Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 159
April 27, 2017
How Amazon’s new Echo can help you with fashion
Amazon.com Inc. wants to help you choose what to wear.
The technology and retailing behemoth on Wednesday unveiled a voice-controlled camera, the Echo Look, and an app that recommends which of two outfits is best, using fashion specialists’ advice and algorithms that check for the latest trends.
The new product underscores Amazon’s ambitions to be a top player in fashion and voice-powered computing.
Amazon is working to make its voice assistant Alexa, which competes with Apple Inc.’s Siri, an indispensable feature of people’s lives: from playing music to helping someone cook, and now to helping someone dress. The more commands it receives and data it processes improve Alexa’s understanding, making the service more useful.
The same holds true for Amazon’s new “Style Check” service.
Users submit two full-length photos of their outfits, taken by the Echo Look, and they receive recommendations that become “smarter through your feedback and input from our team of experienced fashion specialists,” Amazon said on its website.
If successful, the service would not only give Amazon data on what outfits customers prefer, but it also would help shoppers equate Amazon with fashion – a lucrative market for online retailers.
Surging apparel sales are helping Amazon challenge Macy’s Inc as the dominant retailer in the category. Customers like to try on clothing in stores, however, an obstacle to future growth online.
The Echo Look “opens up a new realm of shopping experiences,” said Werner Goertz, a Gartner Inc analyst. It may one day herald the use of augmented reality in e-commerce so shoppers can “try things on visually before you make your buying decision.”
The Echo Look’s camera — the first in an Alexa device — has the potential to be used for home surveillance, video conferencing and various enterprise applications, he added.
The $199.99 Echo Look is not yet available to the general public. Amazon has sold an estimated 10 million or more Alexa devices, and has had trouble keeping the original Echo device in stock, it has said.
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Source:
https://www.reviewjournal.com/life/fashion/how-amazons-new-echo-can-help-you-with-fashion/
The crucial money decision Elon Musk made when he was broke
In a span of less than four months, Tesla Motors (TSLA) founder and CEO Elon Musk has added $2.3 billion to his personal wealth . Musk is now worth more than $13 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, but it could have worked out very differently.
In fact, a crucial decision Elon Musk was forced to make in 2010 when, by his own account, the billionaire was broke, is one of the reasons Musk has been able to cash in on Tesla’s rapid share rise this year: Musk held on to shares at the very moment when a sale to raise cash would have made financial sense.
Musk, who had $200 million in cash at one point, invested “his last cent in his businesses” and said in a 2010 divorce proceeding, “About four months ago, I ran out of cash.” Musk told the New York Times’ DealBook at that time, “I could have either done a rushed private stock sale or borrowed money from friends.”
It’s a dilemma that many entrepreneurs face, but there is a big difference between the options available to Musk and the options available to most business owners. Musk was able to live on $200,000 a month in loans from billionaire friends — while still flying in a private jet — rather than sell any of his Tesla stake. Though the root of the problem is the same: intangible assets or, in other words, a business owner who is “asset rich” and “cash poor.” And it can lead business owners to the most difficult decision of all: having to sell a piece or even all of their company.
This is not a problem limited to founders of technology start-ups based in California.
“It’s really one of those tough scenarios with no good answers,” said Richard Stumpf, CFP and managing partner of Wichita, Kansas-based Financial Benefits. Stumpf has worked with farmers in this situation, and sometimes for reasons that are similar to what drove Musk to admit he was broke: divorce.
“It happens all the time here,” he said. “Farming 2,000 acres … asset-rich, cash-poor. And the options are limited, quite frankly.”
Even if you have friends as nice as Elon’s, borrowing money can cause problems. Years ago a friend of Stumpf’s, who owned a heavy road construction company, got into a bind and borrowed money from buddies. He eventually paid them back, but got behind and risked ruining relationships. In the end the business survived better than his strained friendships.
