TREND REPORTS
Cruise Unveils Its First Driverless Origin Car for Shared Ownership
[Product]
2020/01/27 09:09
Autonomous vehicle startup Cruise has revealed its first self-driving, electric car designed for shared ownership, which has no steering wheel or pedals.Cruise was able to rid the Origin car of an engine, steering wheel, rearview mirrors, pedals and windshield wipers, to leave a spacious cabin "designed around the rider".Developed in partnership with General Motors (GM) and Honda, Origin is the...
Wuhan Virus : A Visual Explainer
[Business]
2020/01/27 09:08
China has confirmed the newly identified coronavirus in Wuhan city is transmitted from person to person. With growing numbers of fatalities and confirmed pneumonia-like infections worldwide, the Chinese authorities’ most urgent concern is to contain the outbreak as the Lunar New Year holiday rush begins.The first cases of what was then a mystery illness were reported in December in Wuhan, the...
(Paper) Adobe’s AI Lets You Preview Any Item of Clothing on a Virtual Body Model - SieveNet
[Tech]
2020/01/27 09:07
Adobe's SieveNet realistically transfers images of clothing to virtual models.Platforms that let shoppers virtually try on cosmetics, apparel, and accessories have exploded in popularity over the past decade, and it’s easy to see why. According to a survey conducted by banking company Klarna, 29% of shoppers prefer to browse for items online before actually buying them, while 49% are intereste...
D2C Brand Perfect Diary is Disrupting China’s Beauty Market
[Business]
2020/01/27 09:06
In China, the development of D2C brands has been built on similar strategies to brands globally, however, the strategies have been adapted for the local market and focus heavily on user platforms and customer care. Perfect Diary has paved the way, becoming one of China’s first beauty disruptors.Perfect Diary is one of China’s most innovative D2C brands and is now valued at US$1 billion. It ha...
Visualizing Companies in The Trillion Dollar Club
[Investing]
2020/01/27 09:05
In mid-January, Alphabet (the parent company of Google) became the newest company to join the “Trillion Dollar Club.” The companies in this exclusive group have three main features in common: their market caps have reached $1 trillion at some point, they are all based in the U.S., and they are all part of the technology sector. Our latest visualization sets out a side-by-side comparison of th...
An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus - Bluedot
[Business]
2020/01/27 09:04
The BlueDot algorithm scours news reports and airline ticketing data to predict the spread of diseases like those linked to the flu outbreak in China.On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors’ exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers...
(Video) Google’s New Idea to Get You Off Your Phone ? Seal It In an Envelope
[Design]
2020/01/27 09:03
Google has announced a trio of projects meant to get you out in the real world and away from your phone.The “apps”: They are designed by Google’s Digital Wellbeing Experiments arm to make your Pixel3a (the only phone for which they work) barely functional. One involves sticking your phone into an envelope, sealing it, and using it only as a camera or a basic keypad to dial numbers. (It’s ca...
(PDF) The Rise of Challenger Banks - Are the Apps Taking Over ?
[Business]
2020/01/22 09:10
Is Plaid cheap at $5.3 billion for $500 billion Visa? +20 key Fintech developments.In the long take this week, I dig deeply into the $5.3 billion acquisition of data aggregator Plaid by $500 billion payments network Visa. We examine why this deal is worth 25-50x revenue, while Yodlee's sale to Envestnet was priced much lower. We also look at how Plaid could be an existential threat to Visa, and...
(Patent) Amazon Wins Patent for Robots That Drop Off Bunches of Items on Delivery Routes
[Tech]
2020/01/22 09:09
BOT or NOT? This special series explores the evolving relationship between humans and machines, examining the ways that robots, artificial intelligence and automation are impacting our work and lives.A diagram from Amazon’s patent application shows a customer issuing a command to open up one of the doors on a storage compartment vehicle. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)Amazon is already testing...
