.com. Amazon has been offering customers lockers in several cities, to serve customers who order goods but might not have doormen or a front porch where they can receive packages.

With this program, Wal-Mart will box up the items a customer purchases and squeeze the box into a locker that fits just right, McAllister said. Then Wal-Mart will send the customer a message with a code that will allow the customer to open the locker. The customer will initially have a couple of weeks to pick up the purchased items.

This is clearly a bid to burnish its online experience, because most people are close enough to visit a physical Wal-Mart store if they wanted to. Two thirds of people in the United States are within five miles of a Wal-Mart store.

Like other Wal-Mart eCommerce initiatives, if it works, it will expand. If it doesn’t, it won’t. Like similar locker experiments from Amazon, Overstock and others, it’s worth watching as a shot at making retail fit the digital age.

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How to deliver the next-generation web experience

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 07:55:36 +0000

Delivering a positive web experience has become exceedingly more complex as the access environment has shifted from a desktop-centric vision to one that is increasingly focused on mobile devices. Mobilizing web design is a catch-22; adjusting to design challenges is costly, but not adjusting is equally costly, because a poor mobile web experience results in a loss of revenue. This report will examine what drives content consumption today and illustrate what the changing consumption of content has meant to the development and delivery of web and mobile content. It will also examine the evolution of the web experience and explore the challenges of content delivery to both mobile and desktop devices.

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Mobile 2012 and beyond

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 06:55:31 +0000

Few industries change at the pace mobile does. Whether it’s the iPhone 5, the importance of LTE, or BYOD trends disrupting the enterprise, there are always new technologies, trends, and companies changing the way we define mobile. Here, GigaOM Pro highlights a few segments of the mobile industry that will be important to watch in the coming months, from location-based shopping to wireless networks, and new business models for carriers.

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Listening platforms: finding the value in social media data

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 06:55:52 +0000

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Ailing patent troll targets Facebook and Wal-Mart, claims to own web

Jeff John Roberts — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 22:40:42 +0000

Even after Amazon and Google put two bullets into its head earlier this year, overgrown patent troll Eolas is stumbling forward with new lawsuits against Facebook, Wal-Mart and Disney.

Eolas is a shell company that had been stomping around the country demanding companies pay it to use basic technology that lets users “interact” with the web. It suffered what looked like a fatal blow earlier this year when Amazon and other Eolas targets persuaded a Texas jury that two of its patents were invalid.

Nonetheless, Eolas has dusted itself off and filed new claims based on the same patents plus two more that are offshoots from the original patent issued in 1998. That patent, which can be seen here, is entitled “Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document.”

Eolas’ legal rampage led the man regarded as the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, to testify in February that its patents should be invalid.

The troll’s activities have also proved controversial because the University of California has been its partner in the patent lawsuits. A spokesperson told Reuters, which was first to report the Facebook suit, that the school considered the patents public assets and that it “should be paid a fair value when a third party exploits that university asset for profit.”

Lawyers for McKool Smith, the firm representing the troll, didn’t return requests for comment. The law firm, which has won hundreds of millions in Texas troll cases through commissions of up to 40 percent, has seen its fortunes turn in the last year.

A Wall Street Journal story last month quoted a lawyer who said McKool Smith may now have to survive on a stream of trout rather than big marlins.

Here’s the Facebook case:

Eolas v Facebook

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The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 06:55:30 +0000

Currently the biggest investments in the business of consumer media cloud storage have come from major consumer-facing platform providers. These players see cloud-based media services both as a way to increase attachment to their platforms and a means to extend and amplify their broader strategic goals. For this report we profile Apple, Google and Amazon, specifically. Each is pursuing a distinct approach to storing media in the cloud, and this report examines those strategies as well as the future prospects for each company.

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Over the top in 2012: trends and technologies to watch

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 06:55:23 +0000

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Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

Thu, 31 May 2012 06:55:44 +0000

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Deploying big data: 2012 strategies for IT departments

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:55:01 +0000

Cloud computing and big data are in the enterprise to stay. However, a recently conducted GigaOM Pro survey tells us that successfully mining data and getting the most benefit out of the cloud come with challenges: Seventy-four percent of large companies said business intelligence (BI) projects were still the domain of the IT group, and just under half of companies (45 percent) said the main reason BI projects fail is due to a lack of expert staff. This report examines the survey’s results in more depth and provides recommendations for making the most of your company’s big data.

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Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:55:54 +0000

The first quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile legal and regulatory battles over privacy, antitrust and copyright that could eventually reshape digital markets, including the pay-TV business and online advertising. It was also marked by shifts in the online video landscape, including a seductive new display from Apple and Hollywood’s first efforts in the cloud. We examine these trends and others in this quarterly report, as well as provide a near-term outlook for the next 12–18 months.

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