Even for business owners with collateral to back the loan, the cash flow needs to be coming in to meet debt payments. And in many cases lenders are picky about asset types they will accept. Intangible assets are not the type of collateral that a typical commercial lender will accept, said Andrew Sherman, partner at Seyfarth Shaw, who has worked with companies at all stages of development.
“The bank is in the business of collecting interest, not foreclosing on collateral,” Stumpf said. “Selling the business or some of the ground that you don’t want to sell can be the only way to survive,” he said.
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This can be a good problem for business owners who have contracts lined up that will create significant cash flow but for which expansion is first needed. But selling equity to fund expansion is often a dreaded decision — and for good reason.
“You don’t want to go the way of angel investors, because you know you’re giving away a whole lot more than you’re getting,” Stumpf said. “In a fast-growing business, you sell 10 percent for cash to make it continue to grow, but when you’re growing 30 percent to 40 percent a year, that’s a heck of a return on capital” being given to someone else. “It’s a shame when that happens with a viable business,” Stumpf added.
Sherman said many entrepreneurs need to turn to the equity markets to solve cash flow problems, reaching out to angels, angel networks, online funding or private placements, especially when they lack real estate or inventory or equipment to pledge as collateral. In the short term it can be attractive, since it does not need to be paid back, but in the medium and long run it can be “a very costly source of capital” for a business that is growing and can expect its equity to increase in value, Sherman said.
One hybrid strategy is to partner with an angel for a bank loan, where the angel provides a guaranty with its personal balance sheet to secure the loan and receives equity or warrants in return. The business owner is still giving up equity, but far less equity than in a straight sale, since the risk to the investor is much lower, Sherman said.
There is an operating principle of entrepreneurship that makes it likely that business founders will face this situation at some point in a company’s development. Owners plow profits back into a business, and the business itself is often 80 percent to 90 percent of their net worth, Stumpf estimated. In a fast-growth business, retained earnings should be low because the owner is reinvesting in the business.
“They will do whatever they can to keep the business alive,” Stumpf said. His prime example is himself. “What I took out of paycheck in the first few years was insignificant. I was buying new computers or subscribing to information services or doing marketing programs. I don’t have a million dollars’ worth of a factory behind me, but I was still doing same thing — reinvesting in the business rather than taking big paychecks home.”
As CEO and co-founder of small-business finance company Biz2Credit, Rohit Arora has a lot of experience with business founders facing the decision to sell as a result of early success. Owners of quickly growing business are barely paying themselves and can only withstand so much of a lack of equity in the business before it becomes a cash flow challenge. “While you’re doing great on paper, just to keep operating at the expanding scale, we have seen owners have to get an equity infusion,” Arora said.
Entrepreneurs can raise money in the debt market, but after a certain point debt gets very expensive. “It’s a classic mousetrap,” Arora said. “A growing business that looks good and there’s lots of money going in and out, plenty of cash flow, but any time there is a hiccup, all the cash flow gets sucked up.”
One of Arora’s clients, an entrepreneur in his 30s who rapidly grew a series of franchised smartphone stories in New York City, borrowed often from the Biz2Credit platform as the business grew to 50 stores over four years. The expansion was so swift that it turned into an asset-rich, cash-poor situation, with the entrepreneur needing more money to run the 50 stores, and for reasons from payroll to stocking expensive smartphones. The notorious Samsung Galaxy Note 7 fire recall put this owner in an immediate cash crunch — he had to wait three to four months for compensation from Samsung.
He really only had two options: Sell a stake or sell the entire operation. He ended up doing both, initially selling a stake but ultimately selling the entire business to a large distributor of phone accessories who was keen to reach customers directly.
“I’ve seen it so many times,” Arora said. “He needed to give up equity, and once he got it, it stabilized the company. But as an entrepreneur, it was difficult working for someone else. He decided it was better to get totally out.”
