Your interview outfit should be professional and put-together. It won't necessarily be the most stylish outfit you'll ever wear, but it should communicate confidence and a good work ethic.

But the days of absolutely having to wear a suit to a job interview are over, said Marc Cenedella, CEO of recruiting firm Ladders.

In fact, rolling up to the office in a suit or skirt suit when everyone else is wearing jeans could hurt you in the interview process. It shows you're not a cultural fit for the company.

"Some of the most common mistakes people make when dressing for an interview are following old and outdated advice or not taking the time to do their research and ask questions about the company culture ahead of time," Cenedella told Business Insider.

Cenedella suggested reaching out to your recruiter, company contact, or the HR team to get a sense for what people at the company typically wear to work.

"You can always be direct and ask 'Will I feel out of place in formal business attire?'" Cenedella told Business Insider. "If they answer 'not at all,' you know it's expected."

Regardless of the typical level of dress in the office, some decorum during the interview is still necessary — yoga pants, wrinkled shirts, or ripped denim shouldn't be in your interview wardrobe even for the most casual workplaces.

Here are the 17 things you definitely shouldn't wear to a job interview:

LONDON — The former CEO of Visa in the UK and Ireland has joined a new cryptocurrency startup that hopes to make spending crypto an everyday occurrence.

Marc O'Brien, who led Visa UK & Ireland from 2008 and 2014, has joined Crypterium as CEO. The startup, which was incorporated in Estonia last year, raised $52 million through an initial coin offering (ICO) at the end of last year.

The startup was founded by a group of entrepreneurs who want to make it easy to pay with cryptocurrency such as bitcoin and ether in everyday situations.

O'Brien told Business Insider: "The idea is that cryptocurrency is actually quite difficult today to use as an everyday method of payment. If you were to go to an exchange with your bitcoin or your ether it would probably take you 3 to 7 days to get that money paid out into a normal bank account.

"What Crypterium will do is make that whole process seamless and give an opportunity for a consumer to actually use their cryptocurrency to pay for everyday items."

O'Brien was hired after a search by executive recruiter Sheffield Haworth. O'Brien said: "They're looking for an experienced financial services team now.

"They're very good at recognising that they were the right team for the concept and the initial coin offering but now that they're moving into the operating model they need to bring in experienced professional staff that are used to dealing with large-scale, global operations."

Crypterium now hopes to partner with either Visa or MasterCard to launch cryptocurrency cards or virtual cards.

O'Brien said: "That card will be attached to a wallet that we've created and every time the consumer makes a transaction we will receive a request for that transaction in our systems, we will check the bitcoin or ether account and provided that they've got sufficient balance we will execute a trade and mark their bitcoin balance for a trade and approve the transaction. You can be in a store and all of that's done in a fraction of a second."

The way Crypterium will do this without being exposed to the extreme volatility of cryptocurrencies in the process is the company's "secret sauce," O'Brien said, and the intellectual property around this is "carefully protected."

Spending crypto doesn't offer much appeal to those who are not die-hard crypto enthusiasts in many developed markets, but O'Brien highlighted the usefulness of Crypterium's products in high inflation markets such as Argentina or Turkey.

"We have a unique opportunity to provide a safe haven to some extent for consumers in those countries," he said. "The concern that many of them might have about getting access to that currency in a short space of time for immediate spending, we're going to be in a position to bridge that gap and make it an instant gratification.

"We are now looking at how we organise to be a global operating business and that means we are taking top-level legal advice on how to structure ourselves so that we can actually launch in the US, launch in Latin America, launch in Singapore, with the right and appropriate licenses in each of those jurisdictions."

Crypterium has a team of three people in London and 10 in Moscow. O'Brien said it is considering offices in New York, Singapore, and Miami.

O'Brien said Crypterium is in discussion with potential partners at the moment and hopes to launch its first products by the autumn.

Remember Don't Be Evil?

When Google became a verb in the early 2000s, the adage became a slogan that paid dividends for the tech company.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin enshrined it in the company's official code of conduct for employees, and inumerable news stories and TV segments gushed over the benevolent tech giant's admirable combination of innovation and altruism.

At some point during the past month that changed. As Gizmodo first reported on Friday, the famous phrase has lost its preeminence in Google's code of conduct. The new code of conduct makes a passing, almost token, mention of Don't Be Evil in the last sentence — but it's a marked downgrade from its previous prominence in the code, when it had several paragraphs dedciated to it.

