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Tesco officially calls time on the Hudl
Last week, it became apparent that Tesco wasn't gearing up to release a new low-cost Hudl tablet, as it had done in October in years past. When asked about the future of the Hudl brand, Tesco confirmed it had no current plans for a third-generation tablet, but it did say: "We continue to sell our Hudl2 and it remains a popular device with our customers." And so it appeared Tesco wasn't quite ready to call it quits on own-brand hardware, even if a new device wasn't in the cards, and probably never would be. A lot can change in a week, however, and it now looks like we've heard the last of Hudl, with Tesco no longer stocking its tablet in bricks-and-mortar and online stores.
Tesco's self-service checkouts are getting a lot less irritating
You don't step up to a self-service supermarket checkout unless you're ready to gamble. Either you hit the jackpot and escape in record time, or you end up wildly hailing the nearest assistant while the infernal machine's repetitive accusations slowly chip away at your sanity. While Tesco can't make its automated checkouts any better at weighing up your loose veg, it can train them to be less annoying. So, for the first time since Tesco introduced self-service checkouts over a decade ago, it's changing their voice alerts, which the supermarket admits "has become a source of frustration for customers." Most importantly, you'll never have to listen to chants of "unexpected item in bagging area" ever again, as well as six other "unhelpful phrases" like "please take your items."
Argos to open digital shops inside Sainsbury's stores
One of the main advantages retailers like Argos have over Amazon is that they operate huge stores all over the country. It encourages passing trade and it often means that customers can leave with their order just minutes after they arrive. The internet retailer is trying to combat this with the rollout of free same-day deliveries, forcing Argos to find new ways to get products into people's hands. Today, the company has confirmed it's done just that, announcing it will open 10 new digital stores inside selected Sainsbury's stores from this summer.
Tesco teams up with BT to make its free in-store WiFi faster
Tesco's finances might not be holding up too well as of late, but from technological standpoint, the company is certainly ticking all the right boxes. After it debuted the impressive Hudl2 tablet last month, the supermarket giant is now switching its focus to better connecting its customers. Today, Tesco switched live free superfast BT WiFi inside 806 of its stores, replacing the old service powered by O2 and ramping up speeds to 76Mb in available areas. By upgrading its connectivity, the company hopes you'll download more Clubcard vouchers, obtain product information and look up recipes while doing your weekly shop. More importantly, it could also provide a welcome backup for when you encounter those dreaded mobile signal blackspots in some of its branches.
Sainsbury's new app will let you skip the checkout
Scan-and-pay isn't a new concept inside Britain's major supermarkets, but Sainsbury's is keen to ensure it plays a key role in its shopping future. The grocery chain today announced that it will soon begin trialling a new shopping app that's designed to cut down the time spent doing the weekly the shop. According to Sainsbury's, the app will let customers fill their baskets using their phone, guide them to the in-store location of their chosen products, and then let them scan and pay. Everything is handled inside the app, which skips the checkout to reportedly cut down bagging and payment time to "seconds." Although Sainsbury's has also teamed up with Zapp to let you pay at the checkout using your mobile from early next year, a spokesperson tells us that the two payment systems will be independent of each other. The supermarket says it will begin trialling the system with its own teams in the coming weeks, before rolling it out to Nectar cardholders sometime in 2015.
Tesco's prototype Glass app lets you order milk by looking at the barcode
While supermarkets have gone mobile to help you order bread and milk while on the go, wearable tech has remained largely unexplored. Not wanting to be left in the chilled section, Tesco gave its R&D boffins Google Glass and tasked them with helping customers order their groceries while barely lifting a finger. The result was a new prototype Glass app that lets the wearer scan a barcode to quickly add products to their virtual basket or find out their nutritional information. Tesco admits that it would struggle with the rigors of a weekly shop, but says the app perfect for "micro interactions" -- i.e. that time when you realise you've just used the last piece of toilet roll.
