Hasta La Gadget!

Wondering how your old buddy Tesco is faring with the launch of its first branded bit of hardware, the £119 Hudl tablet? Well, according to Tesco’s CEO Phil Clarke, via a tweet from Retail Week’s Jennifer Creevy, not too shabby: the supermarket chain has offloaded about 35,000 of the devices over the past few days. We very much doubt the likes of Google and Amazon, which have never been forthcoming with early sales figures, will be threatened by the number, but it’s surely not a bad start from a retailer that knows more about selling bread and milk than tablets. Incidentally, Amazon’s just dropped the price of its soon to be last-gen 7-inch Fire HD to £119, matching that of the Hudl — if you’ve got no ClubCard points to secure a discount, that is. We now have one of Tesco’s tabs in our possession, so look out for the review. We’re assessing the display by rewatching the entirety of Game of Thrones, however, so it might take a while.

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Source: Jennifer Creevy (Twitter)

Anyone that calls the UK home will know that Tesco is a retail behemoth and, like many other supermarkets, has turned into a one-stop shop for everything from a pint of milk to the latest video game releases. It’s grown into much more than a store, however, running an MVNO (although it sometimes gets confused about hardware) and the subscription-based video streaming service Blinkbox. Last year, Tesco let its wider digital ambitions be known, acquiring both a music streaming service and an e-book publisher. We’ve now been told these companies are the primordial soup from which its new online content emporiums will spawn later this year, known as Blinkboxmusic and Blinkboxbooks, respectively. And who’ll be responsible for these new ventures? Well, they’re somebodies — Gavin Sathianathan, who was previously Head of Retail (EMEA) at Facebook, will head up the e-book offering, while Mark Bennett, formerly Head of Digital & Cross Channel at rival super-supermarket Sainsbury’s, will run the musical endeavor. Tesco also announced that former Blinkbox exec Scott Deutrom is taking the reins of Clubcard TV, a new ad-supported video streaming service currently being tested. So, what’s next for Tesco, apart from world domination? If industry trends are anything to go by, a mobile OS, most likely.

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Via: The Telegraph

Source: Tesco (Blinkbox)

Hot on the heels of purchasing Blinkbox and Peter Gabriel’s WE7, Tesco has purchased Andy McNab’s e-book publishers, Mobcast. It seems clear that the British supermarket heavyweight is currently engaged in a phony war with rival Sainsburys, which snapped up Rovi, Global Media Vault and Anobii for its competing online content service. McNab’s company is rather small, only offering around 130,000 titles in the UK, but like the earlier purchases, its infrastructure and resources will most likely be cannibalized to boost the company’s forthcoming digital platform.

Continue reading Tesco recruits Andy McNab’s e-book firm Mobcast to help win the Supermarket content war

Tesco recruits Andy McNab’s e-book firm Mobcast to help win the Supermarket content war originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Sep 2012 11:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fed up with wandering through supermarket aisles in an effort to cross that last item off your shopping list? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University‘s Intel Science and Technology Center in Embedded Computing have developed a robot that could ease your pain and help store owners keep items in stock. Dubbed AndyVision, the bot is equipped with a Kinect sensor, image processing and machine learning algorithms, 2D and 3D images of products and a floor plan of the shop in question. As the mechanized worker roams around, it determines if items are low or out of stock and if they’ve been incorrectly shelved. Employees then receive the data on iPads and a public display updates an interactive map with product information for shoppers to peruse. The automaton is currently meandering through CMU’s campus store, but it’s expected to wheel out to a few local retailers for testing sometime next year. Head past the break to catch a video of the automated inventory clerk at work.

Continue reading Carnegie Mellon researchers develop robot that takes inventory, helps you find aisle four

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop robot that takes inventory, helps you find aisle four originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jun 2012 19:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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