TheChek News Flow

I you want to know more about Lithium have a look to this article from Jan 2017 but very well detailed.

I think Groupe Bollore could be a good alternative also as if there is a shortage of Lithium or Lithim start to be too expensive, industrials will look to alternative technology...Blue Solution is one

comapny were Ipo in 2013 @ 14.50 and bought back recently by Bollore a 18

Company was valued at 520mil euros

Blue Solution is very small in groupe Bollore Valuation (500mil vs 12bil mkt cap) but could be a decent catalyst fro growth ion the next few years.

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Happy Returns has raised a $4 million Series A investment.

When Amazon acquired Whole Foods last month, it bought more than a grocery business; it also purchased 400-plus stores that could serve as return points for Amazon orders.

Now, a startup called Happy Returns is building a nationwide network of return points inside malls and mom-and-pop stores in an attempt to give other e-commerce sites a similar footprint.

The company has struck deals with several mall companies like Simon and Westfield to accept returns at existing Guest Services counters or to rent out space for a Happy Returns return desk in their shopping centers. The startup now has 40 return locations across 14 metro areas in the U.S. and is working on adding many more.

On the other side of the network, Happy Returns is signing up young e-commerce sites with few or no physical stores — like Everlane, Eloquii and Chubbies — to allow their customers to return items to malls near them.

The end goal is to play matchmaker between online retailers and brick-and-mortar stores to benefit three constituencies: E-commerce sites, by reducing their return costs — Happy Returns charges them a per-order fee that’s lower than the cost the site would pay to offer a free mailed-in return to its customer; malls and brick-and-mortar stores, by boosting their foot traffic; and online shoppers by giving them a way to get quick refunds without the need to print out a return label or find a box in which to ship an order back.

“We’ve been saying for two years, returns are an overlooked friction point in the e-commerce experience,” co-founder and CEO David Sobie said. “If you ask people what they want in returns, it’s free, fast, easy and in-person.”

To help fund the expansion of their returns network, Happy Returns recently raised a $4 million Series A led by Upfront Ventures. The venture firm’s partner Greg Bettinelli has joined the startup’s board, as has Bonobos co-founder and former Trunk Club CEO Brian Spaly.

In addition to the 30 mall locations, Happy Returns has also partnered with 10 small brick-and-mortar shops that want extra foot traffic to their stores and which are not competitive with any of Happy Returns’ e-commerce partners. This experiment may not work, as finding the right type of shop that is interested is time-consuming.

But if it does, this approach will help Happy Returns reduce costs as it scales its network; the startup does not pay these shops like it does with malls — the stores are simply interested in getting potential new customers into their shops. About one in four who are coming to return a package end up buying something from the shop.

Another challenge to the model is that Happy Returns relies on its e-commerce partners to market the return option to online shoppers. So far, most haven’t built it into the return flow on their sites, making it harder for online shoppers to discover. But if Happy Returns continues to grow its network of return sites and truly does reduce return costs in the process, you’d expect more e-commerce partners to more prominently feature the option.

An excerpt from the new book, “Streampunks: YouTube and the Rebels Remaking Media,” by the chief business officer at YouTube.

Around the time of YouTube’s founding in 2005, I was working at Netflix. Having worked my way up from a talent agency mailroom to jobs at Mutual Film Company and HBO, I joined Netflix convinced that the company would revolutionize home entertainment and upend rental chains such as Blockbuster. And in the early 2000s, that vision came to life. But once the company’s DVD mail-order business had really established itself, I began to get a little bored.

One day, my bosses, Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings, asked for a volunteer to help lead a new side project: Instead of mailing out physical DVDs to customers, could we figure out a way for our customers to view films and TV shows digitally, over the Internet?

Now, volunteering to lead a new initiative is a very stupid thing to do at Netflix. The company’s culture prides itself on relentless focus, dispassionately eliminating business initiatives that are not core to the overall strategy. You can work on something for years only to find that project mothballed during a quick meeting. But I was hungry for a challenge, so I offered to take on the new project. I was the only volunteer.

