Monthly Archives: December 2017

The subscription box industry seemed to hit fever pitch in 2017, with offerings for seemingly every product category. Here are three things retailers should keep in mind when entering the space. No. 1: Market Share Battle As more players enter the subscription box space, the market is becoming even more fragmented. In January 2017, the top 10 subscription sites represented 67% of traffic to Hitwise’s custom study of sites. By contrast, the top 10 players in January 2015 represented 83% of total visits, according to John Fetto, senior analyst at Hitwise. And in yet another sign that it’s getting harder to stand out and sustain consumers’ initial box enthusiasm, industrywide subscription sites traffic also has slowed, including a 3% drop in September. No. 2: Data, Data, Data One of the thrills of getting a subscription box is essentially liking some—if not all—of the contents within it. In fact, there’s nothing more frustrating than getting a box of things you don’t want or need. To achieve that level of personalization, data is essential. Just look at Stitch Fix. The online personal stylist clothing box service has posted operating income in each of the past three years. The number of its active clients has jumped nearly 10 times to 2.19 million as of July 29, with a repeat rate of 86%. The secret sauce behind that growth? Stitch Fix’s team of some 3,400 mostly part-time stylists and its team of over 75 data scientists who together study more than 85 meaningful data points its customers willingly provide to come up with the best personalized box offerings. No. 3: A New Avenue As many traditional brick-and-mortar retailers struggle with declining traffic and store closings, some brands have been expanding their own direct-to-consumer ecommerce sales. Recently, JCPenney—which is struggling amid a consumer shift away from mall shopping—teamed up with Bombfell, a men’s subscription box service, to offer curated boxes to its Big & Tall customers. Meanwhile, Hasbro Inc., maker of Monopoly and Cranium board games, became the first major toy company to enter the subscription box space and introduce its own game box. The move could not only help Hasbro increase sales—at a time when kids have many mobile gaming options—but also help the company lessen its dependence on the key holiday quarter.

Un Siri pour mieux collaborer au sein du groupe. « Il est temps de réinventer la façon dont nous travaillons ensemble » dixit Arthur Sadoun, nouveau président de Publicis Groupe. Partant de ce désir, Publicis Groupe a annoncé mardi 20 juin, l’arrivée prochaine d’une plateforme basée sur l’intelligence artificielle et le machine learning. Baptisée Marcel en l’honneur de Marcel Bleustein Blanchet, fondateur de Publicis, ce nouvel assistant vocal va permettre aux 80 000 employés du groupe de mieux collaborer, d’identifier les tendances porteuses et les experts référents dans les entités de ce groupe présent dans 130 pays. Cette technologie élaborée par Sapient, un réseau racheté en 2015 par Publicis Groupes, aura pour but d’accélérer la transformation digitale des annonceurs à travers le monde, « Marcel est une autre étape importante dans notre ambition pour devenir une plateforme au service de nos clients » précise Arthur Sadoun. Ce projet inédit à cette échelle confirme la volonté de Publicis Groupe de servir ses clients grâce à des moyens créatifs mais aussi technologiques, plus personnalisés et autonomes. Celle-ci s’inscrit d’ailleurs dans la vision que Maurice Levy, ancien PDG de Publicis Groupe a mis en place en 2015 : Power Of One – toutes les capacités de Publicis Groupe à la portée de chacun de ses clients de façon simple, souple et efficace. La 1ère version opérationnelle de Marcel est annoncée pour l’édition 2018 de Viva Technology.

