The 11th Hour Dispatch — Monday, September 17, 2018
BIG BUSINESS
Amazon has partnered with Getty to populate search results for the Echo Show and Echo Spot with Getty’s catalog of 200 million images. The photos will reportedly enhance Alexa’s results and help “to shape the visual style of Alexa.” Searches covered by Getty will include both current events and general knowledge. So you could now, say, search “What is most incredible dog on earth?” and a photo of an English bulldog puppy would appear (not really, but we can hope). This could simply be a way to enhance the Echo Show and Spot, which you could argue have not been incredibly successful in comparison to other Amazon products. However, it might actually be a way for Amazon to get ahead of the Google monster, which is rumored to be releasing a visually-focused competitor to the Echo Show for the holidays. Regardless, it’s likely a good move because we all have to be visually stimulated to understand anything anymore. If your product isn’t essentially a picture book for adults, no one cares.
BINGE WATCH
The Primetime Emmy Awards may not be until tonight, but Hulu is already popping champagne. The streaming service announced over the weekend that its live TV option, Hulu Live TV, hit 1 million subs. The service now has a collective 20 million subscribers, and that number is expected to grow with the fall television season approaching (as the resident hipster-in-hiding, I like to call it “The Golden Hour of Television”). Hulu is running a cheeky star-studded ad during tonight’s award show, where it is nominated for 27 awards. Last year, it made history by becoming the first streaming service to pick up an award for Best Drama, and it hopes to leave with a few new trophies tonight.
YOUNG MONEY
Historically e-commerce-focused Stripe has launched a new product called Stripe Terminal for brick-and-mortar use, and if you listen closely, you can hear the brains of pop-up founders everywhere collectively exploding. The company is aiming the new product at digital-first retailers that also have in-person presences like Glossier or Warby Parker. Stripe Terminal has a 2.7% fee plus five cents for each transaction. The company had previously said that it would charge a monthly subscription fee, but has since retracted that. To date, Stripe has raised $440 million. In March of this year, it acquired brick-and-mortar retail software startup Index, which it seems to have leveraged for this new product.
NOTHIN’ BUT ‘NET
Colonel Sanders is now a honey bear and…he cute.
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