BRAND: Three weeks ago, though, Sports Authority decided to liquidate instead of restructure; a spokesperson told Racked it was "pursuing a sale of some or all of the business." On Monday, the sports giant began auctioning off its assets. Tiger Capital is also liquidating 41 Aéropostale stores in Canada, which will operate the company's going-out-of-business sales at all of its locations.

ECOMMERCE: Amazon’s sales were up 28 percent in Q1. And consumers aren’t just buying more – they’re selecting from an array of goods that is ever increasing (and encroaching). Clothes, baby goods, household product and groceries – things customers have long bought from other retailers – are now happily shipping (sometimes within hours) from Amazon’s warehouses to customers hands.

BRAND: For the proposed Uber transaction, the documents said a fund managed by a member of SharesPost’s board of directors would buy the shares at a 2 percent premium to their price in last year’s funding round, which valued the company at $62.5 billion, and then resell them for 5 percent more. It’s unclear where the SharesPost fund would acquire the Uber stake from.

DATA: While acknowledging the need for an internet presence, Questrom said: "You cannot give up the bricks and mortar experience, because a customer has to come into the store and be excited. She has to see things that make her (or him) want to buy." "Many of the stores today, there's no reason I want to shop there," he added. "All you see is … sale signs all over the place. That's not the way for bricks and mortar to be successful going forward."

BRAND: The fastest way to build influence is to give it. Instead of worrying about how much information you are giving away, reframe it and ask how much value you are giving away in the form of service. Service can be publishing content, but it also comes in many other ways. How can you add value to an established brand? Can you partner on a webinar, for example? Open a cycle of reciprocity.

DATA: Take clickthrough rates, for example. Universally acknowledged by marketers and media companies alike as inadequate, clickthrough rates still appear in every campaign recap report, seemingly regardless of the campaign's goal. While research has shown time and again that clickthrough rates are usually the wrong metric to measure, they are easy to track and have remained an industry standard.

BRAND: The Baltimore-based company is betting on the notion that the right hardware, the biggest data set, a lot of machine learning and powerful motivational tools can make everyone better, faster, and stronger. It's betting that technology doesn't exist solely to bring everything to our door with the push of a button. The centrepiece of that bet is its $400 (£282) kit announced in January. Called UA HealthBox.

ECOMMERCE: eCommerce has broken free from the perception of being just a “passing fad” and has proven instead to be a booming industry. Having effectively democratized commerce, eCommerce simultaneously lowered the barrier to entry for retail startups, enabling them to more cost-effectively compete with big-box retailers, while providing established brands another channel through which to acquire new customers.

ECOMMERCE: Everlast now gets a higher average order value from consumers who use site search, about $10 more on each order. Our AOV for people who don't convert from site search went from $97 to $107. Bounce rates fell to 31% for people who use site search, compared with 48% for people who don't.

BRAND:“Storytelling” has become the latest buzzword in business, especially in marketing. Telling your “brand story”, re-imagining your company as a story–it makes one long for the days when the marketing world was exhorting individuals to become “personal brands”, telling their own individual stories. Now entire companies are getting into the game.