It wasn’t the first time that Netflix had evaluated an internet-only option, but only in the mid-2000s did data speeds and bandwidth costs finally reach the point where asking users to download an entire movie online no longer seemed like a crazy idea. The initial thinking was that we would create and supply customers with a “Netflix box” that they could use to download movies overnight to watch the next day. It was incredibly difficult to acquire the download rights to movies, just as it was difficult to create the new box and service, but by 2005, we were finally ready to launch.

Then I saw YouTube for the first time. More precisely, I saw grainy videos of snowboarding accidents and people lighting their kitchens on fire, and I saw that those videos were attracting massive viewership numbers, making YouTube one of the fastest-growing sites on the internet. We at Netflix — along with everyone else in the industry at the time — were focused on delivering movies to people in the highest quality available.

But YouTube clearly demonstrated that people were willing to trade fidelity for convenience and speed. Witnessing the popularity of YouTube was a revelation. And it caused us to stop our launch and pivot to a service that would allow consumers to stream movies remotely instead of downloading them. That pivot took two long years, during which we had to renegotiate all our rights and build an entirely new architecture to host and serve content. We had to transform our “Netflix box” from a hard drive that would download video to one that would stream it.* But finally, in 2007, we launched Netflix streaming because we saw the potential that YouTube presented.

Every month, YouTube seemed to be growing faster, launching in new markets, increasing its number of views and attracting more and more people to share videos. In 2011, when I left Netflix to join YouTube, around 40 hours of video were being uploaded every minute. In 2017, the number has grown over tenfold.

But as powerful as YouTube’s idea of free, global distribution of video was, I don’t think it alone was enough to lead to the streampunk era we live in now. I think there were three other developments that have been core to explaining the success of stars such as “Superwoman.”

The first has to do with a decision YouTube made very early in its history — to pay its creators.

Any new-media venture suffers from the same issue: How can it provide content that will attract viewers? That’s true whether you’re starting a blog, a magazine, a TV networ, or a video-streaming service. Your first instinct may be to pay someone noteworthy to create content for you, using an established brand to attract attention to yours.

When YouTube first started, its approach was no different. In addition to hosting all the videos that users uploaded, YouTube signed deals with NBC as well as smaller players such as CollegeHumor.com, giving them a share of advertising revenue in return for content they uploaded to the site.

But then YouTube made a novel decision: In 2007, it launched the Partner Program, extending the sharing of ad revenue to creators of all kinds, not just to established media companies. If you reached a certain number of views or subscribers, you could give YouTube the right to sell advertising against your videos and receive the majority of the money it earned from your channel’s traffic.

If you speak to people who were at YouTube in those early days, the creation of the Partner Program wasn’t primarily a business decision. Instead it was about fulfilling the egalitarian promise of anyone being able to create content.

George Strompolos, currently the CEO of the media company Fullscreen, helped create the Partner Program. He told me that the company “wanted to ensure that YouTube would be a home for new voices, not just to get seen but hopefully to generate some income and earn a full-time living.” It was one thing to give people an opportunity to connect with an audience; it was another to give them a paycheck.

There’s a lot of discussion today about the sharing economy and what companies such as Uber, Lyft and TaskRabbit owe to their employees. But long before there was a sharing economy, there was a social economy. That economy functions because users supply content (posts, tweets, pics, Snaps, Vines or videos), people tune in in massive numbers to see that content, and advertisers pay to run ads against that content to get their products in front of viewers. Without the voluntary contributions of billions of people, the social economy would collapse. But sadly, to date, YouTube is the only significant player in the social economy that pays all its creators a share of the advertising revenue their content generates.

