This module shows a new way of learning, sharing exciting things, or what you familiar with my peers. No doubt, knowing others’ ideas and opinions are beneficial for us to think things from multi-angles. I have nerve thought that there are so many technologies involved in the digital business, such as AI and VR. I thought the digital business is most about online and using technologies.  

My blogs!

With 11 weeks’ variety of classes and discussions, I ran my blog and got some small achievements, which made me proud. Eighty-two visitors browsed my blog 143 times and left 11 comments in total, after four months running and writing three blogs.

I chose the audio tour guide and guided robots as the topic of my first blog. I was attracted by this theme when I learned the MOOC about eye-tracking at home, which inspired me about lots of thoughts about the future development of tour guides and improving the experience of tourists in different scenes. By the way, flexible time of class is working on me, which allows me to stop at any time when I want to think twice or do some further research. The process of finishing the blog is the right way for me to explore and learn something new because I need to share it with my peers, which makes me more cautious and careful to choose what to share and write. I hope my content will be valuable and meaningful to those who spend their time reading. 

The second blog is related to one of the hottest topics, coronavirus. During my writing period, I have to say the fear of coronavirus infected my life. I am afraid of the crowds and feel so worried when I am hanging out. The anxious makes me choose to stay at home, which means I can’t get an approach to any necessities expect booking them on the websites of groceries. Ocado is one of the sites I used most often only because I can get free delivery for the first three months, which is indeed attractive to me. I completed my order as usual. Suddenly, I realized Ocado is a kind of digital businesses, which rely heavily on the Internet and don’t have any physical stores. The technological mindset of Ocado gains a competitive advantage for it in the industry.

My video is about some thoughts of my future career!

My comments about others’ blogs.

Comment 1

Comment 2

Comment 3

Comment 4

There are also some discussions I did during learning the MOOC.

Reference 

Komprise. (2017). Digital business. Retrieved April 7, 2020 from https://www.komprise.com/glossary_terms/digital-business/

Ocado is a British online supermarket which is founded in 2000. It is one of the top 10 most popular online stores in the United Kingdom in 2018 (Statista, 2019). 

Ocado Retail Ltd. is a joint venture invested by Marks & Spencer Group and Ocado Group, which is responsible for ocado.com and other two retail brands: the online pet shop Fetch and the new one-hour grocery service Ocado Zoom. Ocado is the world’s largest online supermarket, has 250,000 active customers, and a 15% share in the UK online sundries market. Ocado Zoom is a new one-hour general store service. Customers can receive a variety of grocery items from the store within 60 minutes, or on the same day. Fetch is the fastest growing pet care destination website, offering a range of specialized pet foods and components for discriminating ‘Pet Parents’.

The sales of it reached £ 1.5 billion in 2017, with double-digit quarterly growth for each year. The company has a very impressive online supermarket, selling 50,000 references at low prices and low delivery costs, placing orders on average less than 120 euros. Chain store Waitrose provides some of the product range, and some are supplied by Carrefour, serving the vast French population of England. Ocado serves about 75% of the UK population, but online transactions account for over 7% of the market.

The most striking advantage of Ocado is the automated warehouse, which is using robots to make the process of online grocery shopping faster. The warehouse is called ‘the hive,’ ‘the grid’ or ‘the machine,’ which is a massive structure on the outskirts of Andover. The robots in the warehouse are cheaper and more efficient than humans, which wheel about moving groceries for 24 hours. Ocado creates hive-grid-machine and sells its technology to other grocery chains. When it goes into full operation, the company will handle 3.5 million products and accept about 65,000 orders per week in Ocado’s Andover business, the most advanced business to date. It’s a perfect example of the wave of automation, slowly hitting countries around the world. The role played by Ocado robots is best explained by simple verbs— ‘lifting,’ ‘moving,’ ‘sorting’ – which means they exist in a range of industries in various ways. Ocado Technology is putting the world’s retailers online using the cloud, robotics, AI, and IoT (Stefan Van Rompaey, 2018). In other words, the selling of food online is far from the only source of income. The company grew from a web-shop into a leading technology company. 