Sainsbury's becomes first supermarket to power a store with food waste alone
Supermarket chain Sainsbury's has found a new way to put its food waste to good use: by using it to power one of its stores. A branch in Cannock, West Midlands will be exclusively powered by energy generated from bio-methane gas expelled by broken down food. You see, Sainsbury's gives any food from its stores that can't be used by charities or fed to animals to waste specialists Biffa, which uses microbes to turn it into gas. Biffa's plant is very close to the supermarket chain's Cannock store, and a new 1.5km cable connecting the two feeds the latter electricity created from the gas. Sainsbury's food recycling program generates enough energy to power 2,500 homes each year, but only now is it diverting some of that back to the source. The company says the store will come completely off the National Grid for its day-to-day energy consumption, allowing it to "close the loop on food recycling" in the process.
Tesco to launch an Android smartphone alongside the Hudl 2 later this year
After accumulating more than 500,000 sales of its first ever own-brand tablet, the Hudl, supermarket giant Tesco is to expand its device line-up by launching a high-powered Android smartphone. Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live, chief executive Philip Clarke confirmed that the company's upcoming handset will feature hardware comparable to Samsung's Galaxy S5 and, like the Hudl, come preloaded with Tesco apps and services. Speaking of the tablet, Clarke also said Tesco will release a refreshed version of its discount slate, appropriately named the Hudl 2, in September. While the tablet has been priced at the low end of the market at £119 (even less if you used ClubCard vouchers), Tesco's smartphone is expected to command a higher price to match its specifications. That might make the handset less of an impulse buy, but Tesco says it will still price the handset aggressively, allowing shoppers to pop a couple of Android devices into their trolley alongside their bread and milk.
Tesco says 400,000 people have already picked up a Hudl tablet with their groceries
UK supermarket Tesco appears to be on to a winner with its £119 Hudl tablet. After notching 35,000 sales in its first few days on sale, the chain says healthy Christmas demand helped it offload more than 400,000 units in the last three months of 2013. While the figure isn't likely to have heavily impacted sales of Google or Amazon tablets, it's a very healthy start for the Hudl, which aims to keep customers locked to the brand by offering grocery orders and movie downloads via its custom apps. With Tesco set to refresh its Hudl lineup later in 2014, its year-end sales undoubtedly prove customers like being able to pick up a low-cost tablet along with their bread and milk.
Tesco sells 35,000 Hudl tablets in first few days following launch
Wondering how your old buddy Tesco is faring with the launch of its first branded bit of hardware, the £119 Hudl tablet? Well, according to Tesco's CEO Phil Clarke, via a tweet from Retail Week's Jennifer Creevy, not too shabby: the supermarket chain has offloaded about 35,000 of the devices over the past few days. We very much doubt the likes of Google and Amazon, which have never been forthcoming with early sales figures, will be threatened by the number, but it's surely not a bad start from a retailer that knows more about selling bread and milk than tablets. Incidentally, Amazon's just dropped the price of its soon to be last-gen 7-inch Fire HD to £119, matching that of the Hudl -- if you've got no ClubCard points to secure a discount, that is. We now have one of Tesco's tabs in our possession, so look out for the review. We're assessing the display by rewatching the entirety of Game of Thrones, however, so it might take a while.
Tesco puts its name to a budget 7-inch tablet in the UK: the £119 Hudl
Not content with flogging other companies' tablets, today UK supermarket chain Tesco is launching one of its own. Priced at £119 and available from September 30th, the Hudl features a 7-inch (1,440 x 900 resolution) display for watching those Blinkbox titles in 720p, a quad-core Rokchip 1.5GHz processor, stock Android 4.2.2, a microSD slot for supplementing the 16GB of internal storage and, according to Tesco, a battery that'll last around 9 hours on a full charge. Some of the specs, such as dual WiFi antennae and stereo speakers on the rear face seem carefully designed to square up against Amazon's elderly (and soon-to-be-replaced) Kindle Fire HD, which, at £160, may suddenly look expensive beside the Hudl. Amazon, however, can claim the stronger ecosystem, while Google's £199 Nexus 7 boasts better all-round hardware. The device is slightly chubby and plasticky, as you'd expect, but it's not some rebadge. Tesco says it worked directly with a manufacturer (Archos, as it turns out) to produce a tablet of its own design. Also, to the retailer's credit, the tablet feels sturdy, which seems to be a theme of certain optional Hudl-branded accessories, too. These include a pair of headphones and a rubbery case intended to make the slate more child-friendly. Tesco says it'll double the value of ClubCard vouchers put towards a Hudl purchase, meaning customers can pick one up for free if they have enough points for a £60 voucher. There's also an offer coming for Blinkbox vouchers, designed to tempt you into Tesco's content ecosystem that complements its first foray into hardware -- we hear the promotion starts next week and vouchers will be half-price, so you'll be able to get £20 of streaming content for a tenner. Sharif Sakr saved up all of his ClubCard points for this report.
