Looks like we’ll be back up and running by tomorrow. WordPress got a major update – Yikes.

Fascinating report from Indian e-commerce startup Flipkart showing how they assess your online shopping cart before you click to buy.

It’s being done in response to the trend of easy returns for fashion items. The much higher return rate for online retailers (vs. brick and mortar) has been a disaster. Figuring out how to minimize those returns is crucial for online retailers’ survival.

Through machine learning, they’ve been able to accurately determine what you will return based on the patterns of what you’ve looked at online, what you’ve put in your shopping cart, plus your actual size and fit (more accurate than you are even aware of yourself). With that information, they can change your returns behavior.

Here are the major highlights of the study:

In less than 70 milliseconds, the computer can decide, how much of a risk of a return you are.

Based on your past shopping/return patterns, they decide on reward or punishment, e.g., increasing your shipping charges, as a deterrent, or offering you a coupon as an incentive to make your purchase non-returnable.

To get real-time predictions, the researchers put together a “fully-connected” deep neural network, which is trained on numerous factors about products and customers. That trained model will then produce the instantaneous assessment of the customers’ cart to predict the probability of returns e.g.

• How many times a given article of clothing has been returned by anyone
• How many similar things you’ve put in your cart, e.g., the same shirt in different colors (doubling-up of items is a leading indicator of higher returns).
• The more items a person has in a cart, the higher the return rate. More than five products in the cart? Return rate goes up to 72%, whereas a cart with one product has return chances of 9%.

Because sizing is the #1 reason for returns, the researchers have developed something called a “personalized sizing latent feature.”

• They put the info from all your online purchases, over time, into the network which allows them to examine what you’ve got in your cart and compare your intended purchases to “sizing vectors which explain your body shape & fit for different brands & products.”
• Running all this info through the neural network, the program creates a probability score of potential returns.
• The model predicts the return probability for a cart as well as the exact number of products that will be returned from that cart. Based on that prediction, the decision is made on what rewards and punishments to implement, if any.

If you shop online for apparel and footwear, this ZDNet article is a must-read. Absolutely fascinating!

Read on below for more on how companies are growing their businesses by cultivating a data culture.

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I just discovered this fantastic site – VISUAL CAPITALIST. Highly recommend if tech and startups are your thing.

For this survey, they asked 529 tech founders which startups would be the most successful and the most valuable over the next ten years.

• The big winner was Stripe (the payments startup).
• It was cited by 19% of the founders.
• Stripe was valued at $1.8 billion in 2013 and is currently valued at $22.5 billion.
• Much less confidence in WeWork (6.3%), Uber (5.3%), Lyft (4.7%) or Pinterest (1.6%)

However, when it comes to predicting which company will produce the next generation of startup founders as influential as the PayPal Mafia, one company stands above the rest:

• Uber is cited by 22.5% as the company most likely to beget the next group of notable founders (although the company itself was not considered as valuable or successful as Stripe).
• Another interesting aside is how few of the founders expect Amazon (1.1%) or WeWork (1.8%) to foster this kind of startup talent.

Other Findings:

• Over 60% of founders believe that the world is in a technology bubble, with evenly split reviews on whether it’s either nowhere close or very close to popping.
• 57% of founders believe the U.S. will continue to dominate the tech world, while 39% predict China’s growth will become the world’s hub for tech innovation by 2028.

Link here to visualcapitalist.com complete with infographics and more detailed info on this tech founders survey.

At the moment, I’m an index-finger typer but just got schooled on how outdated that makes me look. Two-thumb typing here I come. This will also be a great test as to whether you can teach an old dog new tricks!

So why do I even care? Well, a friend of mine recently commented on my index-finger-pecking, and he was a bit shocked by this “senior” phone habit of mine.

I did some research, and he is indeed right. How you hold your phone and which fingers you use to type, signify not only age but how tech-savvy you are and while I’m no tech genius, I do pride myself on being reasonably up-to-date.

I am now fully on board with updating my phone usage style. However, it won’t be easy. After just a few days, I am finding it a constant struggle to make this change. I did add my thumb to my touch ID, so we’ll see if that helps. But changing a ten-year habit is not easy.

While on the subject of tech habits and norms, I also want to share an amazingly informative (and hysterically snarky) article on Silicon Speak from The Guardian. And in the context of today’s post, also adding info on the top-ranked social-media-using CEOs. Doug McMillon of Walmart (one of my favorites because he does his own posts) ranked #1. I bet he’s a two-thumb typer even though he is 52 (which surprised me – he looks like he’s barely in his 30s).

Read on below.

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And to make matters worse, we’re going to start seeing branded content posts from “influencers” who we don’t even follow (like Bridgett from Noom – above).

I understand social media can’t (and shouldn’t) be free but force-feeding us as many lousy ads as can be squeezed into our stories and posts is turning Instagram into garbage. The ads shown above are ones I found on my feed yesterday – every second post is an ad! And I don’t have an iota of interest in any of them.

I’m not one of those people who is opposed to all ads on principle. I follow a slew of brands and influencers, e.g., Wildfang, Akimoto Kozue, Morgenstern’s. The difference is that those brands offer something of interest to me, and it’s solely my decision to follow them. They are not being foisted on me by the overlords of Instagram.

For those of you who haven’t heard the latest news, Instagram just introduced a branded content feature to bring sponsored influencer posts to our newsfeeds—whether we follow those influencer accounts or not!

Instagram claims 68% of its users want to interact with creators. While that might be true in theory, I find it hard to believe that people using Instagram would equate finding a sponsored post in their feed as “interacting with a creator.”

Per emarketer

• 69% of US marketers plan to spend most of their influencer budget on Instagram.
• Before the Facebook-owned social network introduced this branded content feature, there was no direct revenue stream for the platform to make money off the 500,000 active influencers on the platform.

From Instagram’s Business Blog:

Brands/Advertisers will work in tandem with their influencers to turn the influencer’s content into ads which the brand will then pay to have posted as an ad – to one and all.

Read on below for more on how this horrid branded content strategy will work.

Read More >

I discovered James Wang recently when he was a guest on CNBC’s Closing Bell and Fast Money.

He’s a brilliant tech analyst. Not only does he know his stuff, he’s obsessed with it. He’s one of those rare people who can talk about amazingly complicated new technologies and make it easy to understand. And just as importantly, he makes it sound fascinating. He leaves you wanting to learn more.

James is an analyst at ARK Invest. He’s on their Next Generation Internet team. His specialty is artificial intelligence and the next wave of the internet.

Before that, he worked for nine years at NVIDIA, where he helped launch GeForce Experience, a PC gaming application with over 80 million users. He has written about the technology industry since 2000 for various publications.

He’s a welcome new addition to CNBC and is, in my opinion, in the top echelon of contributors. I’d go so far as to say he’s on a par with another favorite of mine, Carter Braxton Worth who has been ranked the #1 Technical Analyst by Institutional Investor for the last two years. James Wang is on that same level!

I follow James on Twitter – and you should too. His feed is one of the best, highly informative, and yet fun and easy to read. I learn something every single time he posts (link here).