Les analystes reprochent à l'iPhone X son prix élevé et l'absence de grande innovation technologique. - Ng Han Guan/AP/SIPA Miné par son prix élevé et des innovations jugées mineures, le smartphone d'Apple devrait se vendre moins bien que prévu début 2018. En cette période de Noël, Apple n'est pas à la fête. Après avoir placé de grands espoirs dans l'iPhone X, le dernier modèle du best-seller de la firme à la pomme, les investisseurs commencent en effet à douter. Lundi, le quotidien taïwanais « Economic Daily News », cité par l'agence Bloomberg, affirmait qu'Apple allait réduire drastiquement ses prévisions de ventes d'iPhone X pour le premier trimestre : 30 millions d'unités seulement, contre 50 millions attendus jusqu'alors. Selon le journal, le principal centre de fabrication de l'iPhone X à Zhengzhou, en Chine, enregistre d'ores et déjà une baisse d'activité et a cessé de recruter des travailleurs. Des informations qu'Apple refuse de commenter. Mais plusieurs analystes ont également abaissé leurs projections de ventes d'iPhone X pour le premier trimestre de l'année prochaine, soulignant que les clients semblent rebutés par le prix élevé du smartphone . Mardi, l'action d'Apple perdait 2,8 % à l'ouverture de Wall Street, entraînant certains de ses fournisseurs (Broadcom, Skyworks, Micron...). La veille, l'analyste de Sinolink Securities Co., Zhang Bin, expliquait dans un rapport, que les ventes de l'iPhone X au premier trimestre pourraient passer sous la barre des 35 millions, soit 10 millions de moins que ses précédentes estimations. « Maintenant que la première vague de livraisons est passée, le prix élevé de l'iPhone X pourrait affaiblir la demande », précise l'analyste chinois, également inquiet de la lenteur de la production.

“2017 has been an amazing year for robotics,” says roboticist Sebastian Thrun, a pioneer of the self-driving car. “Why 2017? Why did it take us so long?” Well, it was a confluence of factors, namely the cheapening of sophisticated hardware combined with better brains. “In the past, in robotics we had not-so-smart software with hardware that would break all the time, and that's not a good product," Thrun says. "It's only recently that both computers have become smart enough and that robot hardware has become reliable enough that the very first products start to emerge.” Perhaps the biggest leap in hardware has been sensor technology. To build a robot you don’t have to babysit, you need it to sense its environment, and to sense its environment it needs a range of sensors. Not just with cameras, but with lasers that build a 3-D map of the robot’s surroundings. These kinds of components have gotten both far more powerful and far cheaper. “I kind of talk about this finally being the golden age of robotics, and that means that for the first time in the last 12 months or so you see robots really becoming prolific,” says Ben Wolff, CEO of Sarcos Robotics, which makes the most bonkers robot arms you’ve ever seen. “And I think it's because we're finally at that crossover point, where the cost has come down of components while the capability of the components has increased sufficiently.”

« Malgré quelques contretemps temporaires liés à la démonétisation de l'économie et l'introduction d'un nouvel impôt sur les biens et les services, l'économie indienne a rattrapé celles de la France et du Royaume-Uni et les aura dépassées toutes les deux en 2018 pour devenir la cinquième plus importante économie mondiale mesurée en dollar », a commenté Douglas McWilliams, vice-président du Cebr. En octobre, lors de la publication des perspectives économiques mondiales du Fonds monétaire international (FMI), ses économistes ont prévu une croissance de 7,4 % en Inde l'an prochain contre 1,2 % en France et 1,4 % outre-Manche. Avec cet écart de performance déjà constaté en 2017 et en 2016, le produit national brut (PNB) indien n'a cessé de gonfler. En 2015 (derniers chiffres disponibles), la Banque mondiale pointait un PNB indien à 2.088 milliards de dollars, juste derrière le Royaume-Uni (2.846 milliards) et la France (2.708 milliards). Les Etats-Unis détrônés par la Chine Selon les projections du Cebr, vers 2032, l'économie indienne devrait se hisser au troisième rang mondial. Entre-temps, la Chine aura détrôné les Etats-Unis en tant que première puissance économique mondiale. Le Japon et l'Allemagne occuperaient respectivement la quatrième et la cinquième place. La France encore dans les dix premiers L'économie française ferait encore partie des dix premiers de la classe, en neuvième position derrière le Brésil (sixième), le Royaume-Uni (septième) et la Corée du Sud (huitième). Le Canada et l'Italie, membres du G7, seraient relégués à la douzième et à la treizième place, et doublés par l'Indonésie. Comme le souligne le rapport, les économies asiatiques excellent avec les entrées attendues de Taïwan, de la Thailande, des Philippines et du Pakistan parmi les vingt premières économies de la planète.

How exactly will ads be served to consumers using such services? New data from Invoca might provide some insight into the answer. The call tracking and analytics firm surveyed US voice-enabled speaker owners, asking them what factors would make them willing to listen to ads delivered through their devices. Three in 10 said they would entertain ads via voice assistants if they were simply asked if they wanted to hear one before it played. In addition, 28% were open to ads if they got to choose the brands doing the advertising.

