Montenegro’s historic port city of Kotor has earned the status of UNESCO World Heritage Site for the beauty of its well preserved medieval town. But Kotor’s international fame has become a source of trouble in recent years. Excessive construction is now threatening to diminish the town’s beauty and its reputation as one of the world’s top tourist destinations. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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Day: May 11, 2017
China’s President Xi Jinping initiated the ambitious Belt and Road development plan but it has become a world plan not tied to his presidency, the Commerce Ministry said Wednesday, days before Xi hosts a global forum on the initiative.
The forum in Beijing next week will draw heads of state to discuss Xi’s plan to expand trade links between Asia, Africa and Europe through billions of dollars in infrastructure investment.
Representatives from more than 100 countries will attend China’s biggest diplomatic event of the year, though only one leader from the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized nations, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, is set to join.
China says that between 2014 and 2016, its businesses signed projects worth $304.9 billion along inland and maritime corridors of the plan, also known as the New Silk Road. But some of the projects could be in development for years.
Judging by recent precedent in China’s political system, Xi is slated to step down from the presidency in early 2023 at the end of his second five-year term.
Asked what guarantee the world had that the initiative would go on after Xi’s second term, Vice Minister of Commerce Qian Keming told a news briefing that its vitality lay in countries’ hopes for development and not in the idea of “who proposed it or what term in office there is later.”
“The Belt and Road initiative was proposed by President Xi in 2013, but this initiative is not an individual proposal, or merely left at a proposal level. Rather it is an initiative that has been widely received by the whole world. It is jointly owned by everyone,” Qian said.
China has repeatedly rebuffed concern that the plan is part of a grand strategy to expand its economic interests for selfish gain and to seek global dominance, saying that anyone can join the plan to boost common prosperity.
Xi has used the initiative to help portray China as an open economy, distinct from a rising wave of global protectionism.
However, the government has faced criticism from foreign business groups and governments alike, who say it has done little to remove discriminatory policies and market barriers that favor Chinese companies.
Foreign business groups have questioned whether multinational companies would be able to compete with Chinese firms through the plan in transparent bidding processes.
Zhang Xingfu, an official from the Commerce Ministry’s cooperation department, played down such concerns.
“Chinese enterprises conducting investment and cooperative business in countries along the Belt and Road initiative will … actively participate in project bidding, and cooperate and compete with international enterprises in the same industries on the same platform,” Zhang said.
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Electric carmaker Tesla has added another product to its lineup: Solar roof tiles.
As of Wednesday, customers worldwide could order a solar roof on Tesla’s website. Installations will begin next month in the U.S., starting with California. Installations outside the U.S. will begin next year, the company said.
The glass tiles were unveiled by Tesla last fall just before the company merged with solar panel maker SolarCity Corp. They’re designed to look like a traditional roof, with options that replicate slate or terracotta tiles. The solar tiles contain photovoltaic cells that are invisible from the street.
Guaranteed for life of home
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said one of the drawbacks to home solar installations has been the solar panels themselves: They’re often awkward, shiny and ugly. Buyers will want Tesla’s roof, he said, because it looks as good or better than a normal roof.
“When you have this installed on your house, you’ll have the best roof in the neighborhood. The aesthetics are that good,” Musk said in a conference call with media.
The roof is guaranteed for the life of the home, which is longer than the 20-year lifespan for a typical, nonsolar roof, Musk said. It has gone through the same hail, fire and wind testing that normal roofs endure.
Tesla’s website includes a calculator where potential buyers can estimate the cost of a solar roof based on the size of their home, the amount of sunlight their neighborhood receives and federal tax credits. They can also put down a refundable $1,000 deposit to reserve a place in line.
$42 per square foot
Tesla said the solar tiles cost $42 per square foot to install, making them far more costly than slate, which costs around $17 per square foot, or asphalt, which costs around $5. But homes would only need between 30 and 40 percent of their roof tiles to be solar; the rest would be Tesla’s cheaper nonsolar tiles, which would blend in with the solar ones.
