Push Notifications for Chewbacca Bobble Heads

Brian: [00:01:07] Welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast about cutting edge and next generation commerce. I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:01:12] I'm Phillip.

Brian: [00:01:14] Whaaaat?

Phillip: [00:01:14] We're back, dude.

Brian: [00:01:15] We're back. We're back.

Phillip: [00:01:17] And from a... Just so we can get the timeline straight because Lord knows we live in this wibbly wobbly timey wimey mess of podcasting realm where we're recording things completely out of order. You are now back from your vacation to Italy. So your life is back to normal now.

Brian: [00:01:38] Now we won't be back yet. Are we going to be back from vacation? I don't think so.

Phillip: [00:01:42] Oh, yes. Yeah, I think so. Actually, you're probably on vacation now as we speak.

Brian: [00:01:46] I'm on vacation right now. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:01:46] You're sipping some wine on the Amalfi coast.

Brian: [00:01:50] Yeah, not Amalfi. Not Amalfi. I wish.

Phillip: [00:01:53] Where are you going, by the way?

Brian: [00:01:56] All over, sort of like north of Rome. So like traipsing through...

Phillip: [00:02:03] As one does through Italian vistas. Well, enjoy your trip, my friend.

Brian: [00:02:11] Thank you.

Phillip: [00:02:11] We have had a little bit of a break. We've been super, super, super busy.

Brian: [00:02:15] Super.

Phillip: [00:02:16] Both you and I. Holy cow. A lot of good things going on. Not the least of which is you been crushing it at Amazon. Certainly don't want to talk about Amazon at all on the show.

Brian: [00:02:26] You mean like the whole show?

Phillip: [00:02:28] Yeah, basically the whole show. So, yeah, we'll talk a little bit about that because I'm going to pick your brain on a couple of things. All things Amazon in just a minute, that you won't ever be able to comment on. But I've also been a little bit busy.

Brian: [00:02:40] You've been really busy, man. You you just emceed Magento Imagine, which I mean, it might be the highlight of your life.

Phillip: [00:02:50] I mean, it's definitely in the top three. It's like probably emcee at Magento Imagine was my number one. Then the birth of my two children.

Brian: [00:02:58] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:02:59] And then close after that, you know, when we started that podcast. Yeah. Marriage is up there, too. Top ten.

Brian: [00:03:06] {laughter}

Phillip: [00:03:06] It's up there. It's up there. Also the fact that my office now has a cold brew coffee on tap.

Brian: [00:03:13] You've been working on that for like six months.

Phillip: [00:03:15] Oh my gosh. It's finally happening. Special thanks to Palm Beach Tech and to Pumphouse Coffee Roasters. So. Oh, God bless. This is incredible. I'm going to drink some right here.

Brian: [00:03:26] I'm a little jealous.

Phillip: [00:03:28] Oh, that's incredible. So, yeah, I did...

Brian: [00:03:30] I'm just drinking drip coffee. Normal drip coffee. Yeah. And you're sitting there sipping on cold brew.

Phillip: [00:03:36] Yeah. Laid back with my mind on my money and my Future Commerce on my mind. Could you tell me a little bit about the Magenta Imagine event. You were there. I was there. We've talked about it a couple times.

Brian: [00:03:47] Yeah. I mean, this is where we met. Magento Imagine. So it's kind of a special place in our hearts.

Phillip: [00:03:54] It's a customer/user conference for those interested in the Magento platform for ecommerce.

Brian: [00:04:00] Yeah, it's not small.

Phillip: [00:04:04] No.

Brian: [00:04:04] It's over 3000 people I think representing over sixty countries. Is that right?

Phillip: [00:04:08] Sixty four countries, to be precise.

Brian: [00:04:10] Sixty four countries. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:04:11] Very big show this year. And I had the opportunity, nay, the pleasure, nay, the honor of being a master of ceremonies.

Brian: [00:04:21] {laughter} Say nay again.

Phillip: [00:04:21] Nay. Naaay {horse sound} Of being the master of ceremonies for a show, which I, you know, really feel like was tied very much to the success of my career the last seven or eight years. So I'm very excited to have been a big part of making that show happen this year. Real honor. How did I do, Brian?

Brian: [00:04:41] I mean, I did have to slap you in the face to get you going.

Phillip: [00:04:44] You did actually.

Brian: [00:04:44] Like seven times.

Phillip: [00:04:47] Yeah, that was pretty brutal. So we did this intro video where the conceit is that I'm like sort of having this crisis of can I really host this show? Do I have what it takes? And then Brian pulls me aside in the back room and slaps me silly and says, you know, here's all the reasons why you can do this. And I believe in you and you're my friend and you better get out there and go do it. And I thought it was... It was so off the cuff. And you did that so perfectly. It was kind of... It was genuinely shocking that you actually literally slapped me.

Brian: [00:05:20] And that was that was my favorite part.

Phillip: [00:05:22] It was like two years coming. Like you've been wanting to slap me for two years, and you finally got the opportunity.

Brian: [00:05:28] And now ever since then you're like, "I'm not so sure about augmented reality." I was like this, "Dang it. I'm gonna slap this guy. Slap some sense into him."

Phillip: [00:05:36] In AR, maybe that could have been something so much more than a slap. But at least I got off with just slap.

Brian: [00:05:45] You did a great job, man. Congratulations.

Phillip: [00:05:47] Thank you.

Brian: [00:05:48] I think you're right. It really was sort of the culmination of a lot of different things in your life. And you're keynote was fantastic.

Phillip: [00:05:55] Thank you.

Brian: [00:05:56] After it's posted, we'll have to link up to it in the show notes because people need to see that and really hear your story.

Phillip: [00:06:06] You know what was really special for me is that that night, the opening night of the show, I shared the stage with a Future Commerce alumni Sucharita Kodali.

Brian: [00:06:15] Which was awesome.

