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Photo courtesy of SJX
Luxury brands primarily rely on their brand and reputation to advance sales. In an age where consumers have been shifting towards the desire to feel that they and their purchases are part of something bigger than themselves; luxury brands have been pivoting towards experiential marketing to better express their alignment with meaningful causes and communicate their brand essence on a deeper, emotional level.
With the coming of the pandemic, lockdowns and isolation have greatly amplified this consumer desire to be part of something bigger. When health concerns dictate that social distancing and staying at home are necessary, it has become even more critical for luxury brands to fulfill this need and bring their experiential marketing to consumers in their homes.
The Shift to Virtual
Louis Vuitton began its shift by launching an exclusive Valentine’s Day popup allowing customers to place orders online. Noting significant success through using social analytics, LV then moved all offline promotions online, along with consultations and post-sale services as well.
The result? They doubled their online sales from Valentine’s Day 2019.
Photo courtesy of Alizila.
The Shanghai Autumn-Winter Fashion Week 2020 was initially postponed due to the pandemic, but eventually partnered with Tmall to shift to a virtual event instead. It became the first ever fashion week to go completely digital – but it wasn’t merely about live streaming the event.
Many brands taking part in Shanghai Fashion Week such as Pinko and Rothy’s enhanced their experiences with commentaries, e-commerce functions and virtual afterparties in addition to their ongoing live streams.
“This ‘cloud launch’ format will greatly disrupt the traditional product launch,” said Mike Hu, head of Tmall Fashion, Luxury and FMCG; where instead of a two-hour press conference or one-day physical event, brands get to interact with consumers over a vastly extended timeline, while reaching an audience of potentially millions instead of just a few hundred visitors. He followed up by saying: “It breaks down the physical limitations of time and geography for brands to engage their consumers.”
Here’s the ‘Why’
While there are certain setbacks to holding a virtual event, such as lack of urgency or personal touch; it would appear that the benefits greatly offset them.
I’ve mentioned audience expansion above, but there are many more opportunities for additional advantages. Take the heightened interactivity, for one. That audiences can contribute to the experience via live polling and Q&A, or have fun through gamification – this by itself is a game changer, as it makes the experience much more memorable and connects with audiences on a deeper level.
Embrace the future of experiential marketing today.
Employing analytic tools that collect data on consumers is extremely important as well. It’s not enough that audiences are engaged, you need to know exactly how engaged they are. Who likes this, who hates that, what works and what doesn’t – this is all priceless information that helps you improve in the long term, as well as pivot in real time to really connect with consumers.
In an age where consumers buy luxury products not only for the status they bring but also to feel as they are part of an exclusive community – one that offers special privileges and really connects to them as individuals; these features are critical to staying relevant and keeping a competitive edge.
Photo courtesy of SJX.
A Step Ahead of the Competition
Other luxury brands have taken their virtual events to the next level. IWC Schaffhausen – a specialty luxury watchmaker owned by Swiss conglomerate Compagnie Financiere Richemont – used augmented reality to showcase its 2020 Portugieser collection, debuting it at the Watches & Wonders online trade fair.
In May, IWC started a Facebook chatbot program allowing customers to directly access a virtual advisor. This launched in the same month as their first Virtual Boutique; a 360° virtual reproduction of their physical flagship store in Singapore. The Boutique also featured two exclusive virtual events with mix-your-own cocktails, delivered to selected clients via snail mail.
Photo courtesy of SJX.
Perhaps the most subtle yet significant inclusion was a matching Spotify playlist to ensure the same vibe for all visitors. Customers could walk around in the Boutique, peruse watches and even interact with others as well – presenting an experience wholly similar to physically being in a store, but with the added convenience of browsing from home.
Your Meaningful Connections
The key motivation for these luxury brands when it comes to creating an online experience is ultimately to connect with consumers on a deeper, more meaningful level. Ensuring that consumers can interact with you regardless of where and when, creating new ways for them to engage and have fun – all these go towards building a better, more memorable relationship between the consumer and the brand.
Marie-Cécile Cervellon – professor of marketing at EDHEC Business School in France – states that experiential events offer an ROI roughly 10 times higher than traditional marketing campaigns. She adds that virtual events “provide a much larger audience and it proves a way to be visible much beyond the frontiers of the physical event”.
With that in mind, it is evident why luxury brands – being brands that significantly rely on curating a memorable and emotional connection with their consumers – are moving to utilise virtual events as fast as they can.
Because beyond all the benefits that pivoting to virtual brings, it sends a clear and simple message to consumers.
We’re here for you, we’ll reach out for you, even when you can’t come to us.
The Times are Changing… Again
It’s hard to argue with the results of virtual events, but the situation is changing once again. Successful brands have identified which way the winds were blowing and correctly pivoted to fulfill the need for consumers to be reminded of their normal lifestyles (such as shopping) and to be part of a bigger experience, a bigger crowd during a time when they were isolated.
But in many parts of the world, the lockdowns are gradually lifting. People are starting to come out of their homes again, and the challenge that luxury brands now face is evolving with the circumstances.
People aren’t as restricted as they were two months ago, but they have become relatively accustomed to brands being present online. We stand at a juncture where people are yearning for physical, personal interactions yet associate lack of online presence with brand weakness.
What’s Coming Next?
The British Fashion Council has announced that the London Fashion Week – originally slated to go fully virtual – will now proceed with both physical and digital shows this September. Brands like Burberry are in support of this venture, synonymously revealing their plans to host physical shows that can be viewed online.
This follows similar announcements from the organisers of both Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks that physical schedules will be in place, complemented by digital support.
Our hypothesis? Experiences are evolving once more to include both online and offline dimensions. The winds are changing, and the age of hybrid events – rather than completely virtual – is rapidly approaching.


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Business leaders know that customer experience and employee experience are intertwined. If an employee is happy in their position, they’re more likley to provide better service.
But while 97% of CEOs say they have a customer experience strategy, only 81% say they have an employee experience strategy, according to the NTT report.
The MIT Technology Review Insights report found that employees are looking for the same things as customers from a brand: personalization, values and efficiency.
“To build an engaged and high-performing workforce, organizations need to reshape their employee value proposition to mirror their customer proposition for fast, convenient, and personalized experiences with a brand that shows leadership on sustainable business practices,” the report read.
To read the rest of this story from our sister site, HR Dive, click here.

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We’ve all heard about how social media is revolutionizing the world we live in. It’s impact on organizing and recording protests and social movements, including Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, has been huge. But twitter has also had a major impact in another area: advertising campaigns. Unlike a television, where viewers must remain passive while they watch and take in whatever information and images are presented to them, twitter is active. It allows users to respond, to talk back, to give their opinion on what’s presented to them.
Because twitter has become such a huge phenomenon, a lot of companies have turned to it as a medium for advertising. However, these ad campaigns haven’t always gone as planned, precisely because people are allowed to voice their opinion openly, on an equal footing with businesses. McDonald’s and Wendy’s both launched ad campaigns through twitter with the hashtags #McDStories and #HeresTheBeef. The companies were hoping twitter would be flooded with tweets about how much folks love eating their burgers and fries, but what should come as no surprise is that they got the exact opposite. They got stories about people finding gross things in their food, throwing up after eating there, the real ingredients that are used by these fast food chains, and on and on. McDonald’s and Wendy’s probably realized pretty quickly that if you let people respond, they may not say what you want to hear.
Related to this, MissRepresentation, a documentary and campaign dedicated to challenging media images surrounding women, beauty, and sexuality, launched a twitter campaign during the Super Bowl to respond to advertisements that aired during the game. The hashtag #NotBuyingIt allowed people to respond to these ads, and not just in their living rooms with friends, but in an open and online forum that a lot of people pay attention to. And as you can imagine, there were plenty of ads during the game that featured scantily clad and overly-sexualized women. So people, both women and men, aired their grievances when they saw young, skinny, sexualized women used to sell cars and everything else under the sun.
What I like about these stories is that twitter has given people the ability to talk back, to have a voice against the barrage of advertisements that are pushed on us every day. And I think it shows that many of us don’t buy into these media images and stories that are always telling us to buy more. These twitter trends may not be enough to persuade fast food chains to sell better food or to stop companies from using young, half-dressed women in their commercials, but I think they’re worth noting because twitter is not the end of the line. Technology, social media, and how people all over the the world connect with each other will continue to grow and change. And from the look of things, it’s going to be increasingly interactive and participatory. And this allows all of us, voiceless as we may feel at times, to speak up and be heard.


