Grocery shopping as a game without checkout lines could make a sometimes tedious errand more bearable thanks to an AI infusion into Instacart’s Caper Carts. Instacart augmented the smart grocery carts with new AI features. They offer a touchscreen that provides navigation guidance to the products you’re looking for, as well as personalized recommendations, discounts, and even a way to make shopping into a kind of treasure-hunting game.
Instacart created the Caper Carts to skip the need for checkout lines. They have cameras, a scale, and other sensors to evaluate items placed within, while the screen lets you know what the cart thinks you just pulled from the shelf using Nvidia’s AI libraries of information about products plus its on-device AI processing platform. You can buy everything before you even get to the front of the store and simply walk out when you’re done.
The AI in the new Caper Cart offers a lot more than just a faster checkout, though. They come with real-time location tracking to note where you are and lead you to what you want to buy. You can upload your grocery list to the cart with a QR code in the Instacart app, which then displays it on the cart’s screen. It can also do the same for products on sale that pique your interest, offering discounts based on your location.
(Image credit: Instacart)
If you want more fun in your shopping tasks, there’s always gamification. The Caper Cart has a feature that creates quests for items on your shopping list as though you’re in a video game. There are real prizes, too. Adding one item to your cart can lead to products with additional discounts related to what you’re buying, such as an extra percentage off soda when buying disposable cups. Anything that leads to more purchases is likely to make grocery store owners happy, of course, even if the Caper Cart is more expensive than the traditional metal basket.
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“Caper Carts are ushering in a new era at the grocery store – making shopping more delightful while delivering a seamless experience for customers, retailers, and brands,” Instacart Chief Connected Stores Officer David McIntosh said. “With Caper Cart’s digital screen, we’re now delivering an unmatched omnichannel experience for retailers and brands in-store. Today’s news is further proof of how we’re truly transforming grocery shopping from a chore to a fun adventure, giving customers a one-of-a-kind, interactive experience in every aisle of the grocery store.”
Grocery stores might find the Caper Cart appealing not just for making shopping faster for customers but for the advertising option on the screen that they can use for in-store promotions and sponsored product recommendations from brands with products in the store. It makes for a kind of mobile impulse purchase aisle that way. More than 70 locations have rolled out Caper Carts, including big grocery chains like Fairway Market, Kroger, and ShopRite, as well as ALDI stores in Austria.
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Much like Adam Smith’s often criticized “invisible hand,” the best proxies also play a nearly imperceptible, but influential role in the business world. Almost all of us interact with proxies on a daily basis, yet few people understand the far-reaching implications of the technology.
Some skepticism regarding proxies is understandable – they’ve historically been used for niche applications, some of which wouldn’t have been considered to be of the highest ethical caliber. While the skeptical public perception continues to follow proxies, the best proxy servers are now considered to be an essential part of many business models.
Karolis Toleikis
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of IPRoyal.
A simple technology with far-reaching benefits
In the simplest possible terms, a proxy is an internet-connected device that can relay traffic for another machine. Much of the same technological foundation is used for a better-known type of product – a virtual private network (VPN).
VPNs, however, come laden user experience benefits that make the service easy to use for consumers and businesses alike. Many of them nowadays grant lots of additional services such as cyber threat protection.
Proxies would be considered a bare bones product by many consumers. After all, most proxy products are a set of IP addresses, ports, and some basic configuration options. Yet, the same bare bones nature of proxies makes them more modular.
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Due to the way networking has been established, any IP address brings with itself some additional information such as the predicted location – something that is of high importance in some business applications.
All of these aspects create unique business applications for proxies. But they also make the same product largely irrelevant for day-to-day consumer use, leading to an environment where the general public never notices them while businesses are reliant on the product.
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That may be why proxies have an air of skepticism surrounding them. When they are operated properly, consumers never notice that proxies are being used.
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When something goes awry, however, proxies will receive a lot of media attention. Since most of that attention will be negative, such a news cycle leads to an unintentionally pessimistic outlook on proxies.
Uncovering proxy procurement practices
Another area that’s veiled under a curtain of mystery is the procurement process. Since every proxy is acquired from a device someone owns, specific software has to be installed into that machine.
Procurement practices differ based on the proxy type, since they are largely defined by the nature of the device. Two of the most common and widely used types are datacenter and residential proxies.
Datacenter proxy procurement has never been controversial. Data centers are business-owned collections of servers. All a proxy provider needs to do is sign a business agreement with the company.
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Residential proxies, however, are acquired from consumer-owned devices such as personal computers or mobile phones. Practices for residential proxy acquisition differ across the industry.
We perform our residential proxy procurement through our sister-company, where users can voluntarily turn their device into a proxy and get monetarily rewarded. Some proxy providers have used other means such as implementing software development kits in popular mobile applications.
An important aspect of any proxy is that it only serves as a traffic relay. No control over the device itself is provided to the buyer and only the absolutely necessary information about it is granted (such as the type and location).
Once an IP address pool is established, a proxy provider will generally perform cost analysis to determine the proper pricing for the product. Typically, proxies will be sold per IP or per GB of bandwidth.
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Businesses that purchase proxies will then get access to a set amount of IPs or the entire pool (if bandwidth is used). It should be noted that, in a technical sense, proxies are sold as a service, not as a product. Ownership, management, and many other aspects remain on the side of the proxy provider.
Part of the reason is that proxies are just a means to an end. They can be used for legitimate, consumer-centric purposes, but they can also be misused. As such, proxy providers will often implement strict controls, restrictions, and risk management practices to minimize abuse.