Phillip: [00:06:18] She crushed it, and I can't wait to get her back on the show. I really want her to kind of talk.... It's been a little over a year since she was on Future Commerce. What episode was that, by the way?

Brian: [00:06:29] Forty one? I don't know.

Phillip: [00:06:34] It was. I don't know. Forty. Yeah. Holy cow, you are insane. It's literally 41. How did you do that? Did you know?

Brian: [00:06:42] I did not know. I'm good at estimating.

Phillip: [00:06:45] You're really good. You're really good. So forty one is the episode that we interviewed her on. She was with Shoptalk back then?

Brian: [00:06:54] No, she wasn't. She was independent.

Phillip: [00:06:56] Okay. So she's back at Forrester now these days.

Brian: [00:07:00] And honestly her talk, I mean, some of it, a little bit of it was what we've talked about on the show, but I think it was one of the best keynotes at the event. I think yours, hers, and then Melissa from Baked by Melissa. Melissa was phenomenal.

Phillip: [00:07:14] Yeah. Another worlds colliding sort of a thing. S he does a great job, doesn't she?

Brian: [00:07:18] Oh, yeah.

Phillip: [00:07:20] And Melissa, just full disclosure, is one of the clients at my professional job in our consulting realm. So, you know, we get to work with her a lot. But to share the stage with those folks was super special.

Brian: [00:07:37] And I got to interview Baked by Melissa's ecommerce manager on the panel that I did, which was super cool, too. Their such an awesome brand. Shannon Fay was on the panel, and she was really sharp, really enjoyed talking with her and getting to hear her story. It was great. The Baked by Melissa story.

Phillip: [00:07:59] If you want to hear a little bit more about the Baked by Melissa story, just because we can. I'm gonna shove people over to go listen to it, go to a podcast.somethingdigital.com There is an interview, episode six back in November of 2017. I interview Melissa, who founded Baked by Melissa and Seth Horowitz, their CEO, about, you know, what Baked by Melissa is, how it got started and their story about how in 2017 they gave away 150,000 cupcakes in an effort to, you know, make sort of a a statement that love and happiness can win out in a politically charged climate, which I thought was really, really cool.

Brian: [00:08:42] Yeah totally.

Phillip: [00:08:43] Use what you have at your disposal to make an impact in the world in the place you have an influence is really what it is. It's like we have cupcakes. We can only fight with cupcakes. So here we go. I think that that's freaking cool.

Brian: [00:08:54] I love that message.

Phillip: [00:08:55] So do I.

Brian: [00:08:55] I think that's so cool. Like her whole attitude and her whole "Use what you have to do what you can," thing is just phenomenal.

Phillip: [00:09:05] I think that's what we all should aspire to do. Right?

Brian: [00:09:09] Totally.

Phillip: [00:09:09] We all should aspire to use what you have and do what you can. That's what it's all about. Speaking of which, over on my other podcast, this is just becoming a terrible, terrible episode.

Brian: [00:09:26] {laughter}

Phillip: [00:09:26] We haven't talked in a month, so I'm just trying to...

Brian: [00:09:28] We've got much to catch up on.

Phillip: [00:09:32] On my other podcast, we launched a merch store, so if you haven't checked that out. It is a Magento focused podcast called MageTalk over at MageTalk.com. But we actually launched a merch store. All proceeds are going to Open Sourcing Mental Illness to continue to fight the stigma in our tech communities about talking about and raising awareness about how mental illness and mental health have an impact on all of our everyday lives. So it's talking about using what you've got and doing what you have, and starting right now, that is what I'm trying to do. And it's all I can do, right. So I've found some health and mental health and renewed vigor in life and decreasing the anxiety that is sort of crippling for me from time to time by running. And I want to help other people find, you know, find that thing that helps them get through. So anyway, that's just a little plug. Okay. I'm done now.

Brian: [00:10:31] That was a great plug.

Phillip: [00:10:33] OK. So speaking of getting out there and going and doing things but never actually leaving your bedroom...

Brian: [00:10:39] Wait hold on. Do we want to move past Imagine Now? Are we done with Imagine?

Phillip: [00:10:42] I feel like we're done with Imagine. What else could we... Oh, do you need to rep Amazon there?

Brian: [00:10:46] No, I don't need to rep Amazon. Actually. Okay. Well I will for one second. It was really fun to be a part of Amazon at Magento imagine. I can say that. And again, anything I say on this podcast is not reflective of my employer. But I had such a good time. You know, it was good. We put a lot of work in to Imagine, as well. If you were there, I'm sure you saw we had quite a big presence. And so it was great. It was great to see the keynote from Eric Presard and kind of see a lot of that come to fruition.

Phillip: [00:11:29] Which, by the way, from a layman's perspective, just to give you, not that my wife is a layman, but she's not in digital commerce. She was there to support me in my role. But one of the things that she said was that he was the most engaging of the speakers because he was like basically relating things in a way that she could grok. So she felt like she could put her self in the shoes of a retailer who isn't otherwise engaged in the sort of Swahili that we're speaking on a daily basis in our tech communities or in like the implementation of like as retailers. We use a lot of acronyms and stuff like that. But he was on a different level and just was breaking it down in such a way and talking about things that she understood, like shared payment context with Venmo. She was like, "Oh, I get that. That's pretty cool." So just for a little bit of feedback there, which I think is cool.

Brian: [00:12:22] It's awesome. Thank you. Yeah. It's great. I'm sure he'll appreciate that when he listens to our podcast. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:12:30] {laughter} If you do, listen. Yeah. Anyway, if he does listen. Brian's thoughts are not reflective of his employer. Speaking of not reflective of anything in the world, now, that's a terrible thing. So Oculus actually did finally release their cheaper VR headset. $199. The Oculus Go came out and was, I think released around the F8 conference. I just kind of want to move on. I'm kind of sick of talking about ourselves. Have you had a chance to use any of the Oculus devices?

