| SoftBank Robotics Strategy Chief On Humanoid Robots The holy grail of robotics has been to create an intelligent device that can interact with humans in a public setting, without breaking the bank or intimidating the customer. SoftBank Robotics Chief of Strategy, Steve Carlin, tells Karen Webster how Pepper â the machine with a brain, a soft touch â is helping blaze that trail in hospitality, financial services and restaurants. |
| Netflixâs Hedging Fail Provides Lessons For Digital Players Netflixâs margins fell victim of the companyâs Q2 inability to hedge its currency risk. Few tech and digital firms focus much on hedging, Cambridge Globalâs Karl Schamotta said during a recent PYMNTS interview, but that seems likely to change â and perhaps pretty soon. |
| Making Friends And Influencing People: Walmart, eBay And Theranos It was a good week for making new friends in the payments and commerce ecosystem. Walmart wants to reach out and touch some social media influencers â and their followers. eBay wants to hang with cool kids like Apple and Square. And Theranos is learning that making enemies is a very expensive proposition. |
| | The Monday Conversation | | ByPass CEO: Diningâs Big Digital Disruption With 90 percent of restaurant traffic coming from the physical location, itâs now dawning on restaurant operators that the 10 percent thatâs digital is too big to ignore. Brandon Lloyd, ByPass president and CEO, told Karen Webster that the acquisition of LevelUp by Grubhub is the latest evidence of the coming disruption to the restaurant sector. Lloyd has a theory about why restaurants havenât made more progress, and shared the one mistake that operators must avoid if they want to be a disruptor and not the disrupted. |
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