Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Oct 29, 2018

choi

(1) Matthew Townsend, Digital Brands Go Brick and Mortar.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... strip-mall-near-you

My comment:
(a) Read only the first several paragraphs, to learn the trend. That is enough.
(i) summary underneath the title in print: After dissing [disrespecting] physical outlets as passe, online retailers discover that stores still matter
(ii) Print and the online version are almost identical. For instance, this online sentence -- "The 'clicks-to-bricks' phenomenon encompasses big names like Amazon Books and Casper as well as less-known startups such as men’s shorts purveyor Chubbies and hair color brand Madison Reed." -- has, in print, "Amazon Books and Casper Sleep -- which popularized the bed-in-a-box -- as well as" instead.
(A) Casper Sleep (2014- ; privately held; headquarters New York City)
(B) "Casper was actually the name of one of the co-founders' old roommates" -- "a six-foot-six German guy named Kasper." from two Web sources.  That co-founder is T Luke Sherwin,
(C) Bed-in-a-box: buy a mattress online and have it delivered to your door in a box.
(D) The print article uses "popularized" -- as opposed to "invented" -- because www.bedinabox.com, based on the same concept, was founded in 2006 and is based in Johnson City, Tenn.

(b) This article mentions the following online brands:
(i) Warby Parker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warby_Parker
("The name 'Warby Parker' derives from two [fictional] characters [Warby Pepper and Zagg Parker, two male baseball players with own statistics who played in two imaginary teams in Kerouac's own fantasy baseball games: NYTimes.com] that appear in a[n unpublished] journal by author Jack Kerouac")
(ii) Founded in 2007, named after the ape and based in New York City, the men's apparel company Bonobos was acquired by Walmart in 2017.

choi

(2) Richard Weiss with Benjamin D Katz and Ania Nussbaum, First Class Wings Its Way Back into Style.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... luxurious-than-ever
("British Airways in 2000 introduced lie-flat seats in business class for thousands of dollars less than first" class)

My comment:
(a)
(i) summary underneath the title in print: After years of cutting super-premium options, airlines are reintroducing them on many routes
(ii) Print and the online version are identical. The latter's title: "First-Class Flying Is Back, and It’s More Luxurious Than Ever."
(b) Read just the first paragraph to get a general idea. That is enough.

(3) Leslie Patton, Can Eateries End Their Midday Nap?
(American restaurants and eateries, as always, "are having a hard time drawing a crowd in the afternoon" after "the lunch rush dies down")

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: The post-lunch period is a sales dead zone for many. But the rent  still needs to be paid
(b) The article provides no clear-cut solutions, as companies makes trial and error. There is no need to read the rest.

(4) Patrick Gillespie, When AI Writes the Court Ruling.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... d-suggests-a-ruling
("Ignacio Raffa's app, Prometea * * * In Argentina, DAs [district attorneys] write the decisions and the cases' presiding judges either reject them and write their own, or simply approve them. * * * Prometea (as in Prometheus) is also bilingual. Users searching the app for a case filed in Spanish can provide instructions in English, and the app will translate and search in Spanish.  Raffa trained the app using the DA office's digital library of some 300,000 scanned court documents from 2016 and 2017, including 2,000 rulings. When a case file enters the DA’s system, Prometea matches it to the most relevant decisions in its database, enabling it to guess how the court will rule in relatively simple cases—teachers complaining that they weren’t compensated for classroom supplies they bought, for example. So far, judges have approved 33 of its 33 suggested rulings")

Note:
(a)
(i) summary underneath the title in print: A software program helps Argentine prosecutors clear six months' worth of cases in six weeks
(ii) Print and the online version are identical.
(b) Ignacio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacio
(Latin name 'Ignatius' from the word [noun masculine] 'Ignis' meaning 'fire' ")
(c) "The name Prometea is the feminine form of Prometeo ('Prometheus' in Greek)."  en.wikipedia.org..

choi

(5) Peter Coy, Companies Give Worker Training Another Try.
("Economists love worker training, but companies are often reluctant to provide it. The benefits of training can walk out the door if newly skilled are poached by a competitor. * * * (still) The US ranks near the top of the global heap, with 66 percent of workers receiving training from employers in the past year, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (see charts)" )

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: A tight labor market forces businesses to spend more to develop their employees' skills
(b)  There is no need to read the rest. The article does not mention any method to counter poaching, and probably there is none.

(6) Mark Bergen with Ian King, Alibaba's Chip Dreams.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... ucing-its-own-chips

My comment:
(a)
(i) summary underneath the title in print: The e-commerce company is designing and making its own semiconductors
(ii) summary in table of contents: In Beijing's push for chip sovereignty, Alibaba looms large
(iii) Print and the online version are identical. The online title is: "The US-China Trade War Means Alibaba Is Producing Its Own Chips."

(b) Reading this print report, I was puzzled: what is the name of Alibaba chip, who (what semiconductor company) makes it, is it (chip) similar to Nvidia's or Intel's chips? How does it perform AI functioon -- similar to Nvidia's (then Alibaba chip is not revolutionary)?  
(c) It turns out that Alibaba has no chip at present, not even a design. See

Yiting Sun, Why Alibaba Is Betting Big on AI Chips and Quantum Computing; Meet the man behind Alibaba's gamble on emerging tech. MIT Technology Review, Sept 25, 2018 (under the heading "Intelligent Machines")
https://www.technologyreview.com ... -quantum-computing/
("The person leading all these research efforts [on artificial intelligence] is Jeff Zhang 张建锋, Alibaba's chief technology officer and head of its DAMO Academy research lab. Zhang sat down with MIT Technology Review at the event ['Alibaba's 2018 computing conference last week'] to discuss his company's plans.  * * * [Zhang:] we don't have a processor for it yet. Once we have a processor, we'll need to answer the question of what to use it for. Quantum computers * * * The number of qubits is not our only goal. We want to solve the engineering problems of quantum computing. How do you run existing programs on quantum processors?")

Take notice quantum computing, quantum computers, quantum processor (or chip), or qubit -- none of which exists (yet).