“In any high-growth business, I don’t think you can do anything much different to avoid it,” Arora said, though he does suggest that geographic expansion beyond an existing successful footprint be considered with caution.
For entrepreneurs, the good news is that there’s always another business to create with the proceeds from a sale. The smartphone store entrepreneur could have sold to a bigger chain or even at a higher price if his hand hadn’t been forced, Arora said. But he made good money and is now back with several new businesses, including one in the smartphone accessories market.
He took what he learned about selling accessories and doing smartphone repairs to the online world, where margins and volume are higher. And instead of lamenting the loss of physical stores, the entrepreneur has eliminated the risk of a cash crunch associated with retail locations.
Via CNBC
GoPro’s New Strategic Focus: The Plan to Expand Into Original Content
“I was up jammin’ ’til 3 a.m. last night,” GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman says by way of apology, as he arrives half an hour late for a recent interview at the company’s headquarters in San Mateo, Calif. If the surfer-dude lingo isn’t enough of a giveaway that Woodman isn’t your typical CEO, there’s the motocross helmet and skateboard deck on display in his playfully decorated office.
This story first appeared in the August 30, 2016 issue of Variety.
What kept him up the night before were meetings with marketing and product teams, preparing for a couple of busy months ahead. GoPro is expected to officially unveil its next-generation consumer camera, dubbed the Hero 5, in the coming weeks. But despite the near-all-nighter, and with his breakfast untouched on his desk, Woodman exudes enthusiasm about the future of his company — a future that has been overshadowed by significant losses over the past three quarters.
To get GoPro back on solid ground, Woodman sees the company’s future encompassing more than cameras. He’s building a suite of software and services around GoPro’s core hardware, including what may be the chief exec’s most audacious move yet: an ambitious foray into the world of entertainment that he feels will help fulfill the brand’s potential.
“This holiday, we will have realized the full vision,” Woodman says. “GoPro 1.0 will finally be deployed.”
Of course, “1.0” is a funny way to describe the state of a company that has gone through more than a few upgrades since Woodman, 41, founded it in October 2002. An avid surfer and world traveler, he hadn’t wanted to choose between being the person behind the lens and the one actually riding the surfboard. As a result, he developed a compact camera that could be strapped to the body, the roof of a car, a bike, or anywhere else that was in the middle of the action. “Before GoPro, you had a world full of people pursuing their passions with no record of it,” Woodman says.
GoPro started selling its first cameras in 2004, and quickly became a hit with action-sports fans — snowboarders, surfers, divers, BMX bike riders, motorcyclists. It has catered to those users with an ever-evolving lineup of cameras and accessories, including straps that can mount GoPros to motorcycle helmets, backpacks, and even the family pet. What was once a scrappy startup has become a billion-dollar publicly listed company.
But the past year has brought considerable turbulence. Investors got spooked when the company’s sales cratered during the holiday season, with year-over-year revenue declining from $634 million to $436 million in the fourth quarter. Things looked even worse the following quarter, when the company lost a record $121 million during the three months ending March 31, compared with net earnings of $22 million the year before.
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GoPro also quietly acquired San Francisco-based computer vision startup Lumific last year with the goal of adding more smarts to its services. Lumific developed apps that were able to find similar photos in a user’s camera roll, and help them find the best shots for sharing. Applied to video, similar features could further advance GoPro’s cloud services.
Asked about revenue opportunities from cloud services, Woodman is enthusiastic. “Is there an opportunity to provide a fee-based service, subscription service? For sure!”
But GoPro isn’t just looking to generate cloud revenue with subscription fees. It also aims to assemble a giant repository of sports and lifestyle videos through its cloud services. “Imagine when all of that content is managed in our cloud, and you’ve given us rights to license it and monetize it on your behalf,” says Woodman.
GoPro already has taken the first steps in that direction with its awards program, launched in October. As part of that initiative, the company invites users to submit photos and videos, paying them up to $5,000 for their footage.
