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Walmart inches toward mobile checkout with Scan & Go app for iPhone

Erica Ogg — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:41:52 +0000

Walmart is taking the idea of self-checkout to another, more mobile level. The retailer is bringing the “Scan & Go” feature of its Walmart iOS app to 200 stores in the U.S., according to a Reuters report Wednesday. The feature has been in use in some stores already, but at only about 70 near Walmart’s Arkansas headquarters and in Atlanta.

Scan & Go is only available on the iPhone, though Walmart says an Android version is “coming soon.”

Shoppers that have the Walmart app can select “in-store mode” and then scan each item’s barcode as they pick up items throughout the store. Users who have also created shopping lists or budgets within the app will see items scanned “checked off” on their lists. Once finished, they need only go to a self-checkout terminal, scan a barcode on the screen — which reads the items they have in their cart — and pay as usual by swiping a credit card.

It’s not a mobile payment system exactly. And Walmart’s version doesn’t enable the same independence as, say, what Apple has enabled in its own retail stores with the EasyPay option in its Apple Store app or apps from companies like Square and Paypal. With Walmart’s app, you still need to scan one final time at a self-checkout terminal to make your payment through traditional means.

But it’s a step toward easier physical world transactions using mobile technology in the company’s 4,000-store retail empire. Scan & Go could be even more convenient and useful to busy shoppers if Walmart were to enable a payment system within the app.

A lot of companies are being creative with mobile payments and barcode scanning with smartphones. And the success of Square, LevelUp and plenty of others have demonstrated that mainstream users are getting used to the idea of paying with their iPhone — without need for technology like NFC chips inside the device.

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iPhone 5 with $45 Straight Talk Unlimited plan now at Walmart

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:10:56 +0000

It’s practically impossible to get Apple’s iPhone 5 on the cheap without a contract, but at least there’s another option for the commitment-averse to save money on the monthly service bill. Straight Talk is officially supporting the iPhone 5 now with its $45 plan advertised as unlimited talk, messages and data. The price of admission for a 16 GB iPhone 5 with Straight Talk is $649 at Walmart stores, but the retailer is offering no-interest special financing for the phone: $25 per month.

You’ll need a Walmart credit card for the financing deal and although the Straight Talk service is month-to-month, there’s a bit of a contract feel to the transaction. At $25 a month, you’ll be paying Walmart for 26 months to pay off the iPhone 5 purchase. Still, for those that don’t have the $199 up front for a contract-based iPhone 5, it provides an ownership opportunity for Apple’s smartphone with a lower monthly service bill.

Based on my own usage of Straight Talk, I find the service to be a good value. Straight Talk buys wireless service from the major U.S. carriers at wholesale prices and then resells it. With this iPhone 5 deal, for example, you’d actually be using AT&T’s network but paying Straight Talk’s prices. Coverage and speeds would be the same as if you had bought the iPhone 5 directly from AT&T, with one major exception.

There’s no mention of Straight Talk offering LTE service. That means if you buy an iPhone 5 and use a Straight Talk nano SIM card, you won’t be using AT&T’s fast LTE network, but its HSPA+ service. In other words: Don’t expect your iPhone 5 to surf the web or download apps at 30 to 40 Mbps. Instead, you’ll see speeds about one-third as fast. Provided you can live with that and don’t mind that Straight Talk’s “unlimited” service has a soft cap of around 2 GB per month, you may want hit up your nearest Walmart.

For those that already own an iPhone 5 and want to switch service to Straight Talk service, you’ll have to wait. I checked Straight Talks’s site for ordering SIM cards and see only the standard SIM and micro SIM available; no nano SIM cards just yet.

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How consumer media will change in 2013

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 07:55:50 +0000

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Boxee lands exclusive Walmart distribution deal for its Boxee TV device

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 07:24:41 +0000

Boxee’s new Boxee TV devices is going to be exclusively distributed by Walmart. The retail giant will start selling Boxee TV devices for $98 later this week, according to a Bloomberg report. This will give Boxee an immediate retail footprint of 3000 stores, which will promote the device with display stations and additional marketing.

Boxee TV is Boxee’s second major hardware initiative after the introduction of its original Boxee Box two years ago. The new device, which was introduced earlier this month, comes with a few apps for services like Netflix, Pandora as well as the Walmart-owned Vudu video-on-demand service, and combines those with free over-the-air content that is being accessed via a built-in dual tuner.

