Tech Nuggets with the Technology

Monday, October 21, 2019

'Assembled in India' iPhone XR Now on Sale in the Country

Apple has started selling its popular iPhone XR phones assembled in India, as it looks to expand its share in the world's second-largest smartphone market. https://ift.tt/2P9EKZO

FT launches a new consulting arm focused on helping businesses use consumer data

As more and more news businesses turn to paywalls and subscriptions, The Financial Times looks like an early model and success story — a few months ago the organization announced that it’s passed 1 million paying readers, with digital subscribers accounting for more than three-fourths of its circulation.

Now The FT is looking to share some of what it’s learned (and further diversify its business) by launching a new consulting unit called FT Strategies.

Chief Data Officer Tom Betts told me that The FT built a lot of the technology behind its subscription efforts. At first, the team assumed that it might be able to build a business selling that technology to other publishers. After all, Vox Media and The Washington Post are both trying to do something similar with their content management systems.

So it was surprising to hear Betts say that FT Strategy is actually “a pure consulting business.”

Asked whether The FT might eventually start selling a tech product as well, he replied, “Never say never about the technology dimension, but I think as we did our market research and started talking to customers and looking more at the technological landscape out there, we realized that over the years, many of the elements of the technology we have built have become commoditized.”

That doesn’t mean there’s a technology stack that publishers can buy off-the-shelf that can meet all their needs (there’s at least one startup called The News Project trying to piece that stack together).

Product lessons from building our subscription service Extra Crunch

But Betts argued, “Even if you go and buy best-of-breed technology, that doesn’t mean you can assembly it in the right way to make it useful and meaningful to scale and grow direct-to-consumer revenues. And most importantly it doesn’t mean that you know how to operate it with teams and how to actually use it to successfully scale and grow your business.”

That’s precisely what FT Strategies is trying to provide. In fact, Betts said the company has already been quietly testing out the idea in beta and built up a customer list that includes Bonnier, The Business of Fashion, Penguin Random House and the V&A — so not just news companies, but also a book publisher and an art and design museum.

“I believe that the capabilities that we’e built, clearly they are salient to other news publishers, but I believe that they span far beyond that,” Betts explained.

He went on to argue that FT Strategies could potentially work with any company that’s “either facing disruption as the news media industry has” or that’s in a sector that’s part of the broader direct-to-consumer trend — basically, any company that needs help figuring out “how do we market to individuals, how do we build relationships to individuals, how do we leverage those relationships both so that the consumers have the most positive and engaging experience with our products and to maximize revenue.”

As for whether any of these business might be leery about giving another company — and, in some cases, a competitor — access to their customer data, Betts said that philosophically, the FT believes that “a healthy paid content ecosystem is good for the FT and it’s good for all the publishers that participate in it.”

More concretely, he said his team is “very clear internally about having the Chinese walls and professional standards for FT Strategy that ensures the right levels of confidentiality of clients’ data [so] their confidential information doesn’t leak back into the core operation.”

Crawling from the wreckage

Former Stitch Fix COO Julie Bornstein is rewriting the e-commerce playbook

More than two years after Julie Bornstein–Stitch Fix’s former chief operating officer–mysteriously left the subscription-based personal styling service only months before its initial public offering, she’s taking the wraps off her first independent venture.

Shortly after departing Stitch Fix, Bornstein began building The Yes, an AI-powered shopping platform expected to launch in the first half of 2020. She’s teamed up with The Yes co-founder and chief technology officer Amit Aggarwal, who’s held high-level engineering roles at BloomReach and Groupon, and most recently, served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Bain Capital Ventures, to “rewrite the architecture of e-commerce.”

“This is an idea I’ve been thinking about since I was 10 and spending my weekends at the mall,” Bornstein, whose resume includes chief marketing officer & chief digital officer at Sephora, vice president of e-commerce at Urban Outfitters, VP of e-commerce at Nordstrom and director of business development at Starbucks, tells TechCrunch. “All the companies I have worked at were very much leading in this direction.”

Coming out of stealth today, the team at The Yes is readying a beta mode to better understand and refine their product. Bornstein and Aggarwal have raised $30 million in venture capital funding to date across two financings. The first, a seed round, was co-led by Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green and NEA’s Tony Florence. The Series A was led by True Ventures’ Jon Callaghan with participation from existing investors. Bornstein declined to disclose the company’s valuation.

