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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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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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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Tencent shows off their vision for the future of unmanned retail
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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The Big Sell | Luckin is not dead
A year after getting kicked off Nasdaq, former unicorn Luckin Coffee is still delivering cheap coffee in China.
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China’s going to take a bigger chunk of world’s $110b app economy in 2018: report
In the past decade, the whole world has witnessed how mobile phones and smart devices have revolutionized the way people live and think. As the iPhone, the forerunner of this evolution turned 10 in 2017, Apple’s App Store and competing platform Android Market are celebrating their tenth anniversaries in 2018. The decade-long development has brought […]
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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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Video: Alibaba shows off face recognition at its cashier-less concept store
In China, the future of retail is already here. Alibaba Group launched its second Taobao Maker Festival on July 8th and introduced the Tao Café, an experimental cashier-less coffee shop driven by face recognition. Alibaba’s AI and data technologies have made it possible for customers to shop in this offline store without going through the time-consuming […]
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Here’s how Chinese VCs are adapting to the ever-changing startup scene
China presents a fascinating nation for tech entrepreneurs. The speed at which China’s technology grows and transforms is perhaps the most important aspect in defining what’s happening in the country’s startup industry: The Middle Kingdom is now the second largest arena for entrepreneurship with one startup is set up every seven minutes. To highlight the changes, […]
