By Justine Griffin

With all the doom and gloom about the state of the retail industry, it isn’t easy to find a company other than Amazon that is considered a bright spot among the ongoing narrative of declining sales and shuttered stores.

But Walmart is proving it will not go gentle into that good night.

Walmart was once the behemoth of the shopping world, until Amazon morphed from being a book retailer into an everything retailer. Today, Arkansas-based Walmart is still among the biggest brick-and-mortar retailers out there with 4,692 stores in 50 states. But Walmart is also investing heavily in ecommerce business these days — it bought both Jet.com and Modcloth.com in the last year — to better compete against Amazon and others.

Walmart continues invest in its growth online by expanding its own third-party marketplace (similar to Amazon Marketplace) and piloting more convenience options for shoppers, like free two-day shipping, pick-up in store options and curbside grocery pick up and delivery programs. It also announced partnerships with Uber and Google this week. The company made headlines in June when it launched its first “vending machine,” which is essentially a giant self-serve kiosk, at a store in Oklahoma. One of these futuristic vending machines opened in Naples last week. Walmart also opened a “Next-Gen Test Store” earlier this year in Lake Nona, an affluent and growing suburb of Orlando.

Read more here.

The first time James Nozar came to Tampa nearly a decade ago, he didn’t think much of it.

Downtown wasn’t very pedestrian-friendly. He saw only sprawling suburban communities. He didn’t ever envision living here.

But when he got a phone call last year about a CEO job that would give him the reins to transform the entire city of Tampa, he reconsidered.

Nozar, 37, was hired in February to be the CEO of Strategic Property Partners, the real estate company backed by Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik and Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment. He’s charged with taking Vinik’s lofty $2 billion plans to transform 40 acres of downtown Tampa’s urban core and making it come to life.

“It’s so rare to see development projects of this scale. From the size of it to the ownership and the financial backing,” Nozar said in an interview at the SPP offices in Channelside Bay Plaza with theTampa Bay Times recently. “When I told my former boss about it, he said this is once in a lifetime.”

Read more in the Tampa Bay Times here.