Product Digest

We operate at scale at Polyvore: 20M users, on a site that pulls in huge amounts of data - millions of products - every day. Our ability to make this data useful to ourselves, our users, and our customers, is crucial to our continued growth and profitability. You’ll be responsible for enabling Polyvore to do even more with our data, by building systems which will do things like: -improve search relevance using machine learning. -improve search infrastructure (scaling for example). -improve ranking features (keyword extraction using machine learning, for example). Desired Skills and Experience BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent Experience with Search (ranking or search infrastruture). Write solid code (Java, Perl/Python). Interest in big data challenges. Past experience working with large scale websites. Familiarity with current research in information retrieval, machine learning, data extraction and related fields. Nice to have Solr and/or Lucene experience is a big plus. Experience at e-commerce company is a plus. Experience with a scripting language like Perl or Python. Experience with Hadoop/Pig/Hive or scientific computing languages such as Mahout and R.

They’re not the only ones, with some of the most chic women in the world clamouring to be on the cover of the ASOS magazine, and Vogue magazine calling it ‘couture on the high street’. This recent trend of celebrity endorsement is particularly ironic considering the brand’s origins. The brainchild of Nick Robertson, the website was created after a colleague told Robertson that when the TV show Friends first aired, thousands of viewers rang the production company, asking where they could buy the photo frame that hung on the back of Monica and Rachel’s door. Seeing a gap in the market, Robertson launched ‘As Seen on Screen’ in 2000, selling near perfect copies of outfits worn by celebrities on TV shows and movies. Although the early years were somewhat difficult, Robertson, now the CEO of the company, believes the timing was perfect, saying that “Maybe we started a little early but by the time broadband took off in 2005/2006, we were up and running already.” With the help of its 40 employees, ASOS was attempting to re-brand, positioning itself as a sort of online fashion editor, choosing the best items from other retailers and grouping them, along with its own brand items, into categories according to the latest trends.

Digg is currently testing a system which would see the viral news aggregator running its own original content on the Digg.com homepage, the company confirms to us today. This would be a new direction for the betaworks-backed service, which has historically collected the most interesting stories from around the web on its site, where they’re then voted on by Digg users. We first noticed the test today, when a story on the Digg homepage had an interesting source: not another news website or blog, but Digg.com itself. Clicking through on the link to the post in question – an interesting longer read about why audio content never goes viral - and we found the resulting page was branded as a “Digg Original.” According to Digg’s Creative and Editorial Director, David Weiner, Digg Originals are still in the experimental phase. “We look at Digg as having the potential to be like any other editorial outlet that features freelancer content,” he says. “This was a piece we commissioned to be written for Digg, so there was never any question of where else this could live.”

For about the last year and a half, Google has let you mute display ads they don’t like. Just click the little [x] button and it’s gone and will never be shown to you again. That’s a pretty useful solution for noisy ads you really, really hate, despite the fact that they promise to show you that one weird trick to finally lose all your belly fat. Google’s users have already muted “millions of ads,” the company says, and it’s using this information as a signal to “make ads more relevant and useful.” To get even more data about how users interact with its ads, you will now also be able to give Google a bit more info about why you didn’t like an ad. Over the next few weeks, Google will roll out an in-ad survey that will pop up when you hit the mute button. These surveys, Google says, will help it learn more about user preferences and why they mute ads. Based on Google’s screenshots, it will only give users three choices per survey, but it looks like the process could be spread out over multiple steps. As far as I can see, users don’t have to actually finish these surveys to mute an ad. Most people will think they have to, however, so this will probably give Google quite a bit of new data to fine-tune its ad targeting.

Skimlinks, a company that helps online publishers make money through affiliate links, says that it had a record year, driving more than $500 million in e-commerce sales. A spokesperson told me that three quarters of Skimlinks sales go through affiliate networks that report e-commerce sales value, and they reported $402.3 million in sales driven by Skimlinks in 2013. However, since there are other networks that don’t report sales value, the company is estimating that it drove more than $500 million total for the year (more specifically, based on historical analysis, the company says the number was probably between $502 million and $536 million). That’s about double the sales from last year. Skimlinks’ technology includes the ability to convert regular links and relevant words into affiliate links (in other words, links where the publisher is paid a commission for driving purchases). Recent additions include last fall’s launch of Skimlinks Editor, a browser plugin that allows publishers to compare the current affiliate commission rates across different merchants. In a conversation with CEO Alicia Navarro before the launch, and in follow-up emails with a company spokesperson, Skimlinks emphasized that the Editor product is the first step toward “intelligent linking,” i.e., links that are automatically updated and don’t require any work from the writer, editor, or publisher: “They won’t have to find products or list prices; and readers won’t be faced with dead links or redirects or outdated pricing.”

