Gadgetory

and good Monday morning to everybody out there in YouTube thank you for joining us on another episode of the 359 podcast with Roger Cheng and Ben Fox Rubin good morning guys what are we talking about today morning happy monday everyone whoo we're gonna be talking about two topics the big merger monday deal walmart buying gedcom for 3 billion dollars yeah Cillian yes with Abby I don't know if people heard of gedcom but don't they well now well now for sure well we're gonna we're gonna get in that we're going to talk a little bit about Delta and how a power outage of all things knocked out pretty much their entire system canceled three hundred flights so sorry if you got your on a delta flight today cuz is not gonna be good day for you yeah you guys can crash at my house as always if you have any questions about these topics or anything else we will try our best answer a producer Brian will pick out the best questions after the actual podcast taping and we will will try to answer them so why don't we get started all right platform set audio is rolling and let's record in three two welcome to the 359 when we talk about the top tech news of the day all the other crap we want to throw in I'm Roger Cheng I'm Ben Fox riffin its merger Monday again Walmart is hoping to supercharge its online ambitions with a 3 billion dollar purchase of gedcom in its early days gedcom was hyped as a potential amazon killer early days early they thing is like a year old so what do you think it means that that definitely that was that hype was not warranted right um that's that's hard to say because they're keeping the senior team in walmart and so jet started with about like 500 or 600 million dollars which is really good for a start-up but still how are you going to take on Amazon with that kind of writing it's really not enough so now jet is going to have Walmart's coffers and it could create much more significant competition for Amazon but probably not in the short term right you know we might see something a couple years from now I don't know well if you and you look this piece last year yeah around a seller around yell about gedcom Chiefs of algorithms to kind of figure out the best deals for you does that mean walmart gets more nimble and I should get you better deals online so that's a good question in their press release today walmart mentions that jet and walmart are going to have separate brands so walmart com is going to do its thing jet calm is going to continues to exist as its own brand so is walmart gonna change walmart.com and start adding some of those fancy real-time discounts yeah I don't know I'd like to see that because it have you ever shopped on jet like never used it nope very quick like everyone like everyone else I know right exactly so I'm in e-commerce reporter so I have shopped on Jed hey I do actually kind of like that you know if you waive free returns you save like seven cents on you know a bunch of you know like the soap that you purchase it a detergent or whatever so those might be some nice little add-ons and they do add them to walmart I I don't know that they will though well we'll see I mean it's a I don't know that I think the biggest problem is no one knows what jet calm is hopefully Walmart is the answer for that yeah I'll see I think an even bigger problem is is that Amazon is just stuff such as suffocating like Jagger nod when it comes to e-commerce and you would think like in the online world so much else in online is competitive actually now that I'm saying it that that's not true Facebook dominates social right google dominates search and amazon.com irse but i would like to see more competition like the thing of it is is Walmart's looking at this from the narrow lens of retail Amazon's already sort of expanded beyond that right total shows our own zone they've got all cut their their everything basic there they are literally the everything store whereas walmart still trying to work on the whole yeah commerce thing ya know what's good luck to them good luck next up my sympathies if you're on a delta flight today a power outage in its headquarters in Atlanta knocked out its system and the company had to cancel about three hundred flights today ouch yeah it's it just surprised me that it took something as simple as a power outage to just knock out an entire nations worth of flights I was saying this i was saying this earlier that the airline is now using twitter as a backup to inform people twitter has its own like fail whale and its own problem so I think you're really kind of screwed if you're using Twitter as a way to inform people about things but well we have we had someone on the ground although I think he's literally in the air now but Terry Collins was out in DC trying to catch flight back home and he he was he was on a Delta flight and had to deal with the delays fortunately he was one of the few flights that actually made it through but it is yeah not a great day of your Delta flyer it doesn't make a lot of sense to me but this I guess proves that I don't know a lot about airplanes and such because like how did this even happen didn't they have backups I I don't know you're gonna see ya I don't wanna know more about these stories check us out and seen it I'm Roger Cheng I'm Ben Fox ribbon thanks for listening and that's a cut on the audio recording and I um we do want people to feed their question and questions in and work out a few coming in right now but I'm kind of curious as a ecommerce participant that's an enzyme analogy sure why not well jet also say chopper identity or will it just be absorbed into like a grander Walmart shopping experience so just kind of by the back end that is definitely a good question i think Jett has about three warehouses it currently owns and operates walmart has its own I don't know off the top of my head exactly how many it would probably make sense from a position of scale to combine those two so that it is in the back end you are buying the same stuff because a lot of times when you're on walmart.com or you're on jet calm what are you getting you're getting like diapers or like a frozen shirt patio furniture yeah patio furniture a lot of it is like like commoditized consumables anyway so I don't think that like people are really going to notice or care about the difference as to whether their items are being fulfilled by a wal-mart warehouse