Tesco names new digital services and the ex-Facebook, Sainsbury's execs that'll run 'em
Anyone that calls the UK home will know that Tesco is a retail behemoth and, like many other supermarkets, has turned into a one-stop shop for everything from a pint of milk to the latest video game releases. It's grown into much more than a store, however, running an MVNO (although it sometimes gets confused about hardware) and the subscription-based video streaming service Blinkbox. Last year, Tesco let its wider digital ambitions be known, acquiring both a music streaming service and an e-book publisher. We've now been told these companies are the primordial soup from which its new online content emporiums will spawn later this year, known as Blinkboxmusic and Blinkboxbooks, respectively. And who'll be responsible for these new ventures? Well, they're somebodies -- Gavin Sathianathan, who was previously Head of Retail (EMEA) at Facebook, will head up the e-book offering, while Mark Bennett, formerly Head of Digital & Cross Channel at rival super-supermarket Sainsbury's, will run the musical endeavor. Tesco also announced that former Blinkbox exec Scott Deutrom is taking the reins of Clubcard TV, a new ad-supported video streaming service currently being tested. So, what's next for Tesco, apart from world domination? If industry trends are anything to go by, a mobile OS, most likely.
Barnes & Noble Nook lands in Currys, PC World and Sainsbury's stores, furthers the UK conquest
Barnes & Noble must want no corner of Britain untouched by Nooks. Following its planned bookstore invasion, the American company is bringing both the Nook Simple Touch and its GlowLight cousin to Sainsbury's and Waitrose supermarkets, as well as Dixons Retail-owned chains Currys and PC World. When the e-readers arrive at the outlets' respective online and retail stores from early October onwards, they'll bring the Nook's reach to nearly 2,000 UK sales points -- not quite ubiquitous coverage, but more than double what we saw in our most recent check. About all that's left is to offer the Android tablets that have been conspicuously missing from Barnes & Noble's initial expansion strategy.
Tesco recruits Andy McNab's e-book firm Mobcast to help win the Supermarket content war
Hot on the heels of purchasing Blinkbox and Peter Gabriel's WE7, Tesco has purchased Andy McNab's e-book publishers, Mobcast. It seems clear that the British supermarket heavyweight is currently engaged in a phony war with rival Sainsburys, which snapped up Rovi, Global Media Vault and Anobii for its competing online content service. McNab's company is rather small, only offering around 130,000 titles in the UK, but like the earlier purchases, its infrastructure and resources will most likely be cannibalized to boost the company's forthcoming digital platform.
Supermarket launches trial virtual stores in UK airport, readies fresh milk for your return
UK supermarket Tesco has decided to bring its virtual supermarket screens (successfully trialled in South Korea last year) to Gatwick Airport. There's ten touchscreens in total, dotted around the departure lounge, with eager shoppers able to make a preemptive grocery strike with their smartphone. On-screen barcodes for around 80 items can be scanned by compatible -- that is, Android and iOS -- devices and added to your shopping basket. Following online payment, your bounty of food can then be assigned a delivery date up to three weeks in advance. The virtual shelves will stay up for two weeks; the UK retailer hasn't commented on further roll-out or extension plans. However, in an airport, during summer vacation, is probably the last place we'd muse on what we're going to eat on our eventual return. If you're wondering exactly how to shop with a four-foot touchscreen, Tesco walks you through it at the source link below.
Carnegie Mellon researchers develop robot that takes inventory, helps you find aisle four
Fed up with wandering through supermarket aisles in an effort to cross that last item off your shopping list? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Intel Science and Technology Center in Embedded Computing have developed a robot that could ease your pain and help store owners keep items in stock. Dubbed AndyVision, the bot is equipped with a Kinect sensor, image processing and machine learning algorithms, 2D and 3D images of products and a floor plan of the shop in question. As the mechanized worker roams around, it determines if items are low or out of stock and if they've been incorrectly shelved. Employees then receive the data on iPads and a public display updates an interactive map with product information for shoppers to peruse. The automaton is currently meandering through CMU's campus store, but it's expected to wheel out to a few local retailers for testing sometime next year. Head past the break to catch a video of the automated inventory clerk at work.