In just over a decade, the scale of YouTube’s partner payments has become massive. Though some paychecks are smaller than others, to date we’ve paid out billions of dollars to content creators of all sizes. That money has helped anchor the growth of several new media properties, from Vice to BuzzFeed to George’s company, Fullscreen. It has helped bolster the bottom lines of traditional media companies and music labels (we’ve paid out $3 billion to the music industry alone). And it has created an entire business-to-business layer of service-oriented firms that provide the infrastructure for internet video to thrive, offering rights-management support, data analysis and specialized ad technology.

But the most significant consequence of YouTube’s revenue sharing has been the democratization of the job of internet content creator. Every month, we deposit money into the accounts of millions of creators around the world. That money is what helps a streampunk get his or her start. It’s what changes the act of making videos from a hobby to a trade. It’s what transforms a career in entertainment from an option available only to the well-connected or very lucky to a path that is open to almost anyone.

* Weeks before the launch of its streaming service, Netflix spun off the “box” into its own company, called Roku; again, a demonstration of the company’s strong desire to focus on its core competencies.

It’s the end of the summer and most employees at Condé Nast are either on vacation or leisurely working through the remaining days leading up to Labor Day weekend. The same is true at Vogue, which sits on the 25th floor of One World Trade Center in New York — but there’s a different sort of energy, a quiet, yet hurried one. The sound of hangers skimming the metal poles of clothing racks intermingles with chatter from editors, who are finishing up end-of-the-year projects while their boss, Anna Wintour, is on holiday, enjoying the last relaxing days before the rush begins for New York Fashion Week and then London, Milan and Paris.

Their work will close out an important year for Vogue, which is feting its 125th anniversary with a host of collaborations, a new conference and editorial projects that nod to the magazine’s past and current mission. The anniversary also comes at a challenging time for print media and fashion magazines in particular, which are still honing their digital voices while working to develop new revenue-generating brand extensions in the face of waning print advertising.

For Vogue, which many view as the crown jewel of Condé Nast, the occasion has provided a moment of reflection on what the publication means today and whether it still holds the same gravitas as it did decades earlier.

Nobody is better able to answer that question than Wintour, who’s been the magazine’s editor in chief since 1988 and, for the last four years, also artistic directorof Condé Nast, a company where she built her reputation as one of the most cunning, influential and intimidating editors in fashion — and became a pop culture figure around the world in the process.

But the landscape has changed since Wintour began her Condé career at Vogue 34 years ago.

Speaking broadly, she thoughtfully addressed the dominant force that is sapping power away from magazines — even hers — explaining that technology has given a platform to everyone, creating the effect of “information overload.”

“I think we’re living, in terms of media, in a very democratic age, but I think that we still look at everything through the lens of Vogue and through our own point of view,” she said, of her title’s mission today. “In the fact that Vogue is someone that can help guide enormous audiences through this fascinating world, I would like to think we are as influential and actually are now reaching so many more people than we ever dreamt of back in the Fifties or the Sixties.”

When asked if she feels as influential as ever, Wintour, whose power-playing persona is the red meat of every Hollywood characterization of a bitchy fashion person (exhibit A: “The Devil Wears Prada”), paused. “Personally?,” she said sheepishly. “That is something I never think about.”

Part of Vogue’s mission, according to Wintour, is to give its audience a “point of view and a point of difference,” via its collaborations with celebrities, brands, designers and artists, among others. The editor pointed to Vogue’s September issue as an example, which features Jennifer Lawrence on the cover. Even though Lawrence was far from an edgy choice, Wintour explained that the “iconic” American actress could be depicted in a Vogue way by tapping today’s great photographers for additional cover images. In a twist, Vogue also asked artist John Currin to paint a portrait of Lawrence. That work of art would become one of the multiple covers of the issue. The issue is emblematic of how Wintour thinks about print these days, namely that it has to be “memorable” and “be something you can’t find so easily online.”

Elaborating, Wintour said, “I think what you have to do in print is to create even more memorable images and more memorable pieces because what one consumes online or in social has a much shorter shelf life, so to speak, so what print has to have is no more weight, but it has to be something that you can’t find so easily online. It has to really stand for print.