or a jet warehouse it does sound to me though that jet is going to be able to continue to maintain some sort of independent status because I know a lot of tech companies these days even after an acquisition continue to get to be you know their own thing kind of like how Instagram is under facebook although i would say i would i would be disappointed if Walmart does it take some of the technology the Eau de lis right like it just seems like a waste like having to sub-brand it to me that's like that's not worth a deal I just really wonder what walmart has been doing with walmart.com this whole time Walmart icons existed for about 15 years right and they make god i don't remember they make about 500 billion dollars in revenue a year Walmart UN's Walmart does yes 13 billion of it is from their online channels like that's embarrassing they're like billion 13 billion out of the 500 billion is online is their ecommerce sales like this well it's not good think about a threat as would the way Walmart's exist massive super stores at every corner kind of thing granted there are holes in pockets across international presence right there in Canada now aren't they ya know they're overseas yeah they're in China why would you go to calm when you could literally go out your front door it's hard I mean I'll find a walmart and their their shelf stock is a lot greater in comparison to other stores have online presence where it's an online only type purchase you can't find this necessarily in your neighborhood you probably will because Walmart's are gigantic daunting like dinosaurs right and they and walmart.com has kind of been um you know second fiddle to walmart I think Robert Horry hasn't been as good either part of the problem is that yes right now you know people are still preferring to go out to be spoken more stores the world slowly shifting that next generation is not really they're not big fans going out the real world and buying stuff they just they want to click on their phone and order something fair but I think there's something to be said that and like this is not me like endorsing walmart in any way shape or form that the it's kind of impressive that they've maintained that they're one of the last ones that really get people in the door I mean I think that's partly because it's like you said scale right look very few other companies gonna look look at Circuit City or Barnes note wind up our noble that eventually yeah borders eventually barnes a noble look at these other retailers they didn't have a scale to compete with everything and so that's why they got gobbled up and the demographic for walmart tends to skew a little older yes my god okay as tech savvy there is shane yeah there is sort of a shelf life on them like they see the future dead is on the wall eventually they did they did yeah it took him a while it took them 20 years but that's okay well hopefully there would be more competition that's that's what I'm hoping to see from this Randall surmises it well he says obviously walmart is a profits titan and i think walmart bought it's because they see the horizon with that profit yeah okay so that's saying yeah right on the nose randall bossom says that he thinks with walmart support gedcom will see greater success be more competitive I've seen gedcom commercial it's not like that weren't completely they were completely invisible but I just never really liked gave them the time of day look a lot of a really long time to build trust in the marketplace generally develop a brand presence and they've been doing that but they've only really existed for about a year and so they were doing this basically from scratch right that's really really hard to do so at least you know that jet is in some ways going to continue to exist under the Walmart brand it definitely has the early definitely has an air of legitimacy under walmart for sure right exactly because i think a lot of folks were like okay you just raised a ton of money as a start-up but you guys are going to be spending like crazy trying to get the word out yeah now people that are jet customers at least know jet is going to consume you exist so what i want to run a few numbers by you by the way just you know they disclosed today that they add about four hundred thousand new shoppers every month process an average of twenty-five thousand orders each day is that good or bad i mean the first startup is definitely good they also have this one number not to get too wonky here but they mentioned in the press release that they are on a run rate for gross merchandise volume of a billion dollars that so okay a billion dollar sounds like a lot but gross merchandise volume means this is what gedcom cells and also all the third parties that are on Jack are not like jet calm is actually making that right that's not a revenue number that's like all the stuff that sells on our website and a run rate it basically means that we're gonna take the best month out of our 12-man we're on pace and then we're going to multiply we're gonna say we're on pace we're going to multiply that by twelve and say well we did ridiculously well in March and if we have more marches for the rest of the area theoretically we have this number yeah so look like those numbers sound pretty good to me for as young a company is at but it's still like um not very big compared to Amazon I mean you have to compare them all to Amazon sure no because like those that's the vicuna david says that the website walmart's website as is is terrible and reinforces my point that he'd rather just go to the store to get what he needs which I probably fine I think I honestly think that walmart has been ignoring its website for a long time or at least not putting another and to as I told you last saw it is i use walmart.com too but i did too video game i I got a dust buster buster on walmart.com so it's not like cyber monday or black friday spec was yeah i was one of those it was something like that and it was just slightly cheaper than amazon doc i would say the experience of it was it was fine it just wasn't as slick as amazon like it what definitely wasn't in total Easy's amazon also it is cheap because L checker says hopefully they can lower the prices because apparently there's not a whole lot of monetary incentive to use walmart com prices are high you're not actually getting a better deal to go online they want you at the