However, until now, users had to submit content to GoPro to take part in the program. With its upcoming cloud services, the company could automatically tap into a huge pool of videos that could then be redistributed on GoPro’s own channels, or licensed to others. “We go from having access to a very small amount of content to having access to dramatically larger amounts of content,” explains Woodman. “That’s going to dramatically scale our licensing opportunities.”
GoPro also wants to use this content pool to identify the best filmmakers in its community, work with them directly on future productions, and, over time, build out a network of correspondents. “Those correspondents then become our stringers around the world,” says Lynch. He likens the effort to the way Vice has been working with freelancers to develop programming with a distinct look.
While becoming a kind of Vice of action sports, travel, and lifestyle — powered by a worldwide network of freelance correspondents — is no easy feat, making money with it may even be harder. Bates readily admits as much. “It takes many, many years to change a business model,” he says, cautioning against overly high expectations. “We as a company need to be realistic that monetizing content is a whole different approach. I think what we are building is the optionality to do it.”
“We as a company need to be realistic that monetizing content is a whole different approach.”
TONY BATES
The question is whether GoPro’s investors have the patience for a multiyear bet on media and the cloud. That patience got tested severely last year by the bungled introduction of the Hero Session, the company’s smallest camera. GoPro had to delay the launch, and decided to go to market in July, at a time when people are frequently on vacation. What’s more, the new camera was priced close to the company’s top-line model, confusing consumers and reviewers alike. The launch was a disaster, and consumers weren’t buying the Session until GoPro cut the retail price in half.
“We introduced a product that competed with our own product,” admits Bates.
Earlier this year, GoPro also delayed the launch of its long-awaited drone, which is now scheduled to be released in time for the holiday season. All of this scared investors, sending the company’s stock sharply down, from a high of $63 a year ago to a low of $8.88 in May, before an August rebound that saw shares climb above $15 to a seven-month high. The company took some painful steps to turn things around, including laying off 7% of its staff and cutting several camera models from its lineup.
Bates maintains that quarterly revenue generated by selling cameras to retailers doesn’t reveal the whole picture. Sell-through data, which shows how many cameras consumers have actually bought, has been on the uptick, suggesting that stores are moving their inventory before GoPro introduces a new model. “From a business perspective, the company is in as good a shape as it possibly can be,” says Bates. “Inventory has never been lower.”
Source:
GoPro’s New Strategic Focus: The Plan to Expand Into Original Content (EXCLUSIVE)
Wearable tech in wellness programs increasing
More and more, employers are turning to the incorporation of wearable technology in wellness programs for employees.
That’s according to the Employer Guide to Wearables 2.0 from employer-facing health intelligence platform Springbuk. The three-part study reviews key preferences, features and implementation considerations of employers for wearables in corporate wellness programs.
In fact, use of such devices is up 10 percent from 2015 findings, with 35 percent of employers now using wearables in their workplace wellness program. Companies are turning to wearables not just to furnish participation and engagement data, the findings say, but also to make wellness programs more effective in lowering health risk and improving health outcomes.
Close to half of employer respondents — 48.6 percent — are considering purchasing devices for their employee population over the next twelve months, whether as a replacement for existing devices or a first-time purchase. And 60 percent cite “app usability” as the most important feature.
But because employers often have multiple vendors to deal with in a wellness program, other factors they consider important are connectivity between various wellness initiatives—prompting the study to consider “sync with a wellness vendor” in addition to other major features such as “long battery life” and “employer-facing dashboard.”
In its review of wearables, the study considers 21 different devices from 8 different manufacturers. Devices were tested to evaluate, among other criteria, each one’s user community; its ability to provide comprehensive reporting to employers; and what kind of overall experience it provides for the employee, including the device user experience, the app experience and the ability of the device to fit in with the life of the employee.
