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Speaker 1: This is a Bloomberg Business Flash from Bloomberg World Headquarters
Speaker 1: on Katherine Cowdery. The stock market staged an afternoon come
Speaker 1: back to close. Higher resource producers rallied along with the
Speaker 1: prices of metals, including gold. The smp f I funded
Speaker 1: snap to three day losing streak. Treasuries fell. A slowdown
Speaker 1: in jobs growth coupled with accelerating wage gains did little
Speaker 1: to alter views on the timing for higher interest rates.
Speaker 1: We took the markets every fifteen minutes the down Industrial
Speaker 1: laverage rose eighty points nearly half a percent, to close
Speaker 1: out the week at seventeen thousand, seven hundred forty. Smp
Speaker 1: f I founded up six and a half points a
Speaker 1: third of a percent to two thousand fifty seven. The
Speaker 1: NAZZAC added nineteen points four tenth of a percent to
Speaker 1: close at forty seven thirty six. West Texas EnterMedia crude
Speaker 1: oil up thirty one cents a barrel to forty four
Speaker 1: sixty three, spout gold up eighteen dollars fifty cents a
Speaker 1: ounce to twelve ninety eight, and the ten year treasury
Speaker 1: down nine thirty second is with the yield of one
Speaker 1: point seven seven And that's a Bloomberg business flash. You're
Speaker 1: listening to taking stock box on Bloomberg Radio. Mother's Day. Yes,
Speaker 1: Mother's Day is a big day in the flower industry.
Speaker 1: So here to tell us more about it is Jim McCann.
Speaker 1: He is the founder and the chief executive of one
Speaker 1: eight hundred flowers dot com. And you're based on Long Island.
Speaker 1: And I'm surprised, Jim that you could even have the
Speaker 1: time to come into the studio, but thank you very much.
Speaker 1: I thought you'd be cutting the flowers and wrapping the plants.
Speaker 1: I'll be back at it. Tune all right, tell us
Speaker 1: just give us the volume. A business that you're going
Speaker 1: to do over the next two to three days. Well,
Speaker 1: this week we'll do well over a million gifts for
Speaker 1: moms all over the country, in fact, all over the world.
Speaker 1: So it's a it's a busy time. Five point four
Speaker 1: million roses, one hundred and fifty thousand plants, all delivered
Speaker 1: in time, all but one on time. Yes, that's that's
Speaker 1: the intent. To get them all there in time takes
Speaker 1: a lot of orchestration, pen to get all of that
Speaker 1: staging done the greenhouses all over the country with the plans,
Speaker 1: see the delivery people. The technology helps that get to
Speaker 1: be a little easier task each year, but it's still
Speaker 1: a daunting task, all right. So I'm glad you mentioned
Speaker 1: technology because that provides me with an opportunity to ask
Speaker 1: you about a couple of new initiatives Facebook, for example.
Speaker 1: Tell me what you're doing with Facebook. Well, I'm very
Speaker 1: proud of the team uh Pen. We've announced over the
Speaker 1: last few months three things in technology. On the app side,
Speaker 1: so we've had apps for a long long time, but
Speaker 1: we just did the next round refreshes on the iOS app,
Speaker 1: on the Android app, and on the Windows ten apps,
Speaker 1: so those are all redone in the last few months.
Speaker 1: And then we had three announcements of new technologies over
Speaker 1: the last three weeks. The first is the one you
Speaker 1: mentioned Facebook. Facebook has uh in the messenger service has
Speaker 1: now has bots, which everyone says is going to be
Speaker 1: the replacement for apps. The new trend and how we
Speaker 1: interact with learning and intelligent machines, and now you can
Speaker 1: order through Messenger without ever having to touch anything or
Speaker 1: pick up the phone verbally, you can order something from us,
Speaker 1: and we were tickled. My brother Chris, as you know,
Speaker 1: runs the company and he was there with his team
Speaker 1: in in San Francisco when Mark Zuckerberg was on stage
Speaker 1: and he chose to demonstrate how this new bot technology
Speaker 1: which is hanging awful lot on the first thing he
Speaker 1: demonstrated that you could do. He said, you know how
Speaker 1: easy it was to call one anger flowers. Now you
Speaker 1: don't even have to do that. You can order through
Speaker 1: the messenger bot. So that was a huge deal for
Speaker 1: us a couple of weeks ago, and then last week,
Speaker 1: week before last week announced all partnership with Amazon. Amazon
Speaker 1: has got this unbelievable new platform of technology where you'll
Speaker 1: have a little tower standing on your on your accounter,
Speaker 1: in your kitchen. It's called the Alexa. Right, Alexa is
Speaker 1: the personality of the voice in that the in that system.