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The European Commission has proposed a new emissions standard that will require all new road vehicles to meet tougher pollution-reduction requirements, including lower emissions from brakes and tyres, even those on electric vehicles.
The target of having cleaner vehicles is separate from the goals of reducing CO2 emissions which are part of the EU's mission to be net carbon neutral by 2050.
By 2035, all cars and vans sold in the EU will have zero CO2-emissions.
However, the Commission says that by 2050 more than 20% of cars and vans, and more than half of heavier vehicles, will still emit pollutants from the tailpipe, while electric vehicles will still cause pollution from brakes and microplastics from tyres.
The EU’s Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said the so-called Euro 7 standards would ensure cleaner vehicles and improved air quality, as the EU continues to pursue its European Green Deal ambitions of zero pollution.
"The two sets of rules give the automotive supply chain a clear direction for reducing pollutant emissions, including using digital technologies," the Commission said in a statement.
The Euro 7 emission standards will ensure that cars, vans, lorries and buses are cleaner "in real driving conditions that better reflect the situation in cities where air pollution problems are largest, and for a much longer period than under current rules."
The new standards would broaden the range of driving conditions covered by on-road emissions tests so they would better reflect the range of conditions that vehicles experience, including temperatures of up to 45C or short trips typical of daily commutes.
Particle limits will be tightened for lorries and buses while the lowest existing limits for cars and vans will apply regardless of the fuel used by the vehicle.
The new rules will also set emission limits for previously unregulated pollutants, such as nitrous oxide emissions from heavy-duty vehicles.
The Commission says the new Euro 7 standards will be the first worldwide emission standards to move beyond regulating exhaust pipe emissions.
Under the new rules all vehicles will have to comply with the rules for a longer period than until now.
Compliance for cars and vans will be checked until these vehicles reach 200,000km and ten years of age, meaning a doubling of the durability requirements under existing rules.
The Commission said the new rules will regulate the durability of car batteries in order to increase consumer confidence in electric vehicles, and will reduce the need for replacing batteries early in the life of a vehicle.
The proposals will need the support of member states and the European Parliament.
On 27 October, MEPs agreed to set a zero emissions sales mandate for new cars by 2035, effectively meaning that any new vehicles sold from that date must be electric.
However, Thierry Breton insisted on an emergency brake review clause in 2026, given the scale of the upheaval that the European motor industry would face in order to phase out the combustion engine by 2035.
The European car industry has criticised today's stricter limits for pollutants.
Oliver Zipse, president of the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA), said: "The environmental benefit of the Commission’s proposal is very limited, whereas it heavily increases the cost of vehicles. It focuses on extreme driving conditions that have hardly any real-life relevance."
The industry also criticised new standards for heavier commercial vehicles, known as Euro VII.
Martin Lundstedt, the chief executive of Volvo Group, said: "Truck makers will have to move substantial engineering and financial resources from battery and fuel-cell electric vehicles back to the internal combustion engine.
"This will severely impact our transition to zero-emission vehicles. It is not good for the climate, not good for people’s health and not good for the industry."
However, the Green group in the European Parliament said the measures did not go far enough and that the Commission had ignored the advice of an expert panel.
Green MEP and vice chair of the environment committee Bas Eickhout said: "After making Europe’s citizens and industries wait with baited breath for almost two years, the Commission has presented a so-called update to emissions standards, which disregards its own experts and environmental goals.
"With these lax rules, the Commission risks driving 100M highly polluting cars onto Europe’s streets."


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Bankruptcy leads to minor jolt for island’s EV drivers
Apparently the departure of an Israel-based company that installed various electric vehicle charging stations on Maui has not created a “major problem” in Maui County, where at least 235 electric vehicles are registered, said the head of the Maui Electric Vehicle Alliance.
In March, OpConnect, based in Oregon, announced an agreement to buy and operate the Better Place network electrical vehicle charging stations. Better Place later filed for bankruptcy.
Better Place had seven charging locations on Maui, according to information from OpConnect’s website.
Although the old charging stations remain, a problem exists because key fobs needed to access the old chargers have run out, leaving new customers without a way to use the charging stations.
“Unfortunately, due to higher-than-expected demand, OpConnect ran out of key fobs to send to new (electric vehicle) buyers, and we have been unable to secure additional key fobs from Better Place,” said Nathan Isaacs, a sales and marketing manager for OpConnect in an email interview.
About 800 electric vehicle drivers in the state were issued a key fob prior to the takeover, Isaacs added.
But even as new customers may not be able to access less than half of Maui’s 20 charging station locations, Anne Ku, the director of the University of Hawaii Maui College’s Maui Electric Vehicle Alliance, said electric vehicle owners need not fret because there are many other options.
“I don’t think it’s a major problem. There are so many other charging stations,” Ku said last week.
An option is charging a vehicle in one’s home or even at a friend’s home while visiting or seeking out the other charging stations, she said.
In July, the state launched a new mobile application designed to help drivers locate publicly available electric vehicle charging stations statewide. The free “EV Stations Hawaii” app is available for Apple and Android smartphones and mobile devices, the state said in an announcement.
Ku said that although Better Place had seven locations, two were being used privately at Alamo for its rental cars. So, technically there were only five public locations.
In addition to the five Better Place charging locations, OpConnect has added two more sites since its arrival on Maui, according to its website. To view a full list of OpConnect stations, go to opconnect.com/ Locations/Map.
Ku said those two new OpConnect stations at The Westin Kaanapali Ocean Resort Villas and Kahekili Beach, do not require a special fob.
The alliance is hoping to talk to the former Better Place charging station property owners to see if they have any fobs and if those fobs could be handed out to customers as they show up to charge their vehicles and then return the fobs to the property owners when done, she said.
Isaacs said OpConnect will replace the Better Place charging stations with OpConnect units, and he expects the work to be complete by late fall. The new units will not require key fobs, but instead give users a variety of ways to initiate charging, he said.
In the meantime, Isaacs said the company will continue to try and obtain key fobs for electric vehicle drivers who need them.
Currently, there is no fee to charge a car at OpConnect’s stations. But when OpConnect’s network is in place, the average price for pay stations is expected to be $2 per hour, Isaacs said. Some pay stations will cost less and others more.
In some cases, the site owner will decide the payment method, and in other cases OpConnect will determine payment, he added. There also will be free OpConnect stations.
Overall, Ku said some people may be bugged by not being able to have access to the former Better Place stations because that company received government funds to install charging stations.
The state energy office through its Hawaii’s EV Ready Program allocated $854,000 to Better Place to set up charging stations across the state as well as introduce electric vehicles to a rental car fleet.
Electric vehicle owners may wonder why only the early birds that signed up for a key fob have access to the stations built with federal public funding, while others don’t, Ku said.
“That’s what bugs people.”
But Ku said she is excited about Maui County’s progress in installing new charging stations.
In June, the county along with officials from Japan and the state announced JUMPSmartMaui, a demonstration project involving electric vehicles and homes in Kihei that could aid in the development of a more efficient power grid to handle renewable energy and to support electric vehicles.
With the program, Maui will see five new charging stations set up. Officials expect all the stations and chargers to be running in the fall.
* Melissa Tanji can be reached at email@example.com.


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Oppenheimer analysts Anna Andreeva and Samantha Lanman initiated coverage of Foot Locker's stock on Friday with a "Perform" rating, arguing the retailer has too many stores and competition to be considered a "Buy."
The analysts caution investors that they worry Foot Locker relies too heavily on Nike Inc. ( NKE) , and while its valuation has decreased, earnings estimates have also moved lower.
"While valuation has compressed and athletic is still a relatively better place to be, with 2,300 mall-based stores across various banners targeting a largely similar consumer, FL could just be starting to be impacted by traffic volatility (first quarter of negative traffic in 1Q17)," they noted.
Furthermore, its reliance on Nike could threaten its "historical moat" in footwear, as Nike prepares to sell directly on Amazon.com ( AMZN) .
Shares of Foot Locker closed down 0.22% to $49.98 per share on Friday.
What's Hot On TheStreet
The biggest deal-maker around strikes again: Berkshire Hathaway Energy, a division of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., (BRK.A) (BRK.B) , confirmed Friday that it will purchase Oncor Electric Delivery Co. LLC in a deal that values the bankrupt unit's equity at $11.25 billion. "Oncor is an excellent fit for Berkshire Hathaway, and we are pleased to make another long-term investment in Texas - when we invest in Texas, we invest big!", Buffett said in a statement. "Oncor is a great company with similar values and outstanding assets."
Clearly, Buffett is still bullish on America's future. TheStreet takes a look at the billionaire's biggest bets on America.
Who cares, Elon: Tesla (TSLA) agreed to build the world's largest lithium-ion battery park in South Australia on Friday, signing off on a deal to finish the installation within 100 days or give it away for free. Failure to deliver the project on time would cost his company about $50 million, said CEO Elon Musk, though neither the state government nor Tesla released details of the contract.
Qualcomm battle with Apple gets even nastier: Qualcomm (QCOM) added a couple of unexpected wrinkles into its legal salvo with Apple (AAPL) , TheStreet's tech columnit Eric Jhonsa says. One of these wrinkles aims to neutralize some of the legal arguments Apple, as well as certain regulators, have been making against Qualcomm. The other, says Jhonsa, aims to both lower the odds of a political intervention in Apple's favor, as well as boost Qualcomm's near-term chip sales at Intel Corp.'s (INTC) expense.
Visit here for the latest business headlines.


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A pair of extremely rare running shoes designed for the 1972 Olympic trials set a new world record after selling for more than $437,000 during a public auction this week.
Collector Miles Nadal surpassed the world auction record for sneakers Wednesday after he purchased a pair of Nike’s 1972 Waffle Racing Flat “Moon Shoe” for $437,500 for his private collection.
Original estimates for the sale were between $100,000 – $160,000.
Only 12 pairs were ever made and, according to Sotheby’s, Nike co-founder and legendary Oregon University track coach Bill Bowerman was inspired by his wife’s waffle iron.
He was said to create the first prototype of the sole by pouring rubber into his wife’s waffle iron.
Nadal acquired 99 other pairs of the rarest sneakers ever produced, including footwear made by Nike, Air Jordan, Adidas, Yeezy and more, during a separate sale last week and for a total of $850,000.
The rare “Moon Shoes” were a part of Nadal’s original bid to purchase all 100 rare finds but the auction house ultimately decided to hold the pair off until Wednesday for a public auction.
The previous record for sneakers was just over $190,000 for a pair of Converse worn and signed by Michael Jordan.