Brian: [00:13:13] I have not used Oculus. I've used the HTC Vive quite a bit.

Phillip: [00:13:16] Ok. Yeah.

Brian: [00:13:16] And so I've used some of the more, you know, phone focused ones.

Phillip: [00:13:22] Sure.

Brian: [00:13:23] So I'm actually super excited about this. I think what I love about it is the price point and the fact that a standalone headset. That's amazing.

Phillip: [00:13:34] Yeah, that's crazy. That's super crazy. The fact also that... I don't know, a lot of people are giving it really high marks, saying that it's nailed a lot of the... I don't know what to believe because I've not used it myself and I'm not a VR aficionado, but I wonder how much of the high marks people are giving it as a result of the price point. Like if people are truly marking this as a good VR experience or if it's good for the price, right?

Brian: [00:14:07] Yeah. So I did read a couple of different views on it. I think that people are saying it's better than just a party trick. So it's great actually for like viewing content. And so that alone has kind of made it worth it. Like, for instance if you're laying on the couch or on your bed or something like that, and you're always trying to like move around and like watching something on your phone and you have to shift over and put your head on your hand or get into all kinds of weird positions and crane your neck to watch your phone. This is way more comfortable. You just throw it on and you can just you know, you can just get into whatever position you want to get into. And it also I think the reviewer was saying it's really comfortable. They did a good job of balancing it out.

Phillip: [00:15:06] Yeah, sure.

Brian: [00:15:07] So, you know, it's not a high VR experience. Like it doesn't have the same like motion capability.

Phillip: [00:15:15] Right.

Brian: [00:15:15] Like you walk around and such. But it it does have the ability if you turn your head to look one direction, then it looks that way. If you turn your head to look another direction, it looks that way.

Phillip: [00:15:26] So it's virtual reality is what you're telling me?

Brian: [00:15:28] It's virtual reality. Yeah. And also has a controller, which I heard was only okay. But all in all.... I heard that the gameplay is pretty good for simple games. It's really fantastic.

Phillip: [00:15:43] Is this a game... Will it be... I guess my question would be this is not a gaming device, right? I don't think this is going to be...

Brian: [00:15:53] It's a game device like a phone is a gaming device.

Phillip: [00:15:55] Thank you. Right. So it's not a true gaming device in the way that people are thinking of VR, nowadays. It's probably more of a media entertainment experience device.

Brian: [00:16:03] Yes. Correct.

Phillip: [00:16:03] And the fact that I have a bunch of friends and sound production, they're doing a lot of VR work right now and producing documentaries and 360 video for VR.

Brian: [00:16:12] So cool.

Phillip: [00:16:13] Those experiences I feel like can be had on an Oculus Go. And any of those like Google Daydream or any of those other sort of entry level experiences where it's just it's video, for the most part, or it's novel, for the most part. It's not like you're really trying to get full presence. It's 360 video. It's 360.

Brian: [00:16:44] Yeah, totally. Right.

Phillip: [00:16:45] It's not the full presense experience that you would get. I'd love to get someone who actually... Maybe we get, you know, one of our VR pundits on without dropping any names. Maybe we can get someone to do a full review here. But if you want to listen to a little more to in-depth analysis, I believe TechCrunch had a really good podcast about this. I heard it earlier this week about the Oculus Go. They had ten or fifteen minutes about it. Or sorry! The Verge. It was Verge Cast. They do a review of F-8. And they talked a little bit about Oculus Go on there, as well. So maybe you could check that out if you wanted a little bit more in-depth now, and you don't want to wait for us. However, this is where I think that the Go actually means something for us. Because the Go is not striving to be the highest end VR experience. I think it's the kind of device that will enable a new frontier for UX and UI.

Brian: [00:17:54] Yes.

Phillip: [00:17:54] You have commerce contexts.

Brian: [00:17:56] I totally agree. Yep.

Phillip: [00:17:57] And that's apps that are commerce enabled that have a 360 VR capability will find their place in the Oculus Go type platform. And that's where we're going to start pushing the limits of commerce and VR.

Brian: [00:18:12] I totally agree. Yeah. This is... You're exactly right. Like viewing content and switching back and forth. In context purchasing or simple switching back and forth between contexts, and yeah I think that VR is the perfect spot for that. And so, yeah, I mean and also I think adoption just needs to happen in order for purchasing to happen. And so I really hope that this is a success in terms for consumers and that, you know, we really start to see more adoption of VR through this platform. And yeah, I mean, the price point. I think I'm actually gonna go out and buy it. I really do, because I'm ready to kind of push this. And in my habits, in my home, I think it's time for VR to start to make its way in.

Phillip: [00:19:07] Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And the fact that, you know, oh, gosh, I'm going to do something that I really should not do.

Brian: [00:19:15] You're about to make a prediction.

Phillip: [00:19:17] Yeah, I am actually. Yeah.

Brian: [00:19:21] Whaaat?

Phillip: [00:19:21] I think this time next year, I really get the sense that we're talking about VR in the way that we were talking about conversational commerce or even voice commerce a year and a half, two years ago. I really feel like having an entry level $199 price point is a psychological shift for a consumer.

Brian: [00:19:37] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:19:37] I was just three and a half seconds ago ready to click "Buy now.".

Brian: [00:19:44] Yep.

Phillip: [00:19:44] I almost bought it as an impulse purchase. It's right at that price point that if I don't like it, it's not going to kill me.

Brian: [00:19:51] Totally.

Phillip: [00:19:52] Right. It is almost at that point for the kind of consumer like me who's sort of late early adopter that I think that we will jump into this. It's not going to have a Pokemon Go moment yet, I don't think. I think we're a little ways away from that.

Brian: [00:20:09] Well, it gets closer to voice. I think voice is a good comparison because... Think about this. What voice was really first introduced, Siri was part of that first introduction. But the real place where it kind of hit was with the Echo, right?