What Google Said About Fred Illyes was interviewed about Fred at Brighton SEO 2017. What follows is a transcript: Interviewer: Let’s talk about Fred. Gary Illyes: Who? Interviewer: You are the person that created Fred. So Fred is basically an algo that… Gary Illyes: It’s not one algo, it’s all the algos. Interviewer: So you can confirm it’s not a single algo – it’s a whole umbrella of a bunch of different changes and updates that everyone has just kind of put under this umbrella of “Fred”. Gary Illyes: Right, so the story behind Fred is that basically I’m an asshole on Twitter. And I’m also very sarcastic which is usually a very bad combination. And Barry Schwartz, because who else, was asking me about some update that we did to the search algorithm. And I don’t know if you know, but in average we do three or two to three updates to the search algorithm, ranking algorithm every single day. So usually our response to Barry is that sure, it’s very likely there was an update. But that day I felt even more sarcastic than I actually am, and I had to tell him that. Oh, he was begging me practically for a name for the algorithm or update, because he likes Panda or Penguin and what’s the new one. Pork, owl, shit like that. And I just told him that, you know what, from now on every single update that we make – unless we say otherwise – will be called Fred; every single one of them. Interviewer: So now we’re in a perpetual state of Freds? Gary Illyes: Correct. Basically every single update that we make is a Fred. I don’t like, or I was sarcastic because I don’t like that people are focusing on this. Every single update that we make is around quality of the site or general quality, perceived quality of the site, content and the links or whatever. All these are in the Webmaster Guidelines. When there’s something that is not in line with our Webmaster Guidelines, or we change an algorithm that modifies the Webmaster Guidelines, then we update the Webmaster Guidelines as well. Or we publish something like a Penguin algorithm, or work with journalists like you to publish, throw them something like they did with Panda. Interviewer: So for all these one to two updates a day, when webmasters go on and see their rankings go up or down, how many of those changes are actually actionable? Can webmasters actually take something away from that, or is it just under the generic and for the quality of your site? Gary Illyes: I would say that for the vast majority, and I’m talking about probably over 95%, 98% of the launches are not actionable for webmasters. And that’s because we may change, for example, which keywords from the page we pick up because we see, let’s say, that people in a certain region put up the content differently and we want to adapt to that. […] Basically, if you publish high quality content that is highly cited on the Internet – and I’m not talking about just links, but also mentions on social networks and people talking about your branding, crap like that. [audience laughter] Then, I shouldn’t have said that right? Then you are doing great. And fluctuations will always happen to your traffic. We can’t help that; it would be really weird if there wasn’t fluctuation, because that would mean we don’t change, we don’t improve our search results anymore. Note: This transcript has been lightly edited by author for clarity.

A YEAR AGO, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi (sha-oh-me) had fallen from the world’s most valuable unicorn to a “unicorpse.” Sales plunged in 2016, pushing the company from first to fifth place among China’s smartphone makers. No firm had ever come back from a wound that severe in the trench warfare of the global smartphone business. Today, Xiaomi is being called a “Chinese phoenix.” The company has grown so fast in the past year that research firm Strategy Analytics says Xiaomi could overtake Oppo, Huawei, and Apple in the next year to become the world’s second-largest smartphone vendor, behind Samsung. Executives are reportedly considering an IPO in 2018, which could be among the highest-valued ever. The comeback has made Xiaomi a poster child for China’s entrepreneurial dynamism. More than 10,000 new businesses are started every day in China — that’s seven Chinese startups born each minute. In the US, by contrast, startup formation has fallen 36 percent in the last 10 years, to roughly 1,000 per day. No longer a nation of “copycats,” China today leads the US in key technology sectors such as mobile payments, and is increasingly competitive in advanced microchips, and artificial intelligence. Xiaomi is one of the best exemplars of this entrepreneurial vigor. What accounts for the company’s unprecedented turnaround? Is Xiaomi’s renewed success sustainable, or will it wither under the relentless margin pressures of the phone business? And can Xiaomi do what no homegrown Chinese phone maker has done — successfully crack the US market? To find the answers to these questions, we have to go back to Xiaomi’s 2015-2016 debacle, which saw smartphone sales decline to a rumored 41 million in 2016, from a reported 70 million a year earlier. Xiaomi’s billionaire founder Lei Jun — sometimes called “the Steve Jobs of China” — blamed the slump on supply-chain problems associated with the company’s rapid growth. This forced Xiaomi to retreat from several overseas markets, including Brazil and Indonesia. There were organizational problems as well, prompting the restructuring of the smartphone hardware, R&D, supply chain, and quality-management teams. But perhaps the biggest source of Xiaomi’s troubles was its exclusive reliance on online sales, which left it unable to reach millions of less tech-savvy customers in China’s smaller cities and rural areas. Rivals Oppo and Vivo capitalized on Xiaomi’s absence by cementing sales partnerships with retailers in those areas. In a classic case of “turning a bad thing into a good thing,” however, Xiaomi used its near-fatal stumble to fashion a radical new business model. With sales rebounding, and the company expanding globally, it’s worth examining the inner workings of that unusual model, and how it helped to power the company’s remarkable resurgence.

