Valentino, which is owned by members of the Qatari royal family, has reportedly put forth an offer of €500 million (roughly $569 million) to acquire Pierre Balmain, French newspaper Les Echos reported Sunday. Over the last five years, the brand has grown in American notoriety and sales. The founder of the brand passed away in 2014.

Artificial intelligence in customer service is the new wave for companies, big and small, who are hoping to capitalize on chatbots and their ability to handle influxes of complex customer service issues. "Everyone is watching the space right now, and that's great," Mike Roberts, head of messenger services at Kik.

Portals (e.g., Yahoo, AOL, MSN) still get most of their traffic from the PC. But every other category now sees more traffic from mobile devices. This finding is especially important for retail, which still needs to invest more resources, thought and effort into mobile and in turning the smartphone into the hub of the omni-channel shopping experience.

Amazon announced this morning a plan to spread adoption of its payments service, Amazon Payments, to more third-party websites. A gift to third-party vendors and a new way for Amazon to cash in on the fin-tech boom, Amazon Prime users could become the benefactor of one-click, web-wide payments in the coming years.

Pride can get in the way of marketing successes, avoid that with these quick points on campaign failure. Learned adjustments is a key to efficacy in this industry. Here are four: 1. You expected too much 2. You had the wrong product or offer 3. You did not reach your prospect 4. Your tactics did not match your goals.

Established retailers have attempted to reformat their outdated systems to accommodate cross-channel capabilities, leaving many with “faux omnichannel.” As the consumer comes to expect a uniform service across channels, retailers are at risk of losing clientele if they do not implement a more holistic system. In essence, they are trying to perform like nimble, smaller brands.

The path toward sustainable journalism is being undermined by terrible data. For instance, page views can tell a publisher how many times an individual piece of content was viewed, but not why it was viewed. Nor does a page view indicate whether consumers found that content valuable or an annoying waste of time they were teased into viewing.

Staples will partner with Workbar LLC to launch its initiative by opening three co-working spaces at stores in the Boston area. Considering the many locations of Staples stores across the U.S., the arrangement could bring co-working—typically focused in urban areas—to the suburbs as well.

Last year, Business Insider reported that “mobile is growing faster than all other digital advertising formats in the U.S.” If Business Insider is correct, it could be the case that your competitors have already learned an important lesson. If you want to attract mobile customers, you need mobile ads.

Artificial intelligence* is developing much faster than we thought. Just last month, Google’s DeepMind AI beat Lee Sedol, a legendary Go player, at his own game in a defining moment for the industry. What enabled this win is a relatively new AI technique called deep learning, which is transforming AI.

This week, as we contemplate Apple’s first 40 years, we’ll take an early eighties dive into the company’s counter-intuitive retail development in France. Here's a rare look at its successes and failures, much of which influenced the Apple retail experiences of today.

The Echo has emerged as Amazon's sleeper hit, a hot-selling gadget that's being hailed as the standard-bearer for an entirely new computing paradigm in which Amazon suddenly has an edge on rivals such as Apple and Google. But the Echo's path into consumers' homes was hardly a sure thing.