Walmart passes Apple to become No. 3 online retailer in U.S.

Walmart has overtaken Apple to become the No. 3 online retailer in the U.S., according to a report this week from eMarketer. While Amazon still leads by a wide margin, accounting for 48 percent of e-commerce sales in 2018, Walmart – including also Sam’s Club and Jet.com – is poised to capture 4 percent of all online retail spending in the U.S. by year-end, totaling $20.91 billion.

The news of the shift in e-commerce rankings comes alongside Walmart’s strong earnings which saw the retailer reporting a 43 percent increase in online sales and upping its year-end forecast for both earnings and sales.

The company had beat Wall St.’s expectations in its fiscal third quarter, with $1.08 earnings per share instead of the expected $1.01. However, it fell short on revenue with $124.89 billion versus the $125.55 billion expected, due to currency complications, it said.

eMarketer had estimated in July that Walmart would capture a 3.7 percent e-commerce share in the U.S. this year, but increased that to 4 percent based on its quickly growing online sales.

This year, Walmart’s online sales will grow by 39.4 percent – just slightly behind the growth rate for online furniture and home goods retailer Wayfair, which is expected to see sales grow by 40.1 percent, the firm also noted.

Apple, meanwhile, will grow just over 18 percent in 2018 – a slowdown related to slowing domestic sales for smartphones and other devices. Its portion of the e-commerce market is relatively unchanged from 2017 to 2018, going from 3.8 percent to 3.9 percent.

Walmart, by comparison, is increasing its share from 3.3 percent to 4.0 percent.

But both are behind eBay, now at 7.2 percent. And they’re both vastly outranked by Amazon, which will account for a whopping 48 percent of the U.S. e-commerce market in 2018, up from 43.1 percent last year.

Amazon will take in more than $252.10 billion domestically this year, eMarketer said.

“Walmart’s e-commerce business has been firing on all cylinders lately,” said eMarketer principal analyst Andrew Lipsman, said in a statement. “The retail giant continues to make smart acquisitions to extend its e-commerce portfolio and attract younger and more affluent shoppers. But more than anything, Walmart has caught its stride with a fast-growing online grocery business, which is helped in large part by the massive consumer adoption of click-and-collect.”

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Apple partners with A24, the studio behind ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Hereditary’

Apple has signed a multi-year agreement with A24, which will see the film studio producing multiple movies for Apple.

Not much else is known about the deal yet — not the number of films, their genres or the talent involved. Still, the deal suggests that Apple is going to be investing seriously in original films, along with TV shows.

Over the past year or so, Apple’s been releasing a steady drumbeat of content announcements, for shows like an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels, a drama set in the world of morning TV starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon and a series from “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle. What’s less clear is how Apple plans to distribute theses shows and movies, though there have been reports that it will give the content away for free to people who own iOS and tvOS devices.

A24, meanwhile, is a relatively new studio launched in 2012. It’s quickly established itself as a home for critically acclaimed films like “Moonlight” (winner of the Oscar for Best Picture) and “Lady Bird.” It’s also released some of the best science fiction and horror movies of the past few years, including “Ex Machina,” “The Lobster” and “Hereditary” (which gave me nightmares for a solid week).

The studio’s films have had a significant presence on streaming, thanks to an early, exclusive deal with Amazon Prime, but A24 has also had success in theaters — particularly noteworthy at a time when ambitious, original films seem increasingly likely to premiere on services like Netflix. In fact, Variety notes that this year has been A24’s most financially successful yet, thanks to in large part to “Hereditary.”

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Apple’s Final Cut Pro X just got a big update — here’s what’s new

Apple’s pro-grade video editing tool Final Cut Pro X is getting a big update today.

While much of FCPX is getting polished up in this release, the biggest change is what it allows for moving forward: workflow extensions. These extensions allow third-party apps and services to hook right into FCPX and build on top of the native interface and functionality.

Apple partnered with three companies to build out extensions for launch day:

• Frame.io: Frame.io lets video producers share in-progress edits, allowing collaborators to view the project as it comes together and drop comments, frame-by-frame annotations and ideas directly into the relevant, time-synced section of your timeline. Frame.io has been building out this functionality within their own app for quite a while now — this new workflow extension just brings all of it right into FCPX to keep you from having to constantly switch back and forth.

• Shutterstock: Need some b-roll you didn’t think to shoot? The Shutterstock extension lets you drag watermarked photos/videos/music into your project for temporary use, then handles swapping in the licensed/unwatermarked stuff later.
• CatDV: If your team uses CatDV for handling/tagging its assets, the new extension lets you connect to your content catalog, search for tagged content and pull it right into a project.

While FCPX has had plug-ins for a while, these new workflow extensions are able to more tightly integrate into the app’s built-in interface. Third-party extensions will come straight from the Mac App Store. Apple says that anyone will be able to build an FCPX workflow extension through a newly built SDK, though it’s asking interested parties to reach out to them directly for now.