Owners of the device will also be able to use it as a DVR, with a twist: Recordings aren’t stored locally, but uploaded to a cloud service that promises unlimited storage. This “No Limits DVR” service will cost consumers $15 per month, and will initially only be available in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia and D.C. Boxee has said that it wants to expand the service to additional markets in 2013.

Boxee TV is significantly cheaper than the original Boxee Box, which initially sold for ~~a whopping $250~~ $199. This is in part because Boxee TV isn’t based on an Intel CPU, as it was the case with the Boxee Box. The new device instead uses the Broadcom BCM7231 chipset, which is significantly cheaper. One downside is that the new Boxee TV device will support slightly fewer codecs for local media playback than the original Boxee Box.

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5 things to know about SolarCity’s IPO (and it’s not all good)

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 16:38:00 +0000

Solar installer SolarCity is moving closer to its planned IPO and said last week that it could raise up to $201 million in a public debut. If successful, the IPO could be one of the few success stories from the cleantech startup sector in 2012, and would be another win for investor and SolarCity chairman Elon Musk.

But the public filing is also one of the first times that we’ve gotten a look at SolarCity’s financials, as well as some of the risk factors that SolarCity lists. And there’s some interesting ones in here. Here’s 5 (+1) things you should know about SolarCity (and they’re not all positive).

1). Energy efficiency play: While SolarCity’s main business is financing and installing solar panels on the rooftops of buildings, SolarCity also is hoping to capitalize in a major way on selling building owners energy efficiency services. SolarCity says 21 percent of its new residential solar customers in 2011 purchased additional energy products and services. SolarCity launched its energy efficiency line in mid 2010, and says it has done more than 11,000 home energy evaluations and sold 1,700 energy efficiency upgrades.

2). Utility competition: SolarCity interestingly describes its main competition as the utilities themselves. SolarCity prices and sells solar electricity at rates below local utilities, so its business basically depends on a steady rise of local electricity prices. It’s business also rests on the rock bottom price of solar panels right now.

3). Has SolarCity been overvaluing its solar systems for the federal grant program?: This is an issue that I’ve been tipped off to before, but we hadn’t yet covered. The Treasury grant program was created to enable the owner of clean power systems to receive a grant equal to 30 percent of the eligible project cost. So a company like SolarCity basically evaluates how much its solar systems are worth and sends in the application for the grant.

But SolarCity says this summer that it and other solar companies received subpoenas from the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Inspector General to hand over documents related to its applications for U.S. Treasury grants, including documents about appraising solar systems for the Treasury grants. Turns out the Inspector General is investigating the implementation of the Treasury Grant program including if the valuation of solar systems were misrepresented.

SolarCity says it will take the Inspector General a year to determine a conclusion. If the Inspector General finds that SolarCity (or other companies) misrepresented solar system valuations then the Department of Justice could bring civil action and recover those costs.

SolarCity also says that it has also already had discussions with the Treasury Department about the valuations for its grant applications for solar systems submitted in the third and fourth quarters of 2011. SolarCity says:

We were unsuccessful in our attempts to have the U.S. Treasury Department reconsider its valuation for these systems, and while we maintained the accuracy of the contracted value to the investment fund, we elected at that time to receive the lower amounts communicated by the U.S. Treasury Department. As a result, the U.S. Treasury Department awarded grants in amounts lower than the appraised fair market values for these systems. We have appropriately reflected the financial impact of the anticipated reduction in our consolidated financial statements as of December 31, 2011.

4). Not profitable, but rising revenue: Like most cleantech startups SolarCity is not profitable. The company, which was founded in mid-2006, generated a loss of $48.91 million for the first six months of 2012, a larger loss than for the same period in 2011 of $35.46 million. SolarCity has accumulated a deficit of $70.3 million as of June 30, 2012. Those losses are on $71.42 million in revenue for the first six months of 2012.

5). Energy storage is at 100 pilot projects: SolarCity says it has 100 energy storage pilot projects under contract. As I reported earlier this year SolarCity has been working with Tesla to create a home battery products to sell to its solar panel customers and Walmart has a been a major customer for that. SolarCity says its battery management systems could provide “back-up power, time-of-use energy arbitrage, rate arbitrage, peak demand shaving and demand response.”