Consumer-centric applications
Travel fare aggregation: Fare aggregation is one of the most lauded and well-known applications of proxies. Most of us have used these services to plan a business trip or vacation.
One of the primary challenges is that travel fare data is location-based. Since there’s users from all over the world, a travel fare aggregator would have a hard time acquiring accurate data for every possible location. Proxies allow them to completely circumvent the expensive process.
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They can use a proxy, matching your location, to collect accurate data with automated tools. The process is then repeated as many times as necessary, all of the data is aggregated, compared, and provided to the user.
Without proxies, it’s unlikely that such a business model would be at all viable. Yet, as I’ve alluded to above, the usage of proxies is completely hidden from the consumer.
Brand protection services: Counterfeit goods are a surprisingly common occurrence. Online and peer-to-peer marketplaces make it hard for businesses to keep tabs on everyone who might be attempting to sell counterfeit items.
Automated data collection and monitoring processes are used to discover potential offenders across a wide array of websites. Since some of these websites may be geographically restricted, only serving customers within a specific region, proxies become a vital part of data collection. Proxies also allow them to circumvent unintentional bans caused by automation.
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Conclusion
No one intends to keep proxies a secret. Yet, as they form the very foundational layer of many practices and business models, consumers never get to interact with them directly.
All of the practices outlined above are a small sample of the various ways in which proxies are used, most of which ultimately benefit everyone. It’s definitely one of the most interesting industries in various ways – treated as something suspicious while being beneficial to everyone.
This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro
A NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has posted a beautiful image showing an aurora over Earth.
Matthew Dominick has been aboard the ISS since March and is due to return home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft on Sunday. In fact, it was from the docked Crew Dragon that he captured the stunning shot.
The American astronaut explained that the Crew Dragon is effectively his bedroom. Dominick has been sleeping there since departing the ISS crew quarters to make way for fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague, who arrived at the orbital outpost aboard another Crew Dragon, Freedom, at the end of last month.
“Peering out a Dragon Endeavor [sic] window that frames red and green aurora streaming by Dragon Freedom docked to the front of the International Space Station,” Dominick wrote in a message accompanying the image.
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Peering out a Dragon Endeavor window that frames red and green aurora streaming by Dragon Freedom docked to the front of the International Space Station.
When Crew-9 arrived I moved out of my crew quarters on the ISS to make room for @AstroHague. I now sleep in Dragon Endeavor… pic.twitter.com/34XfeLXpcH
“We take most of our images from the Cupola,” Dominick said, “But sleeping here has been amazing. This is the view out the window this evening. I miss my family and friends but we would have missed today’s insane aurora if we had undocked today.”
The shot was actually selected from a series of images that were captured to make this time-lapse of the aurora:
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Red and green aurora appear to dance in a timelapse as we flyby looking out Dragon Endeavour’s window with Dragon Freedom in view.
We shot a couple thousand images yesterday trying to get the settings, lighting, and framing just right across multiple orbital nights because the… pic.twitter.com/Y3IhlqTNrO
“Red and green aurora appear to dance in a time-lapse as we flyby looking out Dragon Endeavour’s window with Dragon Freedom in view,” Dominick wrote in the post, adding “a couple thousand images” were taken in order to get the settings, lighting, and framing just right across multiple orbital nights “because the aurora was amazing due to recent solar activity.”
During his seven months in orbit, Dominick has been sharing some impressive photos and videos from the space station around 250 miles above Earth. While he’ll be home soon, another keen space photographer, Don Pettit, recently arrived at the ISS, so if you’re a fan of such content then stick around as there’ll be plenty more of it coming your way over the next few months.
Today, MediaTek announced its latest flagship chipset – the Dimensity 9400. It is using MediaTek’s second-generation All Big Core design, which uses on ARM Cortex-X925 core that operates at over 3.62GHz, with three Cortex-X4 and four Cortex-A720 cores. The company says that this design offers 35% faster single-core performance, and 28% faster multi-core performance compared to the Dimensity 9300.
The Dimensity 9400 is built on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process, and is now up to 40% more power-efficient than its predecessor. The biggest advantage that will bring to devices, is better battery life.
“The MediaTek Dimensity 9400 will continue furthering our mission to be the enablers of AI, supporting powerful applications that anticipate users’ needs and adapt to their preferences while also fueling generative AI technology with on-device LoRA training and video generation,” said Joe Chen, President at MediaTek. “As the fourth-generation flagship chipset, the Dimensity 9400 continues to build on our momentum of steady growth in market share and MediaTek’s legacy of delivering flagship performance in the most efficient design for the best user experiences.”
When it comes to gaming, MediaTek says that the Dimensity 9400 has 41% more peak performance, 40% raytracing performance, and 44% power saving over the Dimensity 9300. It also includes the MediaTek Frame Rate Converter and HyperEngine’s Super Resolution. Providing a really impressive gaming experience.
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MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 also greatly improves camera zoom performance
Another area that MediaTek is touting some massive gains is with zoom. We are launching an “Unparalleled Zoom Experience” thanks to the new MediaTek Imagiq 1090, which provides HDR video recording throughout the entire Zoom Range. Also of note, 4K60 video capture now requires 14% less power.
As you might have expected, the Dimensity 9400 is also ready for trifold smartphones, like the Huawei Mate XT. It has a dedicated 3X MIPI-DSI for tri-fold displays. This is a good thing, as we’re expecting to see many more trifold devices later this year and next.
So when will we start seeing Dimensity 9400-powered devices? MediaTek says that we should start seeing them in Q4 2024. Really, they could be any day now. We’ve also been told that OPPO and vivo are set to be two of the first OEMs using the Dimensity 9400.
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