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Annoyed by high power bills? It’s time to look at how businesses can benefit from solar energy advancements.
FREMONT, CA: As business leaders, one of the highest overhead costs facing CIOs must be the cost of electricity. This chooses solar power as an alternative energy source among business owners. Solar technologies have evolved a lot since they made their debut in the 1960s. Today across the globe, companies, and researchers are working to commercialize new solar technologies that cloud further boost the adoption of renewable energy generation. In previous years alone, there have been milestones in solar efficiency, solar energy storage wearable solar tech, and solar design tech. Read on to get the complete update on all breakthroughs CIOs must know about in the world of new solar technology.
• Solar Skin Design
Business and homeowners consider solar panels to be an unattractive addition, being a significant barrier for the solar industry. Fortunately, new entrants in the market are venturing with innovative solar skin designs which are making significant strides with the idea of an aesthetic enhancement that allows solar panels to have a customized look. Solar skins are available in the market, which makes it possible for solar panels to match the appearance of a roof without affecting panel efficiency or production.
• Solar Roadways
The roads and sidewalks of the future are ready to generate power from solar energy and provide surfaces for people to travel around on. Since the ground space is already in use, this idea makes complete sense. CIOs can try this out in office sidewalks and walkways as a progressive investment to energy efficiency. The cost of solar roadways depends entirely on the system installed and the area it covers. The solar road tiles could power electric vehicles through induction technology, stored or connected directly in the grid for use by nearby infrastructure, and cities.
• Wearable Solar
Wearable solar devices are not new, there solar powered watches and other gadgets already available in the market. But as researching the possibilities of integrating the solar panels to textiles have given way to wearable solar. In this super-thin organic cells are combined with the dress, which is heat printed. These cells could be used to power portable devices and wearable tech, eliminating the need to carry around battery or power bank. The new textile concept makes it possible for solar to expand into products like window curtains and dynamic heated car seats.
• Solar Storage
The off-grid solar and solar plus storage has gained immense popularity among people. It is the clean energy that can be used for commercial power purposes. Solar batteries are becoming common, and their ability to store renewable energy is expected to aid the energy storage industry to grow at a rapid pace. Solar storage is still a relatively expensive product, but there is a surge in demand from solar shoppers, which credits in bringing more efficient and affordable batteries to the market in the coming years.
• Solar Tracking
More and more business owners today are considering solar. Because of this expansion, ground-mounted solar is becoming a viable option which allows solar panels to maximize energy production by the following sun as it moves. Solar manufacturers are genuinely embracing this technology, and it is witnessing an upward trend in the market.
• Solar Water Purifiers
UV rays can destroy bacteria and germs present in the water and taking it as a cue researchers have developed a new solar device that can purify water when exposed to sunlight. It can be considered one of the significant strides towards utilizing solar energy to clean water. Previously, purifier designs needed to harness UV rays and required hours of sun exposure to purify water entirely. But this new advancement can access visible light, and it only requires minutes to produce reliable drinking water. As the technology behind solar purifiers continues to evolve more efficient design may come to the market with campers and hikers being an ideal consumer audience.
• Solar Thermal Fuel
Storage is an area of debate when it comes to solar energy’s drawback. The future of solar involves affordable storage solutions that will make solar a truly sustainable energy source. Though solar batteries are storage option, they are still not economically viable. Luckily researchers are spending time developing alternative storage solutions for solar, and the best one has come out as solar thermal fuels. The technology behind solar thermal fuel is comparable to a typical battery. It can harness sunlight and store it as a charge and then releases when needed. This latest improvement is considered as an enhancement of prior design that allowed solar power to be stored in liquid substances. This solid-state application could be implemented in windows, windshields, car tops, and other surfaces which are exposed to sunlight.
• Solar Panel
There is a race in the solar energy industry to become top in terms of solar cell efficiency. A number of panel manufacturers have brought out higher efficiencies with advancements in solar panels. The solar cell type used in the mainstream market could see significant improvements with this. Now there are solar panels that can generate more than twenty percent efficiency while remaining as the lowest cost options on the market. This new tech concept captures and utilizes the waste heat that is usually emitted by solar panels. As an opportunity to improve solar energy technology, these innovations could help the cost of solar to reduce further.
It is a piece of good news for CIOs considering solar energy for their business now. This long list of solar energy technology advancements has the potential to bring efficiency upgrades, storage improvements, and device capabilities, which in the end can translate into more efficient power use and reduced costs.


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Wharf inspectors in Brisbane have uncovered a stolen 1968 Chevrolet Corvette V8 convertible after prying open the doors of a shipping container which had been sitting on the docks for a decade.
The car was reported stolen 10 years ago, and the 44-year-old, 5.4-litre V8 four-speed manual rag-top has just 77,000 kilometres on the odometer.
The vehicle was built on Boxing Day in 1967, which gives the C3 Corvette a 1968 model year designation.
According to Manheim Auctions spokesman Mathew McAuley, the original owner of the car is believed to have received a payout after the vehicle was stolen and not recovered.
The auction house says the car appears to have sat in the container without interruption for the whole period "without any care or maintenance during the time". As a result, the car does need some TLC, and is expected to be sold to an enthusiast.
The car will be auctioned at Manheim auctions in Brisbane on behalf of Suncorp Insurance on September 25 at 9 am. According the auction house, it is expected to fetch somewhere in the region of A$14,000-A$17,000 (NZ$17,000-NZ$21,000).
- Sydney Morning Herald
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Joe Minihane tries to make sense of the FroYo roll-out that’s flummoxed Fandroids everywhere.
Dew Alam assesses the runners and riders in the tussle for smartphone supremacy.
iPhone users could be prime targets for hackers, according to Symantec.
Mobile users may soon be able to carry over their Google search history from their PC.
Augmented reality will be integrated into Android versions of Lonely Planet apps.
The Motorola Glam has launched in South Korea, with high end features aplenty.
Speculation is mounting that Apple could call time on supporting iOS 4 updates for the iPhone 3G.
3 has committed to bringing Android updates to the HTC Desire and Hero from August.
The much-touted BlackBerry Torch has finally broken cover.
An update to the HTC Desire from Vodafone has vexed users who were expecting Android 2.2.


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Columbia Care’s planned acquisition of Colorado’s The Green Solution (TGS) is set to close on September 1, 2020, the cannabis firm announced Wednesday. In a news release, the New York-based multistate operator said the deal — which includes 23 dispensaries and six production facilities — will make Columbia Care the largest cannabis company in Colorado.
Pennsylvania is staring down a multibillion-dollar budget shortfall as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, and Gov. Tom Wolf wants the state legislature to legalize adult-use marijuana in an effort to help overcome the deficit.
A joint venture backed by Canadian cannabis firm Hexo Corp. and beer maker Molson Coors has announced the launch of several new cannabis-infused beverages across Canada. In a news release, the two companies said five CBD and THC-infused beverage brands have begun rolling out across Canada in hopes of appealing to canna-curious customers that don’t want to inhale.
On the heels of raising more than $68 million in new funding, Massachusetts-based cannabis firm Ascend Wellness Holdings (AWH) today announced plans to purchase two Modern Cannabis (MOCA) dispensaries in Chicago for an undisclosed sum. In a news release, AWH said its agreement to acquire the two stores would expand the company’s Illinois dispensary footprint to six licenses.
Green Thumb Industries is looking to raise as much as $150.6 million through the sale of 10 million subordinate voting shares on the over-the-counter (OTC) market, the cannabis firm revealed Friday. In a filing, the Chicago-based company said it intends to use the proceeds for “general corporate purposes, including working capital, operating expenses and capital expenditures.”
Cresco Labs announced Thursday its second quarter financial results, reporting record revenue of $94.3 million – a quarter-over-quarter increase of 42%. The multistate cannabis firm, which is headquartered in Chicago, said it experienced 30% or more revenue growth in all of its markets except Massachusetts, where adult-use dispensaries were ordered to close for two months at the beginning of the
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and running mate Sen. Kamala Harris will sit down with ABC’s David Muir for their first joint television interview on Sunday evening. Cannabis industry professionals will no doubt be tuning in to see if Biden and Harris are questioned about marijuana. Can Harris push Biden to support federal adult-use cannabis legalization?
Curaleaf Holdings announced Monday its second quarter financial results, reporting record managed revenue of $121.4 million — a quarter-over-quarter increase of 16%. The Massachusetts-based marijuana firm, which last month became the country’s largest cannabis company after closing its acquisition of GR Companies (Grassroots), also said its first half revenue surpassed $226 million.
Dutchie, a leading e-commerce solution for the cannabis industry, has closed a $35 million Series B funding round. In a news release, Dutchie said several high profile investors — including rapper Snoop Dogg, NBA star Kevin Durant, and former Starbucks chairman and CEO Howard Schultz, participated in the round.
Leafly, an online cannabis information resource and commerce platform, has named general counsel Yoko Miyashita as its next chief executive. Effective Tuesday, Miyashita will supplant outgoing CEO Tim Leslie, a former Amazon executive who was tapped to lead the Seattle-based company in March 2019.
The Montana Secretary of State last week certified two complementary petitions — Initiative 190 and Constitutional Initiative 118 — that, if passed, would legalize and tax cannabis products for adults over the age of 21. Backed by New Approach Montana, the legalization measures aim to establish a regulated adult-use cannabis market in Big Sky Country.
Sales of cannabis soared to new highs in Colorado during the month of June as retailers sold a record $198 million worth marijuana products, according to the Department of Revenue’s Marijuana Enforcement Division.