Phillip: [00:20:28] Oh, for sure.

Brian: [00:20:29] And Echo, when it was first introduced, actually had a $99 price point, which for me was an impulse buy. I was like, "What? $99 to do voice computing?" I didn't even think about it like that. But I was like, "To do stuff with my voice in my home? $99? I'm in." And I think, you know, it's kind of weird because VR, they've kind of tried to go full on like... Imagine if Amazon's first release of voice had been a thousand dollar device that had like a much bigger feature set, and they'd spent a lot of time on it ahead of time. I think a lot of people would have been like voice is never going anywhere, or they would've been really excited about it, but there would have been no adoption. And so it would have just taken forever to get anywhere. This I think, finally, like I think we finally have someone who's saying, "Oh, yeah, I'm gonna hit this early with a cheap price point." And now we're gonna start to see similar adoption.

Phillip: [00:21:31] Yeah. Yeah, precisely. That's where we're at. You know, what's funny is we went to... I take the kids every year to the Maker Fair here in Palm Beach. And they had a whole VR bus that they pulled up for doing VR gaming and the kids jumped in there. So my two kids, six and seven, tried VR for the very first time. And you should have seen like I mean, I don't know if your kids have done it yet, but you should have seen the mind blowing aw.

Brian: [00:22:04] Yes.

Phillip: [00:22:05] You know, my seven year old had she's like screaming at the top of her lungs. "I'm a video game." I don't want to discount that this was my dream as a child.

Brian: [00:22:19] Totally.

Phillip: [00:22:20] I wanted to ready player one. Get me in there.

Brian: [00:22:25] Totally. I was the same.. I was the same.

Phillip: [00:22:28] We're taking it for granted that for $199 is literally... That's a marvel. I still want to go on record saying we still do not have the the vaporware that is... Oh gosh. What's the name...

Brian: [00:22:46] This isn't even VR. You're switching topics.

Phillip: [00:22:48] No. I'm coming... No. The VR...

Brian: [00:22:51] Magic Leap.

Phillip: [00:22:51] Magic Leap.

Brian: [00:22:52] That's not VR. That's AR.

Phillip: [00:22:53] No I understand. But what I'm saying is that like this promise of having accessible technology that pushes boundaries is here, and it's in a particular form, and it will only serve to delay further players like Magic Leap from coming onto the market and trying to make a dent because they're going to be viewed as... The consumer doesn't understand the difference between Magic Leap and the Oculus Go. So they're going to say to themselves, "Why do I need to spend a thousand dollars or two thousand or however expensive that thing's gonna be when it finally happens?" Like, why would they ever want that? And I think that's, you know, Oculus and Facebook. I mean, really, it's just Facebook. Oh, God. Now, that's a whole separate thing. It didn't even occur to my brain till just now. But Facebook, you know, they've made it happen. They're the ones who hit the price point. I know that there have been others before them like PlayStation or Sony and and Samsung who have done interesting similar things. But I truly believe that anyone is going to take the consumers mindshare from going forward, it's going to be Oculus for the next, you know, year and a half, two years.

Brian: [00:24:01] Yeah. You could be right about that. I think looking at actually that one of the reviews I was reading, one of their biggest complaints was you had to give your location data in order to sign out. So actually that was one of the complaints was like you still had to use your phone to get all set up on it to and had to hand over data. And it was like, come on, you know, it's going to Facebook who, let's be honest, is the last company I want to hand my data to right now. And so that was super annoying.

Phillip: [00:24:40] Well, think about it like this in the dystopic future, where we are blaming Facebook for shifting elections, do you really want to hand over to them things like how much attention you're paying to certain pieces of content and where your gaze is fixed and for how long??

Brian: [00:24:57] We already do that, but yeah.

Phillip: [00:24:59] Well, they don't have eye tracking set up on Facebook.com, yet.

Brian: [00:25:02] That's a good point. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:25:03] They only know how long you might linger on a particular picture in Instagram. Now you're absolutely telling them where you're focusing.

Brian: [00:25:09] That's true.

Phillip: [00:25:10] That's a completely separate, you know, set of topics that I think verges on body data.

Brian: [00:25:15] Yeah. Right.

Phillip: [00:25:16] But that's a... Oh, speaking of Instagram. Hold on. That's a great segue because what you know, besides what else do they want? Is not just your attention and not just the dopamine hits that you're gonna get over and over again by getting those likes. But they also want you to be able to spend your money while you're in the app. So, yeah, get ready to shop the gram.

Brian: [00:25:40] Shop the gram. Instagram. Shop the gram. You know what's funny? I don't really relate the word Instagram back to the word MoneyGram but like...

Phillip: [00:25:52] Oh, yeah. Look at that. I didn't even think about that.

Brian: [00:25:55] Yeah. I tend to think of the word gram in any title of anything to be a really lame title. But I've never thought that about Instagram. I don't know why.

Phillip: [00:26:06] Well it's I actually have finally gotten over the nausea that I used to feel when people called it Insta.

Brian: [00:26:14] I'd rather them call it Insta than Instagram.

Phillip: [00:26:17] Well I had "the gram" is even worse. But over on TechCrunch you can check it out. There's a blog we'll link up in our show notes. But yeah, it's big news. Instagram without any fanfare just quietly...

Brian: [00:26:31] Yeah. That's the funny part. That's an interesting...

Phillip: [00:26:34] Yeah. Quietly added native payments. They've been increasing their commerce features sort of steadily for the past year. So you know, it went from Instagram for business to Instagram for you know, they actually had actual product catalogs and links out to products. Then they actually had shoppable Instagram, which wasn't actually shoppable at all. Just went off to a product detail page in your digital commerce. But now they actually have payments in there, which, you know, is one step closer to the edge. And I'm about to break.

Brian: [00:27:05] And yeah, I wonder if David Marcus had a hand in this at all. David Marcus was involved in Magento at one point, actually.

Phillip: [00:27:16] Oh really?

