“Walmart Announces Winning Team in 2013 Walmart Better Living Business Plan Challenge”  “The team from MIT started off the final round with a 15 minute presentation. Their idea, called Takachar, is to turn landfill waste into charcoal briquettes that local households in Mombasa, Kenya can use for cooking fuel. University of Michigan students followed with Covaron, an advanced material that can outperform high-grade engineering ceramics for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the embedded energy.  After both presentations, the team from the University of Michigan was named the Grand Prize winner and received a check for $20,000.”  Read more:  https://news.walmart.com/news-archive/2013/04/30/walmart-announces-winning-team-in-2013-walmart-better-living-business-plan-challenge

 

“Trader Joe’s Tops Net Promoter Rankings” at Supermarket News.  “Among supermarkets measured in the survey, Trader Joe’s scored highest despite a 10-point drop to a 63% score. Wegmans Food Markets, which was the sector leader in 2012, dropped to fourth place with a 20-point decrease…Satmetrix’s Net Promoter Industry Benchmarks were based on surveys of more than 24,000 U.S. consumers asked to rank how likely they were to recommend a company’s product or service.”  Read more:  https://supermarketnews.com/retail-amp-financial/trader-joe-s-tops-net-promoter-rankings#ixzz2S2RK73X1

 

“Lowes Launches Home Improvement Tips on Vine” at AdRants.  “Lowe’s has launched Lowe’s Fix in Six, a Vine campaign which focuses on everyday home improvements by offering sharable tips…The Vines launched last week and will continue to debut on Lowe’s Vine, Twitter and Facebook pages through the first week of May.”  Read more:  https://www.adrants.com/2013/04/lowes-launches-home-improvement-tips-on.php

 

“Girl Scouts: Big Business for Little Cookies” by Kayla Tausche at CNBC.  “Don’t let America’s youngest sales force fool you. The 3.2 million Girl Scouts run a juggernaut business in a limited, eight-week period allotted to each troop. This year cookie sales are on pace to exceed last year’s record $790 million, which beat 2011’s $760 million. By comparison, the U.S.’s most popular cookie is Mondelez’s Oreo, which posts annual U.S. sales of more than $1 billion. Girl Scout cookies are second, followed by another Mondelez brand, Chips Ahoy.”  Read more:  https://www.cnbc.com/id/100690574

 

“PayPal Being Accepted At More & More Stores – But Not Walmart” by Adeel Qayum at News for Shoppers.  “According to a recent report on BusinessInsider, PayPal will be accepted in more than 2 million brick and mortar stores by the end of this year.  But there’s huge hold out when it comes to taking PayPal as a payment method…. Walmart.”  Read more:  https://www.newsforshoppers.com/paypal-being-accepted-at-more-more-stores-but-not-walmart/36713484/

 

“Walmart’s Food Subscription Service Goodies.co Now Using Stripe To Process Payments” by Romain Dillet at Tech Crunch.  “Today at Disrupt NY, Stripe co-founder John Collison participated on a panel with Hill Ferguson (PayPal) and Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad) about digital money. He shared that Walmart’s Goodies.co is now using Stripe to process payments. Convincing a big company like Walmart to switch to Stripe is a big achievement for the startup.”  Read more:  https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/30/walmarts-subscription-service-goodies-co-now-using-stripe-to-process-payments/

 

“Warby Parker’s Flagship Foray into Physical Retail” by Scott Lachut at PSFK.  “Much has been written about how Warby Parker has reinvented the business of selling eyeglasses online from its reasonable price point ($95US) for a pair of fashion forward frames and buy one, give one model to its virtual and home try-on programs…All of this thinking has culminated in the launch of the brand’s first flagship retail space, which opened its doors to the public on April 13th. PSFK had a chance to tour the shop located in NYC’s Soho neighborhood.”  See pics of new store:  https://www.psfk.com/2013/04/warby-parker-retail-store.html?utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer:%2BPSFK%2Bon%2Btwitter&buffer_share=b3a5a

 

“The Part Of The Internet You Don’t See Lets Machines Talk To Each Other—And Will Change The World” by Ben Schiller at Fast Company.   “The “industrial Internet” is the idea of connecting millions of machines–railroad cars, wind turbines, MRI scanners, you name it–to a network, extending today’s connectivity to factories, hospitals, buildings, and much else. According to Jon Bruner it is “machines becoming nodes on pervasive networks that use open protocols.” And, to many others, it is as a big a deal as the Internet itself: essentially completing a job that’s only half-finished with web sites, email, Twitter, and so on.”  Read more:  https://www.fastcoexist.com/1681712/the-part-of-the-internet-you-dont-see-lets-machines-talk-to-each-other-and-will-change-the-w?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

 

“The Frontier of Online Sales is Curation” by Carrie Whitehead at Zappos via PSFK.  “Curation” is a relatively new term, but it’s finding its way into other realms; you hear about content curation, music curation – all meaning that in some way, these industries are personalizing their offer according to your individual wants, needs and likes.”  Read more:  https://www.psfk.com/2013/04/online-retail-curation.html

 

“Office Depot Sales Drop 5% in Q1”  “Total Company sales for the first quarter of 2013 were approximately $2.7 billion, down 5% compared to the first quarter of 2012 in both U.S. dollars and in constant currency. Sales in the quarter were negatively impacted by approximately $58 million or 200 basis points compared to the prior year due to a shift in the timing of the New Year and Easter holidays.”  Read more:  https://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsLang=en&newsId=20130430005435&div=-1245645151

 

Thanks for reading…

 

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