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Retail Giant Tesco Follows In Amazon's Footsteps With Hudl, A Cut-Price, Own-Brand Android Tablet
Tesco, the UK-based retail giant with 20 million customers in 12 countries across Europe and Asia, today took its biggest step yet into digital commerce and content: the company launched Hudl, an own-brand, seven-inch-screened Android (Jellybean) tablet priced at £119 ($190).
The idea will be for Tesco to use the hardware to promote use of its own range of digital content and e-commerce services, and in keeping with that it will be even cheaper to buy the device for those who use the company’s Clubcard loyalty card. Those who buy Hudl on the Clubcard can buy it for less than £100 ($160) when the device goes on sale September 30, first in the UK market.
Tesco is playing on a magic combination of factors: it already has a pretty large range of digital services (from entertainment through to shopping and banking); we still have relatively low tablet penetration in markets like the UK; and it’s being very Tesco-like (that is, competitive) on price. It’s also just chapter one for Tesco in this game, says its CEO (emphasis mine):
“Hudl is a colourful, accessible tablet for the whole family to enjoy. The first stage in our tablet offering, it’s convenient, integrated and easy to use with no compromise on spec,” Tesco Chief Executive, Philip Clarke, said in a statement. “Customers are quite rightly very discerning about the technology they buy so we knew we had to be competitive on all fronts.”
In some ways, offering a tablet is a logical progression for Tesco, which has in the past year acquired Mobcast, an online bookseller, for $7.2 million; and beefed up its Blinkbox film and TV service. Alongside this, the company has its web portal for online shopping and grocery delivery, as well as various consumer-focused financial services like online banking and insurance, and brodband, telephone and cellular services.
As with Amazon and its e-commerce operation and content holdings and subsequent foray into hardware with the Kindle e-readers and subsequent Kindle Fire tablets, Tesco pulling all of these together and putting them front and center will help the company promote these products more effectively, in a way that only Tesco would be able to do on its own device.
Right now, the intention appears to be to offer these devices in the UK market only, which is Tesco’s biggest, with nearly half of its 6,784 stores; over 310,000 of its 530,000 employees; and most of its profit. Indeed, Tesco points out that in the UK right now some 75% of households do not own a tablet; and the market for these is still in its early days, even in developed markets, and it is there for the grabbing.
But I suspect the sights are bigger. Just as Tesco has plans to take its various online services out to other markets (those include China, India, Malaysia, South Korea, Thailand, Czech Republic, Hungary, Republic of Ireland, Poland, Slovakia and Turkey), it would make sense to bring Hudl along for that ride.
“Currently there is nothing specifically planned outside the UK, but that’s not always going to be the case,” a person close to the company told TechCrunch on the occasion of its Blinkbox digital content launch earlier this year, when the company also made a big point of hinting hard about a tablet launch.
Today, a spokesperson echoed that sentiment. “We wouldn’t rule out other markets in the future,” he said, in response to questions about what will come after the UK.
Going global is also what the company did with other digital pushes, claiming that it “built the world’s first virtual store where commuters buy groceries via their mobile phones in South Korea.” (Those services first came online in its home market, the UK.)
In fact, you could argue that, with the economies of scale that you need to make hardware break-even or profitable business, pushing the tablet into international markets will be an important part of the equation for Tesco, which says that it is producing the tablet with a “manufacturing partner based in China…which also manufactures well-known products for Microsoft, HP, Blackberry and Sony.”
And while it makes sense for Tesco to push hardware to “close the loop” on the digital proposition, it is also an imperative for the company in a wider sense. Philip Clarke, Tesco’s chief executive, remarked recently on how conditions outside the UK remain “challenging” with the UK currently “subdued.” Pushing into new areas like hardware and tablets in that regard is an important offensive move to defend against erosion and competitive pressure elsewhere in the business.
Specification detail:
· 7” 1440 x 900 HD screen
· Android Jellybean 4.2.2
· 16GB storage which can be expanded to 48GB with microSD cards.