The five top-scoring devices are, in order, the Fitbit Blaze (scoring 94 out of a possible 100); the Garmin Vivoactive HR (89/100); the Fitbit Charge 2 and Fitbit Surge (86/100); the Samsung Gear S3 and Garmin Vivosmart HR (85/100); and the Samsung Gear S2 (83/100).
More than half of employer respondents (54.6 percent) say their workplace wellness program is “metrics driven,” with the common metrics tracked including changes in health risk (62 percent), financial impact (58 percent) and improvements in clinical outcomes (53 percent). And they’re using the metrics and data from wearables, the report says, to build better, more effective programs; 44.1 percent of employers are using wearable device data in the strategic planning of their wellness programs.
“We’re seeing more employers turn to wearables not only to provide participation and engagement data, but increasingly to help move the needle on effectiveness of wellness programs in lowering health risk and improving health outcomes,” Rod Reasen, chief executive officer of Springbuk, says in a statement. Reasen adds, “The data provided by wearables can also create actionable insights about how to invest your wellness dollars next year.”
Source:
http://www.benefitspro.com/2017/04/27/wearable-tech-in-wellness-programs-increasing
Amazon’s delivery drones may drop packages via parachute
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday granted Amazon a patent for a method to guide packages released from drones safely to the ground.
Previously the e-commerce giant had publicly released demo videos of its drones landing in yards to drop off packages. The company has testing for several years to determine the best method to deliver to customers in the future.
The patent suggests Amazon is considering keeping its drones high above customers’ homes, an approach that could be more efficient and safe. In the document, Amazon said that landing a drone takes more time and energy than releasing a package from high in the sky. If Amazon’s drones don’t land in yards, this prevents potentially dangerous collisions between the drones and any people, pets or objects in a customer’s yard.
The patent also describes how Amazon’s drones would use magnets, parachutes or spring coils to release the delivery while in mid-flight. Once the package is released, the drone would then monitor the descending box to make sure it’s dropping properly onto the desired landing patch.
It’s unclear when Amazon will launch drone delivery in the United States. Its current plan, which calls for automated drones flying without the direct supervision of a human, isn’t legal today.
Amazon featured Prime Air in a light-hearted Super Bowl ad, in which Alexa told a customer she could look for delivery of Doritos soon. But the ad wasn’t meant to be taken literally, and there is no launch date for the service in the United States.
Doritos. Drones. Drama. The perfect recipe for the big game. #JustAsk Alexa #SB51pic.twitter.com/5sMvM5O6mU
— Amazon Echo (@amazonecho) February 6, 2017
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the patent awarded Tuesday.
Competitors such as Google have shown off similar plans, in which a package is dropped from the sky. Late last year the drone delivery firm Flirtey completed an automated drone trial with 77 packages delivered from a 7-Eleven in Reno, Nevada. The flights were legal because Flirtey had a human supervise the flights, which were completed within a mile of the 7-Eleven. After extensive testing, Flirtey said it had found a way to drop a Slurpee without spilling a single sip.
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Source:
http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/14/technology/amazon-drone-patent/
How to make money designing custom Snapchat geofilters
Snapchat is looking to geofilters as the next source of growth for its fledgling ad business.
Starting Monday, Snapchat maker Snap Inc. is allowing its ad partners in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada to sell and manage sponsored geofilters, which allow Snapchat users to place special filters over their photos and videos in certain locations.
Snap’s more than a dozen outside ad partners, like Amobee and VaynerMedia, will now be able to sell sponsored geofilters alongside fullscreen video ads, a Snap spokesperson told Business Insider. Sponsored geofilters could previously only be purchased directly through Snapchat’s own self-service tool, which launched in February 2016.
By giving outside partners the ability to buy, manage, and report analytics for sponsored geofilters alongside video ads, Snap is hoping that the geofilter format will catch on more widely with advertisers. The company has previously touted paid, on-demand geofilters as a more consumer-oriented feature by showing how people can create custom filters for events like weddings and birthday parties.