Meanwhile, some of the other changes coming to FCPX:

• A Comparison Viewer that lets you pin clips side-by-side (or drag in references from the web) to help with color correction and grading.
• A batch-sharing tool to help export multiple clips (or export into multiple formats) at once.
• A newly built video noise reduction effect for helping to cut down on grain while maintaining sharpness.
• A fancy “Tiny Planet” feature that can convert 360º video into a trippy spherical view

Apple is also pushing updates for Motion and Compressor, two apps it sells separately from FCPX on the App Store. Motion, Apple’s tool for building titles and transitions, is getting deeper color management tools to help get all the grading just right, along with a new comic book-style filter and a tiny planet feature similar to the one now built into Final Cut. Compressor, Apple’s dedicated tool for encoding your videos and prepping them for distribution, is being shifted over to a new 64-bit engine (though it’ll still work with 32-bit file formats). It’s also picking up the ability to burn subtitles directly into a video, and will at long last offer support for handling SRT subtitle files — particularly useful for anyone trying to upload straight from FCPX to Facebook, which will only accept SRTs.

All of the updates are free to existing users. For new users, Final Cut Pro X costs $300, while Motion and Compressor go for $50 each.

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MacBook Pro with updated GPU is now available

Apple recently unveiled a bunch of new products during a press event in New York. But the company also quietly shared a press release with new configurations for the 15-inch MacBook Pro. Customers can now get a MacBook Pro with an AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16 or Vega 20 graphics processing unit.

Before this update, users could only get Radeon Pro 555X or 560X GPUs. Those options are still available, but you can now pay a bit more money to get much better GPUs.

As the name suggests, Vega is a new generation of graphics processors. The iMac Pro comes with desktop-class Vega processors — the Vega 56 and Vega 64. The Vega 16 or Vega 20 are less powerful than the iMac Pro GPUs. But they also fit in a laptop and consume much less power.

In particular, Radeon Pro GPUs use GDDR5 memory just like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One X. But Vega GPUs now take advantage of HBM2 memory, which provides more bandwidth and consumes less power.

It leads to a direct bump in performance. Apple says you can expect as much as 60 percent faster graphics performance. But we’ll have to wait for the benchmarks to know that for sure.

Vega GPUs are only available on the most expensive 15-inch MacBook Pro configuration that starts at $2,799 with a Radeon Pro 560X. Upgrading to the Vega 16 costs another $250, while the Vega 20 is $350 more expensive than the base model.

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Google Assistant picks up a few new tricks

Google Assistant, the voice-driven AI that sits inside Google Home (plus Android phones, newer Nest cameras, and a bunch of other devices) and awaits your “Hey, Google” commands, is already pretty clever. That doesn’t mean it can’t learn a few new tricks.

In a quick press briefing this week, Google told us a couple new abilities Assistant will pick up in the coming weeks.

First, and perhaps most interestingly: routines can now be set to trigger the moment you dismiss an alarm on your phone. Routines are basically Google Assistant combo moves; you build them to trigger multiple actions at once. You can build a “Hey Google, I’m going to bed.” command, for example, that turns off your smart lights, shuts down the TV, and locks your smart locks. For a while now, you’ve been able to have routines triggered at specific times; now you can have them triggered by alarm dismissal.

The difference? If you snooze the alarm on your phone, the routine won’t go off just yet. So you can build a routine, for example, that turns on the lights and starts reading the news — but now it can go off when you’re really getting out of bed, roughly two snooze-buttons after when you probably should’ve gotten up. You’ll find this one hiding in Android’s Clock app.

Another feature, meanwhile, is getting an upgrade: broadcasts. If you’ve got multiple Google Home devices around your house, you can already “broadcast” to all of them to make house-wide announcements like “Dinners ready!” or “help I need toilet paper downstairs” (THE FUTURE!). Now you can broadcast messages back to your home while out and about via Google Assistant on your phone, and people inside the home can respond. You can say “Hey Google, broadcast ‘Do we need milk?'” and anyone inside your house can say “Hey Google, reply ‘no but please get eggnog, come on, please, it’s basically December, you said we could get eggnog in December’.”

Broadcast replies will be sent back to your phone as a voice message and a transcription.

Google is also starting to introduce “character alarms” — which are, as the name implies, alarms voiced by popular characters. Right now they’re adding the heroes in a half shell from Nickeloden’s Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and a bunch of LEGO animated series characters (alas, no LEGO Batman.) They’ll presumably expand this with more licenses if it proves popular.

And if you listen to podcasts or audiobooks on your Google Assistant devices, you can now adjust the playback speed by saying “Hey Google, play at 1.5x” or “1.8x” or whatever you want up to twice the speed. “Play faster” or “Play slower” also works if you’re not feeling specific.

Oh, and for good measure: Google Assistant can now silence all the phones in your house (or, at least, the Android phones tied to your Google account) with a quick “Hey Google, silence the phones” command.

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Netflix is testing a mobile-only subscription to make its service more affordable

Netflix is testing a cut-price mobile-only subscription as it explores new packages aimed at widening its appeal in Asia and other emerging markets.

