Yandex will become like Amazon, panic in Europe and the best HR tools with artificial intelligence

About how a smart column from Yandex will change the Russian market - in the evening mailing list The Bell

The founder of Yandex Arkady Volozh at the presentation of the smart column. Photo: "Yandex."

Yandex today presented two projects that, if successful, can make it more like “Russian Amazon” than a joint online marketplace with a Sberbank, which is usually called so. This is a smart column “Yandex.STA” - there are no markets for such devices in Russia yet, but almost 50 million people are already using them in the USA, and for Amazon it is one of the main growth drivers. Even more similarity to Amazon “Yandex” will give a new paid subscription to its Yandex Plus services - on a similar service, Amazon earns almost $ 10 billion a year.

• The launch of the device with the built -in voice assistant to Alisa Yandex announced in 2017. The column knows how to recognize and perform the user commands, connect to other home devices (for example, a TV) and manage them - for example, choose a film according to an abstract description and without a specific name. The Yandex.STASION will go on sale in the summer and will cost 9,900 rubles in retail. You can leave an application for the purchase here .
• Details about what Yandex.STANTA can do with Alice, why the company is about this project and how it is going to compete with the leaders of Amazon and Google, The Bell said Mikhail Bilenko, under whose leadership the column was developed.
• “Yandex.STAR” is the first smart column of a large manufacturer, which understands Russian. In the English -speaking world, this market has been growing violently since 2015, when Amazon introduced its first Amazon Echo column with Alexa voice assistant.
• In the first quarter of 2018, 9.2 million smart speakers were sold in the world - this is 4 times growth compared to 2017. In the United States, they are already in every fifth house where Wi-Fi was held. Google with his Google Assistant is rapidly catching up with Amazon market, and Alibaba and Xiaomi have already joined in China.

Sales of smart speakers in the world in the first quarter of 2018. Source: Statista

• Amazon never discloses Echo sales, but it was her and Alexa by Jeff Bezos who devoted almost half the company's reporting for 2017. “Our expectations from Alexa for 2017 were very optimistic, but reality exceeded them much. We often encounter such pleasant surprises, ”Bezos said.
• According to IDC, the sales of speakers over the next four years will grow three times-from $ 4.4 billion in 2017 to $ 17.4 billion in 2022. But the main thing, at least for Amazon, is not the sale of devices themselves, but the effect that their implementation of flipple for the main business of the company: according to OC & C Strategy Consultants analysts, in addition to 2022, only in the United States, the volume of online purchases made with a smart column will increase to $ 40 billion.
• It was as if this was not enough for comparison with Amazon, today Yandex introduced another new service, very reminiscent of Jeff Bezos - a paid subscription to the services of Yandex Plus. For 169 rubles, the user receives access to the Yandex.Musik music service, a discount on taxi and car sharing services, free delivery when buying from 500 rubles in the Yandex market and Sberbank and the right to watch films without advertising at Kinopoisk, from which Yandex now makes a full-fledged online cinema.
• “In fact, this is the local version of the Amazon Prime, but with what Yandex has,” admits Grigory Bakunov, director of the spread of Yandex technology. Both announcements will change the market, he promised.
• Amazon takes Prime $ 99 per year for his subscription and offers a wide range of services for it, primarily related to the video (separately they cost $ 700 - let's hope that Yandex’s offer will be the same profitable). In addition to the Prime subscriber board allows Amazon to form a community of loyal customers who pay more and more often than others for other services of the company. In 2017, Amazon announced that the number of Amazon Prime subscribers reached 100 million, and the company's revenue from the sale of subscription services is $ 9.72 billion.

What am I to me?

Last year, we already called for a business to prepare for the appearance of smart speakers in Russia. Now you must definitely not waste time - the transition of retail and many communications to the voice control will form entire new markets in which there is a place for new startups. And business must learn to work with voice marketing now.

MONEY

Panic in Europe

On the world stock and foreign exchange markets today a panic . The government crisis in Italy, where the populists who win the elections have not been able to appoint a new government for three months, brought down the euro and the debt of European countries to minimums in a few years and became the reason for the fears of a new large -scale crisis in the eurozone. Against this background, billionaire George Soros, who promised the world a new large -scale financial crisis, which would begin with Europe, was especially ominous. Soros is already 87 - but the signs of problems in Europe are evident, and investors are transferred to protective assets.

In search of profitability

Bitches on deposits are melting before our eyes, Sberbank customers clearly do not like this. For those who are ready to pick up their money from deposits, the bank today launched the first ETF exchange fund in Russia. Surprisingly, for the Russian market, this is know-how: before, all the ETFs that are traded on the Mosbirzh were focused on foreign indices or to Russian corporate bonds. At the same time, all of them were ruled by foreign companies. Sberbank is focused on the Mosbirzhi index and includes shares of 50 largest Russian companies. We figured out how good it is and whether it is worth investing in it.

PRACTICE

Best AI services for HR

We have already told : HR is one of the main spheres of application of artificial intelligence, and the AI-Services for Hedhanters also invest Roman Abramovich and Alexei Mordashov. Inc. I summarized modern developments and collected more than a dozen services for HR departments for every taste-from the obvious and “simple” AI platform, which itself analyzes the resume and selects the most suitable candidates to the application with the series of “neurological” mini-games, which evaluates the key indicators of employees (willingness to take risks, focus, etc.) and compares their results with the data of beginners and the data of newcomers and the data of newborn On the way, applicants are such a game scheme, by the way, Tesla and Linkedin use.

Subscription cars in Moscow

Another alternative to a personal car, car sharing and electric scooters appeared in Moscow - today a subscription car rental under the name Willz has started . The user can rent cars of different segments - both Renault and Ford and Audi and BMW. The monthly cost depends on the model of the machine and the duration of the subscription (the minimum period-three months), it is 35-115 thousand rubles. The price includes insurance and other little things like replacing rubber, but do not include parking, gas and washing.

Peter Mironenko