Bonus +1 — Musk is a major owner: SolarCity discloses that Elon Musk owns 31.9 percent of SolarCity’s shares before the offering. Other major owners listed include John Fisher of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who owns 26.3 percent, SolarCity executives Lyndon Rive and Peter Rive each own 7 percent, Nancy Pfund, DBL Investor, who owns 7.4 percent, and Raj Atluru of Silver Lake, who owns 2 percent.

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Following Target, Walmart stops selling Kindles

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 16:51:51 +0000

Walmart has become the second large U.S. retail chain to announce that it will stop selling Amazon Kindles, after Target made a similar announcement in May.

Reuters first reported the news, citing a memo that Walmart sent to store managers on Wednesday. “We have recently made the business decision to not carry Amazon tablets and eReaders beyond our existing inventory and purchase commitments,” the memo read. “This includes all Amazon Kindle models current and recently announced.”

Walmart confirmed the change to Reuters and it appears to extend both to Walmart’s website and its stores.

The chain is still selling Barnes & Noble’s Nook as well as some other e-reader brands.

As with the change in Target’s policy, it’s unclear why Walmart stopped carrying Kindles. But the company is working hard to beef up its own e-commerce strategy. The company recently built its own shopping search engine, which it is now deploying on Walmart.com, and it takes cash for online purchases. Meanwhile, Amazon is trying to sell as much Amazon.com content to Kindle device users as possible. (The company is even selling physical products through Kindle Fire apps.) So it makes sense that Walmart would not want to turn over more sales to a competitor.

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Walmart dominates the list of U.S. companies using solar

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:38:29 +0000

Walmart’s massive scale allows it to dominate a lot of sectors it enters — turns out the retailer is also a behemoth in solar panel power. According to a list of the top 20 companies in the U.S. using solar panel systems, released by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) on Wednesday, Walmart comes out on top for both how much solar power its stores are generating as well as how many individual systems it’s installed.

Other major U.S. solar customers include Costco, Kohl’s, Walgreens, IKEA, and Macy’s. It’s not surprising that the companies that have a lot of department and grocery stores — with large roof space — would have the most opportunity for installing solar panel systems. According to the report there’s 2.3 GW of solar panel systems installed, delivering over 24,000 systems, for companies and governments (non-residential). In comparison 1 GW is the size of a large coal or nuclear plant.

Remember these are already installed systems. Other companies have sizable plans in the works. For example, Apple is building a 20 MW system in North Carolina for its data center.

As I reported yesterday, the trends behind this interest by companies in solar panels is due to rock bottom solar panel prices, policies in some key states, like California, Arizona, and New Jersey, and also new business models for financing solar panel systems. Companies like SolarCity have created businesses around raising money from investors like banks (or even Google) to finance the upfront cost of a solar panel system. SolarCity’s customer can then pay for the solar system over a 20-year, or so, time frame (which is more convenient and affordable), and the bank can get back a return on that investment (like 12 percent).

However, according to the report released on Tuesday about the growth of solar panel systems in the U.S., this rapid adoption is expected to slow down in the second half of this year and next year.

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The Apple Roundup: iPhone 5, and a brief history of Apple product names

Erica Ogg — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:56:04 +0000

With so many people writing about Apple, finding the best stories and reports isn’t easy. Here’s our daily pick of stories about the company from around the Web that you shouldn’t miss:

Apple has strongly hinted the next iPhone to come after the iPhone 4S will be iPhone 5 by placing a “5″ strategically in the press event invitation today. Asymco looks at how the iPhone diverges from the naming conventions Apple uses for its other product lines.
AppleInsider has some pretty good evidence that the next iPhone, which will almost assuredly be revealed a week from Wednesday, will have the smallest SIM yet. Some European carriers, including Deutsche Telekom, are already receiving shipments of the tiny new SIM cards.
Bloomberg examines the cliched slogans tech companies have been using recently — and points to a Steve Jobs quote as the source.
Samsung’s Galaxy S III stole the crown of top-selling smartphone in the U.S. for the month of August from Apple. But, as ZDNet reports, ComScore still has Apple selling one out of every three smartphones in the U.S. between April and July.
The world’s largest retailer is testing out how the iPhone can speed up checkout. Reuters says Walmart is considering a service where customers can scan items as they’re shopping so that when they leave the store, they don’t have to wait for a cashier to scan items — customers can simply pay for their previously scanned items at a self-checkout kiosk.

