Target buys same-day shipping startup: Hoping to both fend off Amazon's challenge and keep pace with rival Walmart, Target is buying same-day delivery platform provider Shipt for $550 million. Target says Shipt will give it same-day delivery at half of its stores by early in the new year, and in every major market by late next year.
Shipt will become a subsidiary of Target but will run independently and still seek deals with other retailers. At first, Target customers can get same-day deliveries of grocery items, home products, electronics and some other categories, with an expansion coming over the next couple of years.
The startup, based in Alabama and San Francisco, has a network of 20,000 personal shoppers who fulfill customer orders in 72 markets. As of right now, Shipt's coverage area is centered in the South, Mid-Atlantic, part of the Midwest and Texas. Memberships are $99 for an annual plan, or $14 for a month-to-month plan. Deliveries are free on orders over $35 and can be completed in less than one hour, according to Shipt's site. Delivery drivers can earn around $25 per hour.
POV: Target's move comes just a few months after it acquired Grand Junction, another delivery-related startup. Grand Junction's platform has a different focus, however. It can be used to coordinate and optimize deliveries performed by a retailer's own employees, as well as connect them to some 700 local contract carriers. Shipt's model has more of a gig economy makeup, but it will be interesting to see how Target blends the two companies' capabilities going forward.
Meanwhile, Target's ambitious-sounding plans for increased Shipt availability sound like a must, given its absence in major markets such as the Northeast and California. While there will be an awareness gap at first, Target's retail footprint, digital channels and loyalty programs could close it rather quickly. Overall, same-day delivery is becoming table stakes for many retailers, and Target is showing willingness to make serious investments in it.
But Target's competitors are hardly standing still. Walmart, which is experimenting with rapid delivery on multiple fronts, recently acquired Parcel, a New York delivery startup with a different twist than either Shipt or Grand Junction. Parcel uses its own employees and leased trucks to make deliveries from a warehouse in Brooklyn to locations around the city. For Walmart, buying Parcel was a way to test out same-day delivery in one of the most difficult markets to maneuver in from a logistics standpoint.
Meanwhile, Amazon unsurprisingly isn't letting off the gas either. On the same day as Target's announcement, Amazon said that free same-day and one-day shipping for its Prime members has been expanded to 8,000 U.S. cities and towns.
NVIDIA, Komatsu eye AI for safer jobsites: Chipmaker NVIDIA, which has moved deeper into software and artificial intelligence in recent years, is working with construction equipment manufacturer Komatsu on technology aimed at making work sites safer places. Here are the key details from their announcement:
The partnership – described at GTC Japan by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang – will focus on Komatsu using NVIDIA GPUs to visualize and analyze entire construction sites. The NVIDIA® Jetson AI platform will serve as the brain of heavy machinery deployed on these sites, enabling improved safety and productivity.
NVIDIA GPUs will communicate with drones and cameras in the construction sites, acting as an AI platform for analysis and visualization. SkyCatch will provide drones to gather and map 3D images for visualizing the terrain at the edge. OPTiM, an IoT management-software company, will provide an application to identify individuals and machinery collected from surveillance cameras. Both of these Komatsu partners are also members of NVIDIA’s Inception program for AI startups.
At the center of the collaboration is NVIDIA Jetson, a credit-card sized platform that delivers AI computing at the edge. Working in tandem with NVIDIA cloud technology, Jetson will power cameras mounted on Komatsu’s construction equipment and enable 360-degree views to readily identify people and machines nearby to prevent collisions and other accidents.
NVIDIA and Komatsu will hit at other pain points in the construction industry beyond safety. In Japan, construction workers are in high demand because of its aging population; to that end, Komatsu and NVIDIA's object is also to make job sites more productive.
POV: The project, which builds upon jobsite safety measures Komatsu has been working on since 2015, has many moving pieces. This reflects both its complexity and the breadth of NVIDIA and Komatsu's plans. Construction is just the latest industry move for NVIDIA, which has pushed strongly into autonomous vehicles, healthcare and robotics.
NVIDIA's Jetson developer kit for embedded applications uses the same Kepler GPU core found in supercomputers. GPUs contain thousands of smaller cores that are well-suited for massive parallel processing of deep learning workloads.
NVIDIA has been working on AI for nearly 10 years and has developed a vast set of related libraries and frameworks. This year, it introduced NVIDIA GPU Cloud, a unified software stack that runs on a PC, a more powerful DGX system, or in the cloud.
A related focus has been on education; NVIDA has said it will train 100,000 developers on deep learning this year. The deal with Komatsu represents the type of broad industry use case for AI that can start putting those developers to work sooner than later.
Microsoft pushes Azure cost envelope again: If there is a perennial trend in the IaaS and PaaS industry, it's a steady stream of cost cuts as rivals seek to remain competitive. This week, Microsoft introduced four new capabilities and pricing changes for Azure, with the most prominent being Azure Policy.
The service, now in public preview, allows customers to apply governance over their Azure resources:
Azure Policy allows you to turn on built-in policies or build your own custom policies to enable company-wide governance. For example, you can set your security policy for your production subscription once and apply that policies to multiple subscriptions.
Microsoft is also expanding support for its Cost Management service to Azure Virtual Machine Reserved Instances; cutting prices on Dv3 VMs in some regions, and making its Azure Archive low-cost storage generally available.
POV: None of the announcements on their own are earth-shattering, but they all hold some importance to Azure customers. Moreover, while Microsoft wants to grow Azure workloads and corresponding spend as much as possible, and price cuts are one way to entice more consumption. But keeping a steady focus on factors such as cost optimization and good governance as well drives more value from customers and demands similar efforts by competitors.