Ocado Solutions have partnered with Morrison’s in the United Kingdom, Casino in France, Sobeys in Canada, ICA in Sweden, and Kroger in the United States. These retailers use Ocado’s technical solutions to calculate the most efficient distribution routes, user-friendly application interfaces, especially data centers, algorithms, etc., especially fully automated distribution centers.

Human labor is still necessary for terms of some fresh products, such as bananas, grapes, and so on. However, to solve this problem, the company is working on a new generation of robots that can treat products ‘gently.’ There is a video showing an impressive example of an automated distribution center. But Ocado doesn’t stop here. It was also working on the development of driverless delivery vans, which will play a significant role in the more efficient delivery of Ocado.

Recently, the coronavirus spreads in the British. To avoid being infected, people are more willing to make the order online and use the delivery service. Therefore, to meet the exceptionally high demand, the online grocery stalwart Ocado has advised customers to place their orders early. If the situation is getting worse in the next days, the further step of Ocado might be thinking about the contactless delivery services to protect both customers and employees. The delivery service without contact with human beings is meaningful for those who feel sick and stay at home for self-isolation to avoid infecting others. 

Furthermore, Marks & Spencer and Ocado have confirmed a deal that will give the High Street retailer a home delivery service for the first time (BBC NEWS, 2019). Ocado will deliver M&S grocery products from September 2020 when Ocado’s deal with Waitrose expires. Ocado solves the problem of M&S that has struggled with not having an online delivery service, which means in the future, Ocado can get joint with more traditional stores on the High Street.

reference

Statista. (2019). Most popular online stores in the United Kingdom in 2018, by e-commerce net sales (in Million U.S. Dollar). Retrieved from Statista.

Stefan Van Rompaey. (2018, September 25). Ocado: a technology company disguised as an online supermarket. Retail Detail. Retrieved from https://www.retaildetail.eu/en/news/food/ocado-technology-company-disguised-online-supermarket

Tech Insider. (2018, May 9). Inside A Warehouse Where Thousands Of Robots Pack Groceries [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E

BBC NEWS. (2019, February 27). M&S and Ocado to start home delivery service next year. Retrieved fromhttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47383159

I am interested in the changes of tour guides in the tourism industry. When visitors have sightseeing activities in certain places such as museums, historic heritage, natural scenery, and so on, the staff can be found to assist the visitors in the service centre or the tourist information centre during the tour. The traditional tour guide plays a significant role in the tourism industry. They have rich knowledge about the attractions to help the visitors get a better understand of the attractions, but they get some limitations by the time and cost constraint. Therefore, the tour guide system and the tour guide robot are built up to meet the demand of increasing tour efficiency while minimizing resources required.

There are a large number of tour and travel guides employed in the United States from 2015 to 2018 (statistic, 2020). 

With the development of technology, audio tour guide machines have become standard tools to help visitors understand the attractions. Visitors are used to renting and returning the audio tour guide in the entrance and the exit. Not only the cost of the audio tour guide is lower than a traditional tour guide, but visitors also have more freedom to choose different kinds of service. For example, the seniors may need higher volume, and visitors from different countries and regions may need different language choices. These demands can be meet by providing more personalized information to each visitor by using the tour guide system. Also, the audio tour guide can ensure the visiting experience of tourists to a greater extent. Traditional tour guides need to use loudspeakers to ensure that every visitor in the group can hear the explanation. However, the use of speakers in the room will be boisterous to tourists who want a quiet sightseeing environment and affect their tour experience. The palace museum of China set two places for visitors to get access to the audio guide.

The audio and multimedia guides based on smartphone technologies are widely used in sightseeing. For example, visitors can listen to the introduction of each scenic spot by scanning the QR code by using their cell phones, which is very convenient and nearly no cost for the visitors. The way of scanning QR code might not so user-friendly to the seniors who are not familiar with using the cell phones, which should also be considered by the management of the attractions. An “in the wild” study showed the use of technologies has an impact on visitors’ experience (Petrie et al., 2017). There was a significantly more positive visitor experience for visitors with a smartphone guide. This part of participants also spent more extended time on visiting. Another research presented an indoor location-aware portable device aiming at improving the visitors’ experience during a tour of an indoor facility (Aman et al., 2017). A Raspberry Pi 3 with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi transceivers are used to support this module to assist visitors based on their location and providing personalized audio-visual information.