Brian: [00:27:17] Or PayPal or something like that? And he went over to the lead up commerce on Facebook or something to that effect. I wonder if he had a hand in this at all.

Phillip: [00:27:27] Well, what's really, really interesting here, and there's a lot of background noise. This is crazy today. I don't know what's going on here. What's really crazy is that I haven't actually been prompted to add my payment information for any good reason. I've not interacted with an ad that was shoppable. I've gone to... I follow a couple of menswear brands that are usually at the cutting edge of adopting certain pieces of Instagram's social marketing. None of them have anything set up. So I've not been prompted yet. But I can go to my user settings on my Instagram app and add a payment method, which I don't know why I've done it. I did. It's like, please, I want you to have all of my data. I want you to have my credit card. I can't live without you having my credit card. But then I got a little frustrated because I thought to myself, Facebook already has my payment information. So why do I have to reset it back up in the Instagram app? I thought that that was a strange feeling to have, but that's the feeling that I had.

Brian: [00:28:28] I wonder if it has to do with the fact that Instagram was acquired. You can have a separate log in to Instagram from your Facebook account.

Phillip: [00:28:38] That's true. That is a thing you can do.

Brian: [00:28:41] So, I mean, it makes sense that if you did link your accounts, that you would be able to share your payment information. But that is interesting.

Phillip: [00:30:31] Yeah, what I do think... And I do have a shared account, for what it's worth, but I think that I will shop a lot with my newfound obsession with sneakers.

Brian: [00:30:44] Yeah. You've become a real sneaker head.

Phillip: [00:30:47] Yeah. I'm a baby hype beast is what I like to say.

Brian: [00:30:50] {laughter}

Phillip: [00:30:50] Which I haven't actually gotten you to laugh at that yet. This like the 30th time that I've said it today and you haven't laughed yet.

Brian: [00:30:56] But I just laughed. What are you talking about?

Phillip: [00:30:58] I know I finally got you laugh at it. I actually... This is how bad I am. I actually installed the Hype Beast app on my phone. That's that's how bad I am.

Brian: [00:31:11] Oh my goodness.

Phillip: [00:31:11] I have a whole folder just for for sneaker stuff.

Brian: [00:31:14] Oh my gosh, dude. You've taken your running thing and now you're obsessed with shoes.

Phillip: [00:31:20] I fell down the hole. Brian, I need your help to get back out. What I find really interesting, and actually I talked about on the last episode a little bit, but what I find really interesting is I probably will purchase a lot more when I encounter things on social. I've already been doing that, though, because I bounce out the Amazon's app, and I buy stuff that I see on Instagram pretty frequently. This is just cutting out the middleman and putting it into Facebook's coffers instead of Amazon. I wonder if this hurts Amazon in some way in the long run. Amazon, by the way, the Amazon app is giving me push notifications that I never asked for. By the way, I'm gonna complain to you because I have no one else at Amazon to complain to. Amazon now has it's like Snapchat thing, which it calls a Spark. It's now sending me push notifications for Chewbacca bobbleheads. I never asked for any of this from from Amazon, by the way, but they've decided I need it. It's that mean girls moment... Quit trying to make Snapchat happen, Amazon. It's not going to happen.

Brian: [00:32:32] Well, allow me to go down then and head over to our Snapchat office.

Phillip: [00:32:36] And yeah, which I find really endlessly fascinating. I know Amazon would want... If Amazon could bring Pay into Instagram, then my life would be complete.

Brian: [00:32:50] Well, I'll have to let the team know. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:32:54] You know, that's a really interesting segue for you, by the way, if you wanted to talk... I wanted to ask you actually. Amazon Pay. We mentioned on the last show with Ryan, by the way thank you, Ryan MacInnis, for joining us the other Ryan without a B. It's Ryan, not Brian. So thank you for joining us on that show to fill in for Brian. But so we mentioned it before. Amazon's basically, you know, going after Ali Baba and everyone else in a big way to spread the good word and the good news in the gospel with Pay. And they're doing it by picking up the tab in a big way for new merchants that are coming over to the Pay platform. Could you give a little bit of context to that? I know we didn't do it justice.

Brian: [00:33:39] Yeah. Mm mm mm mm mm. It's probably not a good subject for me to talk about, but...

Phillip: [00:33:50] Oh I see. {laughter}

Brian: [00:33:51] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:33:53] I finally did it. I found something you're not allowed to comment on.

Brian: [00:33:56] Oh no, no, no it's not that I couldn't comment on it. I could, but it's gonna take us down a lot of rabbit holes that I probably can't go down.

Phillip: [00:34:02] Okay.

Brian: [00:34:04] Maybe next time. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:34:07] Well, what I find really interesting, though, is that by having Pay as part of the know sort of strategy, they're getting into a lot of places they wouldn't otherwise be. And I personally think from a digital commerce strategy point of view, it would be super interesting to be able to have an Amazon Pay button everywhere on the Internet so that if my brand wasn't actually on Amazon, that I could utilize that particular functionality for things like lead back campaigns and like digital advertising on Amazon to keep it in the ecosystem, but not necessarily have to have the full breadth of my catalog on Amazon for someone to experience my brand on Amazon.

Brian: [00:34:50] I think that was kind of the message that we brought to Imagine. Similar. Similar. I'm not saying it's identical, but essentially, you know, where there is a story both on Amazon.com and off Amazon dot com for merchants. And so I think, you know, if you go back and, you know, once that Eric Prasard keynote is up and you listen in on that, you'll hear what's available. And, you know, I think you'll see that there's a lot of opportunity for merchants across multiple, different offerings. So I would say go watch Eric Prasard's keynote once it's up because I thought it was an unbelievable message. It's not one that at least I've read and you know, I'm new to Amazon. I haven't really seen that message before. So I mean, I helped craft that keynote with him, but the message is I think one that if I was a merchant, that's something that I would want to listen to 100 percent. And you know, the feedback, if you go look at Twitter and if you go look at the different blog posts and things like that, that's exactly what merchants and other Magento ecosystem members were saying. So it's pretty awesome, actually.