Google released a report on their AdWords blog today detailing just how vehemently they are cracking down on “bad actors” who are abusing the online advertising services. Mike Hochberg, Director of Ads Engineering at Google, states: We’ve allocated substantial technical, financial, and human resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web. Hundreds of our engineers, policy experts and others have dedicated their careers to this work. Even with a team that large the amount of ads they managed to remove last year is still surprisingly substantial. Over 350 million bad ads were removed from Google’s systems in 2013. To put that in perspective, Hochberg says, if someone looked at each of the bad ads for one second, it would take them more than ten years to see them all. By comparison, 220 million bad ads were removed in 2012. What’s also notable in this report is that the bad ads are coming from far fewer sources. Just 270,000 advertisers were banned in 2013 compared to 850,000 in 2012. Google attributes this decline to scammers being stopped by safety screens and moving on to less secure targets. Read more at http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-cracking-bad-advertising-practices-350-million-ads-removed/86595/#sy8svOZIhlCoK7gH.99

The legacy of the past year’s Big Data buzz is clear to see. The majority of marketers today are fully engaged with the term, and many have even mastered the difficult balancing act between ambitious theorising and practical application, successfully incorporating Big Data usage into their business strategies. The repeated refrain of “data is nothing without insight,” has become familiar ground for retailers who are now savvy to the importance of harnessing readily available information, both internal and external to their businesses, and using it to understand their customers better. It seems, however, that a different side of the Big Data coin remains largely unexplored. The use of unstructured data, collected from sources such as social media, internet forums and LinkedIn, is still in its infancy within the commercial world, but is rapidly evolving along with the technology created to measure and refine it. This type of data has the potential for rich and powerful insights and has several discernible advantages over the kinds of information marketers are now accustomed to dealing with. Social media is the richest source of up-to-date customer insight in the world of unstructured data; it can act as a real-time window onto how people are feeling, behaving and communicating with one another. Most major agencies and brands have been using some form of sentiment analysis for the past several years to ‘listen’ to customers by monitoring billions of social media conversations and examining linguistics to find out how customers are feeling toward a particular product or service they provide.

Victoria Beckham has confirmed that she will open her eponymous brand's first bricks-and-mortar store on London's Dover Street in the autumn. Related articles Victoria, Victoria Beckham spring/summer 2014 collection in pictures Victoria Beckham's sister line helps take label into the black New York Fashion Week: Victoria Beckham spring/summer 2014 in pictures New York Fashion Week: Victoria Beckham spring/summer 2014 Victoria Beckham's massive statement dress Victoria Beckham to open fashion boutique in London's Mayfair The designer has hired architect Farshid Moussavi, whose previous projects include the Olympic Park, to revamp the 7,000 sq ft, three-floor space, which sits opposite famed conceptual fashion store Dover Street Market. Plans include "drilling a massive hole through the middle" of the building's interior, Beckham told WWD . "I think the time is now because I know my customer," she commented; her brand is now five years old. "It's young and cool," she said of the location. "There are great galleries in the area. There's Dover Street Market directly opposite of us, which is not a bad thing."

According to industry data published last week, one sector where there was a clear growth during the holiday season was the online sales of non-food products, which grew 19.2 percent, the highest growth in the past four years. Data published by IMRG shows an 18 percent year-on-year growth, with British consumers spending 11 billion pounds online in December 2013, up from 9 billion pounds spend in December 2012. HowUK retailers miss out on 1.5 billion pounds in m-commerceever, a report published by Jumio, credentials management company, indicates that although British retailers enjoyed the most successful mobile holiday season to date, they still missed out on nearly 1.5 billion pounds in sales due to outdated mobile payment experience or slow mobile sites. Jumio data analysis indicates that the lost sales were equal to over 50 percent of total mobile commerce profits, despite IMRG calling 2013 'the year of the mobile'. 27 percent of all online sales in December made via mobile device The IMRG Capgemini e-retail Sales Index published this week revealed that 27 percent of all online sales recorded last December came from a mobile device and equated to 3 billion pounds, double the amount spent during the same month in 2012. This data is supported by the figures released by UK retailers, with multichannel retailers such as John Lewis, House of Fraser and Next all reporting positive Christmas trading, due to strong e-commerce and m-commerce sales. Tina Spooner, chief information officer at IMRG commented: “Shopping has become a leisurely activity for many of us and mobile devices have fundamentally altered the way that consumers engage with brands. Often we browse on our smartphones during our morning commute and ‘sofa surf’ in the evenings on our tablet devices. With mobile and tablets now accounting for almost 4 in 10 visits to e-retail websites and 27 percent of the UK online retail market, we expect growth to continue throughout 2014 with m-retail set to account for 30 percent of online sales during the first quarter.”