What advertisers will see in Amobee if they opt to buy a geofilter.Snap
Snap is also looking to make paid geofilters more available to marketers with other outside partners. In the coming weeks, the company will start selling on-demand geofilters through the wedding planning site WeddingWire, Hootsuite, Eventfarm, and MomentFeed.
Snap has yet to disclose how much money it makes off sponsored geofilters, and pricing for the format varies based on duration and location. Covering the size of about 17 football fields in downtown Los Angeles for five hours on a Friday evening would cost roughly $35, for example, while the same size and duration in midtown Manhattan would cost roughly $170.
Snapchat’s geofilters are another feature that’s been copied by Facebook, which recently started showing location-specific camera frames in Instagram and is currently testing them in its main app.
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Source:
http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-opens-up-paid-geofilters-to-outside-ad-partners-2017-4
Google becomes first foreign internet company to go live in Cuba
After former President Obama reopened America’s diplomatic relations with Cuba, businesses started looking for opportunities to make inroads to the island nation. Google was one of these, with Obama himself announcing it would come to help set up WiFi and broadband access there. Cuba’s national telecom ETECSA officially inked a deal with Google back in December, and today, they finally switched on the service, making the search giant the first foreign internet live on the island.
To be fair, Google already had a headstart when it made Chrome availablein Cuba back in 2014. The servers Google switched on today are part of a the Google Global Cache (GGC), a global network that locally stores popular content, like viral videos, for quick access. Material stored in-country will load much quicker than Cuba’s existing setup: Piping internet in through a submarine cable connected to Venezuela. Many Cubans can only access the web through 240 public access WiFi spots scattered through the country, according to Buzzfeed. While this won’t bring Cuban internet near as fast as American access, it’s still a huge step forward.
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April 26, 2017
Shanghai’s Bid to Conquer Asian Fashion
With bulging eyes and mouths agape, they were the very picture of new arrivals in a city they had underestimated. Buyers from a well-known Japanese department store stood waiting for a show to start at the latest edition of Shanghai Fashion Week. Still stunned from their encounter with a mob of ticket touts selling black market invitations outside, they appeared flummoxed but reflective.
“Power,” whispered one surprised retailer to her colleague. “That’s what it is. I couldn’t put my finger on it before, but now I get it. You can literally feel the power in the atmosphere here.”
Surveying the scene at the lively venue in the heart of China’s commercial capital, the Japanese buyer declined to share her name but she was clearly captivated by what she saw as Shanghai’s ambitious march on her hometown of Tokyo. And faintly protective too.
After listing off Japan’s many strengths — its long legacy of producing master fashion designers, unrivalled street style, sophisticated consumers and cutting edge apparel industry — she stopped abruptly mid-sentence.
“Wait, do you mean Tokyo as an international hub? Like, Asia’s fashion business capital? Hmmm, that’s tricky,” she paused, turning in vain to her colleague for some reassurance. “We won’t lose that chance to Shanghai — will we?”
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While Tokyo’s fashion scene is incredibly vibrant, diverse and influential, it is also insular and conservative when it comes to the way the industry operates. Shanghai, on the other hand, is in its honeymoon period with the global fashion industry. Bounding full-throttle ahead, the city’s fashion leaders seem happy to experiment at every juncture — and supremely unfazed when things go a bit wrong.
“People here have a can-do attitude which means things can be surprisingly efficient even though they’re sometimes guilty of being inconsistent or even chaotic,” says Shaway Yeh, group style editorial director at Modern Media. “Anyway, Shanghai has the weight of China behind it. It’s that simple. That’s precisely why Hong Kong and Singapore are not in the running as Asian fashion capital.”
Confident in its position as the gateway to Asia’s powerhouse economy and the region’s largest consumer market, Shanghai Fashion Week is now able to attract niche and contemporary brands to China from around the world. And those most eager to join the event’s 25,000 square metres of selling space often hail from other Asian nations.