Phillip: [00:36:12] Message received.

Brian: [00:36:14] Gets back to Imagine again. And it was a really unbelievable event for us.

Phillip: [00:36:21] So I did kind of do a little end around here. We talked about Instagramming commerce. But I do think that there is a little bit of a sense that people... There's an age or generation gap in what people think of Amazon for. Right? So if you if you ask my brother-in-law, he would tell you Amazon is original programing. It's Netflix. It's Spotify. It's music streaming. Right? Amazon is in a lot of different areas in his life. It's in his kitchen on his Echo. It's all of these things, right? That's what Amazon is. But if you ask, you know, my father-in-law, he would tell you that Amazon is two day shipping for the woodworking tools that he buys on the marketplace. And they're both right. But they interact with Amazon in a different way. Which actually kind of leads us to the next story is that the price increase on Prime, although it's $20, apparently is world ending for some people, which I will never understand. And, you know, just to show them, I'm going to just have to buy a whole lot more things on Amazon just to get my money's worth. Ahha! I win, Amazon. I'll show you.

Brian: [00:37:34] I can tell you I'm renewing Prime. I mean, I'm sure you are. You don't get Prime for free as an employee?

Brian: [00:37:48] Well, I think that's a good question. That might be a perk that I haven't looked into yet.

Phillip: [00:37:53] Really, that's not part of the onboarding? They don't just say, "Hey, what's your Prime user name? We got you. We got you, fam."

Brian: [00:38:01] There is a lot of perks that working at Amazon. So I need to explore the full range of them. There's a whole section on that, and I still have not touched them all yet.

Phillip: [00:38:10] What's really interesting is there is this story which I'm now looking for right now. Oh. According to a... Where was it? You know, this is really annoying that I don't know. It's not right off the top of my head. I should know this because I don't think we've covered it on the show. I think we talked about it on another one of my podcasts. Amazon has such penetration. Amazon's Prime penetration in the United States is over 90 million people, or something to that effect. Like it's basically it's so high that it eclipses any other voting block. Basically Amazon has more mindshare in US households than anything else, including people that identify as Christian, Catholic or Evangelical, which is like just a huge part of the voting block.

Brian: [00:39:14] Apple's gotta be up there, too. I mean...

Phillip: [00:39:16] I doubt it. No.

Brian: [00:39:16] You know, Apple is gonna be the first trillion dollar company. They are the first trillion dollar company?

Phillip: [00:39:22] No, they will be the first trillion dollar company. Right. Yeah. That was another story that we had. But I find that really endlessly fascinating that Amazon has a reach in to so many American households and has so much influence and in ways that you may not even expect. For instance, you and I we're talking in a pre-show, and I'm like, "Man, Twitch Prime, they're killing it." And I thought Twitch Prime was new. It's been around for two years, but it's only on my radar because the Amazon shipping tape is repping Twitch Prime right now.

Brian: [00:39:54] Look at that. There's an example of touch points. Shipping tape.

Phillip: [00:39:59] That blows my mind. The shipping tape has alerted me to a thing that I didn't really exist. I'm on Twitch. I'm an Amazon Prime member. I don't know why I didn't connect the two things. That's just endlessly fascinating to me. So it's incredible that the mindshare that Amazon Prime has in US households and again, back to what we always talk about is that Amazon sets the precedent and apparently a lot of people behind me are all cheering and agreeing with me. You know, Amazon setting the precedent for how you should interact with your customer. And because they are an Amazon customer, too, you know, over 80 million of them. So if you're doing business with anybody in the United States, it's very, very high likelihood that one in four people are a subscriber, one in four households are subscribers to Amazon Prime. So your customer is Amazon's customer, which I just think is just amazing.

Brian: [00:40:56] It is amazing. And it's really cool to see. I mean, I've learned a ton about Amazon culture since I came in. And it's really it's not surprising to me at all.

Phillip: [00:41:08] Right. You can't really comment on any of that, but I... OK. Anyway, what else do we have? There's so much that's not Amazon.

Brian: [00:41:16] There was an interesting thread on Reddit about what inconveniences people born after 2000...what will they never see that the rest of us have had to deal with forever?

Phillip: [00:41:30] Yeah, what will they never fully appreciate?

Brian: [00:41:32] What will they never fully appreciate? Exactly. It's just, it's actually it's an insane amount. You and I were born not too far apart, but our parents that we didn't have to deal with a lot. I think the next generation, it's like exponential. It is exponential what people are not having deal with, just in terms of commerce. I mean, if you think about people that were born after 2000, they live in a post Amazon world. They can always order things with two day shipping. That was not even close to true pre-2000.

Phillip: [00:42:18] That's I mean, not to complain... I'm going to listen back to these podcasts a year or two from now and laugh at myself of how in sneakers I was for like a minute of my life.

Brian: [00:42:30] It's going to end in two minutes, man. I feel like this might be something...

Phillip: [00:42:35] This might be a thing from now on. I don't know.

Brian: [00:42:36] This might stick with you for a while, yeah.

Phillip: [00:42:36] I mean, I do run a lot now, too, so I have a legitimate need for shoes. But here's the deal. Shoe shipping is absolutely ridiculous to me. I am so angry that shoes that I want are not on Amazon because they can't get to me in two days. I'm so frustrated that I have to buy them through like a Nike's special app. And then it takes five to seven days to ship to me. It's absolutely ridiculous. I just cannot believe that is OK. That absolutely just frustrates the living snot out of me. So talk about modern conveniences that people born after a certain time will never fully appreciate.

Brian: [00:43:15] Five to seven days?

Phillip: [00:43:18] I know. That already is showing you how much like... It used to be that you used to have to order these things out of a catalog. Oh, my gosh. I cannot believe how loud it is in here.