It would cost $69,100 to install a solar roof with 40-percent solar tiles on a 2,600-square-foot roof in suburban Detroit, according to Tesla’s website. That includes a $7,000 Tesla Powerwall, a battery unit that stores the energy from the solar panels and powers the home. The roof would be eligible for a $15,500 federal tax credit and would generate an estimated $62,100 in electricity over 30 years. Over that time period, Tesla estimates, the homeowner would save $8,500.
Tesla said the typical homeowner can expect to pay $21.85 per square foot for a Tesla solar roof. The cost can be rolled into the homeowner’s mortgage payments and paid for over time, the company said.
Sales to be slow at first
Musk wouldn’t say how many orders the company expects to get this year. He expects the initial ramp-up to be slow.
“It will be very difficult and it will take a long time, and there will be some stumbles along the way. But it’s the only sensible vision of the future,” Musk said.
Palo Alto, California-based Tesla Inc. is making the solar tiles at its Fremont, California, factory initially. But eventually all production will move to a joint Tesla and Panasonic Corp. factory in Buffalo, New York. Panasonic makes the photovoltaic cells used in the solar tiles.
Tesla said it would be installing equipment in the Buffalo factory over the next few months.
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Earlier this year, engineers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. who track rivals’ prices online got a rude surprise: the technology they were using to check Amazon.com several million times a day suddenly stopped working.
Losing access to Amazon.com Inc.’s data was no small matter. Like most big retailers, Wal-Mart relies on computer programs that scan prices on competitors’ websites so it can adjust its listings accordingly. A difference of even 50 cents can mean losing a sale.
But a new tactic by Amazon to block these programs — known commonly as robots or bots — thwarted the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer.
Its technology unit, @WalmartLabs, was unable to work around the blockade for weeks, forcing it to retrieve Amazon’s data through a secondary source, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The previously unreported incident offers a case study in how Amazon’s technological prowess is helping it dominate the retail competition.
Now the largest online retailer in the world, Amazon is best known by consumers for its fast delivery, huge product catalog and ambitious moves into areas like original TV programming. But its mastery of the complex, behind-the-scenes technologies that power modern e-commerce is just as important to its success.
Dexterity with bots allows Amazon not only to see what its rivals are doing, but increasingly to keep them in the dark when it undercuts them on price or is quietly charging more.
“Benchmarking against Amazon is going to become hard,” said Guru Hariharan, a former Amazon manager who now sells pricing software to retailers as chief executive of Mountain View, California-based Boomerang Commerce.
A Wal-Mart spokesman declined to discuss the January episode but said the company improves its technology regularly and has multiple tools for tracking items. He said the company offers value not only through pricing but from discounts for in-store pickup and other benefits.
A spokeswoman for Amazon said the company is aware of competitors using bots to check its listings and denied any “campaign” to stop them. “Nothing has changed recently in how we manage bots on our site,” she said. Still, she said, “we prioritize humans over bots as needed.”
Bots can slow down a website, a big motivator for retailers to block them.
Reuters interviewed 21 people familiar with bots and how they are deployed, including current and former Wal-Mart employees, former Amazon employees and outside specialists. Many spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issues publicly.
Most pointed to Amazon’s leadership in the burgeoning bot wars.
The company’s technological edge has been good for its profit margin, and it’s proving a winning formula for investors.
Shares of the internet powerhouse have risen about 15-fold since the market’s bottom in March 2009, while the S&P 500 has more than tripled in value. Amazon hit $100 billion in annual sales in 2015 — faster than any company in history, it said.
Brave new world
Bot-driven pricing has represented a massive change for the retail industry since Amazon helped pioneer the practice more than a decade ago.
Traditionally, brick-and-mortar stores changed prices no more than weekly because of the time and expense needed to swap labels by hand.