· Quad-core 1.5GHZ processor
· 9 hours video battery life (Conditions may vary dependent on video format and content, audio volume, screen brightness and processor load)
· Micro-HDMI port
· Bluetooth 4.0, GPS
· Dual band Wi-Fi for a more stable connection
· Access to over a million apps via Google Play™
· Comes in 4 colours: black, blue, red, purple
· Wi-Fi only
· Sleek, high-quality design, with a durable, matte, soft-touch back for better grip
· Scratch resistant touch screen
On Friday, 
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Happy Saturday! It's time once again for a new episode of 
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It's official, 
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This Hacker News complaint about 
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Well, folks, it’s September. The holiday gift giving season is ON! Wish, the mobile shopping app that lets users create lists of items they would like to purchase later, has launched Gifting, a feature that enables others to purchase and ship products to their friends. It draws from users’ existing wishlists and uses them to predict other items they would like. It’s a frazzled gift giver’s dream. Gifting has been part of the plan since the inception of the app, Wish CEO Peter Szulczewski said, which makes every bit of sense, since it’s the natural other half to wishlist creation. At this point, Wish is seeing half a million people on the app daily, at an average session length of 29 minutes. According to Szulczewski, sending presents was already a use case among Wish users prior to the feature’s launch this week. In looking at transactions, the team realized that people were requesting different shipping addresses for their purchases in order to send items to their friends. In addition to allowing users to create and share targeted wishlists (the easiest way to get it right), Gifting also predicts items that friends most want and uses social integration to notify users on their friends’ birthdays. “We use collaborative filtering in the same way that Amazon.com uses it,” Szulczewski said. “People that buy this will also buy these items.” As Szulczewski explained, the Wish demographic skews toward the young and female. Gifting is a way to access an older demographic, like fathers who don’t really know what to buy their daughters, nieces, or granddaughters. While there are a slew of gifting apps out there — like Giftly for gift cards, the locally-focused Yiftee, Karma, and Wrapp — the fact that Wish draws on pre-existing knowledge of the recipient’s likes ups the giver’s odds of nailing it. Wish has been bulking out its features this summer, having launched Wish Closet in late July to provide users a platform to resell their clothing. The plan is to grow internationally. Currently 55% of usage comes from North America, although there are growing communities in Europe and Latin America, which Szulczewski said present huge opportunities to grow the brand.
Microsoft wants to take your Apple product off your hands, today expanding its trade-in programs to allow owners of dated iPhone hardware to cash in their now-passĂ© electronics. If you own an iPhone 4S or 5 that is “gently used” and not much worse, Microsoft will offer you no less than $200 for it. The kicker? The funds come in the form of Microsoft Store credit, so you are trading in your Apple hardware for the chance to buy Microsoft goods. What does Microsoft want? That you drop that iPhone off with them and wander out with a Surface 2 pre-order or a Lumia Windows Phone handset. Microsoft has cash and wants market share; this is a natural outgrowth of those two facts. Microsoft also has in place a deal that will grant store credit for iPads. In short, if you have an Apple device that Microsoft competes with – recall that Microsoft doesn’t build PCs that are not tablet-based, through its Surface line – it wants to buy it from you and get you onto its own hardware. In a way the move is ballsy: Microsoft is betting its own money that you will be content with its wares after a long stint on Apple silicon. And it is paying to make the wager. Precisely what Microsoft intends to do with all its accumulated Apple hardware remains opaque. Microsoft is in the process of purchasing Nokia’s handset business, and recently announced new Surface hardware that replaces its first-generation attempts at OEM supremacy. Expect more moves like this to support Microsoft’s yet-nascent devices business. Top Image Credit: brett jordan
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Gillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session for today has concluded. Like us on Facebook at facebook.com/GillmorGang
