Instagram’s livestream shopping feature is now over a year old, and beauty brand adoption has become widespread.  On September 19, Instagram concluded its “10+ Days of Live Shopping” campaign featuring a range of consumer brands, including many in the beauty and fashion categories. Beauty participants included one of the first Instagram livest... See more

Online shopping sales in 2020 grew 32.4% from 2019 to $791.7 billion, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce. E-commerce ended last year accounting for 14% of all U.S. sales, up from 11% in 2019.

Since users own their data, they can bring it to any application built on top of Lens Protocol. As the true owners of their content, creators no longer need to worry about losing their content, audience, and livelihood based on the whims of an individual platform's algorithms and policies. Additionally, each application using the Lens Protocol bene... See more

Since this essay is targeting at startups, I’m going to mostly focus on the first few stages of the framework and the skills that it implies for your new hire. If you look at each stage, they roughly imply a different set of problems you are trying to face – first, finding product/market fit and building the initial “atomic network” — a stable set ... See more

“Thrasio’s success comes from the ability to take that marketplace data and do something smart with it where there was no ability to to that before,” said Ari Horowitz, a former Thrasio executive and now co-founder and CEO of New York-based Yardline Capital, a fintech startup providing funds to professional Amazon sellers. “The genius was recognizi... See more

How to win on TikTok: • Use Caution With #SponCon. Influencers and consumers on TikTok tend to be distrustful of content that appears overly transactional, so it’s important for brands to prioritize inspiring authentic enthusiasm, rather than leaning heavily on sponsored activities. When possible, use paid activations to elicit an organic response,... See more

Crypto, and specifically NFTs (non-fungible tokens), can accelerate the trend of creators monetizing directly with their fans. Social platforms will continue to be useful for building audiences (although these too should probably be replaced with superior decentralized alternatives), but creators can increasingly rely on other methods including NFT... See more

When the basis of competition changed away from pure processor performance to a low-power system the chip architecture needed to switch from being integrated (Intel) to being modular (ARM), the latter enabling an integrated BlackBerry then, and an integrated iPhone four years later. More broadly, breaking up a formerly integrated system — comm... See more

An NFT represents an access pass to an unspecified, generative possible future associated with an object. It is a key to a possible world. A key that is distinguishable from other keys. A key to a world that may or may not open up. A key that carries some hints of the kinds of locks it might unlock. A key that, unlike fungible tokens (or stock), al... See more