Speaker 1: And now you can instead of saying, hey, I'd like
Speaker 1: to listen to pin box on blue Berg and have
Speaker 1: it automatically turned on for you. In addition to that,
Speaker 1: you can say pause phim for a minute because I
Speaker 1: need to send laws to mom for Mother's Day. Again.
Speaker 1: It will go into your roller deex, it will select
Speaker 1: the address you want the product you want, all done verbally,
Speaker 1: and that's that's a big partnership when we've worked on
Speaker 1: a long time and coincidentally came right after the Facebook announcement,
Speaker 1: and then just this week we announced a partnership with
Speaker 1: IBM S Watson and we have our own personality we've
Speaker 1: named Gwen, and gwen sits on top of Watson, which
Speaker 1: is artificial intelligence platform and so now you can order
Speaker 1: through our site through Gwyn. With conversational commerce, you can
Speaker 1: interact with a bot to get all the different kinds
Speaker 1: of recommendations you want and then have it automatically ordered
Speaker 1: for you. So it's been a busy three weeks of
Speaker 1: big time announcements and frankly there's more to come. Take
Speaker 1: the Facebook experience for just a moment, and I'm wondering
Speaker 1: if you could share with other business owners the challenges
Speaker 1: or what they should expect. Is there any anything, any
Speaker 1: guidance or advice that you can offer a business owner
Speaker 1: who's thinking of doing something similar for their industry. Well,
Speaker 1: I think I think the lesson that we've learned would
Speaker 1: probably probably apply to most businesses, especially small businesses, which
Speaker 1: which is where we play. It's not hard to see
Speaker 1: what the next technology revolution is going to be. All
Speaker 1: you have to do is listen to your program, watch
Speaker 1: the Bloomberg TV read Bloomberg Business Week. You see the
Speaker 1: new technologies. And we've been seeing this talk about artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence for quite a while now and then only in
Speaker 1: a recent few months talk about box. Well, it's easy
Speaker 1: to read what they are. So you need to step
Speaker 1: back and say, in a business like ours at One Flowers,
Speaker 1: it's all about convenience. So will any of these technologies
Speaker 1: make it even more convenient for customers make us more
Speaker 1: accessible because at the end of the day, we're in
Speaker 1: the business of helping out customers act on their thoughtfulness,
Speaker 1: all right. So so the idea of being if it
Speaker 1: answers the question will it make the relationship for the
Speaker 1: customer more convenient? If you check the box, yes, you
Speaker 1: should go ahead with this kind of project. But in
Speaker 1: terms of time and money, is it always going is
Speaker 1: it like more than you think the thought that you
Speaker 1: were going to spend or well, it depends on a
Speaker 1: platform you're on. You know what kind of technology you have,
Speaker 1: So sometimes you almost have to look to throw the
Speaker 1: old technology out to leap frog onto the new platform. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: we keep investing in technology. So we were just looking
Speaker 1: talking to a company earlier this week who said, geez,
Speaker 1: we'd like to do that too, and when we looked
Speaker 1: at their technology, they really have the leap frog, so
Speaker 1: it's so expensive for them. So my recognition is to
Speaker 1: stay current, that is, to when everything else has to
Speaker 1: be cut back for one reason or another, keep your
Speaker 1: investment in technology going because you could fall so far
Speaker 1: behind it you really can't catch up. In this convenience world,
Speaker 1: the convenience for the deliver the delivery service, how has
Speaker 1: that changed, Well, I think changing dramatically. You know, we
Speaker 1: have a test we announced a month ago with Uber,
Speaker 1: with the Uber product. We're doing that and bossed in
Speaker 1: today all these last mild delivery things. I was chatting
Speaker 1: with a friend recently who's a local merchant, has a
Speaker 1: dry cleaning business, has a truck, goes around, comes to
Speaker 1: my house twice a week, wants to drop off, wants
Speaker 1: to pick up. It's a wonderful service. But I was
Speaker 1: saying to why don't you do other things? Why don't
Speaker 1: you bring other things to my house? And so we
Speaker 1: got into a conversation. I was happy to hear him
Speaker 1: say yesterday, Hey Jim, we're doing new stuff. I'll tell
Speaker 1: you about it next week. Very good. Thank you very much,
Speaker 1: Jim McCann, founder, chief executive of one eight hundred flowers
Speaker 1: dot com and at others coming up. Bloomberg Law brought
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