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