Social media stars are trying to get you to buy,
not just follow or watch, said Mark Bergen
and Lucas Shaw in Bloomberg.com. This week,
YouTube took its first step toward becoming “a
shopping destination,” with a livestreaming event
in which celebrities, including the chef Gordon
Ramsay, pitched products from brands like Veri-
zon, Samsung, and Walmart. Previous efforts at
bringing the QVC model to livestream video have
“mostly floundered in the U.S.,” but YouTube is
“banking on the influence of its stars,” many of
whom already sell merchandise through links on
their channels. Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat
have also recently debuted similar features involv-
ing live product reviews from top influencers.
They are betting live e-commerce will eventually
catch on as it has in China, where “Lipstick
King” Li Jiaqi sold $1.9 billion of goods in one day at Alibaba’s
annual shopping extravaganza last month.The digital shopping experience is interactive and hyperactive,
said Jacob Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. “I’m sitting
on my couch, staring at my phone as I watch Noah Thomas,
a pitchman wearing glasses like Willy Wonka’s, sell a pair of
Adidas sneakers” on the 3-year-old livestream platform Ntwrk.
Its streams are like frenetic, “extended infomercials,” during
which viewers can comment and ask questions while hosts
“scramble around makeshift studios.” That still may be prefer-able to the influencer-driven model currently on
social media, said Jeva Lange in TheWeek.com.
At least QVC and HSN are transparent about
their hawking. “There’s something shady about
intending to use social media to check on your
friends only to end up with an impulsively pur-
chased National Parks T-shirt.” With QVC—
and now livestreamed shopping—you’ll never
be “blindsided by its premise.”There’s still one big holdup for most of these
platforms, said Julia Gray in MorningBrew
.com: The lack of one-click shopping. “As it
stands, most purchasing involves clicking out of
the livestream, toggling over to a retailer’s web-
site, adding in your contact and payment info.”
It’s an effort—and why many shoppers just skip
over to Amazon. The video platform Firework says “90 percent
of its sales occur after livestreams end.”The main forces driving this are, as usual, greed and fear, said
Shira Ovide in The New York Times. Google is worried that
more Americans are skipping searches to go straight to Amazon,
while Facebook frets about “Apple’s new data-privacy rules
eating into their advertising sales.” We might not like “shopping
where we chat with our Facebook gardening groups,” but
corporate interests will probably “change our habits by sheer
force of their will.”Commerce: The evolution of the shopping show
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Lawyers under surveillance
Lawyers are some of the earliest guinea pigs
for enhanced employee-monitoring software,
said Drew Harwell in The Washington Post—
and some of them worry that if even law firms
that defend workers’ rights are turning to the
software, “why won’t every other business?”
Contract attorneys are typically hired as
needed by law firms and often asked to “look
at sensitive files” under “strict confidential-
ity rules.” But working from home, they are
now subject to monitoring software that uses
a webcam to “record their facial movements
and surroundings and will send an alert”
even if the attorney’s focus begins to drift.
Several lawyers complained that the software
was error-prone and would “boot them out
of their work if they shifted slightly in their
chairs.” Another type of monitoring software,
RemoteDesk, logged “every online activity a
worker had done during the day, with each
classified as ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive.’”The unicorn bubble grows
The ‘unicorns’ just keep multiplying, said
Nicolas Rapp and Jessica Mathews in Fortune.
In 2015, when Fortune ran a cover story on
the proliferation of pre-IPO companies valued
at $1 billion or more, the magazine counted80 around the world. “That figure seems
quaint today.” In the second quarter alone,
136 startups achieved unicorn status, more
than in all of 2020. And “it’s not just VCs
sloshing money into startups: Hedge funds,
mutual funds, and sovereign wealth funds are
entering the private market,” competing for
“stakes in the most innovative companies.”
Tech investors are now often making decisions
on tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in
funding “in a matter of days, maybe a week.”Public-interest satellite maps
A mapping project at Google with a huge store-
house of data has become an essential tool for
climate scientists around the world, said Leslie
Kaufman in Bloomberg.com. Google Earth
Engine offers researchers a “vast trove of open-
source satellite imagery,” updated with 20,000
fresh images per day. A team of staff scientists
(Google won’t say how many) helps translate
massive data sets for pro bono clients, including
“conservation groups, city agencies, community
advocates, and researchers.” The information
has been helping science and advocacy groups
track everything from “how much water is
being consumed field by field” in parched re-
gions of the American West to the locations of
illegal logging on indigenous land in Peru.Bytes: What’s new in tech
Companies are turning to 3D print-
ing of replacement parts to skirt
the supply-chain crisis, said Stuart
Condie in The Wall Street Journal.
For many
industries,
a single
missing
or worn-
out com-
ponent
can shut
down
a whole production line, and
there’s no telling how long import-
ing a crucial part will take these
days. Firms that used to count on
quickly shipped replacements have
begun re-creating metal parts with
3D printing. Oil giant Chevron “was
so impressed with the manufac-
turing specifications produced by
AdditiveNow” that it “acquired
the intellectual property for use
on future projects.” 3D Metalforge,
a startup backed by Australian
energy giant Santos, showed off
its production of “a 20-inch wrench
printed in about 10 minutes.”Innovation of the week
Technology NEWS^21
Ramsay, online pitchman