eBay has acquired online marketplace for men’s shopping Bureau of Trade, the company announced today. Founder Michael Phillips Moskowitz is joining the eBay Marketplaces team, where his focus will be on helping eBay improve its personalization efforts. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it was an all-cash deal and an “acceptable” and positive (if not stellar), outcome for Bureau of Trade’s investors. The startup had raised $1.2 million in seed funding in a round led by Foundation Capital, with contributions from Founder Collective, FF Angel, Courtney Holt on behalf of the Techfellows Fund, and other angel investors. The deal speaks to eBay’s increasing efforts to modernize its website by experimenting with new kinds of shopping experiences. The first results of Moskowitz’s work at eBay will be seen as early as this fall, we’re told. Though Moskowitz declined to discuss Bureau of Trade’s sales or user numbers, he said that the company’s blending of content meets commerce had proven to drive up the sales price for items on the site. “The average good on eBay will sell at X purchase price. That same piece of merchandise when covered by the Bureau – when written about by us – created in many instances a 50 to 100 percent price increase. That’s profoundly valuable,” he says. He hints that there’s something interesting in the works with what he’s learned through Bureau of Trade that’s now coming to eBay, but couldn’t provide details. Bureau of Trade remains online for now, and will have some sort of “big surprise in store this fall” with regards to its future. Sometime in either November or December, the site will introduce “something you’ve never seen before,” Moskowitz teased. (TechCrunch has seen quite a lot, actually, but he swears it will be new.) In fact, Moskowitz says he can’t even tell us his title at eBay, because it’s a role that has never before existed and would give away too much. eBay, he notes, now has his startup Bureau of Trade, plus other acquisitions like Svpply and Hunch, which he describes as a “triumvirate that’s uniquely positioned to do something catalytic and game-changing later this fall. We’re all working together symbiotically,” he says. As you may recall, eBay had first announced a Pinterest-inspired redesign last October, which featured an image grid and improvements to site search. That revamped homepage was then rolled out to all U.S. customers in February, with eBay touting
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Is #FeelGoodFriday a thing? With the launch of e-commerce site Zady last month, we’ve been keeping our eye on other conscious consumerism startups in the pipeline. Here for your consideration, three newcomers to the transparency scene and one new program from the three-year-old Everlane. Such startups don’t come without skeptics. It’s hard to shake the feeling that socially conscious ecommerce sites are just paying lip service to ethical production. Videos can be fudged, factory workers asked to smile, manufacturing cycle infographics simplified and rendered in cheery colors. Without actually visiting a production site in person, who’s to say we’re not all being played? It’s hard to know for sure. But as Nielsen pointed out, consumers are increasingly willing to spend more on goods from socially conscious companies. Savvy entrepreneurs should be looking to capitalize on this. And they are. Given Goods Newly launched e-commerce site Given Goods is an impact-driven decor, kitchen, and accessories site. Rather than revealing the production process, Given Goods’ product descriptions speak to who benefits from each purchase. It may be the makers themselves — as with a glassware company that gives jobs to unemployed individuals in Idaho — or the brand may donate a percentage of each purchase to a particular organization or charity. The site includes the all-but-obligatory impact map to help consumers visualize where their goods are coming from. RVNA A startup called Runa (stylized RVNA) is opening an Indiegogo campaign in October to raise around $20,000 to get its Colombia-sourced fair trade clothing line off the ground. They are promising three things on the transparency and impact front: showing customers exactly how much the main worker in the production process was paid, a video profile of said worker upon purchase, and follow-up videos to track that worker’s progress. The micro-collection they’re showing now has a clean, simple aesthetic, and with it Runa is hoping to shake the somewhat frumpy image of fair trade clothing. The startup’s target audience is young professionals in their 20s and 30s — a cohort that can and will pay for ethically produced goods. If they meet most of their crowdfunding goal, the plan is to have the e-commerce site up and running by March 2014. Everlane Everlane has built its brand on a clean, classic aesthetic and on transparency in the manufacturing process of its goods. Through their Everlane Explores videos, they’ve been working to give customers a behind-the-scenes (albeit edited) look at the factories
