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The AI Europe conference, organised by Events Corp, was located on the third floor of the Queen Elizabeth II conference halls (just off Houses of Parliament) in central London on Nov 21-22, 2017. Score: 3/5, worth a visit if you are local (1/5 = go if you need to get out of the office; 5/5 you’re missing out by not going) Note: We did not listen to any of the presentations. Our primary goal was to see the exhibiting companies and have conversations. It is also worth noting that our main interest is to talk to retail related technology companies,...

Retail Technology: A Visual Future? This is a review of startup companies that we randomly met or which presented at the Tech London Associates’(TLA) Retail Tech meetup at River Island’s Shoreditch tech hub earlier this week. Of the companies, three stood out with clearly defined use cases for machine learning and computer vision technology (popularised as AI). Combined with our earlier work on fashion technology: visual search we are starting to sense a visual theme developing in retail which may or may not combine the physical and digital retailing channels into True Omni Channel retailing. The three companies anonymize data...

Our verdict (of 5): Admittedly we visited Ecommerce Expo in 2016 and were very impressed and the September 2017 edition did not disappoint on content or exhibitors. In fact it seemed as the quality of exhibitors was slightly better than the previous show. Ecommerce Expo had everything from the usual suspects such as Shopify, SAP Hybris, Bronto, Marketo and others to some of the more exciting startups such as Mad Street Den, Phrasee and others. SAP Hybris were mightily excited about their rumoured $350m acquisition of Gigya and the opportunties this will mean for upselling to existing Gigya customers and...

The answer is: An interest in the Chinese online market. In June 2016 Walmart acquired a 5.9% stake in JD.com, the Chinese ecommerce marketplace listed on Nasdaq since 2014. In January 2017 Walmart had upped its stake in JD.com to 12.1%. In October 2016 Asda (owned by Walmart) and JD.com announced a collaboration to bring 'British authentic merchandise' to the Chinese market. In June 2017 JD.com acquired a minority stake in Farfetch with the two companies announcing a collaboration in the Chinese market, bringing authentic luxury goods to Chinese customers.   Questions: What do luxury brands really think of Farfetch's...

Farfetch appointed its third CMO since 2013 in May 2017. No other position has changed to the same extent pointing towards issues in the Marketing role. Both Pepper and Horton were external appointments, whereas Veichmanis is an internal promotion. What is striking is that while Veichmanis is a highly experienced and accomplinched marketer his experience from luxury goods is absent, perhaps a good thing after all. Prior to joining Farfetch he was VP Marketing at Expedia, with responsibility for Global Search Marketing and Customer Acquisition. May 2017: John Veichmanis August 2013: Stephanie Horton June 2012: Amber Pepper Horton came from...