This Is the Future of Retail, According to 1 Silicon Valley Engineer | Inc.com

December 22, 2016December 22, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The retail shop might be beleaguered in this era of convenient online shopping and free returns, but it’s not dead yet. Far from it: just look at the storefronts operated by formerly online-only brands such as Bonobos, Warby Parker, and Rent the Runway.

But e-commerce has definitively changed the way people shop–and according to one Silicon Valley engineer, retailers are failing to adapt.

Most bricks-and-mortar shops are never going to be able to beat the Amazons of the world at supply chain efficiencies, says Vibhu Norby, formerly a lead engineer at the smart thermostat company Nest. So, he concludes, “the future of retail has to do with discovery and customer relations.”

Washington, D.C. Passes 8 Week Paid Parental Leave Bill | Forbes

December 22, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

On Tuesday, lawmakers in Washington, D.C. passed one of the most generous paid parental leave laws in the U.S.

The new legislation will grant all full- and part-time workers in the city eight weeks of leave at up to 90% of their full weekly wages for birth, adoption or fostering. The bill also provides for six weeks of family leave to look after a sick relative and two weeks for a personal medical emergency.

The law will only cover private-sector workers, excluding those on city or federal payroll. To qualify, a worker need only be employed in D.C.; residents of other cities and states with jobs in the capital are eligible. Non-profit workers and the self-employed are also covered.

CodeFights: Play this coding game, score a job in Silicon Valley | Money Cnn

December 19, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

It took less than three months for an online coding game to transform James Johnston’s life.

Johnston, 31, was designing software for orthodontists and living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when he landed a better-paid software engineering job in Silicon Valley at a major tech startup.

The key to this career upgrade and cross-country move? CodeFights, an online game that offers programmers the chance to improve their skills and get noticed by Silicon Valley titans like Uber and Dropbox.

Johnston told CNNMoney he discovered the game through a Facebook ad in June.

“I was kind of intrigued and thought it was a fun little activity,” he said.

The top 15 events that happened in space in 2016 | TechCrunch

December 16, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

2016 was a big year for research and discovery in space. The year started off with Caltech astronomers picking up the presence of a ninth planet while researchers at LIGO were detecting gravitational waves for the first time. NASA’s Juno spacecraft finally arrived in orbit around Jupiter, and astronomers found the closest exoplanet to Earth. Blue Origin showed off their suborbital rocket reusability skills and Elon Musk revealed a plan to colonize Mars. Not to mention the huge developments for SpaceX, which successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the ocean for the first time, but then suffered a devastating explosion later in the year. These are the top events for space in 2016.

These facts about millennials and driving will blow your mind (Allstate) | Mashable

December 15, 2016December 16, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to driving, car ownership and vehicle maintenance, millennials’ status as OG digital natives is especially evident.

Millennials love their apps. There is literally an app for almost every element of the daily routine: waking up, meditating (important to this health-obsessed, new-agey generation), keeping track of finances and managing the morning commute. There’s even an app to tell them when to drink water.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that millennials depend heavily upon apps when they hit the road. Navigation systems are huge: In fact, millennials say nav apps are the number one technology they use when en route.

Wells Fargo’s Hometown Penalizes Bank Amid Fake-Accounts Scandal | Bloomberg

December 14, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Wells Fargo & Co., the bank working to contain a scandal over bogus accounts, was suspended from doing some business with its hometown of San Francisco.

The city’s Board of Supervisors on Tuesday suspended the firm for two years from providing services as a broker dealer, in commercial banking and in commercial paper. The measure, sponsored by Supervisor John Avalos, also removed Wells Fargo from securities investments and counterparty/repurchasing agreements. San Francisco had barred the lender in September from a banking program for low-income residents.

Retail sales show massive shift in restaurant industry | Business Insider

December 14, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Wednesday’s retail sales report was disappointing, missing economists’ expectations and raising concerns over the outlook for the holiday shopping season.

Within the retail sales report, however, was an interesting nugget that may be worrying for America’s major restaurant chains.

The percentage of retail sales devoted to bars and restaurants compared with food and beverage stores was nearly the smallest gap in decades, according to Bespoke Investment Group.

The ‘Uber for X’ Fad Will Pass Because Only Uber Is Uber | WIRED

December 12, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

“UBER FOR X” has been the headline of more than four hundred news articles. Thousands of would-be entrepreneurs used the phrase to describe their companies in their pitch decks. On one site alone—AngelList, where startups can court angel investors and employees—526 companies included “Uber for” in their listings. As a judge for various emerging technology startup competitions, I saw “Uber for” so many times that at some point, I developed perceptual blindness.

Nearly all the organizations I advised at that time wanted to know about the “Uber for” of their respective industries. A university wanted to develop an “Uber for tutoring”; a government agency was hoping to solve an impending transit issue with an “Uber for parking.” I knew that “Uber for” had reached critical mass when one large media organization, in need of a sustainable profit center, pitched me their “Uber for news strategy.”

6 million borrowers are 90 days late on their car loans | Money Cnn

December 2, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Roughly six million auto borrowers with shoddy credit scores are at least 90 days late on making their loan payments, according to new figures released by the New York Federal Reserve. The percentage of delinquent subprime auto loans has raced to the highest level since 2010.

Since the end of the Great Recession, there’s been an explosion of auto loans, growing to more than $1.1 trillion. That, along with a far stronger economy, has helped fuel a boom in U.S. auto sales.

While Detroit’s sales slowed down earlier this year due to rising prices, General Motors (GM) and Ford (F) on Thursday said sales accelerated in November. The industry is now back on track for record sales in 2016. It could be the eighth-straight year of increases.

But part of those sales may have been fueled by easy availability of credit for borrowers with poor credit, who are evidently now struggling to pay off those loans.

Here’s everything AWS will announce today | TechCrunch

December 1, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Amazon is hosting the second of two major keynotes at its re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas today. TechCrunch has received detailed notes on the contents of today’s keynote, which will be delivered by Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels. We already knew he was going to talk about DevOps and containers today, but here are a few more details of what to expect. The keynote is scheduled to start at 8:30am PT.

AWS Personal Health Dashboard

AWS Personal Health Dashboard will give developers data on the health of the infrastructure that is running their applications. This is the kind of operational data that companies are used to having on their applications — and should make DevOps teams feel a lot more comfortable using AWS to launch their cloud applications.