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3/18/2013 3:45 PM ET|
Lincoln lives: Why pennies persist
The least-valuable of US coins makes change unwieldy and costs more than its face value to manufacture, but there is a lot of resistance to getting rid of it.
For some Americans, the penny has overstayed its welcome. You could say it keeps turning up like a bad -- well, you know.
The news from our neighbors to the north that, as of Feb. 4, the Canadian government had stopped producing and distributing their penny naturally stirred up a lot of questions and debate in the United States about the American counterpart, and whether it would eventually depart our nation's cash registers. (It should be noted that the Canadian penny can still be spent in Canada -- the coins simply won't be made anymore.)
It doesn't seem likely that the one-cent coin will be going away anytime soon; there hasn't exactly been a groundswell of action in Congress or the media to get rid of it. But given that in 2012, the U.S. mint produced and distributed 4.9 billion pennies, costing $118 million to create $49 billion worth of pennies, now seems as good a time as any to take a look at why the American penny has managed to stick around so long.
Fear of rounding. Many people worry that getting rid of the 1-cent penny, which is produced and distributed at a cost of 2.4 cents per penny, will lead to retailers rounding purchases upward. In other words, consumers fear that a $13.97 purchase would become $14, instead of $13.95. A 1990 study commissioned by Americans for Common Cents, a pro-penny lobbying organization, concluded that rounding up on purchases could cost Americans $1.5 billion (in 1990 dollars) over a five-year period. That study is still frequently trotted out today.
But not everyone fears the rounding theory. In 2006, Robert Whaples, a professor of economics at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., conducted a study of almost 200,000 convenience-store transactions on the East Coast and found that, presuming the rounding was done properly -- to the nearest nickel and not always rounded up -- the American consumer would break even.
"Actually, if anything, I found that more likely, it would be slightly rounded down in the consumer's favor," Whaples says.
The Royal Canadian Mint has encouraged businesses to round cash transactions to the nearest 5-cent number in a "fair and transparent manner." The expectation right now is that if a purchase costs $3.98, someone paying with a debit or credit card would pay $3.98 while the cash customer would pay $4; likewise, if the item in question cost $3.97, the person paying cash would pay $3.95 while the person with the debit card would spend $3.97. Presumably if the American penny is ever retired, U.S. businesses and consumers would do something similar.
The slippery of slope of "what's next?" It costs 10.09 cents to produce a nickel, which has decreased from a year ago when it cost 11.18 cents, according to Coin Update, a daily coin news website. Some economists fear that if the penny disappears, consumers will use even more nickels, which will cost the country even more to produce. Besides, if we scrap the penny, critics wonder, how long will it be before nickels and dimes are urged to be relegated to memory lane? Even though dimes are still a relative bargain, costing 4.99 cents each to produce and distribute, Whaples says it would make the most economic sense to have the quarter as our lowest coin.
Lobbying. If the penny is ever going to be abolished, it will be up to Congress, and you can't discount the influence of all the lobbying groups in Washington, from the Americans for Common Cents to the zinc lobby (pennies are copper-plated and 97.5% zinc) to the vending industry. That includes the company CoinStar, which has made a business of collecting Americans' spare change and giving them back a voucher for currency, minus a fee, of course.
Nostalgia. That's really the main reason we still have the penny, according to Chip Manning, director of the Babson Center for Global Commerce at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. "It doesn't take much of an economic argument to get people to say, 'Stop making it,'" says Manning. "But when I have explored the issue or talked to people, it seems the sentimental argument of keeping it is what most people revert to."
It's easy to see why people are partial to the penny. After all, our nation's 16th and arguably most beloved president, Abraham Lincoln, adorns the penny, and the coin is part of Americana, with pennies often becoming the first coins in a kid's collection. Then there's penny candy, which has managed to stay in the vernacular and began in 1896 with the advent of the Tootsie Roll, which sold for 1 cent. And let's not forget the beloved but outdated saying, "A penny for your thoughts," and, of course, "See a penny, pick it up, all day long, you'll have good luck."
With all that going for the penny, many people are loath to let it go, even if they seem to have a love-hate relationship with it. Manning says, "Studies have shown that most people who see a penny on the ground do not stop to pick it up."
Whaples concurs, observing that the average American earns a penny every two seconds, and it takes about two seconds to pick up a penny. Perhaps that's why so many people often don't bother to pick one up, good luck or not. Whaples also agrees that nostalgia is a key factor that has kept the penny around, but as the years go on and generations continue to embrace credit and debit cards, that will change.
"Eventually people won't even think about the wonderful shiny penny that first got when they were 3 years old and thought it was so cool," Whaples says.
Whaples would like to see the penny go.
But people like to root for an underdog, which may help explain the penny's appeal and endurance. After all, this isn't the first time there has been a national conversation about the fate of the American penny. Every few years, someone in Washington or an economic think tank brings the issue up.
It seems to have begun in late 1976 when the Treasury Department issued a study showing that the cost of producing a penny, at the time, was 0.67 cent and that by 1982, the cost of producing a penny would be higher than a penny. Some people had a novel solution at the time, which probably wouldn't have done much to solve the problem of too much pocket change: Get rid of the 1-cent penny -- and start making 2-cent coins.
More from US News & World Report:
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I've already given up on the penny, maybe ten years now. To the penny pricing is insulting! I refuse to wait to get a penny or two in change, "put it in the dish" I tell them. My time and that of the folks behind me in line is being wasted with every transaction. To me all that a $19.99 or what ever 99 pricing is saying is we think you are stupid enough to be thinking you got a better deal than $20 or what ever.
In twenty years, we will not use cash at all. Counterfeiting, cost to produce money, track money, destroy old, worn money will all lead us to go to ecommerce. Fingerprint readers or maybe even retina scanners will Identify who you are and then you can decide what account you want to pay for your latte.
More and more businesses are moving to ecommerce. Recently I went to a farmer's market, the last place I would have thought they would take anything but cash. Well almost all of them had their IPads with them and they all had credit card readers that happily accepted the transactions.
I asked a few of the farmers if the credit card option helped their sales, one said it was up 33% from his previous year, the other one said DOUBLE! I don't like carrying cash, but I have 5 credit cards in my wallet...
put some "cents" into CONgress, por favor.
Get rid of the paper dollar as well. These
remedies are so easy a cave-dude could
do them, but apparently are far above
the pay level of Congressperps to deduce.
- C'est la vie
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NEW DELHI: If you were to ask any random aam aadmi anywhere in India what is the single biggest failing of the UPA
, the answer would be – price rise
. This is so because the most important items of family spending – food items – have relentlessly risen for the past several years despite repeated promises to bring them down by the economic mandarins and policy wonks that run the country’s economy.
Poorer families have had to stop eating various foods in order to save crumbling family budgets.
Between 2004 and 2013 food prices
in general rose by 157%. But when you get into the nuts and bolts the real pain becomes starkly clear. India is the second largest producer of vegetables in the world. Yet chronic supply shortages coupled with serial hoarding has led vegetable prices to shoot up by a deadly 350% in that period.Onion prices
have increased by an incredible 521% since 2004. And it’s not a smooth even rise. There were times when onion prices doubled, even tripled within weeks and then subsided after a few weeks of rampage. This happened in the winter of 2010-11. And it is happening again now with onion prices touching Rs 70-80 levels in most parts of the country.
This has happened with other key staples also like potatoes. In the second half of 2009 potato prices zoomed up by almost 100% and it was only in January 2010 that the levels came down. Other vegetables have followed their own mad ways – brinjal for instance is 311% costlier now than in 2004, and prices of the lowly cabbage have risen by a jaw dropping 714%. Various vegetable prices are in fact at all time highs.
The hike in vegetable prices hit poorer families especially hard because earlier, starting 2006, another staple of families had been knocked out of thalis. This was pulses, the single biggest source of protein in largely vegetarian India. Their prices rose steadily 2005 onwards and by 2010 they had more than doubled. Then again they increased in 2012 and reached an all time high in September last year. There has been a slight decline since then but even then prices are 123% higher than 2004.
What about other key food items? Milk prices have increased by 119%. Egg prices have gone up by 124%. Spices and condiments have increased by 119%. Sugar has increased by 106%. Even salt, an essential of most cooked food has increased by 85% in the past decade.
Prices of the two staple cereals of India, rice and wheat, have increased by 137% and 117%, respectively. Remember, India has seen record harvests for a series of years and except for 2004 and 2009, monsoons have been good generally. So mass produced crops like wheat and rice which demand high water inputs have not been subject to the usual weather depression. Even fruit prices have increased by 95% despite bumper crops of many popular fruits like bananas, mangoes, oranges and papaya.
These are the wholesale prices. What the aam aadmi gets at the local shop has more jacked up prices. But if the wholesale prices have risen so dramatically, imagine the real prices you pay for.
Strangely, principal political parties gearing up for elections next year seem to be indifferent to this continuing decimation of family budgets. It will be a very angry voter that they will face at the hustings.


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Nixi chief has crossed 2.5 million .in registration, a localised domain name becoming more popular among the second country in Asia, according to reports National Internet Exchange of India (Nixi).
I am happy to inform you that we have already crossed a major milestone of 2.5 million, NIXI chief executive Anil Kumar Jain told ET telecom added that India has the highest adoption of localised domain names after China.
The .in domain is a part of the country code top-level domain or CCTLD. We are now catching the gap between .com and .in by the middle of this year calendar. Nixi logged a turnover of about Rs. 115-crore last year and is expecting a robust growth of least around 25% this year.
The biggest revenue driver is domain business such as .in and .bharat and the other is the internet protocol called national internet registry for internet protocols.