Beacon for Asia and broker for China
As vice secretary-general, Lv Xiaolei is the power broker behind Shanghai Fashion Week. “Madame Lu,” as she is deferentially called by almost everyone in the city, chooses her words very carefully — especially when talking about competitors in Asia.
“Well, South Korea’s institutions are willing to promote their local brands in China,” she offers, keen to focus on the relatively new and still fragile spirit of cooperation with her Asian counterparts. “And Masahiko Miyake, chairman of the Japan Fashion Week Organisation, he came to us during this Shanghai Fashion Week to sign a strategic partnership with us too. We’ve been talking for a while, you know. From rivals to friends.”
When asked directly what her ambition is for Shanghai Fashion Week in the Asian context, Madame Lu spends a long time ruminating, responding obliquely and changing the subject before she finally concedes: “OK, we’re trying to build the most influential fashion trade platform in Asia,” she sighs. “Is that ambition enough?”
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Without doubt, Shanghai Fashion Week is a work in progress and has much to prove. It may lack the rigour of Tokyo and the pizzazz of Seoul but, make no mistake, it overshadows them both in terms of chutzpah. If for no other reason than the strength and scale of its market, China is in a league of its own. Not even India, with its own vast fashion industry in Delhi and Mumbai, comes close. No wonder Shanghai’s fledgling designers can seem so dangerously overconfident.
“I think sooner or later Shanghai will become the top fashion week in the Asian-Pacific region and I think eventually even Europe will need to buckle up,” says Moto Guo, the Malaysian designer shortlisted for last year’s LVMH Prize.
“Everybody’s working hard to break the Shanghai market. But even so, I was surprised to learn we had almost nine or 10 young brands from Malaysia participating at Shanghai Fashion Week this time.”
The Autumn/Winter 2017-18 collection was Guo’s second selling season at The Tube, a tightly curated Shanghai showroom founded by Zemira Xu who has developed a knack for spotting some of China’s more progressive designer talent such as Xiao Li and Xu Zhi.
“The whole industry here is moving so fast,” Guo continues. “It’s so competitive and so aggressive. But at the same time, people here are getting more and more open-minded. They’re willing to listen to young voices and even spend money to buy our work, which is definitely a great advantage for us as a young label.”
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China’s mainstream brands like Reineren and young designer “repats” like Shushu/Tong, Deepmoss and Andrea Jiapei Li may dominate the runways here, but stroll through any of the official trade shows hosted by Shanghai Fashion Week and you can hear dozens of foreign languages spoken by designers, sales agents, showroom reps, and distributors manning the exhibitor booths.
Shanghai Fashion Week’s sales floors have become so international, in fact, that brands from abroad now outnumber those from China at the four official trade shows. A tally of the brands at Mode, Ontimeshow, Showroom Shanghai and Dadashow revealed that international brands make up 58 percent of the 1,000-plus brands exhibiting this season. Just under half of those are from other Asian countries.
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Boohoo online fashion retailer sees its profits double
Its sales have jumped by 51% to almost £300m, thanks to new overseas markets.
The Manchester-based firm puts its success down to “combining cutting-edge, inspirational design with an affordable price tag”.
Its booming sales growth has also been reflected in its share price, which has more than trebled in the past year.
On its stock market flotation in 2014, it was valued at £560m. It is now worth about £2bn.
The firm has gone from strength to strength in recent years, while its High Street rivals have had to deal with increasing competition from Boohoo and other online retailers.
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“It has been a momentous year for us. The Boohoo brand has achieved outstanding revenue growth and increased profitability margins during the year,” said joint chief executives Mahmud Kamani and Carol Kane.
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Its only temporary misstep was a profit warning in 2015 that unnerved investors and sent its share price down by some 40% – something the online retailer has now put behind it.
“Boohoo has seen strong sales across multiple markets, and significant volume growth in sales,” says John Stevenson, retail analyst at Peel Hunt.
