ECOMMERCE: This presents a big opportunity, but also a big challenge for the Yoox Net-a-Porter Group, the world’s largest luxury e-commerce platform following the merger of Yoox and Net-a-Porter in 2015. The company’s main banners may well have all bases covered, with Net-a-Porter serving the in-season, full price market and Yoox targeting the off-season side. But by now the big luxury brands have learned their lesson and are putting more and more resource and attention into developing their own online operations. 

DATA: The new app – which is at trial stage – monitors what someone is doing every day for a week, to recommend and design a dress style for them. "Where do you regularly eat out for dinner or hang out with friends? Are they more casual or formal meetups? What's the usual weather when you're outside?" writes Google's group creative business partner Jeremy Brook in the post. This information – known as context signals – is passed through an algorithm to tailor the design of the dress, which can then be bought.

ECOMMERCE: Highsnobiety readers voted Kith the best store of 2016, ahead of the likes of Kanye West’s “Pablo” pop-up shops, and online marketplace Grailed, which landed firmly in second and third respectively. Building on the shop’s retail stronghold in New York, Kith owner Ronnie Fieg made big moves into new markets last year, like Miami and Aspen. Fieg even brought back the iconic Bapesta in two new made-in-Portugal versions. Given how much Fieg pushed his business forward in 2016, our expectations are quite high for what Ronnie and Kith have planned for this year.

BRAND: As marketers, it's only natural to see an opportunity and immediately want to "own it." It's what we do. But unlike some of the previous linguistic superstars of marketing, words like "real" and "authenticity," empathy isn't something that as a brand, you can ever hope to be, or own. Empathy is something you give. And brands that understand that will be the brands that are appreciated and embraced; these are the brands that will connect, ultimately rising to the top in the hearts and minds of Americans this year.

MEDIA: Over at Atlantic Media, National Journal adopted the selling approach honed by the Advisory Board, the consulting firm founded by Atlantic Media owner David Bradley. National Journal transitioned to a members-only operation in 2015 and charges $5,000 to $50,000 a year, depending on the size of the organization, for specialized research, tools and networking events for D.C. insiders. 

ECOMMERCE: What determines a successful business? It depends on one’s objectives and measurement criteria — profits, passion, exit strategy, and so forth. These are generally aligned with the reasons for starting the business in the first place. Regardless, how does an entrepreneur chart a course for success and mitigate the inevitable speed bumps along the way? The link features 10 key elements.

MEDIA: There are solid indications that more people are willing to pay for news. This is reason for prudent optimism when contemplating the future — but a clarification is required before going further: this applies to genuine value-added/original news produced by newsrooms, not to ersatz, largely recycled, superficial commodity information. Big difference. The former is inherently expensive and difficult to streamline. The latter is cheap to produce at scale and some players in this category will continue to thrive in distributed content ecosystems, mostly on video. 

MEDIA: There’s a nagging problem: Facebook and Google need to convince marketers to believe in their calculations. The technologies used by the ad sellers to measure foot traffic—which rely on smartphone apps tracking users’ locations and maps reflecting accurate geospatial data about businesses’ stores—are still works in progress, fanning doubts among many advertisers. And measuring foot traffic is typically more extrapolative than conclusive, relying on estimates based on a portion of users Facebook and Google can track that either open their apps in a store or allow the apps to track them in the background.

ECOMMERCE: Pinterest today introduced Lens, a new visual search tool that uses machine vision to detect objects in the real world and suggest related items on the service. Lens, which is now in beta, is a tool inside the Pinterest mobile app that functions as a kind of Shazam for objects. Point it at food, furniture, or even the night sky, and Pinterest will return objects that it believes are related. In a demonstration, Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp used Lens to detect a pomegranate. Pinterest returned results for pomegranate bread, pomegranate sandwiches, and tips for peeling pomegranates. 

MEDIA: Facebook’s Instagram photo-sharing app has been adopting Snapchat-like features, such as Instagram’s “stories,” which followed Snapchat’s format of letting users broadcast an ongoing diary of short videos and photos that are available to view for only 24 hours. In paperwork for its initial public offering filed this month, Snap said Instagram’s features “largely mimic” its app. Instagram’s new features may be limiting Snapchat’s growth. Snap said in the IPO filing that user growth has been slowing. Meanwhile, Instagram says it now has 150 million daily users of the feature, nearly matching Snapchat’s total user base.

DATA: A subfield of AI called computational creativity forges algorithms that can write music, paint portraits, and tell jokes. So far the results haven’t threatened to put artists out of work, but these systems can augment human imagination. David Cope, a composer at UC Santa Cruz, created a program he named Emily Howell, with which he chats and shares musical ideas. “It is a conversationalist composer friend,” he says. “It is a true assistant.” 

MEDIA: The ad, dubbed “Born the Hard Way,” isn’t just an opportunity for Budweiser to tout its heritage; it will also introduce the brand’s new marketing messaging for the year and likely longer. Bud needs to position itself in a way that will resonate with consumers in the U.S.—especially craft beer-loving millennials—as it aims to grow market share and return to its former “King of Beers” glory.