Online shopping won't grow forever, says Unibail boss creating malls giant SYDNEY/PARIS (Reuters) - Online shopping has its limits and physical stores will never go out of fashion, says the CEO of Unibail-Rodamco which is betting $16 billion on buying Westfield to create a global mall giant. The deal comes at a time when the traditional retail sector and shopping centers are under pressure to reinvent themselves in the face of fierce online competition led by Amazon. However, Unibail-Rodamco Chief Executive Christophe Cuvillier predicted online shopping would peak at 20 percent of global retail spending, up from 8-10 percent now, although he did not give a timeframe. “Internet will grow but internet cannot do everything. It’s very difficult to be profitable on the internet, particularly pure-play online retailers,” he told journalists on a call on Thursday. "retailers need physical presence,” he added, noting that largely online companies like Apple, Nespresso, Tesla and even Amazon had opened bricks-and-mortar stores. Franco-Dutch group Unibail’s planned acquisition of Westfield will create a stronger competitor for the world’s biggest commercial property owner Simon Property Group, one with 104 centers and more than 1.2 billion visitors a year. The deal gives Europe-focused Unibail, which owns Les 4 Temps and Forum des Halles in Paris and has centers spreading from Helsinki to Valencia, exposure to Britain, the United States and Italy, countries where Westfield operates 35 malls. The acquisition is part of Unibail’s strategy of increasingly focusing on high-end “destination” malls in landmark locations and Westfield would bring shopping centers in big cities like London, New York and San Francisco, which offer customers a wide range of restaurants, bars and entertainment. Unibail could replicate some of Westfield’s services at its other centers around Europe, including staging events like concerts and hosting pop-up shops, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Le groupe avait déjà levé plus de 5,5 milliards de dollars en avril. En faisant alors la start-up la mieux valorisée d'Asie. Parée à conquérir l'Europe, Didi Chuxing, principale application chinoise de réservation de véhicules avec chauffeur, fait le plein. La société a ainsi annoncé avoir levé plus de 4 milliards de dollars pour financer son expansion après s'être lancée notamment à Paris ou à Londres en annonçant un partenariat avec l'estonien Taxify. Didi, qui avait forcé en 2016 son concurrent américain Uber à mettre un genou à terre en rachetant ses activités en Chine, avait déjà levé en avril plus de 5,5 milliards de dollars. Ce qui en avait fait la start-up la mieux valorisée d'Asie. Intelligence artificielle et voitures connectées Créée à Pékin en 2012, l'application de réservation de taxi a déjà largement tissé sa toile en Chine. La nouvelle levée de fonds servira donc à financer son expansion mais pas seulement. Didi veut accélérer dans l'intelligence artificielle et dans le développement de réseaux de recharge de véhicules électriques ainsi qu'à l'international. En mars, Didi a ouvert dans la Silicon Valley, sur les terres d'Uber, un laboratoire de recherche consacré aux applications de l'intelligence artificielle à la conduite autonome. En octobre, la société a conclu un accord avec le constructeur suédois de voitures électriques Nevs (ex-Saab, passé sous pavillon chinois) afin de mettre au point un modèle optimisé pour les flottes de véhicules de transport avec chauffeur (VTC). Didi n'a pas précisé quelles entités avaient participé à la nouvelle levée de fonds, indiquant seulement qu'il s'agit « d'institutions chinoises et étrangères ».