BRAND: Nike's Back to the Future II self-lacing shoes, the HyperAdapt 1.0, are not only real, they now have an official release date: November 28. For "sneakerheads" and fans of the hit 1989 movie, the Monday after Thanksgiving should be a particularly exciting day. However, the shoes may be hard to come by, based on Nike PR director Heidi Burgett's tweet announcing the release date. According to Burgett the self-lacing sneakers will be available at "select Nike retail locations."

MEDIA: This year’s “NBA 2K17,” released Tuesday, includes an immersive, story-driven “My Career” mode, featuring a voice and motion-capture performance by actor Michael B. Jordan. Licensing agreements with 10 NCAA basketball teams allow players to guide their character’s career from college to the pros. The game’s soundtrack featuring top musical artists like Drake and Future, while the “MyLeague” game mode allows players to experience what it’s like to run every aspect of an NBA franchise.

ECOMMERCE: Marketing tools are great. They can help you get better results for less money on a regular basis. Unfortunately, putting in the effort can be more than you can handle. But with marketing automation, you can deliver huge results with the latest features. It helps you commit to your marketing campaign while focusing on other things. And when it comes to ecommerce, nothing gets the job done better.

ECOMMERCE: (INDIA) The Bank of America Merrill Lynch study adds that India will be the second largest market for Amazon outside the US, while Snapdeal will fall to 9 percent by 2019, from 14 percent in 2015. In fact, Amazon had overthrown Snapdeal in terms of sales a year ago. In the last two months, they have reportedly also beaten Flipkart in sales. Amazon GMV in 2025 will be $81 billion according to the report, which also states that it will generate $5.5 billion in GMV in 2016.

ECOMMERCE: As more and more shoppers make their purchases online, keeping e-commerce fraud in check — while minimizing interruptions to good customers — is a priority for everyone in payments. Thanks to changes coming to Verified by Visa (VbV), Visa’s online authentication service, and to Three-Domain Secure (3-D Secure), the industry-wide messaging protocol for online authentication on which VbV is based, e-commerce payments are set to become even more secure and convenient for consumers.

ECOMMERCE: In June, Ray Elias was named CMO for HotelTonight, tasked with leading the company’s brand efforts, communications strategy, customer acquisition and retention. With more than 20 years e-commerce experience, Elias served as StubHub’s CMO from 2008 to 2015 before joining HotelTonight. “At StubHub, we truly disrupted and changed the way ticketing works. We played a major role in shifting consumer behavior to purchasing the week of an event – where the greatest value is,” says Elias.

DATA: Fast-forwarding seven years and a career change, I found myself at Amazon running SQL queries against their data warehouse. The scope of that database honestly blew my mind; I had to figure out tricks to even pull down a week of summary data without having it choke or overflow Excel. I thought I’d understood what big data was, but it turns out that I had no clue. Big data has become a buzzword so prevalent that it’s practically meaningless. At a party last week, I heard someone say, “Every company is a big data company now.”

MEDIA: Facebook Inc. today rolled out dynamic ads for retail, a new mobile ad unit that retailers can use to drive in-store traffic and sales. The ads enable a retailer to dynamically showcase products available in a store that’s nearby the consumer seeing the ad. The ads build on Facebook’s more broadly focused dynamic ads, which let retailers and other advertisers serve shoppers ads based on the products they looked at on the merchant’s site or app.

DATA: It’s a sales world these days. CRM rules everything around me (and my colleagues) seemingly every day; with a new financing, launch, or app that’s designed to make the life of the busy sales executive a little bit more convenient. And the latest tool to step into the breach sits at the intersection of the massive CRM trend and another two or three “super hot” business tech buzzwords. Troops’ platform and bot (the products of a stealthy til now company) are now freely available to use.

MEDIA: But after consistently garnering tens of thousands of viewers each weeks, Facebook Live is a top priority for Birchbox to build brand awareness, educate consumers on its products, interact with shoppers and drive sales, she says. Birchbox is No. 202 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide. “We can assume that not everyone who is following us on Facebook is a deep and educated fan or subscriber,” Dallas-Feeney says. “The value that I see Facebook Live really brings is to make that person fall in love with us a little bit more.”

BRAND: A series of product launches includes the “Return to Tiffany Love” collection—a repackaging of the house’s entry-level “Love” jewelry line launched in the 1990s featuring $400 lock-and-key charm bracelets and $175 branded key rings with tagline #LoveNotLike. Tiffany is the first luxury brand to pioneer digital marketing on Snapchat, spending a reported USD $700,000 to launch branded geofilters live at all 93 of its stores across the US, while also investing in video ads as it builds out its Snapchat presence.

MEDIA: Recently, Facebook’s Instagram product launched Stories as a direct competitor to Snapchat, cloning much of the latter’s functionality. Given Facebook’s reach, they’ll be able to apply the social graph and drive massive distribution of this new Stories product. This could certainly slow Snapchat’s growth as it gives non-millennials a meaningful reason not to try out Snapchat. So what will all of this mean for Snapchat longer term? We’ll get to that later on in the post.