As “new retail” changes from jargon to oft-used phrase, Tencent has thrown their hat into the ring. However, they don’t plan on opening their own stores (the WeChat pop-up seems to have been exactly that). Rather they want to be the foundation to help the retail industry achieve two goals: the digital upgrade of stores and […]
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China’s answer to Amazon Go aims to conquer the unmanned frontier with facial recognition
Long-waited Amazon Go opened its door to the public in Seattle last week and there has been overall positive feedback. However, unmanned stores are definitely not a new concept for China’s tech-savvy consumers. Since May 2017, when Alibaba launched its first unmanned store with the focus word “new retail”, a flurry of Chinese tech companies has […]
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Top 10 Chinese unmanned stores in 2017
The announcement of Amazon Go, the cashierless store concept, in late 2016, coincided with a flurry of Chinese tech companies creating their own versions of unmanned stores. For them, 2017 was a fruitful year for developing their solutions tailored to Chinese consumers, as well as in educating the market. What’s more important behind the quick […]
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Video: We tested one of China’s unmanned stores and this is what we found
BingoBox is becoming one of the more vivid examples of how fast innovation is moving in China’s retail industry along with Alibaba’s initiative in unmanned stores powered by their face recognition technology. However, the concept isn’t without its own teething problems. A BingoBox in Shanghai was closed for being too hot and when we tried one ourselves, we […]
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Here are 4 new retail spots you can visit in Shanghai
New Retail is the trend in China right now. Before November 11st Singles’ day, a day when Chinese spends the most in a year, Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba flexed its muscles on both online and offline channels. We will tell you four destinations in Shanghai that you can visit to get a glimpse of China’s […]
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Live from CES Asia 2017 – An inside look at Baidu autonomous vehicles
Baidu’s GM of Intelligent Vehicles Gu Weihao started his keynote session for CES Asia by asking the question: When will autonomous driving be able to surpass human ability? He cited a report from think tank RAND that calculated self-driving vehicles would have to clock 275 million failure-free miles to demonstrate that it meets the safety standards […]
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China and the future of driving: Q&A with Vitaly Ponomarev, CEO of WayRay
Editor’s note: This piece was contributed by David Green, a Taipei-based writer and journalist covering the future of work in Asia. Imagine being transported through a gleaming city of the future in a driverless car. All that space outside, all those windows through which to watch your world pass by. Who would want to spend the […]
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Forget QR codes, China’s next favorite payment method is your face
The launch of Apple’s new iPhone X equipped with tech that turns your face into a poop emoji seems to have left China’s consumers less than impressed. This shouldn’t surprise us—authentication through facial recognition and other biometric features has been gaining traction in China for quite some time. From fighting toilet paper thieves with dispensers […]
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Baidu launches their open platform for autonomous cars–and we got to test it
Baidu has launched an autonomous driving ecosystem with 50 partners at its first AI developers conference in Beijing. At its heart is the US-developed code for controlling the vehicles, but the scope of Apollo 1.0 is to create an entire ecosystem encompassing research universities, components makers such as NVIDIA, navigation developers such as TomTom, and […]
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Live from TechCrunch – The car the internet made
China is likely to become the next leader in new energy vehicles, said Ian Zhu, a partner at NIO Capital, founded by NextEV and VC firms. Zhu spoke at a panel called “The Car the Internet Made” during TechCrunch Shenzhen; he pinpointed some of the advantages of the Chinese electric vehicle market such as motor […]