“I get asked all the time, what do you do differently than 10 years ago or what will you do differently in the years to come? In the years to come, I have no idea. Did you know we’d be living in an Instagram age or a Snapchat age five years ago? I mean, I’m not an engineer. I don’t work in Silicon Valley. I’m thrilled there are people who can create these amazing channels and our job is to think how we can best use them to create the best content that we possibly, possibly can.”

But what signals the new era for Vogue, and other print publications, is what the title has to build around the anniversary. In the old days, a 125th anniversary issue (or even the September issue alone) would suffice, since it would be telephone-book thick, (remember telephone books?), with ads that would guarantee the magazine and Condé would have a successful year.

No longer. The magazine now is supplementary to a number of other revenue-generating branded licensed product deals Vogue has done for the anniversary with a mix of brands, including Pressed Juicery juices, Comme Des Garçons pochettes, a Lord & Taylor capsule collection designed by Karl Lagerfeld, a beauty box from Birchbox, Soludos espadrilles, colorful sweatshirts from Kith, tote bags by Marni and a long-sleeve T that says: “Never Trust a Vogue Girl” designed by Hood by Air, among others.

“Revenue is revenue,” said Vogue chief business officer Susan Plagemann. When asked if the high-low mélange was off-brand for Vogue, she said: “It’s not about do we do something for the sake of doing it but what keeps the integrity of who we are.”

She offered up the Met Gala special edition publication as a new-ish successful example of an on-brand revenue driver, as well as the September issue, which retails for a pricey $9.99. Both speak to “key moments” in which consumers “can’t live without us,” Plagemann explained.

Despite Vogue’s ability to trade on the influence of its famed editor, its storied past and new brand extensions, the magazine, like its rivals, is feeling the pain of the volatile media landscape, in which consumers are buying less print and reading a variety of digital publications.

In the first half of 2017, Vogue’s paid and verified circulation totaled 1.1 million, flat with the year-ago period, as newsstand sales totaled 102,557, a 25.7 percent drop, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. In 2016, Vogue’s total paid and verified circulation was to 1.2 million, a 1.4 percent dip from 2015, on newsstand sales of 139,099, a slide of 28.3 percent.

On the web, Vogue’s U.S. site has also struggled to massively move the needle given its large staff of roughly 60 digital reporters and other resources. From January to July, the title’s average monthly unique web visitors equaled 6.2 million, up 1.2 million from the same period in 2016. The site hit its all-time traffic high in the last two years with 7.5 million uniques in May, thanks to the Met Gala, but that figure is dwarfed by some of the bigger players at Condé Nast, such as The New Yorker, Wired and Vanity Fair. (Vogue’s international web footprint is larger than the U.S. site, a spokeswoman said, but declined to provide figures).

Complicating matters is that 90 percent of vogue.com readers do not read Vogue in print, a statistic that Plagemann said she finds “awesome” and Sally Singer, Vogue’s creative digital director, is energized by. In order to attract and retain new readers, Singer said she spends time developing the aesthetics and utility of Vogue’s online platforms. Editorially, her way of driving traffic is bit harder to characterize.

“You want to be brilliant and ubiquitous,” Singer said of her digital mantra. “I never think this [story] is only sitting on Vogue, I say, this is sitting. So it’s got to sit there alongside the other publications I respect, and the other world I respect in terms of discourse.”

Her focus isn’t about driving traffic through viral news, which she calls a “cheap, fast strategy,” nor is she about breaking news.

“That’s just cheap traffic,” she said of reporting rumors. “Usually when another publication has the scoop in fashion, we know it. We’ve already got it but we won’t run it until it’s confirmed, like actually confirmed by the house.”

Instead, Singer prefers to shed light on cultural, political and fashion and style stories through reporting or “real opinion,” or original photos or video produced by Vogue.