According to its latest results, Boohoo’s revenue grew 33% in the UK, more than 50% in Europe, 140% in the US and 40% in the rest of the world.
The company now has 5.2 active million customers worldwide, and crucially is able to rely on social media “influencers” and video bloggers – “vloggers” – to spread the word to its 18 to 24-year-old target market.
Digital engagement
“Boohoo has been able to halve the amount it spends on marketing over the past five years, because of this shift to social media,” says Mr Stevenson.
“Relatively speaking, it has a far more engaged social media base than many other retailers – and it can use digital as a call to arms.”
It is an online marketing strategy that High Street chains are now scrambling to emulate.
The key to its success is that Boohoo is able to batch-produce items “in the low hundreds” to trial for sale on its website; something that is not a viable option for fashion chains with bricks-and-mortar stores.
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This ability to “test and repeat” allows the online retailer to have a constant flow of new items on its website, with only about a third of them ever being reordered for bigger production runs if the initial sales prove successful.
Crucially, this means that online fashion retailers like Boohoo can potentially respond much more quickly to changing fashion tastes than can their High Street rivals.
With its constant product changes and low prices – dresses can start for as little as £8 – Boohoo can set its own prices. “They don’t have to follow the lead of, say Marks and Spencer,” says Peel Hunt’s John Stevenson.
Over the past 12 months, Boohoo has bolstered its international expansion plans through its £20m acquisition of struggling US fashion site Nasty Gal, which it completed in February.
The US purchase has given Boohoo access to Nasty Gal’s intellectual property and customer database that will help its US expansion plans.
Earlier this year, it also bought the smaller online fashion retailer PrettyLittleThing, which was founded by the sons of Boohoo joint chief executive, Mahmud Kamani.
Boohoo plans to expand PrettyLittleThing, which has more than a million active customers, in new markets and said it had shown strong profitable growth in the first two months since the takeover.
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Source:
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39697246
The inventor of Siri says one day AI will be used to upload and access our memories
Artificial intelligence may one day surpass human intelligence. But, if designed right, it may also be used to enhance human cognition.
Tom Gruber, one of the inventors of the artificial intelligence voice interface Siri that now lives inside iPhones and the macOS operating system, shared a new idea at the TED 2017 conference today for using artificial intelligence to augment human memory.
“What if you could have a memory that was as good as computer memory and is about your life?” Gruber asked the audience. “What if you could remember every person you ever met? How to pronounce their name? Their family details? Their favorite sports? The last conversation you had with them?”
Gruber said he thinks that using artificial intelligence to catalog our experiences and to enhance our memory isn’t just a wild idea — it’s inevitable.
And the whole reason Gruber says it’s possible: Data about the media that we consume and the people we talk to is available because we use the internet and our smartphones to mediate our lives.
Privacy is no small consideration here. “We get to chose what is and is not recalled and retained,” said Gruber. “It’s absolutely essential that this be kept very secure.”
Though the idea of digitally storing our memories certainly raises a host of unsettling possibilities, Gruber says that AI memory enhancement could be a life-changing technology for those who suffer from Alzheimer’s or dementia.
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Gruber isn’t the only one in Silicon Valley thinking of ways to get inside your head. Last week at the annual Facebook developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg shared a project Facebook is working on to build non-invasive sensors that will read brain activity. The sensors are being designed to read the part of your brain that translates thoughts to speech to allow you to type what you’re thinking.
And Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has started a new company called Neuralink to build wireless brain-computer interface technology. Musk shared his idea for the technology, which he calls “neural lace,” at Recode’s Code Conference last year.
Watch Musk discuss neural lace and why he thinks it could help humans keep apace with rapid advancements in artificial intelligence.
Source:
https://www.recode.net/2017/4/25/15424174/siri-apple-tom-gruber-ted-memories-artificial-intelligence
