Minnov8 Gang 396 – Can Target & Best Buy Weather Retail Storm?

We cover the Minnesota tech stories of the week including disappointing earnings from both Target and Best Buy over the holiday period. Can they compete with Amazon and other online sources? We have a few ideas. Later we discuss the Amazon S3 outage, Uber’s use of tech to evade law enforcement and Google’s rapid rise in the education market at the expense of Apple.

Hosts: Tim Elliott, Phil Wilson and Julio Ojeda-Zapata (Steve Borsch is off this week)

Music: Ring of Fire by Window Shop for Love under a CC by 4.0 License

The Podcast

Past Week’s Top Minnesota Stories

• Product Recalls, Shortages Hurt Best Buy During The Holiday Period


• Best Buy grew web sales faster than Amazon and Wal-Mart last year


• Target Unveils $7B Makeover Plan After Weak Q4


• Fledgling Minneapolis tech VC stops making investments


• Macchina: The Ultimate Tool for Taking Control of Your Car!


• Code 42 moves to 100 Washington

Other Top Tech Stories

• Amazon AWS goes down; the internet freaks out:
  
  
  
  • AWS is investigating S3 issues, affecting Quora, Slack, Trello (updated)
  
  
  • Amazon explains big AWS outage, says employee error took servers offline, promises changes
  
  
  
  


• How Uber Used Secret Greyball Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide


• Nokia is back from the dead with a trio of pure Android phones


• Google Assistant, its AI-based personal helper, rolls out to Nougat and Marshmallow handsets


• YouTube, the world’s biggest video site, wants to sell you TV for $35 a month


• IDC: Wearables grew 16.9% in Q4 2016, Fitbit still first but Xiaomi is gaining

Gang Mentality: Can Apple compete with Google’s rise in the education market?

• Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

Cool Thing of the Week

• Phil: How to breach a classified network not connected to the internet.


• Tim: Raspberry Pi Zero W


• Julio: New Apple Watch Stand Looks Like the 128K Mac

Upcoming Events

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  • The Complete List of 280+ Tech, IT, and DevOps Conferences in 2017
    
    
    
    • The list as a Google spreadsheet
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Mobile Twin Cities, March 14th, BuzzFeed Offices.
  
  
  • Midwest PHP 2017, March 17-18, Radisson Blu Mall of America
  
  
  • Enterprise Rising Conference, March 30th
    
    
    
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  • IoTFuse Conference 2017, April 21st, Mpls Conv Ctr
  
  
  • New! Overnight Website Challenge, April 22-23, 2017, CoCo Minneapolis