For the anniversary, Singer’s team has depicted diversity through photo packages called “American Women.” Those photos showcase a diverse range of women from different socioeconomic backgrounds, races and sexual orientations.

Indeed, representing diversity is a mission now at Vogue and to some extent at Condé Nast, which has been criticized — along with other fashion-centric magazine publishers — for their lack of it up until now. The publisher has made an effort, shepherded by Wintour, to hire editors in chief of color, and it recently formed a diversity committee led by Wintour and The New Yorker’s David Remnick.

“I think that any media company today has a responsibility to reflect the world that we are all living in. That is about diversity of sexuality, it’s about diversity of race, it’s about diversity of belief,” Wintour said, while sidestepping a request to comment on Naomi Campbell’s recent statement about the lack of diversity at British Vogue prior to the arrival of new editor in chief Edward Enninful. “I think there is no question that Condé Nast feels very strongly that we all have a responsibility to support and respect that diversity. I think that you could certainly look at what many titles at Condé Nast have done and understand that.”

As Condé continues to evolve with the times and a new generation of editors are ushered in while old hands like Graydon Carter and Robbie Myers are heading for the door, there is a natural question about Vogue and its identity — and the role that Wintour plays in fashion and beyond when she ultimately retires. Can anyone fill her designer shoes?

“I’m the last person to answer that question,” Wintour said. “I really don’t think I’m the right person to answer that question.”

On Oct. 1, a number of the brand’s faces, models and fashion icons will walk the tony shopping avenue.

PARIS — L’Oréal Paris plans to turn the Avenue des Champs-Élysées into a fashion runway on Oct. 1 in a project conceived with La Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode and the backing of the Paris mayor’s office.

Dubbed Le Défilé L’Oréal Paris, it is billed as the first runway down the French capital’s tony shopping street. On the catwalk will be a number of L’Oréal Paris spokespeople, including Jane Fonda, Doutzen Kroes, Maria Borges and Soo Joo Park; new faces; models sporting 70 hair and makeup looks — twists on Parisian chic; fashion icons, and influencers, according to the brand.

The program is done in partnership with the Chopard jewelry brand and 18 established and emerging fashion houses.

“This is a celebration of Paris, the heart of our brand, and the fashion-beauty synergy that drives creativity forward in this city,” said Pierre-Emmanuel Angeloglou, L’Oréal Paris global brand president, in a statement. “Bringing the show onto the most famous street of Paris is a way of opening up the worlds of fashion and beauty like never before. Le Défilé L’Oréal Paris is truly open to all, and we are proud to cast models and spokespersons from all around the world, and from diverse backgrounds to represent beauty for everyone.”

Six hundred people will be seated to watch the show, and thousands more are expected to look on.

The makeup looks parading down the runway will be created by Val Garland, the newly minted L’Oréal Paris global makeup director. Hairstyles are to be conceived by Stéphane Lancien, global hair director for the brand.

The duo will hold two live master classes right after the presentation, which will be viewable on social media. There are also to be four pop-up hair and makeup booths — manned by 24 beauty experts, wielding 9,545 L’Oréal Paris products — dotting the Champs-Élysées for a see now, try now beauty experience.

For the next Paris Fashion Week, which begins on Sept. 26, L’Oréal Paris will be involved in hair and makeup backstage at a dozen shows. The brand plans — through its social channels — to give viewers a glimpse of what happens behind the scenes at fashion displays, runway beauty tips and how-to advice.

Also during fashion week, on Sept. 28, L’Oréal Paris and Balmain will co-host The Invincible Party in celebration of the brands’ joint lipstick collection, called Color Riche. The 12-unit line, developed with Balmain’s creative director Olivier Rousteing, gleaned inspiration from three runway themes key to the fashion label.

Earlier in the day, L’Oréal Paris will be backstage at the Balmain spring 2018 show.

L’Oréal Paris first became a Paris Fashion Week sponsor in early 2016