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And it's throwing in a free gift pack of media subscriptions and web apps worth 600,000 won.The mass market - where a smartphone can be had for as little as $25 - is the new mobile device battleground, as high-end growth eases off with sales slowing in mature markets. Japan, for example, may see smartphone shipments shrink this year, according to researcher IDC.Samsung's flagship S5 price cut suggests the South Korean firm wants to encourage users to trade up to a fancier phone - at a potential cost to its margins. Samsung's mobile business operating margin dipped to 16 percent in October-December from 18 percent over the whole of 2013."It reflects how much Samsung is agonizing to secure margins. They're now offering premium models at lower prices as the demand outlook for high-end phones remains uncertain," said Lee Seung-woo, an analyst at IBK Securities.
Premium smartphones tend to be priced at above $300 and pack in more features, such as more powerful processing power, high resolution display, better cameras and fingerprint reading. With the S5, which has few hardware improvements from its S4 predecessor, industry watchers reckon Samsung is aiming more at a broad mass market than tech savvy users.To be sure, Samsung has a far broader product line-up than rival Apple, and it has some leeway to trim prices given that manufacturing costs have fallen. Lee Min-hee,Most recently he was working at Nerstrand Agri Center in sales an analyst at IM Investment, reckons the total cost of production materials for the S5 - from the battery and screen to the processor and sensors - will be 10-15 percent lower than for the S4.
While this allows vendors to make quality phones for less, it makes it tougher for them to maintain a premium brand image.
"Samsung needs to be very clear about the market segment it's pursuing," said Clement Teo, analyst at Forrester Research in Singapore. "Take Apple - it didn't drop prices on its iPhones, even with the new models. This helps it maintain a margin premium and attracts a certain loyal user base."But Cupertino, California-based Apple is also taking note of the growing potential of the mass market. Internal documents revealed during an ongoing U.S. patent trial against Samsung indicates some at Apple felt the pany priced itself too high.


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Nike Air More Uptempo ‘Olympic Dream Team’ Shoe Set to Drop in July
Nike Air Foamposite Pro Shoes Announced
Galaxy foams are one of the newest innovations in the world of shoes, offering shoemakers with the ability to come up with bold new designs and great comfort.
Nike is taking it to a whole new level by introducing a new class of foams set to release later this year with the Nike Air Foamposite Pro. This time they’re going with a shiny, black speckled design with red and gold accents for a fresh new look.
Following the design of the Galaxy, the new Nike Air Foamposite Pro is expected to be one of the first of many new shoes that move away from the normal foams that most of us are used to seeing in our shoes.


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A quarter of agricultural goods produced from illegally deforested land are destined for the EU, a new report has found, which estimates their value at more than €6bn (£4.3bn) a year. The investigation by Fern, a Brussels-based forestry NGO, puts the EU ahead of the US and China per capita. More than half of the total value of EU imports of agricultural commodities estimated to be linked to illegal deforestation originates in Brazil, and a quarter originates in Indonesia.
While the figures may be shocking, some campaigners see it as just another example of how the EU ignores the environmental and social problems associated with the low-cost imports its economy depends upon.
Sam Lawson, author of the Fern report and an independent environmental investigator, says: “The EU population would not accept these kinds of illegalities, human rights abuses and environmental damage if it was happening within their borders, so it’s hypocritical to then not care about the influence EU imports has on them [elsewhere].”
Voluntary approach failing
Lawson joins a groundswell of leading NGOs tackling various ethical trade issues who say voluntary guidance is failing to compel European companies to clean up their supply chains or take responsibility for their impacts overseas, and think new EU legislation is needed.
“Promises from big companies are all well and good, but I don’t think the voluntary approach will succeed on its own because of the level of illegality and poor governance involved,” says Lawson. He argues that individual companies can only do so much without the bilateral agreements between the EU and producer countries to support and police them.
Lawson adds: “The regulatory approach taken by the EU on timber has been transformative of the industry and has driven change in a way that the voluntary approach over previous decades was unable to achieve on its own.
“Similar action is needed by the EU on commodities like conflict minerals, clothing from sweatshops and agricultural products.”
In fact, proposed new legislation on conflict minerals – such as tin, tungsten,
tantalum, and gold, whose mining can be linked to funding wars and which are used in electronic goods and jewellery – is going before the European parliament this week.
“Unfortunately, the proposed Conflict Minerals Regulation that the European commission has put on the table is extremely weak and risks undermining a lot of the [UN and OECD] voluntary frameworks it already endorses,” says Michael Gibb of the NGO, Global Witness, which is leading a campaign to clean up the EU’s €123bn (£83bn) mineral trade, the fourth largest in the world.
“There are fears that the EU risks lagging quite far behind progress in other countries, notably the US and 12 countries in Africa, who have recognised the limitations of voluntary frameworks and the need to get companies much more proactively involved in this process through mandatory regulation,” says Gibbs.
He adds: “The EU’s current position is very, very concerning, and makes many European companies, consumers and investors vulnerable to reputational risks by potentially inadvertently funding some very serious abuses.”
Will big business support action?
On cheap labour issues, too, there are frustrations that EU legislation isn’t keeping pace with the rest of the world or even its own member countries. In November, a coalition of NGOs, trade unions and retailers succeeded in getting a transparency clause added to the Modern Slavery bill, which recently received royal assent and compels UK companies to report about what they’re doing to identify and address slavery in their supply chains.
“This is the first legislation of its kind in Europe, but I really think it should be EU-wide,” says Rachel Wilshaw, ethical trade manager at Oxfam, who says the clause was inspired by the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act 2010, which obliges companies with a turnover of more than $100m to take similar measures. “Slavery knows no borders, so it would be far more effective if the same legal pressures to report on supply chains were on all European companies, not just British ones.”
Last month, the EU congratulated itself in its latest State of the Environment Report (pdf) (SOER) for consuming less materials, less non-renewable energy and emitting less greenhouse gases while still managing to increase economic output. But given that household consumption in the EU has increased by a quarter since 1996 and EU imports have doubled in the past decade (pdf), those greener claims are clearly only made possible by effectively outsourcing its environmental footprint to countries outside the eurozone.
“Between 24% and 56% of the associated total footprint occurs outside Europe, with on average 56% of the land footprint associated with products consumed within the EU estimated to lie outside the EU territory,” says the European Environment Agency.
The EU’s recent pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030 looks weaker when taking into account emissions embedded in ever-increasing imports.
Campaigners argue that the EU could – and should – be exercising greater domestic powers to encourage better practices beyond its territory and reduce its global footprint.
“What’s needed is a combination of government procurement policy, regulatory requirements on importers for due diligence along their supply chains, and bilateral work with producer countries,” adds Lawson. “If the big companies making ethical promises really want to make a difference, they should throw their weight behind such action by government.”
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Though nothing will
Drive them away
We can beat them
Just for one day
~David Bowie, Heroes.
That collective sigh of relief you hear this morning is probably the millions of YouTube users who are relieved that Google and Viacom have reached an agreement to protect their privacy. All I can say is thank goodness that common sense prevailed for once.
I am sure I was not alone in my anger and outrage when word got out earlier this month that a federal judge had ruled in a copyright infringement case against Google involving its YouTube property, that the plaintiff Viacom had the right to see YouTube logs to see which copyrighted material was used, but also included a free pass to access user names and IP addresses. In my view, if Viacom wanted proof of the perceived misuse of its content, then a list of its copyrighted content itself should have sufficed without seeing the viewing habits of each and every YouTube user. The judge, by the way, did see fit to protect YouTube’s source code from Viacom’s prying eyes, but thought nothing of trashing user's privacy.
Interestingly enough, according to this article in PC Pro, the agreement does not cover Google employees. Seems Viacom wants proof that Google explicitly knew about the copyright violations because individual employees were among those watching. Leaving aside, how that proves corporate knowledge, I can’t help but thinking if Google is responsible for masking user identifying information, how is the employee information going to be kept separate? I guess that just more billable hours for the attorneys involved to hash this all out.
Another interesting aspect to this is that Google in protecting its users from this information grab comes out looking like the good guy in the eyes of millions of users. Google, like Apple (as I reported on Monday in Consumers Should be Mad as Hell Over iPhone 3G Phone Launch Debacle (But Aren’t)), is a Teflon company. Unlike Microsoft which forced to suffer all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Google comes out unscathed looking like the hero to us all.
I have to admit, I’m pleased that Google stood up for its users. The lawyers could have simply thrown up their hands and said that a judge’s order is a judge’s order and there is little they can do, but they didn’t. They sat down with Viacom’s legal team (stacked up a bushel of billable hours) and found a way to protect our privacy. For that, we really should be grateful, and truth be told I don’t recall Apple or Microsoft ever taking a similar step in the name of its users.
Whatever Google's motivation on this one, I’m just glad that common sense prevailed, and for that Google is a hero, at least for one day.