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Walmart builds its own shopping search engine

Ryan Kim — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:00:32 +0000

Walmart is deploying a new internally-built search engine to power Walmart.com and ultimately increase sales conversions from searches. The Polaris search engine, developed by @WalmartLabs over the last 10 months, has been in use for the last few months on Walmart.com and has already boosted conversions to sales by 10-15 percent, the company said.

Polaris grew out of the semantic technology brought over through Walmart’s acquisition last year of Kosmix, including Kosmix’s social genome project, which connects people to places, events and products. While Kosmix founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who led the newly established @WalmartLabs, have moved on, Walmart is making good use of their technology.

Now, when users search on Walmart.com, they don’t just get a page full of results. For certain searches, they will get directed to a topic page that features specials and curated items as well as traditional search results. The searches are also getting smarter.

Unlike the previous search engine from Endeca, which was bought by Oracle last year, Polaris does more than just match text or look at what’s selling well recently. Polaris looks at the search term and tries to understand what a user is really looking for by matching the term and all its variations to a knowledge graph. It also applies engagement scoring and previous user actions to help refine its results.

That helps Walmart display more relevant results which can lead to increased sales. And it helps Walmart tailor its search experience to its users instead of relying on a generic third-party search engine.

“As physical retailers get serious about ecommerce, they have to invest in their own technology to track under the hood and really tune and take things to the next level, understanding what users want and matching that to inventory,” said Sri Subramaniam, vice president for @WalmartLabs and head of our search initiative.

Subramaniam said Polaris will get rolled out to Walmart’s international sites over the next few months and will also power its mobile apps. The search engine will also get a visual facelift as well to match the internal upgrades. Subramaniam has no intentions of licensing its search engines to other commerce companies.

Walmart’s decision to build a search engine is not surprising. Harinarayan and Rajaraman had previously built Junglee, a database and search engine that they sold to Amazon in 1998. And Walmart has been talking up its focus on big data recently. The retail giant needs to keep getting smarter if it wants to compete with Amazon, the leader in online retail. That was why it established @WalmartLabs in the first place, to understand how to blend data, social and mobile together and advance the future of commerce. Walmart is also facing more pressure from Google, which has also turned its Google Product Search listings into a new vertical called Google Shopping.

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SolarCity to install solar panel & battery combo for Walmarts

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 19:02:04 +0000

Updated: SolarCity will install solar panels combined with batteries for energy storage at Walmart stores, according to SolarCity Chairman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk at the National Clean Energy Summit in Vegas on Tuesday. SolarCity and Walmart already had a substantial partnership, including solar panels installed at a newly announced 60 stores in California, but this is the first time I’ve heard that batteries will be involved for some of the installations.

I’ve reached out to SolarCity for more details on the deal and will update this if I hear back. In Musk’s 15-minute talk at Harry Reid’s annual clean energy conference, he said that energy storage, and low cost batteries, will be an important piece of solving the energy problem. (I think Musk said that the battery, solar panel deal would be for 90 Walmarts, but with his accent, maybe that was 19. SolarCity so far isn’t responding.) Update: SolarCity says the work with Walmart is “a pilot storage project” and the company expects to install storage at up to 10 sites by early 2013.

The battery, solar panel combo, is an interesting product and one I’ve been following closely. Back in April I reported how Tesla and SolarCity have been quietly building an energy storage businesses together, selling Tesla batteries paired with SolarCity’s solar rooftops installations. I’m not sure if the Walmart installations will use batteries from Tesla.

Tesla sources small format (laptop-sized) batteries from Asian battery giants like Panasonic and bundles them together into a pack. The batteries connected to a solar rooftop would be able to store the solar energy for use when, say, a cloudy day reduces the power production of the solar panels.

If the two companies can make the economics work for the grid storage lithium ion batteries, this could be a breakthrough for energy storage and clean power. SolarCity has submitted at least 70 applications for energy storage projects to attempt to receive rebates from the California Public Utility Commission’s Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP), which provides incentives for distributed energy generation. Are these 70 applications for the Walmart stores? I’m not sure, but I’ll update this when I know more.

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