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The line had just died down at Hong Kongs Apple flagship store on Canton Road when I arrived on what happened to be the release day for the iPhone Pocket, the companys new and very buzzed-about design collaboration between Apple and Issey Miyake Design Studio. I purchased it immediatelya short one in Sapphire blue, as the cross-body version was already sold out. I observed neither pomp nor circumstance with the overwrought packaging, which I shed on the spot despite its velum-bound elegance and prominent Miyake branding. I was on a working vacation after all, and so I simply looped the Pocket around the strap of my nylon cross-body bag and went about my day in a city whose entire experience is all but governed by smartphone technology. I was going to have to use the thing, not just look at it. Awkwardness ensued. Bouncing around on my thigh beneath the weight of my phone, the Pocket felt like a surprising, unwanted appendage. An attempt to access the Mass Trasnsit Railway (MTR) system by tapping my phone through the Pocket failed, which meant I had to remove the phone from the pocket altogether. (I accidentally dropped my phone while trying to quickly slip it back into the Pocket amidst the throngs of fellow passengers hustling past me.) [Photo: Apple] On a quick trip to Shenzhen, China the following day, I experienced a moment of panic before I realized that my Pocket hadnt been pickpocketed, but rather I had simply intuitively placed my phone in my bag, its familiar location, rather than fiddling with my newest accessory. [Photo: Apple] At an eyebrow-raising $229.95 for the crossbody version and $149.95 for the shorter version, the limited-edition iPhone Pocket might simply be dismissed as an overpriced marketing gimmick, despite Apples long history of collaborating with luxury fashion brands. In my case, I am an inveterate fan of the late Issey Miyakes work, which I collect in various vintages and frequently wear. I can simply look at the iPhone Pocket and see its potential for abject failure as a functional design object, and yet the Issey lover in me deeply appreciates the way his studios clothing and accessories challenge commonly held notions around how a piece of cloth should behave. Miyakes designs are infamous, in part, for the way they play against the body, allowing the wearer exceptional freedom in how they position the garment. There is no right way to wear Miyake. The iPhone Pockets pleats not only allow the accessory to morph in shape according to its contents, but it allows that alteration to remain visible. (Similarly, the shape of the ubiquitous Lucent bag, for example, is designed to distort as the bag is filled with objects.) [Photo: Apple] The relationship between Apple founder Steve Jobs and Issey Miyake himself is the stuff of legend: Miyake personally designed the black, mock-neck turtleneck that Jobs infamously paired with his Levis 501 jeans and New Balance shoes. Jobs, like many tech executives since, preferred to adopt a uniform as a means of reducing the cognitive load associated with choosing ones clothing on a daily basis. Indeed, many Miyake megafans, myself included, are drawn to the kind of strangely unique uniformity one may achieve in wearing his clothing. The Pleats Please line, in particular, can be styled endlessly and sits effortlessly against the body in a way that begs for common wear. [Photo: Apple] The iPhone Pocket, in contrast, offers frictionand a lot of it. The Miyake Design Studio team knows it, too: Recently quoted in The New York Times, Yoshiyuki Miyamae, the studios design director, said that design should be leaving things a little bit less defined to allow more creativity from the user side. He also questioned whether the American market was ready for such a development. While its true that Americans are less likely to follow the trend of wearing their phones across their bodies, as is commonly seen in Asia, the iPhone Pocket simply looks strange in a way that may brstle against more practical sensibilities. [Photo: Apple] The sensationalization of the iPhone Pocketit has already been panned by the popular press and meme-ified across the internetposes a stranger version of the initial fervor that surrounded the iPhone itself. (The last time I waited in line to purchase something from Apple was in San Francisco, the day the first iPhone was released!) People dont quite know what to make of it yet, even though Apple does hold a precedent in its 2004 iPhone Sock, a much cheaper and similarly intentioned, if less intentionally designed object. As Miyake Design Studio apparently planned, the onus for the design success of the iPhone Pocket seems to be placed squarely on its owner, which isa risky proposition given the tension it poses, as an object, with the sleek minimalism of Apples design philosophy. In terms of branding, it could be argued that the heavier lift lies with Miyake over Apple, as Miyake holds strong name recognition in Asia, where the iPhone Pocket sold out immediately and where the demand for phone accessories is markedly higher. Its 1994 Pleats Please line has enjoyed a recent surge in popularity in the United States, yet Miyake is a far cry from a household name in America. Apple, on the converse, has a built-in, global audience for everything it produces. [Photo: Apple] Will the iPhone Pocket catch fire, or will it slip into design obscurity alongside so many other tech accessories gone by? Now freshly arrived back in New York City, Ive looped my Pocket yet again onto a sturdy leather bowler handbag along with a few other small charms for added flair. Im willing to give it another try, and am ready for the conversation (and the criticism) that will inevitably follow me.