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A sixteen-member delegation from six African countries is currently exploring the possibility of directly exporting cotton from their countries to Indian textile mills, especially those based in Coimbatore and Tirupur.
The delegates from Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Nigeria, Uganda and Malawi, include Government officials as well as private players from the cotton and textile industry.
During a meeting with representatives of the Indian Cotton Federation in Coimbatore, the visiting team urged the cotton traders and textile mills to help them in developing direct cotton trade between their countries and India.
Speaking to Fibre2fashion, Mr. Vishwanathan, Secretary of the Indian Cotton Federation, said, “A delegation from Africa had come on a fact finding mission two years back. This time they have come with concrete plans to export cotton to India.”
Indian Cotton Federation officials told the visiting members of the delegation that a substantial quantity of African cotton is currently being sourced by textile mills in Coimbatore region through international traders and merchants.
They said the Coimbatore region uses over 10 million bales (of 170 kg each) of cotton each year, and most of it is bought from Gujarat. For importing cotton from Africa, the time taken for delivery is more, in addition to issues such as shade variation and contamination.
However, they are willing to help facilitate direct cotton trade between the African countries and India, but would like to have more information about the quantity of cotton produced in each country, the marketing season, Government norms, taxation, etc. Moreover, problems related to regular shipments and infrastructure need to be addressed, they added.
The visit of the African delegation to India has been organized as part of the Indian Government’s Cotton Technical Assistance Programme for Africa (CTAP). The programme aims to strengthen the cotton value chain in Africa to fortify the competitiveness of the sector.


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The last sneaker in the Nike Kobe "Prelude Pack" was shown off for the first time on Wednesday in the form of the Nike Kobe 8 "Prelude". One of the main attractions in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, the Nike Kobe 8 has continued to roll along long after other signature shoes in Nike's portfolio has already released their latest models.
Reflection is a key theme of the Nike Kobe 8 "Prelude" as the upper is meant to replicate the contemporary art movement of today through the lens of a proud champion like Kobe Bryant. The Nike Kobe 8 has quietly become one of the most beloved basketball shoes in recent memory, thanks in large part to the Engineered Mesh upper that has allowed Nike to get very experimental with their designs. From the coral snake to the pit viper, there is no doubt that Nike Kobe 8 will be remembered as on the best in Kobe's signature line long after he has retired from the game of basketball.
Kobe Bryant experienced his toughest season during the 2012-13 campaign, which started out with championship aspirations. After acquiring Dwight Howard and Steve Nash via trades, there was talk of a new Lakers dynasty; unfortunately, that would not turn out to be the case as Howard quickly discovered he was not made for the Los Angeles spotlight while Nash bravely battled various injuries. Bryant would suffer the worst fate of them all, tearing his Achilles just as the team was starting to get into a decent groove. The neon colors of the sneaker are meant to represent the same bright lights that Howard could not handle while the chrome on the heel clip encapsulates the cold-blood nature of Kobe's Black Mamba persona.
The Nike Kobe 8 "Prelude" will launch on Jan. 25, the final sneaker in the "Prelude Pack" and more than likely the final Nike Kobe 8 that will drop. More than any other modern sneaker, the Nike Kobe 8 has experienced a very long shelf life, but eventually it will have to make way for the Nike Kobe 9 Elite "Masterpiece" that will drop Feb. 8.
Check out the Nike Kobe 1 "Prelude" here.


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Ecommerce innovators are leveraging containers to perfect their supply chains
June 10 2021 Posted by Flex Container Uncategorized
Ecommerce has transformed retail and logistics — and ecommerce companies are leading the way in material handling innovation today. Watch the video below to learn about the latest product styles, materials, processes, features and accessories being used for ecommerce fulfillment. And see how Flexcon’s engineers collaborate with customers and automation teams to optimize operations and maximize value.


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Typical Motors is investing tens of billions of bucks to make a bevy of new electric powered motor vehicles and, it hopes, capture up to Tesla.
But the automaker appears significantly from reaching those formidable goals. This yr, it is having difficulties to generate a new sort of electrical vehicle battery pack meant for the electric cars it options to introduce in excess of the future quite a few many years.
“It’s been a tiny little bit demanding,” the company’s chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, said in a meeting contact with reporters on Monday afternoon.
In the 1st 50 percent of this yr, G.M. designed just 50,000 electric automobiles, and most of them employed an older battery pack manufactured by a provider. In the United States, G.M. marketed fewer than 2,800 cars that made use of its new, modular Ultium battery packs, becoming produced at an Ohio manufacturing unit that the company owns with LG Strength Resolution. Two other Ultium factories are less than development, in Tennessee and Michigan.
G.M. as soon as claimed it prepared to make 400,000 electric powered automobiles in North The usa from 2022 to 2024, and far more than one particular million in 2025, the huge greater part of which ended up intended to use Ultium technology.
Mr. Jacobson claimed that the firm predicted to make 100,000 battery-driven motor vehicles in the next half of 2023, and that he would deliver more information and facts on production designs on Tuesday in a meeting call with money analysts.
For now, the sluggish rollout is not hurting the company’s base line. G.M. said on Tuesday that it designed a financial gain of $2.6 billion from April to June, an enhance of 52 percent from a yr before. Revenue totaled $44.7 billion, up 25 %.
Mr. Jacobson explained the firm had benefited from increased costs and solid gross sales of vehicles and activity utility motor vehicles in North America. The normal cost of the automobiles that G.M. bought in the next quarter was $52,000 — about $1,600 much more than in the initial quarter of the yr.
G.M. sold 833,000 cars and trucks and vehicles in North America in the second quarter, a 26 per cent enhance from a year earlier. In the relaxation of the earth, it sold 147,000 automobiles, about 8,000 fewer than a 12 months previously.
While the solid earnings are welcome, quite a few investors are increasingly fearful about the company’s electric powered auto tactic simply because these kinds of vehicles are the speediest-developing section of the car industry.
A big anxiety for buyers is that G.M., Ford Motor and other substantial automakers could quickly shed buyers as a lot more motorists acquire battery-driven cars and trucks. In China, Europe and California, wherever electric motor vehicles currently account for a significant and expanding share of new automobile product sales, when dominant automakers like Volkswagen and Toyota have been shedding market share to Tesla and Chinese automakers like BYD.
Two years back, G.M.’s chief executive, Mary T. Barra, mentioned the firm aimed to double annual profits by 2030, to about $280 billion. Substantially of the elevated business enterprise is meant to come from electric powered motor vehicles, and new profits streams from computer software and services linked to those people automobiles and trucks. The corporation has also established a target of phasing out production of inside-combustion designs by 2035.
Appropriate now, G.M. is “way driving where by they should be,” reported Sam Fiorani, vice president of world automobile forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions, a consulting firm. “If they’re obtaining difficulties with the initially wave of these new E.V.s, and if they cannot roll them out, which is not great for the upcoming wave of increased-quantity models.”
G.M. now offers only a few area of interest motor vehicles that use Ultium battery packs. They consist of the Cadillac Lyriq, an S.U.V. the GMC Hummer, which has a starting price tag of about $90,0000 and big supply vans manufactured by a new division named BrightDrop.
This summertime and drop, G.M. is supposed to incorporate 3 electrical Chevrolets — the Blazer and Equinox S.U.V.s and an electric powered Silverado pickup. The firm experienced earlier said the Silverado would go on sale in the spring, but the truck is now not envisioned until finally the tumble.


