BRAND: In that closely watched battle, the Under Armour (UA) basketball shoes of Golden State's Stephen Curry are the underdog against Cavaliers star Lebron James and his business partners at Nike (NKE), which has dominated the basketball shoe market since Michael Jordan's heyday in the 1980s. Sales of Nike's Jordan-branded footwear hit $2.5 billion in 2013, more than the next four players combined. That's more than 10 times the forecasted 2016 sales of Curry ($160 million) and James ($150 million).

ECOMMERCE: With technology at every touch point of daily life, consumers are now armed with more ways to shop online than ever before. According to McKinsey, luxury eCommerce sales are expected to reach $21 billion over the next five years, furthermore, the luxury eCommerce industry is seeing a much larger growth than many other areas of eCommerce. The first wave of eCommerce brought fashion to the world online.

ECOMMERCE: Remember walking into a Blockbuster Video store in 1990s and seeing your friends and neighbors picking out their favorite movies and video games? At its peak, the video rental leader was an integral part of American culture. Enter Netflix. The company was founded in 1997 and allowed customers to rent DVDs using the internet, an innovative new idea at the time. In 2000, Blockbuster could have actually purchased Netflix.

BRAND: The company on Thursday named designer Tim Coppens as executive creative director for a collection dubbed UAS -- for Under Armour Sportswear -- that will make its debut this fall, according to Ben Pruess, the company's senior vice president of sportswear. The line will have a preppy look and include men's and women's apparel, footwear and accessories. Coppens, a rising star in the fashion world, has his own sporty-chic brand sold in high-end retailers like Barney's. Items include $395 plaid jogging pants.

ECOMMERCE: Founded in 2012, Loot Crate currently has more than 600,000 subscribers and more than $100 million in annualized revenue. And it’s expanded beyond the basic plan, with subscriptions focused on anime, gaming, individual franchises like Joss Whedon’s Firefly and more. (On that front, Loot Crate is also announcing a partnership with 343 Industries/Microsoft Studios for a new subscription around Halo.) The big funding round suggests that Loot Crate isn’t just aiming for that a niche, geeky audience, perhaps because those interests are becoming increasingly mainstream.

DATA: Since Pebble is one of the most popular wearables on the market, its announcement carries some weight, and when it ships next January, will be among the first body computers on the market to integrate Alexa. (Right now, the only third-party device using the Alexa Voice Service is a kitchen-based display called Triby. According to Amazon, Ford is considering integrating Alexa in cars and another smart-watch company, Co-Watch, is planning to build the bot into its product.)

MEDIA: Bloomberg reports this morning that Snapchat, the ephemeral photo-and-video app popular among people younger than you, is now outpacing Twitter in its number of daily active users. According to Bloomberg’s sources, the app brings in 150 million users per day, up from 110 million just six months ago. Twitter, on the other hand, has a daily user base that’s currently hovering around 140 million.

MEDIA: Take Britain. If you look at the IAB’s figures, which it conducted with YouGov, 22 percent of U.K. adults are blocking ads. Wait a minute, market research company GlobalWebIndex says the figure is 37 percent. According to Pagefair and Adobe’s 2015 report, it was already at 20 percent in the second quarter last year. U.S. ad blocking firm Optimal puts U.K. ad-block rates at 16 percent.

DATA: What does it mean to call your company "data-driven?" Definitions range from simple reporting to viewing data science as a core business strategy. We asked executives from a variety of businesses to help us identify which traits are essential for becoming a truly data-driven company. See what we learned, and tell us how your organization stacks up.

DATA: Under Armour spent over $700 million to acquire fitness apps in the last few years, and also released an overhauled version of its own UA Record app earlier this year. Under Armour now has over 170 million registered users across its digital platforms, with more than 100,000 added each day. Those users logged more than 8 billion foods and 2 billion activities in 2015. Altogether, this translates into an incredible amount of data at Under Armour's disposal.