“AI and machine learning already dominate in many verticals, but e-commerce is still open for a player to have a meaningful impact,” Callaghan said in a statement. “Amit is leading a team to build deep neural networks that legacy systems cannot achieve.”

Bornstein and Aggarwal withheld many details about the business during our conversation. Rather, the pair said the product will speak for itself when it launches next year. In addition to being an AI-powered shopping platform, Bornstein did say The Yes is working directly with brands and “creating a new consumer shopping experience that helps address the issue of overwhelm in shopping today.”

As for why she decided to leave Stitch Fix just ahead of its $120 million IPO, Bornstein said she had an epiphany.

“I realized that technology had changed so much, meanwhile … the whole framework underlying e-commerce had remained the same since the late 90s’ when I helped build Nordstrom.com,” she said. “If you could rebuild the underlying architecture and use today’s technology, you could actually bring to life an entirely new consumer experience for shopping.”

The Yes, headquartered in Silicon Valley and New York City, has also brought on Lisa Green, the former head of industry, fashion and luxury at Google, as its senior vice president of partnerships, and Taylor Tomasi Hill, whose had stints at Moda Operandi and FortyFiveTen, as its creative director. Other investors in the business include Comcast Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures

Private brands biz of e-tailers under scanner

DPIIT has sought several details, including total percentage of sales that come from private labels, their sourcing and categories in which these companies sell private labels https://ift.tt/2W3rCXR https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

SoftBank's WeWork takeover would lead to Adam Neumann's exit: Sources

WeWork could run out of cash as early as next month without new financing, sources have said, after the company pulled plans in September for an initial public offering https://ift.tt/2JqoUqj https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

World's most-popular smartphone gets a 'made-in-India' tag and more

https://ift.tt/31tYxG0

Amazon Great Indian Festival sale: Cool gadgets, lights for Diwali under Rs 999

https://ift.tt/2P8NoYM

Devumi settles FTC charges that it sold fake followers and likes; cosmetics firm Sunday Riley also settles with FTC for allegedly posting fake online reviews (Shelby Brown/CNET)

Shelby Brown / CNET:
Devumi settles FTC charges that it sold fake followers and likes; cosmetics firm Sunday Riley also settles with FTC for allegedly posting fake online reviews — The Federal Trade Commission uncovered and stopped the misleading online marketing tactics of two different companies, it announced Monday.

The Resistance makes its last stand in final The Rise of Skywalker trailer

It's here: the final trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Disney finally dropped the hotly anticipated final trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, during the Patriots vs. Jets game on Monday Night Football. It's the third installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy produced, co-written, and directed by J.J. Abrams, following The Force Awakens (2015) and The Last Jedi (2017). Disney's timing is extra special, because today was also the late Carrie Fisher's birthday, and this film was her final role. (Fisher's daughter, Billie Lourd, plays Lieutenant Connix, a resistance officer, in the new trilogy.)

Disney has been holding their cards pretty close to their chest when it comes to details about The Rise of Skywalker, but we do know it is set one year after the events of The Last Jedi. The few surviving remnants of the Resistance will be facing the First Order once again, and the "ancient conflict between the Jedi and the Sith" will reach its climax.

We got our first teaser back in April, at the annual Star Wars Celebration event. It gave us a few Millennium Falcon flights and some desert-speeder combat, plus a brief glimpse of Princess Leia, thanks to footage shot in 2016 before Carrie Fisher's untimely death. It closed with the new trilogy main cast members staring at the wreckage of a Death Star, followed by the sound of Emperor Palpatine's evil laughter (even though he's supposed to be dead). We also learned that BB-8 has a new robotic buddy—a one-wheeled junk-heap character named Dio.

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https://arstechnica.com

Facebook now requires some page owners to disclose the orgs running them and if they're tied to state-owned media, will add labels to pages run by state media (Josh Constine/TechCrunch)

Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook now requires some page owners to disclose the orgs running them and if they're tied to state-owned media, will add labels to pages run by state media — Heaven forbid a political candidate's Facebook account gets hacked. They might spread disinformation...like they're already allowed to do in Facebook ads...

Will ensure online, offline price parity: Smartphone brands

Xiaomi assures faster offline launches from next year; Oppo says it will offer the best consumer offers and dealer profits for offline this year https://ift.tt/2BytVIK https://ift.tt/eA8V8J