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E-Commerce
As I uploaded a 1940s photo of my grandpa Max and hit a few buttons in Googles Veo 3 video generator, I saw a familiar family photo transform from black and white to color. Then, my grandpa stepped out of the photo and walked confidently toward the camera, his army uniform perfectly pressed as his arms swung at the sides of his lanky frame. This is the kind of thing AI lets you do nowvirtually bring back the dead. As a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch this weekend highlighted, though, just because we can reanimate our departed loved ones, that doesnt necessarily mean we should. Grilling the dog The sketch, which The Atlantic has already called SNLs Black Mirror Moment, features Ashley Padilla as an aging grandmother in a nursing home. Her family membersplayed by Sarah Sherman and Marcello Hernándezvisit her on Thanksgiving, and use an AI photo app to bring her old family photos to life as short videos. At first, things go well. Padillas character marvels over a black and white image of her father waving as he stands in front of a spinning ferris wheel. But then, things go hilariously, predictably wrong. A photo of family members at a barbecue turns into a horror scene when the fictional AI app has Padillas father (played by host Glen Powell) roast the family dog, which happens to have no head. As other photos come to life, Padillas father pays a bowling buddy to perform a lewd act, and in a baby photo, her mothers torso splits from her body and floats around the frame as a nuclear bomb explodes in the background. The sketch is hilarious because its so relatable. Anyone who has played with AI video generators knows that they can make delightfully wonky assumptions about the laws of physicsoften with spectacular results. In my testing of AI video generator RunwayML, for example, I asked the model to create a video of a playful kitten at sunset. Things start out cute enough, until the kitten splits in two, with its front half attempting to exit stage-right as its back half continues adorably cavorting around. Show me the movements Video generators make these errors because of the way theyre trained. Whereas a text-based AI model can learn by reading essentially every book, website, and other piece of textual data ever published, the amount of training-ready video content is far more limited. Most AI video generators train on videos from social media platforms like YouTube. That means theyre great at creating the kinds of videos that often appear on those platforms. As Ive demonstrated before, if you want people knocking over wedding cakes or having heated arguments with their roommates, video generators like Veo and Sora excel at making them. For less commonly posted scenes, though, the available training data is far more limited. Most online videos, for example, show interesting things happening. People rarely post hour-long clips of themselves casually walking around (or to SNLs example, holding a baby or grilling a hot dog) on YouTube or Instagram. Those videos would be so terminally boring that no person would want to watch them. Yet copious amounts of video of these kinds of boring, everyday activities are exactly what AI companies need to properly train their video generators. This has created a fascinating market for such clips. Companies like Waffle Video are popping up to serve the need, paying creators to film themselves doing things like chopping vegetables or writing specific words on pieces of paper for AI training. Until AI companies can get their hands on more videos of these kinds of mundane actions, though, AI video generators will struggle to mimic them. Ironically, video generators are currently great at showing fanciful, dramatic actions. Ask them to make the kinds of everyday scenes you might find in an old black and white family photo, though, and you get Fido on the barbie. Reanimate grandma? All that brings us to the question: should you use todays AI tools to reanimate your dead loved ones? My best advice: wait a bit. AI video tech is advancing incredibly quickly. The first tools that added movement to family photoslike Deep Nostalgia from My Heritage, which launched in 2021used machine learning to perform their wizardry. The tech felt revolutionary at the time. Today, it looks primitive compared to the full motion scenes like the one of my Veo-animated grandpa. And even with those advances, Veo and its ilk are still in their avocado chair moment. Image generators have improved tremendously as their creators have gotten better at training them. Video generators will see similarly vast improvementsespecially as AI companies invest millions in buying bespoke training data of everyday movements. Personally, I brought photo of my grandpa to life because I thought the real Grandpa Max would find it amusing. Ive resisted reanimating photos of more recently departed loved ones, though, for many of the reasons implicit in SNLs sketch. Family photos are intimate things. Its nice to see your late loved one smile and wave at you. Seeing them split in two or explode in a nuclear fireball, though, would be disturbingand something you couldnt unsee once youve conjured it up from the depths of Sora or Veos silicon brain. Until AI models can be trusted to avoid these kinds of distributing, random visual detours, we shouldnt trust them with our most prized memories. A splitting kitten is amusing. A splitting grandma, less so.