In the world of e-commerce, though, retailers update prices with ease, sometimes multiple times a day, helped by algorithms that consider inventory levels, sales forecasts and rivals’ pricing data.
To stay in the game, companies such as online wholesaler Boxed, based in New York, depend on a variety of methods including bots to ensure they do not lag others’ price moves for even 20 minutes.
“That’s like a lifetime during Christmas,” said Chief Executive Chieh Huang, whose company sells bulk staples like toilet paper and pet food. “If we’re not decently priced, we’ll see it almost immediately” in sales declines.
Disguised as humans
Using bots to view massive amounts of data on public websites — a process known as crawling or scraping — has many purposes. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, for example, constantly crawls the Web to gather information for its search engine results and to sell ads.
In e-commerce, though, the use of bots has developed into a cat-and-mouse game. Companies try to thwart the practice on their own websites while aiming to penetrate their competitors’ defenses. Third-party services abound to help less-savvy retailers.
To protect data from rivals, some retail websites use what’s known as a “CAPTCHA” — typically a distorted string of letters and numbers that humans can read but most bots can’t. Amazon shies away from the practice because it annoys some customers.
For merchants seeking to evade such defenses, disguising their computer programs as real shoppers is key. Some pricing technology experts have programmed computer cursors to meander through a Web page in the way a person might, instead of going directly to the prized data. Another technique is to use multiple computer addresses so that retailers cannot track a barrage of clicks to a single source.
“It is an arms race,” said Keith Anderson, a senior vice president at e-commerce analytics firm Profitero, based in Ireland. “Every week or every month, there’s some new approach from both sides.”
Amazon’s maneuver that halted Wal-Mart in January took aim at a specialized Web browser called PhantomJS. Unlike, say, Internet Explorer, this browser is designed specifically for programmers — a telltale clue that its users are not typical shoppers. Amazon put up a digital curtain to hide its listings from PhantomJS users, according to three people familiar with the situation.
It was unclear how the move, which was not aimed at Wal-Mart in particular, affected other companies.
Tests conducted in recent weeks for Reuters show that among major U.S. retail chains, Amazon had by far the most sophisticated bot detection in place, both for its home page and for two popular items selected by Reuters because they change price frequently — a De’Longhi coffee maker and a Logitech webcam.
The tests were run by San Francisco-based Distil Networks, which sells anti-bot tools. In one of the tests, Distil programmed bots to hit each retailer’s website 3,000 times, but slowly enough to mimic a person clicking through listings. This tricked most retail behemoths, but not Amazon.
Blocked bots would not have seen, for instance, that Amazon’s price for the De’Longhi espresso machine changed four times in a single 24-hour period starting on the morning of April 25, according to price tracking website camelcamelcamel.com. During that time, the price swung by more than 10 percent, from a low of $80.06 to $88.16.
Swarming with bots
Despite Amazon’s capabilities, the sheer volume of crawling on its site is staggering. At times, as many as 80 percent of the clicks on Amazon product listings have been from bots, people familiar with the matter say, compared with just a third or more of the traffic on other large sites.
In addition to rivals seeking price data, that traffic includes bots from university researchers studying competition, search engines, advertising services and even fraudsters trying to break into Amazon accounts.
For Wal-Mart, a small group in Silicon Valley directs its automated pricing strategy while dozens of engineers in India and around the world handle the code, current and former Wal-Mart employees said.
Amazon had about 40 engineers who would covertly extract and organize rivals’ data with bots as of several years ago, one of the people interviewed said. Amazon did not discuss the size or structure of its teams working with bots.
According to one U.S. patent application, Amazon is working on encryption technology that would force bots, but not humans, to solve a complicated algorithm to gain access to its Web pages.
“Amazon has both the competency to detect bot traffic and the wherewithal to do something about it,” said Scott Jacobson, a former Amazon manager and now managing director of Madrona Venture Group. That “isn’t the case for most retailers.”