ashin's Profile

I’ve always been fascinated by Sephora’s success, so I really enjoyed this article!

Living in Boston, I didn’t realize Sephora was launching these cool projects in SF and Paris. The only cool tech project I’ve seen around is the usage of Color IQ, which scans your skin to find the right foundation, eye shadow, and lip color for you. Even that I thought was cool, even though I personally have not really liked the results of it 😛

I agree with your point that beauty-subscription services could be a competition for Sephora, but I actually see Sephora’s potential to be a lot bigger than its current offering, which is selling beauty products. By collecting the user’s data online and in stores, I think it’s able to replace the role of a beautician that takes care of you hair, skincare, makeup, to even health. For example, maybe it can detect when you’re under stress by looking at your skin or even what products you’re looking to buy.

Very interesting!

I actually interviewed for iRobot back in 2012 as an engineer and was not very excited about them because I thought they were just a vacuum company! That was definitely before companies started dreaming of IoT. I really liked your last point – I think competition/integration with other products is going to be huge. I wonder if this is just going to call for more M&As in the tech industry…

Super interesting!
As I was reading this article, I was a bit confused as to why museums would want to collaborate with Google on this. But your explanation that this project is meant to be complementary, to convince users to visit the museums in person, makes perfect sense!

You mentioned that this is an example of democratization of knowledge – I wonder if this can also help democratization of marketing, for artists who are not able to feature their work in established museums.

I love this! Not only does this improve operational efficiency, but it actually enhances the experience of it, too, by helping you to collect photos and keep track of lost children (maybe? :P). I also love the idea for its potential – measuring emotional response to different experiences through heart beat, activity level, etc. That might get into the danger zone of “big brother Mickey” you mentioned in the article, but I can see that data becoming so useful for the rest of Walt Disney business units, like Pixar.

Really interesting article!
I think that one of the greatest effects of digital revolution is democratization of content and tools, and Khan is surely one of the many examples of this phenomenon. I think that online learning hasn’t yielded satisfying results yet, but with your proposed next steps regarding interactivity and collaboration, I have no doubt that it’ll have a huge effect. I think the fact that people are moving online when it comes to forming relationships or working for companies will make online learning a more important tool as time goes on.

I also agree that Hershey’s isn’t doing enough to save the key ingredient of their products. I honestly feel like in order for the world to be more sustainable, everything has to be more expensive and therefore become less in demand. I think this applies to chocolate, coffee, electronics, clothing, etc. When your scale of production is so large in quantity, it’s just impossible to make a big change to fight climate change.

I’m also concerned that cocoa comes from developing economies, but Hershey’s consumers are mostly in the U.S. We saw this with Ikea as well (and almost all big corporations), where the impact of climate change is felt in the emerging economies the most in order to serve the customers in developed economies.

#promoteyoself

This makes me so sad -“by 2039, 50% of the ski resorts in New England would have to shut down.” So my grandchildren might never get to ski in New England? 🙁

It seems like most of their efforts are pretty accepting of the fact that their industry might be changed forever. I’m surprised to see that most of their reactions are around how to work around these changes, instead of trying to create a change to stop climate change. I wonder if that speaks to their political powerlessness, or just low efficacy.

I also wonder if there is any coalition of skiiers or ski resorts to fight the effects of climate change. I see skiing as a pretty luxurious sport, so I’m surprised to find that not much is done about it.

What was shocking for me is how cheap bananas are everywhere in the world, even when their production is at risk due to climate change. I think this is not just an operational issue that can be solved with great ideas like partnerships with local farmers as mentioned by other commenters, but also a global economic system which detaches the true cost of food with its price tag.

It’s also interesting that you’re giving Dole 30-50 years to respond. I’d think the better they’re able to take action, the less the impact would be. You mentioned initiatives like community education, plastic protectors for bananas, and other water-saving tactics – do you think they’re completely useless at this point? Is it not possible to develop them more to be more effective within the next 30 years?

I had never thought about the effect of climate change on healthcare before, so I really appreciated it. The framework of mitigation, resilience, and leadership you gave was really interesting for me to think about, especially resilience because it wasn’t something that I thought would be pertinent to developed economies.
I think it’s easy to see “saving lives right now” as the more immediate goal than the goal of “combating effect of climate change”. So I wonder if leadership is even more important in healthcare to make the changes you recommended, for goal-alignment purposes.

As a huge fan of Ben&Jerry’s, this was a really fun read. I was actually kind of surprised that the content (ice cream) of the packaging was only 5x the packaging impact, when you consider their volume ratio. I see that as a huge opportunity.
I couldn’t help but to put on my marketing hat while reading your post. I liked your point about Vegan ice cream. I feel like Ben&Jerry’s has this authentic, “local” brand image, which would help its customers to be more receptive to Ben&Jerry’s message about climate change and why vegan ice cream needs to be more consumed instead of dairy ice cream. But I wonder what alternatives the company has about its popular flavors – would the more sustainable option be local fruit flavors?
I see Ben&Jerry’s brand image as a huge opportunity for them to make a change – encourage people to consume less dairy and more local flavors.