ECOMMERCE: We originally had an internal BuzzFeed Swag Shop that opened online about a year ago for employees to purchase swag for family and friends. It was a big success internally, and we have also consistently heard from our community that they’d love the opportunity to purchase BuzzFeed swag and merchandise, so we decided to highlight some of our favorite internal swag and most popular illustrations and BuzzFeed designed art and share it with our larger BuzzFeed audience and community.

FINTECH: A federal judge in California will allow an EMV-related antitrust and conspiracy lawsuit filed by two small retailers against the major US card networks to proceed into the discovery phase, according to a press release. If it escalates further, the suit could become a class action and ultimately leave a big impact on card networks implicated. The merchants believe that card providers colluded to make the EMV migration as self-beneficial as possible.

TECH: No, the next bubble is NOT in tech where innovation and capital are never in short supply… rather, the REAL bubble is in far-too-generous P/E multiples and valuations of global public companies, whose business models are being obliterated by startups and improved by orders of magnitude. As more Fortune 500 CEOs recognize and admit their vulnerability to disruption, expect them to hedge their own public valuations by buying the very same unicorns that keep them awake at night… Welcome to the Unicorn Hedge.

ECOMMERCE: This is especially important for Amazon as Prime members spend more than nonmembers — the average annual spend by Prime members is $1,200, significantly higher than non-Prime members, who spend only $500 per year, on average, according to a report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP). By widening the addressable market for AmazonFresh via a new pricing model, Amazon Prime members will likely become even more valuable to the company's total business.

BRAND: Besides being a smart marketing strategy, collaborating with WeWork also made good business sense. The founders felt that having a physical space for customers to see the garments and experience the brand's values was very important, but leasing a retail store, then investing money in building it up, is expensive. "There's so much risk inherent in brick and mortar retail, and we feel so strongly about having a physical presence," Christeson says. "We feel really strongly about building a community around our product and giving our customers a chance to connect with one another."

BRAND: For nearly a decade, Samsung and Apple have been in a tug of war over smartphone supremacy. (History alert: Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, Samsung released its first Galaxy Smartphone in 2009.) From the beginning, it was a battle between the closed Apple iOS operating system versus the open source Android OS. The Samsung Galaxy mimicked the Apple smartphone in look and function, so much so that Samsung today (as you read this) is defending itself in the Supreme Court against a $400 million jury decision that Samsung violated Apple patent rights.

VOICE FIRST: On Wednesday, the company unveils Amazon Music Unlimited, a streaming service that will compete directly with Spotify, Apple Music and every other outlet in the increasingly crowded on-demand audio market. Like most of those, Amazon’s offering will have a catalog of tens of millions of songs, offering essentially most commercially available music. That is a big increase from Amazon’s two-year-old Prime Music service, which caters to a casual audience with playlists and just two million tracks, a fraction of the songs other services offer.

ECOMMERCE: It explains why Airbnb—which is trying to grow its business to meet its $30 billion valuation—is trying to add more of the services that online travel agencies offer, like instant booking. Airbnb’s popularity and revenues are growing thanks to customers who come back to the short-term-rental site far more than any individual hotel brands in the U.S. But online travel agencies, particularly Hotels.com, get strong repeat business as customers turn to them to find the best price.