In the future, there is an increasing number of technologies used to enrich visitors’ experience, including VR and AR, and tour guide robots will be widely used in museums and exhibitions. An interactive museum tour using augmented reality technology already used in Egyptian Museum to allow visitors being shown around by Ancient Egypt’s famous pharaoh Tutankhamun (MINTEL, 2018). The program found that visitors with wearing the headset stay five to seven minutes in front of the exhibits rather than five to fifteen seconds without it, which provide a more memorable and in-depth experience for visitors.

VISTA AR, the Interreg France (Channel) England project, leading by the University of Exeter, aims to develop an understanding of visitor experiences, create new VR and AR digital tools, and explore new business models and opportunities presented by digital technology (. The project is a significant step in providing cultural heritage sites with an effective way to enhance visitor experiences while increasing visitor numbers and revenue.

The long-term deployment of autonomous robots co-located with humans in real-world scenarios remains a challenging problem. Further research about how these new museum guides can optimally interact with visitors can be challenging. Velentza, Heinke, and Wyatt (2019, October) proved that the personality of the robot affected the human learning process and found that people remember significantly more information when a cheerful robot guides them than when their guide is a serious one. These results inspire scientists who are considering to design tour-guide robots.

Reference

Aman, M. S., Quint, C. D., Abdelgawad, A., & Yelamarthi, K. (2017, March). Sensing and classifying indoor environments: An Iot based portable tour guide system. In 2017 IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium (SAS) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

MINTEL. (2018). Pharaoh Tour Guide.

Petrie, H., Othman, M. K., & Power, C. (2017). Smartphone Guide Technology in Cultural Spaces: Measuring Visitor Experience with an iPhone Multimedia Guide in Shakespeare’s Church. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 33(12), 973-983.

Statista. (2020). Total number of tour and travel guides employed in the United States from 2015 to 2018.

The palace museum. https://en.dpm.org.cn/visit/facilities/?id=3#facont

Velentza, A. M., Heinke, D., & Wyatt, J. (2019, October). Human Interaction and Improving Knowledge through Collaborative Tour Guide Robots. In 2019 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 1-7). IEEE.

这是一篇示例文章，最初作为 Blogging University 的组成部分发布。报名参加我们十个项目中的其中一个，立即开始撰写您的博客。

您今天要发布一篇文章。不必担心您的博客的外观。如果您还没有给博客命名或是感到不知所措，也不必担心。只需点击“新文章”按钮，告诉我们您来此处的原因。

为什么要这样做？

• 因为它能为新读者提供背景信息。让他们了解您是做什么的，他们为什么应该阅读您的博客。
• 因为这将帮助您专注于自己对博客的想法，以及您想用博客来做什么。

文章可短可长，可以是对您的生活的个性化介绍或是博客宗旨说明，也可以是对未来的宣言或是对希望发布的内容类型的简要概述。

为了帮助您开始撰写，不妨思考以下几个问题：

• 您为什么要公开写博客，而不是写个人日记？
• 您认为您会写些什么话题？
• 您想通过博客和谁联系？
• 如果您的博客成功写到明年，您想要达到什么目标？

您并非一定要受此限制，博客的一个奇妙之处在于，随着我们学习、成长和与他人互动，它们是会不断演变的，不过如果知道从何处入手以及为何开始，这将会颇有益处，并且明确您的目标可能会激发您写其他一些文章的灵感。

不知道如何开始？只需写下您脑海中闪现的第一件事即可。Anne Lamott 是一位作家，大家都喜欢她写的书。她指出，你要允许自己写出“蹩脚的初稿”。Anne 提出了一个很好的观点，先开始写，之后再去考虑如何编辑。

在您准备发布时，给您的文章贴上三到五个标签来描述您博客的关注点 – 写作、摄影、小说、育儿、美食、汽车、电影、体育等。这些标签将帮助关注您话题的人在阅读器中找到您。确保添加“zerotohero”标签，这样其他新博主也可以找到您。