Drug vending machines start trial in UK, allow awkward videophone conversations with your pharmacist
You've got to imagine the Japanese are green with envy right now, as the BBC report not one, but two different drug vending machines are being tested out under Her Majesty's watchful eye. The first of these experiments is run by supermarket chain Sainsbury's, which has installed a pair of drug dispenser machines in its stores. They identify users by their fingerprint or a unique number, demand PIN verification too, and then finally accept your prescription. Then -- and this is the really silly part -- a pharmacist comes along, picks up your prescription, fills it out, and deposits it in the machine for you to pick up. So it's impersonal and unnecessarily convoluted, great. PharmaTrust seems to have a slightly better idea with its videophone-equipped, ATM-style robo-vendor: it's intended to allow pharmacists to approve prescriptions off-site and out of usual working hours by letting them speak to you via videophone. It could in fact be a big benefit in more remote areas, depending on how patients take to it -- we'll know more when the trial starts up in participating hospitals this winter.
WoW Mountain Dew ad was directed by Tarsem Singh
A number of sites have done a post-mortem on the Mountain Dew WoW Game Fuel ad (featuring two ladies battling it out through their WoW characters in a live-action supermarket), and they've uncovered a really interesting fact: the ad was actually directed by Indian director Tarsem Singh, one of my favorites -- he not only did the visually stunning sci-fi/horror flick The Cell a few years ago, but more recently made The Fall, which is an very well-done kind of mirror-life fairy tale. He's directed a number of commercials before, including some for Nike and Levi's, and teamed up with a company called Zoic Studios (they've done a few other spots for video games already) for this WoW commercial.The original CGI models for the ad did come from Blizzard (I'd guess that they're the original models from the WoW CGI trailer), though they were spruced up quite a bit by Zoic to add facial expressions and dynamic costumes and hair. They were then connected to motion captures from stunt artists (which were probably also tweaked to seem a little more than human, and then composited all together in the supermarket scene.Very cool stuff. This isn't the first time WoW characters have been used to sell soda, but hopefully we'll see more fun sequences like this come out of the deals between Blizzard and their partners.
Aldi stores to sell budget 47-inch LCD HDTV?
With the ever-dropping prices in the big screen television realm, it's not too surprising to hear of more and more companies dropping their ticket in the hat hoping to snag business from bargain hunters. While the success story of Vizio could be hard to replicate, an unconfirmed report from TechDigest is reporting that Aldi stores could end up offering a mysterious 47-inch LCD HDTV before too long. No word on what brand / model this thing could end up being, nor if it'll sport a swank Aldi sticker front and center, but we are hearing that it'll boast a 1600:1 contrast ratio, integrated Freeview tuner, wall mounting bracket, S-Video / VGA / composite video inputs, a pair of HDMI ports, automatic volume correction to muffle those blaring commercials, and a three-year warranty to top it off. Of course, we have absolutely no idea if an April trip for mangos and steak sauce will lead to an LCD TV impulse buy, but drop the price in comments if you catch a glimpse.
Sharp brings e-ink displays to the supermarket
While e-books might still be a bit out of the price range for most consumers, that quick trip to the store for a jar of mayonnaise might give the lowly proletariat its first glimpse at the wonders of e-ink, thanks to some new price tags from Sharp. The tags will include price info, along with extra data like place of origin and a sell-by date. Supermarkets will be able to update tags wirelessly from a central computer, and thanks to the battery sipping technology of e-ink, the batteries should last up to five years on each tag, leaving stocking jockeys with quite a bit less to worry about. Sharp plans to start selling the tags on the 25th, and will charge 2,000 yen ($16.61 US) for a 2-inch version, while the 3-inch display goes for 2,300 yen ($19.11 US) -- both prices we're guessing are wholesale, and there's no word how much the back-end will cost. Sharp hopes to sell about 10 billion yen ($83 million US) of these things in 2007, but we've no idea when they'll start shipping 'em over to our beautimus supermarket meccas in the States.[Via Plastic Bamboo]