store well and I think that they also they have a fifty dollar minimum for free shipping which is right you know free shipping these days like people kind of take it for granted especially if you're a prime member not so if you're not putting what is not so with 35 with Amazon what's the 35 and it's also by the way 35 I believe for jet calm so I ok maybe walmart will lower the price I'm not sure well see okay speaking of been you said you've used Jack calm yeah give us a little more background information on the user experience in their history because people are curiously recurring comments what's jet calm right heard of this yes exactly um so jet calm was started by Mark lawyer who is kind of like an e-commerce wunderkind he's like 45 years old but he started quit Z which you don't know that name but he quit Z was a parent company for soap calm diapers.com and wag calm that company was sold in 2011 to Amazon for 545 million dollars he proceeded to work for amazon for a couple years kind of chafed at that and then he was going to do his own thing and so he started jet jet officially launched only like last summer and look I think their mobile is actually pretty good they have their own app and I'm I'm pretty happy with the app sometimes I can't find what I want like the search isn't that good sometimes but I think they have been improving that and online like they're also pretty alright but the differentiator that they have is that they have this real time algorithm they say it's kind of like a trading platform where basically if you purchase bulk orders or you purchase a lot of items from the same warehouse they can cut the price down for you the more stuff that you buy right so um it's surprise like a loyalty card almost yeah it like the prices are fluid though depending on the right if equation yeah so if i buy like one bar of the one thing of deodorant it's this price but if I by five they'll cut the price for every single one of them um so it's this pretty clever way of gamifying shopping and I always end up buying a little bit more than I might normally because I'm like oh you know now I get all these other discounts if I just buy one more thing isn't that right in line with like the walmart business model though walmart sam's club it's like oh yeah i could buy like other bloke like a six pack of ramen noodles but they have 44 eight dollars so i'll get forward that's yeah it's like the costco model right yeah exactly the same so I I agree with you that walmart continues to try to get people in the store because invariably if you do go in the store you are going to make some impulse buys yeah and then end up like I was planning on spending twelve dollars on I end up spending 50 instead the thing is is that like we're in 2016 like their online presence isn't big enough and they know that and you know the world's biggest retailer so well by revenue by total revenue so I think this jet thing is an admission that they're like we have to get much more serious about web and we have to get much more serious like right now like yesterday so yeah hopefully that was some helpful info finally i'm bored with the 21st century yeah yeah yeahs took him to come along 20 years yeah become 20 years that's fun do we have any flights coming out of this office anytime soon it's a that's a bummer what the delta thing the delta thing is killing me but like you say you know it's embarrassing that one power outage but remember a couple years ago one power outage took down our scenic coastal servers that's true one power outage took down basically the northeast corner for the Northeast I was a couple years oh yeah a couple years ago but yeah were you in the city when that happened I was in New Jersey City it was there in doubt it was out of their buddies uh I remember I was living in hoboken home of jet calm and I for whatever reason are our apartment had a generator downstairs we were like the only building like within like the square mile whatever that that had power people were looking up at our apartment cuz we had our lights blasting AC running we're just like hey guys chickens check us out anybody watching been affected by the Delta outage or know somebody that's been affected by the Delta outage would be curious to hear like we we said a couple of our reporters have been kind of uh vac seated in the process it's yeah it's going to show it was it wouldn't send Terry out there specific cover this he just happened to be like waiting for his flight when he got hit with the delay like everybody else and he's sitting there like aa gold yes like that to be like hey we covered slick yes yes we're on top of it so outage took out spirit in February in southwest in June thank you for that LJ yeah that's a good point i forgot about those yeah shire that's a very killer for us at this just proving that you know the tech world is not invulnerable no yeah well especially companies like Airlines the airline guys they're not exactly known for high-tech right like I remember the Delta CEO was speaking at this conference like two years back wearing when he can all these questions about it was a tech conference and he just sort of scoff at the whole notion of tech in general just likewise I don't understand the stuff like it just seemed like he clearly didn't really care about tech like airplane caretech a place art you should care about airline tech maybe I necessarily know he cared about because he still today you have to turn your phone off to get on a plane right but he just he didn't care about some of the the more you know like cloud services mobile apps that stuff like they do that but he didn't seem like he really that wasn't really his folk right because they don't have a job to be that focus cuz they put you on the airplane and then you're completely disconnected from the ground so what do they care about any of that stuff that's true huh yeah any last questions no I think it's about time to wrap up that's a good show all right hopefully we don't have any traveling in our near future yeah um I'm traveling like two weeks now then three fine by the actually be driving quite a bit mmm knock on wood there we go alright let's wrap things up here if you like anything you saw or heard here check us out on cnet com or podcast is also available on itunes google play music soundcloud tune in and feedburner well done thank you see you tomorrow woo