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In 2017, shortly after Georges Kern grew to become the chief government of Breitling, his private Instagram account started to attract feedback from folks with robust opinions about his plans to reposition the Swiss watchmaker as a purveyor of “informal luxurious.”
Although he encountered his justifiable share of critics on the platform, Mr. Kern additionally rapidly seen “who was including worth to the dialogue,” he stated on a latest cellphone name.
What Mr. Kern did subsequent might need shocked his extra conservative colleagues within the Swiss watch business: He invited a couple of of these Instagram commenters to affix a brand new advisory board. The group, which ranges from 25 to 30 folks and contains journalists, shoppers and collectors, gathers in Switzerland annually; its most up-to-date assembly was in late August in Geneva.
“We present them new merchandise, ideas or concepts one to 2 years upfront,” Mr. Kern stated. “And right here and there, we alter our thoughts or our method to designs, and take a look at designs in different instructions.”
“The Chronomat, which we launched final 12 months in April, with the well-known bullet metal bracelet — the design was confirmed by certainly one of these advisory board conferences from individuals who commented on my Instagram,” he added. “This is the power of social media.”
As a platform for discovery, connection and, more and more, commerce, Instagram has develop into the spine of the posh watch business since its introduction in 2010.
The diploma to which the photo-sharing app shapes design, nevertheless, is a fragile topic. Bound by centuries of heritage, most watchmakers insist that what occurs, or doesn’t occur, on the app has no bearing on the feel and appear of their merchandise.
“While Instagram has modified the way in which we method content material creation and communication, it has no impression on our timepiece design codes, that are created with the identical ideas and values which have guided our maison for the previous 266 years,” Laurent Perves, Vacheron Constantin’s chief business officer, wrote in an e-mail.
Yet it’s clear there’s a correlation between the sorts of watches that generate engagement — likes, feedback and shares — and those who catch hearth within the market. (In Vacheron’s case, its Overseas Everest prototype acquired a number of constructive remark when the mountaineer and photographer Cory Richards wore it in 2019, one thing that Mr. Perves stated “comforted” the model and led it to introduce two restricted editions final month.)
“Everyone is seeing, partially pushed by Instagram, that what sells now are 39- to 42-millimeter chrome steel sport watches with built-in bracelets and blue or grey dials,” stated Stephen Pulvirent, a former editor on the watch publication Hodinkee who not too long ago based his personal inventive company, Rime & Reason, in Santa Monica, Calif.
“That’s what everybody needs, whether or not they’re $5,000 or $50,000,” Mr. Pulvirent added. “And watchmakers say, ‘Fair, we’ll make that.’”
Catalyst For Creation
A decade in the past, when Instagram was nonetheless in its infancy, few folks within the Swiss watch commerce would have imagined a social media platform may have that a lot sway.
Anish Bhatt — referred to as @watchanish, one of many business’s unique influencers — stated that when he went to the 2011 Baselworld watch honest along with his new deal with, he discovered Instagram to be a troublesome promote.
“At that point, nobody believed social media was a platform to speak about luxurious items,” Mr. Bhatt stated on a latest name from his dwelling in Cyprus. “It was a spot to share footage of your lunch.”
That considering endured for years. It was November 2015 when Rolex, the world’s hottest luxurious watch model by any measurement, posted its first picture on Instagram (a blurry shot of a Rolex clock at CHIO Aachen, the World Equestrian Festival, in Germany).
But as smartphone cameras improved, permitting higher macro pictures, watch lovers started to return round. Over the previous few years, and particularly within the midst of pandemic lockdowns that gave folks ample time to spend on social media, the business has completed a 180-degree flip. While the platform’s impression on watch design could also be indirect, it has develop into so central to the way in which timepieces are launched, promoted and offered that the query may very well be: If a brand new watch design doesn’t seem on Instagram, does it even exist?
With the IWC Big Pilot “Tribute to 5002,” the reply is not any, fairly actually. First constructed as a prototype, the watch was made right into a restricted version of 100 items solely after Christoph Grainger-Herr, IWC’s chief government, posted a picture of the piece, nicknamed Safari, on his private channel, in June 2017.
“I occurred to be on safari on the time, in Kruger National Park in South Africa,” Mr. Grainger-Herr recalled in an interview at a latest IWC occasion in Los Angeles. “I stated, considerably foolishly, that if I get 50 confirmations within the feedback of individuals saying they’d purchase it, I’ll make it. We obtained extra like 250 feedback inside 15 minutes.
“We despatched out all of the reservation kinds by DM,” Mr. Grainger-Herr added. “It was our first unintentional foray into social commerce.”
More not too long ago, Instagram helped to verify the curiosity round an sudden revival at Girard-Perregaux. “We posted an image of a watch referred to as a Casquette, produced by Girard-Perregaux within the ’70s, with a really ’70s design, and other people went loopy,” stated the model’s chief government, Patrick Pruniaux. “One of those watches is now being produced with a associate for a charity public sale.”
Reimagined for the Nov. 6 Only Watch public sale in Geneva, the one-off timepiece — a remake of a cool, spaceshiplike mannequin that Girard-Perregaux debuted in 1976 — was made in collaboration with the London-based watch customizer Bamford Watch Department.
While Mr. Pruniaux declined to verify whether or not a business version of the Casquette reboot is within the making (“Maybe,” he stated. “How cryptic is that?”), he acknowledged that the response a mannequin receives on Instagram “offers us a possibility for remodification.”
“Watch corporations are based mostly in Switzerland — in our case, in a small metropolis in Switzerland,” Mr. Pruniaux added, referring to La Chaux-de-Fonds. “We aren’t at all times in touch with the tip client. I wouldn’t say we’re altering our technique, however for certain we’re listening.”
Today, the watch market’s mania for a handful of manufacturers — together with Rolex, Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe — is loud and clear on Instagram. A matter of some debate, nevertheless, is whether or not the obsession with these makers and their most coveted metal sport fashions is a direct consequence of their recognition on the platform, or merely a mirrored image of it.
“I don’t know what’s the hen or the egg,” stated Arthur Touchot, the Geneva-based head of digital technique for Phillips’ watch division.
Yoni Ben-Yehuda, head of watches at Material Good, a New York-based luxurious retailer, is satisfied that Instagram’s algorithms guarantee “all we see are these loopy sizzling Royal Oaks and Rolexes and that’s how they develop into what we would like,” he stated.
“It’s just like the ‘Life of Brian’ scene,” Mr. Ben-Yehuda added. “‘You’ve obtained to suppose for yourselves. You’re all people! Yes, we’re all people!’”
For all of the complaints about how Instagram breeds conformity, nevertheless, there’s loads of proof to counsel the platform additionally has elevated smaller, experimental makers.
“Every model, each form of product, each bizarre eccentric factor has discovered its public,” stated Maximilian Büsser, proprietor and inventive director of the boutique model MB&F.
Asher Rapkin, co-founder of Collective Horology, a California-based group that develops timepieces in collaboration with watch manufacturers, stated the app has changed phrase of mouth as collectors’ major vector for studying about smaller, artisanal manufacturers. “Without Instagram, it’s laborious to think about the success of unbiased watchmakers like Grönefeld or Habring,” he stated. “It’s opened eyes to makers, references and patronage that wouldn’t have been there with out it.”
And therein lies a key to understanding the modern-day watch market: While entry to sure sought-after timepieces has remained unique due to their excessive costs and extremely restricted manufacturing, details about them — to not point out a relentless stream of beautiful images — is offered to anybody prepared to observe a hashtag down the horological rabbit gap (attempt #watch, #wristshot and #watchfam, for starters).
“Forty or 50 years in the past, merchandise and data had been each unique,” stated Austen Chu, founding father of WristCheck, a pre-owned watch retailer in Hong Kong. “You solely knew of manufacturers like Audemars Piguet if your loved ones taught you, otherwise you noticed advertisements in magazines focused towards the wealthy.” (He collaborated with the home on its first Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar totally in titanium, launched in January 2020.)
Now that the abundance of knowledge out there on Instagram has led to demand for sure watches far outstripping provide, methods to capitalize on that consciousness continues to be a sticking level for many watchmakers, stated Ted Schachter, an affiliate professor and assistant chairperson of the promoting and advertising communications division on the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
Instagram is most influential when it exhibits folks how they will use merchandise, Professor Schachter stated. “How do folks put on your watch? How do they decorate it? Showcase your product with actions folks can acknowledge and encourage them to share that with you.”
While that form of real-world perspective abounds on TikTok, the place user-generated content material depicts watches “within the field, on the hand, wrist rolls, that form of factor,” stated Benjamin Arabov, chief government of the posh watchmaker Jacob & Company, Instagram continues to showcase professionally produced, extremely curated photographs and movies — all of which can be to watchmakers’ detriment.
“I take a look at Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe — it’s mainly simply their journal advertisements in an Instagram,” stated Brynn Wallner, a.okay.a. @dimepiece, an account that highlights the intersection of popular culture, girls and watches. “Really shiny, tremendous produced. Big blocks of the grid, like six photographs, are one marketing campaign. Nothing shot on iPhone.
“But the pages that get probably the most engagement are the other of that, particularly for the Gen Z viewers,” Ms. Wallner added. “When I see a shiny photograph of a watch, it does nothing for me. I want some humanity to be able to even start to consider these objects which might be means out of my worth vary.”


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Atlanta Security Solutions News Blog
This year consumers will spend over $294 billion on online shopping, with UPS being the primary delivery company. While UPS offers fast shipments and free tracking, they also take very little care to protect these gifts once they are delivered. According to UPS, 95% of packages are delivered on the first attempt, but since most UPS drivers don’t wait for the recipient to come to the door, the majority of those packages are left at the doorstep - sometimes even if the recipient is at home! With $294 billion worth of merchandise just sitting on doorsteps, shopping season is also big business for thieves!
Insurancequotes.com reports that 23 million Americans have had packages stolen from their doorsteps. They have dubbed the thieves “porch pirates”. Apparently, the most common tactic for porch pirates is to follow delivery vehicles and grab the packages within minutes of the delivery. This means your packages could be stolen even if you are at home!
Most retailers will replace stolen goods or offer refunds, but that takes time and it doesn’t help if you needed the delivery in time for the holidays. To help consumers understand the serious nature of porch pirates, police departments across the country are publicly advising residents to purchase doorbell cameras to help deter package theft and to aid local enforcement in catching these criminals. Recent reports from police departments in Atlanta, Alpharetta, Macon and Woodstock, Georgia have shown a decrease in overall neighborhood crime after residents installed home security alarm systems including alarm systems with front door bell cameras and porch CCTV systems.
If you are one of the millions of Americans who enjoy the ease and convenience of online shopping, you shouldn’t be without a security camera at your front door. Security cameras act as a deterrent to theft by stopping home burglars in their tracks. Just the presence of a camera can actually prevent your packages from being stolen and if you become a victim of porch pirates, a security camera will provide proof when you file a claim for reimbursement and will help police to catch the thief. Once a burglar finds success stealing from homes in Atlanta, he will continue stealing until he gets caught. The best defense to prevent crime in Georgia is by installing a security camera. This will not only protect you but will also protect your neighbors and the rest of your community.
In addition to providing advanced home security protection that will prevent your packages from being stolen, a door bell camera connects to your phone providing live video feedback and two-way voice communication with anyone at your front door, even when you're not home. Imagine the piece of mind, the convenience, and the luxury of sending solicitors away and knowing you home is safe no matter where are.
Protecting our friends, family, and community around Atlanta, Georgia is our number one goal. Crime Fighters of Atlanta provides home & business security product installation including home security alarms, wireless cameras, and advanced CCTV surveillance solutions. If a front door security camera is right for your home or if you are interested in other security options, CFA Security can assist you with questions, design concepts, and installation.
Georgia Home and Business Security Solutions