CEO Reed Hastings told Bloomberg last week that the company would test lower-priced packages and it hasn’t taken long for those experiments to come to light. The first reports are from Malaysia, where Netflix quietly rolled out a mobile-only tier priced at RM17, or around $4, each month. That’s half the price of the company’s next cheapest package — ‘Basic’ — which retails for RM33, or around $7.90, per month in Malaysia.

A Netflix spokesperson confirmed the Malaysia trial. They added that similar trials are “running in a few countries” although they declined to provide details. It remains to be seen if this new subscription tier will roll out to other parts of the world.

The mobile-only trial cuts the price of Netflix in Malaysia by around 50 percent

The move makes sense for Netflix. While it has added plenty of international users — those outside of the U.S. represent 79 million of its total base of 137 million customers — I have argued in the past that it is missing out on even more customers because its rigid pricing is too expensive in many parts of the world. Indeed, to prove that point, a number of rivals in Asia price their services more aggressively.

Rivals including fast-growing Hotstar in India, iFlix — which is backed by Sky and covers 28 countries — HOOQ and Viu are priced from $3 upwards per month. While it isn’t clear how many users they are pinching from Netflix, there’s clearly a pricing disparity which this new mobile-only offering goes some way to addressing. It also hones on millions of mobile-only users in India and other parts of Asia.

Aside from offering cheaper options, Netflix is also doubling down on local content in Asia. India is a key focus and the company this month revealed a slate of eight new Netflix Original movies and one new series from India.

The mobile-only package isn’t the first time Netflix has tinkered with its pricing strategy.

The company tested a strategy to bypass Apple’s App Store with its own web-based payment system over the summer. Rather than using in-app payments for billing, and in turn paying Apple a 30 percent share of the spoils, this approach enabled Netflix to collect all the money for itself. More money is better, of course, but the cost is that the user experience is clunkier without the App Store and that may put some prospective customers. It isn’t clear how well the test performed for Netflix.

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Snap is being probed over its IPO because some investors are salty about losing money

Here’s something I didn’t expect to read today. The U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission has subpoenaed Snap for details on its IPO apparently in connection with a lawsuit from disgruntled shareholders who claim the company played down its rivalry with Instagram.

Reuters first reported on the subpoenas which Snap has confirmed. Precise details aren’t clear at this point but Snap told Reuters that the probe is likely “related to the previously disclosed allegations asserted in the class action about our IPO disclosures.”

Snap went public last March with sharing popping over 40 percent on its debut to give it a valuation of $30 billion. It’s market cap today is a more modest $8.9 billion due to numerous factors including, most prominently, the efforts of rival Facebook to compete with Instagram, which has rolled out a series of features that mimic Snap’s core user experience.

That cloning has taken its toll on Snap’s business.

Today, Instagram’s Stories — the feature that closely resembles Snap’s app — has some 400 million users, that’s more than double the users of Snap. But it is far-fetched to claim that Snap played down that threat when it went public, which is what the class action case claims.

The writing had been on the wall for some time as Snap noted in its S-1 filing ahead of the IPO:

We face significant competition in almost every aspect of our business both domestically and internationally. This includes larger, more established companies such as Apple, Facebook (including Instagram and WhatsApp), Google (including YouTube), Twitter, Kakao, LINE, Naver (including Snow), and Tencent, which provide their users with a variety of products, services, content, and online advertising offerings, and smaller companies that offer products and services that may compete with specific Snapchat features. For example, Instagram, a subsidiary of Facebook, recently introduced a “stories” feature that largely mimics our Stories feature and may be directly competitive. We may also lose users to small companies that offer products and services that compete with specific Snapchat features because of the low cost for our users to switch to a different product or service. Moreover, in emerging international markets, where mobile devices often lack large storage capabilities, we may compete with other applications for the limited space available on a user’s mobile device. We also face competition from traditional and online media businesses for advertising budgets. We compete broadly with the social media offerings of Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and with other, largely regional, social media platforms that have strong positions in particular countries.

But even if an investor something didn’t read that document or reports of it (not advised) there was ample press coverage of the growth of Instagram Stories, and Facebook’s general Snap cloning efforts, since its launch in August 2016.

In particular, TechCrunch covered the rivalry and cloning closely ahead of Snap’s IPO with reports that showed Instagram was “stealing” Snap users, that it was responsible for slowing user growth and more.

In short, it was fairly clear that Instagram was cloning Snap, which in turn was a key factor for Snap’s growth struggles.

Don’t get me wrong there’s certainly a lot to worry about over at Snap — those poor user numbers, a string of executive exits and a strange u-turn on a recent hire — but this lawsuit looks to be little more than sour grapes from investors who either didn’t fully understand the space they invested in, or simply made a poor decision to back Snap at whatever price they did.

On that note: anyone who invested at Snap’s peak valuation might have lost more money than betting on Bitcoin during this year’s January hype — that’s saying something — but ultimately they have no-one to blame but themselves.

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