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E-Commerce
When entrepreneurs list their principal reasons for launching a company, small business owners often cite being their own boss, flexibility in setting their working hours, and turning a commercial concept into reality as their main motivations. Now, new data identifies another incentive that may convince future entrepreneurs to take the plunge. According to a recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the average self-employed person earns significantly more income during their career than people who work for someone else. However, the reports findings also note the widely varying levels of income among small business owners, and the length of time usually required before stronger earnings start flowing in. Those details may lead some less enterprising prospective entrepreneurs to stick with punching a clock after all. The analysis by the Minneapolis Fed differs from most research on small business owners, which often relies heavily on survey responses. The shifting makeup of participants in those inquiries often produces widely contrasting results, creating what Minneapolis Fed authors likened to the parable of the blind men and an elephant: Each poll was essentially touching only one part of the body, and led to researchers drawing different and incomplete conclusions. To establish a more complete picture of the nations entrepreneurs, the Minneapolis Fed used U.S. tax and Social Security Administration data from 2000 to 2015. That allowed it to determine the income those small business owners collectively generated for themselves, and identify why they stuck it out with companies that were often slow to reach profitability. And that wasnt due to setting their own hours. (W)e find that self-employed individuals have significantly higher income and steeper income growth profiles than paid-employed peers with similar characteristics, the report said, while also refuting frequent survey results that suggest many entrepreneurs stay in business for the perks of not having to answer to a boss. Contrary to earlier studies based on surveys plagued by underrepresentation in the right tail of the income distribution, we find that non-pecuniary benefits of self-employment are not substantial when considering the source of most business income, it said. What that means, in non-economist-speak, is that many entrepreneurs earn up to 70% more than people working for other employers over their careers, with their income increasing considerably faster than paid workers. That winds up vastly outweighing the advantages surveys often identify of founders setting their own work schedules or getting to ask employees to fetch their coffee. The study found that during the 15-year period, a 25-year-old entrepreneur earned on average about $27,000 per year in 2012 dollars, while an employee of the same age made $29,000. About five years later, that income disparity had typically reversed, and then continued growing larger in small-business owners favor. By age 55, our estimate is an average (entrepreneur) income of $134,000 in 2012 dollarsmuch higher than the estimate of $79,000 for the paid employed, the study said. It added that gap was probably even larger before government agencies adjusted small-business income declarations by 14% to 46% to account for presumed underreporting. These dierences in profiles for the self- and paid-employed would be even more striking if we were to (re)adjust reported incomes to account for business income underreporting. Not every small-business owner winds up earning as much as people working for salaries, howeveror as much as their more successful peers. The study said about 80% of the total income of entrepreneurs it identified was generated by people earning $100,000 annually or more. That means a lot of small-business owners fared less well than the more affluent minority at the top. As a result, the authors said in wonky terms, a minority of self-employed people made even less than workers working for someone else. IRS data shows that many of the primarily self-employed earned less over the sample years than paid-employed peers with similar characteristics, but in the aggregate this subgroup has a much lower share of the total income than those that earned more than their peers, it noted. The Minneapolis Fed noted some other interesting observations in its findings. One was that many entrepreneurs continued working salaried jobs, or had other income coming in as they supported their still unprofitable new ventures. Those supporting funds improved the cohorts overall positive revenue figures, even during early lean years. In other words, when starting a new business, owners rely on other sources of labor earnings, through either paid employment or other business enterprises, it said. Thus, even though most businesses have losses, few owners have negative individual incomes. Another significant detail was what the authors said was their use of official data to create a more precise collective financial portrait of entrepreneurscontrasting the results of many surveys that may simplify the motives and activities of limited samples of small-company owners. (T)he literature on entrepreneurship has an array of narratives, describing the typical business owner in many possible ways: as a gig worker seeking flexible arrangements, a misfit avoiding unemployment spells, an inventor seeking venture capital, a tax dodger misreporting income, it said, before noting its own use of official income statistics collected from millions of entrepreneurs. This data provides new insights into the central questions of the entrepreneurship literature and will hopefully prove useful for researchers interested in calibrating models of self-employment and business formation. Bruce Crumley This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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E-Commerce
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