Amazon dropped a bomb yesterday when they announced that Amazon Product Ads (their CPC product advertising program) would be listed alongside its Marketplace listings. This is where Amazon will start to roll out their Amazon Product Ad (APA) listings: amazon-product-ads-new-placement For context, this is where Product Ads show up now (note how far down the scroll bar is): amazon-product-ads-placement What we see is a major improvement in visibility.

Last year, we noticed a trend of commercial retail brands deciding to show during Fashion Month — primarily during New York Fashion Week — and one of them was Whistles, which showed in London for the second time last season, though not on the official calendar. Well, the decision seems to have paid off. The British high street retailer announced Friday that it would show its Fall 2014 collection as part of the official London Fashion Week schedule for the first time. And coincidentally, another more commercially-minded brand announced today that it, too, would be showing that week: Hunter Boots. Yep, the Welly purveyors are expanding into ready-to-wear. Stay tuned. Commercial brands like Hunter and Whistles, which operates an e-commerce site and stores throughout Europe, have a lot of potential reasons for showing during Fashion Week despite not quite fitting in with the “designers” we expect to see there. One is to get the validation that potentially comes with being associated with an event like New York or London Fashion Week. Another is that it puts the designer on an international stage, giving brands who want to expand internationally the opportunity to present to press and buyers from across the globe. For instance, that’s why J. Crew decided to start showing on the NYFW calendar, and now they’re in London. Fingers crossed this is a sign that Whistles is coming to the states.

Amazon’s plans for autonomous flying delivery drones are so last year. The ecommerce juggernaut is purportedly working on something far more dystopian: pre-shipment. Amazon has filed a patent for a shipping system designed to cut delivery times by predicting what buyers are going to buy before they buy it — and shipping products in their general direction, or even right to their door, before the sales click even (or ever) falls. Which really is one more step towards cutting out human agency entirely from the ecommerce roundabout. Why not have machines autonomously buy stuff from other machines and have a third set of autonomous bots deliver it — while the quaking flesh recipients who open the door meekly accept whatever packages they are getting in the hopes that yet more machines won’t decide today is the day to harvest their organs. [Aaaand right on cue, the doorbell rings. It's a delivery man, with -- you guessed it -- an Amazon parcel for me. This interaction should be entirely normal but there's a distinctly sinister undertone, even though I'm 99.9% sure that the thing inside the box is something I ordered last week, not something Amazon thinks I'll want to order next week. Or the thing I ordered a few minutes ago. But that, presumably, is exactly where Amazon is aiming to go.]

1st Dibs An astoundingly good source of vintage clothes and jewellery, from extremely rare fashion finds to precious costume jewels, from specialist dealers across America. 1stdibs.com Related articles The 50 best boutiques outside London 50 best beauty buys under £10 40 best natural beauty products Ally Capellino Beautiful, understated British accessories for men and women, from elegant everyday bags, belts and purses to utilitarian back-packs and everything in between. allycapellino.co.uk Anya Hindmarch As you would expect from the queen of personalisation, many of the super-luxurious bags and accessories on this site can be embossed with monograms and messages. You can order the Be A Bag pieces online too. anyahindmarch.com APC Gamine womenswear, cool menswear with a street vibe and fabulous interiors items, from hand-made quilts to delicious candles, are to be found on the site of this preppy Parisian stalwart. apc.fr Asos This is young, fast fashion on a vast scale, but there are also many gems to be found, from numerous collaborations to a great designer boutique selling smaller labels such as Emma Cook, Peter Jensen, Sonia by Sonia Rykiel and Sessun. asos.com

via Facts about eCommerce Retail payments on mobile devices will reach $707B by 2018, up from $182B in 2013

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via Drapers - News Burberry has credited investment in marketing, technology and customer service for a 14% increase in revenues for the three months to December 31.