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Sophie Turner Trolled Influencers Who Promote Toxic Diet Products In the Best Way
All hail the Queen of the North.
Sophie Turner just became the latest celeb to call out toxic diet culture. The Game of Thrones actress took to her Instagram Stories and mocked social media influencers who push physically harmful weight-loss products on their followers simply for financial gain.
Bundled up in a beanie and scarf with a filter accentuating her lips, Turner addressed fans in her best American accent. "Hey guys, just kind of going for my influencer look today," she said. "Today I just wanted to promote this new powder stuff that you put in your tea. Basically, it makes you sh*t your brains out." (Related: The Truth About Detox Tea Cleanses)
"It's totally, really, really bad for me to be promoting to young women and young people everywhere, but I don't really give a f*ck because I'm getting paid money for it," she continued.
Turner ended her mini-rant ironically exclaiming, "Influencer life!"
Sarcasm aside though, the implications of diet culture really hit home for Turner. She's personally struggled with the pressure of conforming to unrealistic beauty standards and has gone to great, often unhealthy lengths to achieve a certain aesthetic. "I was too aware of my body at a young age," she told The Sunday Times earlier this year. "And it just kind of took over my mind, it was all I would think about. Calorie counting, everything. Oh, I'll just eat nuts today."
It wasn't until Turner was 19 years old that she sought help for her disordered eating habits. "I stopped having my period for a year—that's when I decided to have therapy," she said. (Related: Sophie Turner Gets Candid About Her Battle with Depression and Suicidal Thoughts)
ICYDK, fellow actress Jameela Jamil of The Good Place has also used her platform to raise awareness of diet culture and the impact it can have on young people. Jamil has openly called out celebrities like Kim and Khloé Kardashian, Amber Rose, and Cardi B for promoting unhealthy detox teas and shakes. She even started a petition to prevent celebs and influencers from promoting such products on social media, which has been backed by nearly 250,000 supporters. More recently, Jamil actually teamed up with Instagram to create a new policy restricting the promotion of harmful weight-loss products on the platform.
"The issue is at its peak because, in my day, you'd have to search for ages to find this toxic information, but now it finds you because of algorithms that know your age, sex and what you're into," Jamil told Elle UK of her work with Instagram.
While the social media platform's new policy is much-needed, Jamil has also been keen to highlight the responsibility that Instagram users themselves have when navigating their feeds. "Curate your space," she told Elle UK, explaining that she personally unfollows anyone who makes her feel bad about herself. "Just like as in your personal life, you have to do that online."
In other words, it sounds like you need to follow Sophie Turner on Instagram ASAP.


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A Japanese developer has possibly solved the problem of being caught short without a toilet thanks to a brand new device and app.
D Free, is a small wearable device that uses ultrasound technology to monitor bowel movements. Once the device reads that the user is ‘ready to go’ it will send a notification to the users’ phone via an app stating: “We have detected activity in your intestines: you have approximately 10 minutes.”
The Japanese creator, Atsushi Nakanishi, said he hopes this new device will benefit the ageing population to cut down on adult nappy costs and preserve their dignity. He’s said referring to the Ultrasound technology “If it can see a tiny baby inside a mother, it must be able to keep track of poo.”
Mr Nakanishi has revealed that an awkward experience sparked the idea for him after he was caught short walking down the street carrying heavy luggage and there was no toilet in sight. “I pooped my pants… it was very embarrassing,”.
It made him wonder whether he could develop an early warning system to prevent it from ever happening again.
The product looks like a small cake of soap, is made from plastic and can either be stuck to the skin under the belly button or it can be worn in a pocket on custom-designed underpants.
The product and app are still being produced and developers plan to crowd fund its development in May followed by a December launched into the market.


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Alibaba chief steps down as $294 mn deal announced
Alibaba chief Jack Ma stepped down on Friday before a potential initial public offering as the Chinese online retail giant announced a $294 million stake purchase in digital mapping firm AutoNavi.
Alibaba, the world’s largest online retailer, said it bought a 28 per cent stake in Nasdaq-listed AutoNavi, its second big purchase in as many weeks.
The deal follows Alibaba’s $586 million purchase of an 18 per cent stake in China’s dominant microblog provider Sina Weibo, a separate transaction that was announced on April 29.
The moves come before an expected initial public offering by Alibaba, which analysts say could value the group at between $60 billion and $100 billion, prompting comparisons with Facebook’s blockbuster IPO.
At a company event in Hangzhou city, 48-year-old Ma handed over the reins of the company to Lu Zhaoxi - previously executive vice president -reaffirming his decision announced four months ago to step down as chief executive officer.
“From tomorrow I will have a new life and life will be my job. I sincerely ask everyone to support Lu Zhaoxi like you have supported me and trust Lu like you have trusted me,” Ma told 30,000 employees and clients at the event.
Lu said he would carry on the mission of Alibaba by making the company transparent and responsible.
Ma will still provide strategic direction but he told the audience that he aimed to focus on education and environmental protection.
In the deal unveiled Friday, Alibaba and AutoNavi would form a strategic alliance to develop “location based” e-commerce opportunities, according to a joint statement on AutoNavi’s website.
“Now is the time to be aggressive on some of these deals because it’s a lot easier when they’re private than it’s going to be when they list,” said Bill Bishop, a columnist for The New York Times’s DealBook.
Alibaba operates China’s most popular e-shopping platform, Taobao, which has more than 90 per cent of the online market for consumer-to-consumer transactions. Taobao has more than 800 million product listings and over 500 million users.
Alibaba aims to expand beyond its home market by targeting overseas Chinese through Taobao, an executive told a news conference Friday at the company’s headquarters in Hangzhou.
“We hope to provide services to markets of overseas Chinese consumers first so we can have the experience and ability to further promote Taobao in other markets of non-Chinese consumers,” said Daphne Lee, director of overseas business for Taobao.
Such a move could potentially make Taobao, which also marks its 10th anniversary Friday, a threat to US giants eBay and Amazon.


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MSNBC: Tech & science
NBC News Technology
Updated: 8 min 3 sec ago
Can Samsung steal away some of Apple's hype? It's hoping a phablet with a curved screen and a virtual reality headset will do the trick.
Two months after the mobile app Isis Wallet announced it would rebrand to avoid association with the Sunni militant group, the wallet has a new name.
Google is working with UCSB researchers to make quantum computing a reality.
Roboticists in Japan have created a new bipedal robot that keeps its footing by watching its own steps using a nearby high-speed camera setup.
Apple: 'None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple's systems including iCloud or Find my iPhone.'
A company that makes wearable cameras has seen business boom since last month's shooting of a black youth by a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri.
Home Depot is working with investigators to flesh out the origin of "unusual activity," a spokeswoman told CNBC in a statement.
A new study by MIT has found that not only are workers willing to allow robots to give commands, but that they prefer robot orders to those of humans.
The ride-sharing service Uber hit a speed bump after a Frankfurt court temporarily banned it from operating in Germany.
A new iPhone release means people putting cash to get the hot new device, and there are more options than ever — but which is best for you?
The hackers who claimed to have harvested photos of celebs likely used a relatively simple attack that everyday Internet users are also vulnerable to.
Miraisens says its "3-D Haptics" technology allows users to “experience the presence of objects as if their entity existed there physically.”
The apparent hack of several iCloud accounts resulted in revealing photos of prominent Hollywood actresses being posted over the Web.
A remotely controlled quadcopter gives a bird's-eye view of the progress of construction on Apple’s new Campus 2 in Cupertino, California.


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OpenAI, with backing from Microsoft, has revealed GPT-4 Turbo and the groundbreaking GPT Store, presenting its most advanced AI technology. CEO Sam Altman made this exciting announcement at the inaugural developer conference of the AI lab.
During a recent public address, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, unveiled GPT-4 Turbo, representing a significant leap in artificial intelligence. It’s presently in a developer preview phase, with wider availability on the horizon.
This latest iteration promises to reshape AI interactions by offering customizability, greatly enhancing user experiences to cater to individual needs and preferences. It boasts an expanded knowledge base, with information available up to April 2023, and a capacity to handle more substantial inputs, accepting documents spanning up to 300 pages.
OpenAI has also made GPT-4 Turbo more cost-effective, with input tokens priced at $0.01, a threefold reduction from its forerunner, and output tokens costing $0.03.
In a further development, OpenAI has introduced the capability for users to create bespoke chatbots. Sam Altman disclosed their ambitions for GPT-5’s development, although no specific completion timeline has been set.
Expanding on these advancements, OpenAI has introduced a novel revenue model akin to an app store known as the GPT Store. This platform serves as a marketplace where developers can publish their personally crafted GPTs for public consumption. The GPT Store aims to foster innovation by enabling creators to showcase their AI models to a global audience.
In the coming months, the GPT Store will evolve into a monetization hub for developers, with OpenAI planning to reward creators based on the usage metrics of their AI creations. This initiative will promote quality and creativity in the AI field, offering a financial incentive system aligned with user engagement data.
Creators can anticipate increased visibility for their GPTs within the store, with the possibility of higher ranks on leaderboards. OpenAI is committed to highlighting exceptional GPTs across various categories, such as productivity, education, and entertainment, ensuring that the most impactful and enjoyable AI tools gain the recognition they deserve.
This unveiling comes at a time when major tech players, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and X, are competing to adopt their AI solutions. Alphabet introduced Bard earlier this year, while Meta leveraged AI to enhance its advertising tools. Amazon, on the other hand, invested in the AI startup Anthropic, and Elon Musk recently introduced an AI tool named Grok for X.