Brian: [00:43:28] It's not too bad. Don't worry.

Phillip: [00:43:29] I'm gonna kill someone. I'm gonna kill these people. Don't they know I'm trying to podcast? But what I can't believe is that we used to order these things out of catalogs, write a check, put it into the mail, send it. It would get there. Then the check has to clear. Then they ship the thing to us and they'd ship it through USPS, and they send it media mail. By the time it actually gets to your house it's like a month later, and we were totally okay with that. Like SEARS' entire business was built on that business model, which is kind of phenomenal. That's kind of incredible to me.

Brian: [00:44:03] That's just one example. It's insane how many other things like. Like cell phones. I shouldn't say cell, I should say smartphones..

Phillip: [00:44:16] Oh, for sure.

Brian: [00:44:17] My kids, looking at them... They were born well after 2000, obviously. But trying to explain to them life before smartphones is going to be very difficult.

Phillip: [00:44:34] Oh, for sure. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Like I do it every day. I'm like, well, when I was a kid, and then I kind of catch myself a little bit. One of the really fun inconveniences that we're on this Reddit thread. And I just want to ref it real quick because I think it's awesome. It was like this theoretical conversation, like "What was her name? You know, the actress in the movie with the Lion and the Tin Man and the Wizard. What was her name? You know, I'm going to have to ask my mom on Monday when I see her.".

Brian: [00:45:02] {laughter}

Phillip: [00:45:04] That whole thing is not a thing that we deal with anymore. And someone else actually kind of chimed in on that. And I think this is really fascinating is that it kills a lot of interesting conversation and banter. Or what they called bar banter, where you're debating with your friends, like which movie made the most money? Which movie had the best attendance when it first came out? How many homeruns you have in a baseball?

Brian: [00:45:24] Like knowing trivia doesn't even matter anymore.

Phillip: [00:45:27] It doesn't matter anymore because our plastic brains tell us we never have to think...

Brian: [00:45:31] Thanks, John Swords.

Phillip: [00:45:34] Yeah. Credit to John Swords of TurnTo Networks for coining that phrase for us. But that's totally true. Is that every fact, even fake news is totally referenceable at any moment, at any time. And there's no debate of those sorts of things anymore, which I think actually it cuts both ways. Right? It's great. But it's also kind of a shame.

Brian: [00:46:01] Yeah. Like, for instance, my friend knows who won and lost every World Series by how many games ever. And that has no value anymore. I can look that up on my phone anytime I want. I guess he's a little faster to it than I am. But I can't be like, "Hey, Tom, tell me who won or lost this World Series. It's like I need to know.".

Phillip: [00:46:30] Right.

Brian: [00:46:32] It's like people who were trivia nuts used to be... Or like had a lot of knowledge just in general... I can Wikipedia anything just by asking Alexa right now.

Phillip: [00:46:43] Right. Well, you used to be able to, like pick up the phone and call them and ask them. You probably had their phone number memorized. Now you don't even need to have that anymore because your phone just tells you.

Brian: [00:46:51] Oh yeah. I don't remember anyone's cell phone numbers.

Phillip: [00:46:53] But what's really interesting about that is that those kind of people now the only thing they can do is podcast. {laughter} That's about the end of those kind of people's skills and their skillset is they can really only just podcast and riff in those types of conversations.

Brian: [00:47:13] So the sad part is now like no one's doing that. And I actually think that's actually a bad thing because those people, like especially if they're really knowledgeable on the specific...

Phillip: [00:47:24] Like the Patton Oswalts the world who just know everything about everything.

Brian: [00:47:27] Right. Right. I mean it already is a dying breed a little bit.

Phillip: [00:47:35] Yeah. I wonder if that changes who we... I have this thought about sort of the evolutionary biology of the human being. And you know, Jason Silva, who I endlessly enjoy. {laughter} Jason Silva had this whole thing. We're all captains of Spaceship Earth. His thing is that, you know, humans are homo sapiens have evolutionarily evolved to create our own destiny. So we are new creatures now who guide our own evolution, which has never existed before in the history of the universe. And so which I find like this really fascinating concept, but it's totally true. And I think we're doing it to now to... It was to our benefit. But I think we might have peaked in the mid 90s. You know, and now we're...

Brian: [00:48:34] That's why the Matrix is set in the mid 90s. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:48:37] Yeah, I totally, fully agree with that is because now we're at a place where no one needs to actually retain knowledge. No one needs to actually learn, you know? You don't need to learn things because things are easily referenced. And don't quote Einstein at me. Don't at me, bro. I don't care what Einstein said about easily reference-able content. I just think that we're probably poorer for it as a species. But that's my own cynical take on it.

Brian: [00:49:06] Yeah, you know what's also really funny about this topic? If you look at TV shows from back in the 80s and 90s and now even like shows that are referencing back to those eras, or like pre 90's era, I guess, or pre-2000s really, like The Americans or Stranger Things, which I love both those shows and 90% of the drama just doesn't exist in this world. Like most of the problems on those shows are created by technology problems, and we've solved them.

Phillip: [00:49:43] Yeah. For sure. I fully agree. In fact that there're a lot of movie tropes like, you know, or TV tropes, people sitting around waiting for the boyfriend to call or the dad picking up the phone, you know, talking on the phone to the boyfriend or, you know, those things are just things that don't exist anymore. Like those problems are those conceits that lead you to interesting, you know, storytelling, they're not problems that exist in the real world.

Brian: [00:50:10] We have to get to a phone.

Phillip: [00:50:11] Oh, gosh, that's gone. You know, that whole thing. Actually, what would be a really interesting thing is more in the vein of modern convenience, like someone who's used to the modern convenience of this era, having someone having to travel back to the 80s where none of that exists and being really, really blown away, that like people could even live in that day in time. You carry spare change, so that you can make a phone call at a payphone? That's a thing?

