Amazon’s home grocery delivery service, AmazonFresh, is expanding slowly—on purpose. Ther service's first roll-out beyond its home base in Seattle hit Los Angeles last week as Amazon starts in on a strategic plan to focus on high-density urban areas and warehousing robotics, according to a report from Reuters.  

Amazon's Jeff Bezos has shown a lot of restraint in rolling out the grocery product as a handful of competitors like PeaPod, Fresh Direct and a host of more local, store-based systems have entered the space. But Bezos has slowed the process in order to learn from previous mistakes, as well as the mistakes of others. After all, with less than one percent of online activity responsible for the $586 billion in grocery retail sales, the addition of online grocery to Amazon's portfolio makes it virtually unsurpassable. Continue reading...

With dizzying 3D animation, zoom ins and outs and a map recreation, the Foursquare Time Machine visualizes a user’s past check-in history because—why not?

The social check-in app, which has seen a gradual decline in usage as of late, teamed up with Samsung to get users' attention with personalized heat maps that deliver recommendations on places to visit. The South Korean multinational conglomerate is footing the bill in part, after the two joined forces at South by Southwest when Samsung promoted its charging stations on the Foursquare app.

The new tie-in inlcudes branding for Samsung's new Galaxy S4 smartphone and features a tab titled "The Next Big Thing," which was an integral part of Samsung's marketing campaign for the latest device.Continue reading...

China is the second largest economy in the world and every significant brand's future is impacted by its growth (or collapse)—but who's got the time?! Here's the week's reads that will make you look like a keen China observer in case you find yourself immersed in a cultural conversation.

This week: McDonald's owns the night... KFC woes... Middle-class spending... GM exports... Buick and Toyota recalls... Adidas fakes... GSK scandal... Volvo and Carrefour look West... Hollister brah... Givenchy... Dreamworks' Tibet Code... Durex gets spanked... and more.Continue reading...

The government’s infringement on communicative freedom and privacy is hardly a new topic in America. 

Starting in the late-1940s, the US underwent a period called the "Second Red Scare," which gave birth to the era of "McCarthyism," a time in America where many citizens feared their phone lines were being tapped. Today, heightened security over terrorist activity has caused the nation's security divisions to implement such tactics yet again, though the digital age poses a much greater challenge to operations as the public shares more, but also knows more. 

Privacy concerns have peaked as The Guardian recently published a series of reports documenting questionable actions by the US National Security Agency. Late last week, The Guardian revealed its source— Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence operative who consciously leaked the NSA program called "PRISM.” According to CNN, PRISM is a top secret, on-going program that entitles the NSA "to extract the details of people's online activities—including audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents and other materials."

Yet, unlike past federal privacy infringements, the PRISM scandal has implicated major brands including Verizon, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Apple and Skype. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a public note on Facebook claiming, "We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday," and Google CEO Larry Page wrote an open letter sharing similar sentiments, other brands haven't been nearly as forthright, although all have denied knowledge of the program.Continue reading...

No doubt, Ford could stand to generate a little excitement these days.

It has done a great job of instilling the confidence of American consumers in its ability to field a highly competent and very competitive lineup of vehicles across every important segment, but the new F-150 pickup truck won’t come along until next year, and in the meantime the most buzz the brand can generate has to do with a newly redesigned—yet decidedly middle-of-the-road—Fusion mid-size sedan.

So hype for the 50th anniversary of the Mustang is coming along just in time. Not only that—Ford has come up with a perfect vehicle for an integrated marketing campaign that will keep the original pony car and its golden anniversary front and center right up through when the actual occasion is marked in early 2014.Continue reading...

Hoping to take a bigger bite out of Europe's $8 billion single-serve coffee market, Mondelez, the No. 2 coffee maker, will start producing coffee pods compatible with its rival Nestle's Nespresso machine.

This isn't the first time that rival brands have tried to collect some profit off of Nespresso's single-serve brewer, which requires special, premium-priced pods. Nestle has filed patent-infringement suits against several companies for producing the copycat pods, but hasn’t had much success in stopping distribution. In fact, in some markets, Nespresso-branded pods have lost 10 to 20 percent of market share due to more competitively priced alternatives, Bloomberg reports.

The issue lies within Nespresso's distribution model, which still relies on a direct-to-consumer format, leaving grocery store shelves vacant for competitors' offerings. While the system has seen sustained success in Europe, Nespresso is looking to expand further into the US, where single-serve competition is even more intense.Continue reading...

Sunday Night Football was the most-watched show on TV last year even though millions of fans were also able to stream the big game on their smartphones. Now the NFL is going a step further and will offer up Sunday afternoon games on smartphones as well.

The NFL’s new $1 billion, four-year deal with Verizon Wireless will help make this happen, expanding the number of games being streamed to smartphones from just the evening games on Sunday, Monday and Thursday to all of the games in a customer’s home market, the Wall Street Journal reports. The broadcasts will begin next year after Verizon’s current four-year, $720 million contract concludes.

"I can see viewers for NFL games on mobile continuing to double for the foreseeable future," Lee Berke, a media consultant who has worked with Verizon Wireless, told the Journal. "At this point, nobody knows where the upper limit is, and that's why these deals are being done. In the 1970s people predicted cable would reach an inflection point at 30 percent penetration, but now we're at 80-90 percent with pay television."Continue reading...

China is the second largest economy in the world and every significant brand's future is impacted by its growth (or collapse)—but who's got the time?! Here's the week's reads that will make you look like a keen China observer in case you find yourself immersed in a cultural conversation.

This week: Pepsi taps into The Voice of China... why Baijiu is not like tequila... Samsung outsells Apple... Boss fashion shows... MBA kindergartens... Chengdu does Fortune 500s... Internet Explorer and China's banks... 3D printing boom... new Ikeas... the Backstreet Boys and pandas... Lenovo... and more.Continue reading...