Brian: [00:50:42] Back to the Future 4.

Phillip: [00:50:44] Yeah. Exactly. I really feel that maybe that's what it should be. Oh, God. If they if they resurrect Back to the Future, that will really, truly be the end.

Brian: [00:50:53] {laughter} The end of days.

Phillip: [00:50:53] I actually had this moment. I had this moment recently where Jurassic Park has a movie in the theaters right now. There was another movie that's coming out that's a revival of an old... So it's basically we live in the 90s over and over and over again. That's the world that we're in.

Brian: [00:51:13] That's was the golden age of of movies. Right? The 90s.

Phillip: [00:51:17] Well, everyone... Whenever you're 13 is the golden age of... It's like when ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen...

Brian: [00:51:23] No, the golden golden age... There's no golden age of the movies now. It's all about TV. One hundred percent.

Phillip: [00:51:28] Well yeah. That's actually a hundred percent true. And we can probably talk about that endlessly. But we have one last thing I do want to get to before we sign off.

Brian: [00:51:35] Aw man, it's been such a fun conversation.

Phillip: [00:51:38] It really has been...

Brian: [00:51:39] This is not all commerce. I feel really bad like this is...

Phillip: [00:51:41] No. No. It all touches it in some way. We've brought it back to commerce a few times. Here's something that's really scary. Speaking of body data, this is really scary. The royal wedding, speaking of classic television. The royal wedding is going to use facial recognition AI for our entertainment. Article over on Futurism. Basically saying that Sky News is instead of thinking to yourself, I wonder who that person is, Sky News is gonna use AI and facial recognition to be able to sort of live simulcasts, just like, you know, you might get player stats in a hockey game or in a football game, and you get those little lower thirds. Sky News is gonna use that to give you the same sort of experience with the royal wedding, which I find really fascinating. And it's going to be powered by none other than Amazon's recognition and cloud based machine learning tool.

Brian: [00:52:45] And I can see all kinds of opportunities for commerce.

Phillip: [00:52:51] Yeah. Give me give me a couple.

Brian: [00:52:52] Yeah. I mean, I think definitely, you know, this type of technology can be applied down the road, and I'm looking way out to the future. But like, you know, for you personally, and this would be an augmented reality type thing, where you're walking down the road with machine vision, and you're able to recognize things and find them on Amazon and buy them. Things like that. This type of machine vision is really... I mean, we've talked about this ad nauseum, but it's really going to change the world. And so as we go throughout our day, as I think it's going to help inform us about things and, you know, this is a shared experience that we're going to have. But like, we're going to have personal experiences with machine vision, as well.

Phillip: [00:53:51] Ok. So on that note, I feel like it's interesting to sort of daydream about what smart TVs will actually bring to us because my sense of needing to know who a person is in the royal family or who this person like that sort of context, is a very different context to what someone else who follows this sort of stuff might need or want. And so maybe smart TVs, the future of smart TVs is to give us the kind of context that's personalized to us.

Brian: [00:54:23] Right.

Phillip: [00:54:23] So when Fergie, Duchess of York, comes on the screen, a certain type of a viewer might get an in context pop up that says, well, here was her QVC appearance a couple of weeks ago when she was repping cheap jewelry. And I might get the I don't even know who the heck this is. Just tell me who that is and give me a Wikipedia link.

Brian: [00:54:45] Right. Exactly. Yeah, I totally agree. If you've already got history with that individual, you get more relevant content.

Phillip: [00:54:55] Fergie and I have a lot of history, a lot of water under the bridge, Fergie and I. But I do think that that's sort of the personalization of television. Instead of it being a broadcast medium and having that experience is the thing that I think AI will power ultimately and not necessarily, you know, this garbage idea of it's just, you know, really things that could have been prepackaged or human sourced. It would have to be powering an experience that could really only be powered by true scaled cloud intelligence, which, you know, that will impress me. Up until then, I'm absolutely unimpressed.

Brian: [00:55:37] You know what I can't wait for? When LinkedIn gets a facial recognition... Maybe I've already talked about this on the show? I know I've told you this. So that I can when I'm on a conference, I can just like hold up my phone and then it'll just link me directly to someone's LinkedIn page, and I'll have my own personal, essentially, secretary running around with me that will help me keep track of who people are.

Phillip: [00:56:07] Tony Hale.

Brian: [00:56:08] Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:56:09] Whispering in your ear.

Brian: [00:56:10] Yep. Exactly.

Phillip: [00:56:11] This is Fergie, Duchess of York. She was on QVC one time.

Brian: [00:56:16] Yeah. It will make more sense with glasses, so that it's not really awkward to hold your phone up all the time.

Phillip: [00:56:22] Oh lord. Now you just lost me. You absolutely lost me.

Brian: [00:56:25] Magic Leap. Magic Leap.

Phillip: [00:56:29] On that note, thank you for listening to Future Commerce. We want you to never miss any of your Magic Leap news or anything else we talk about in commerce context and endless rants and rabbit holes. And the best way you can do that is go to FutureCommerce.fm and sign up for FC insiders. Going to let you know about all the cool things that we're doing, where we're gonna be, what we're gonna be talking about. In fact, really cool things. You know, we didn't talk about it here on the show was on the last show. But you know, there's a lot of interesting conferences and cool things happening in the fall. Groceryshop and some other things that are happening. I'm sure that we'll be heading to or talking about, and we want to see you there. So go over to FutureCommerce.fm. Sign up for FC insiders. Your weekly dose of all things Future Commerce, and make sure you subscribe. Get on all the places. Wherever you get podcasts. We are there. So Spotify, Stitcher and Apple Podcast, Google Play, anywhere you get podcasts or any smart speaker device with the phrase "Play Future Commerce podcast.".

Brian: [00:57:30] Well with that. Retail tech moves fast...

Phillip: [00:57:33] Future Commerce is moving faster. Thanks for listening.

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