Google argues that the fact that the phrase remains in the code, albeit at the end, shows that it's still "foundational."

Fair enough.

Here's the reality though: Google outgrew its Don't Be Evil motto from the moment it was coined.

Google's two founders and former CEO Eric Schmidt AP The phrase was never meant to be a declaration of human rights. It was coined by former Googler Paul Buchheit, who has said that he had shady internet business practices like spyware and spam in mind when he came up with it.

But the world wanted to see it as someting grander. And Google never did much to disabuse anyone of the notion. The warm and fuzzy glow Google got from Don't Be Evil was too valuable to quit, even as it became increasingly clear to anyone that worked at the company that the phrase was dangerous. It set a standard that Google, or any for-profit company, could never live up to.

Google makes its money from targeted ads that rely on knowing as much about us as possible. Every single product in its catalogue, from virtual assistants that tell you the weather to AI-based email that can finish your sentences for you, ultimately lead to showing you better, more effective ads.

The project has grown into something so extensive and vast that the company now has its hands in everything from hardware to automobiles. It's tough to position youreself as the Don't Be Evil company when you're building products with components that use rare earth minerals and are assembled by laborers in offshore factories you don't control; or when you offer online services in countries with repressive free speech rules.

The 2015 restructuring of Google into Alphabet was the first effort to move away from the problematic legacy phrase.

Now, like characters crowding the bed of a dying Count in a Russian novel, Google and its shareholders are waiting for Don't Be Evil to draw its final breath. After all these years, Google can finally claim its inheritance.

If Google's YouTube were a standalone company, the world's dominant video-sharing site would be worth more than big blue-chip companies like General Electric, IBM, PepsiCo or Comcast, and would be roughly the same value as media powerhouse Walt Disney Co., according to investment bank Morgan Stanley.

In a note to investors on Friday, the investment bank concluded that YouTube is worth $160 billion, based on the firm's analysis of its business. Since Google has yet to reveal YouTube's financial performance, Morgan Stanley's sum-of-the-parts valuation represents only an estimate (the firm put a 7x multiple on its estimated 2019 revenue for YouTube).

But if that figure is even close, it underscores how the website that Google acquired for $1.65 billion in 2006 has grown into one of the most valuable media entities in the world. And it could become more valuable still. Morgan Stanley said YouTube stands to bank big money from subscription music.

YouTube managers announced this week that they plan to roll out revamped subscription services. The much ignored YouTube Red is dead and from the ashes comes YouTube Music Premium, a $9.99 subscription music service that enables users to watch ad-free videos.

In addition, YouTube has created YouTube Premium, which offers ad-free music videos, offline downloads, and YouTube's original movies and TV shows for $11.99.

Brian Ach / Stringer "YouTube's new Music and Premium products speak to a growing subscription focus which could lead to 13X higher user monetization," the bank said in the report.

According to Morgan Stanley data, music is the most common type of content consumed on YouTube, with 36% of users turning to the site for music everyday, compared to 22% watching movies and movie clips and 20% watching TV show clips every day.

Every 1 million YouTube users who switch to a paid subscription instead of listening to music for free on the site will add 1% more revenue to YouTube's topline, Morgan Stanley estimates.

Of course, Google has tried its hand at music subscriptions before with little success, compared to streaming-music rivals, Spotify or Apple Music, the sector's leaders.

But even if YouTube's paid music service doesn't become the No.1 streaming service on the charts, the site is already a massive media entity in its own right.

A decade ago, some observers thought the giant media conglomerate Viacom, parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures, would squash the then tiny YouTube in court, after suing the video service for copyright infringement. Not only did Google-owned YouTube prevail in that landmark case, but — based on the Morgan Stanley estimates — the video site is now worth more than 10 times Viacom's $12 billion market cap.

Here's how YouTube's $160 billion estimated value compares to the market capitalizations of some of the most well-known corporations:

Mike Walsh is a member of the Uber rich, meaning he's über rich off the ride-hailing service.

In 2010, a mutual friend introduced him to Ryan Graves, who worked an IT specialist job and was considering a move to San Francisco to help build something called UberApp. After Graves explained the concept, Walsh saw "the common sense approach" for someone, like a limo driver, to make money with an asset, a vehicle, that was under-utilized. He told Graves to take the job.

Graves became the first employee of Uber, and as a show of thanks, he, Travis Kalanick, and Garrett Camp (another cofounder) offered Walsh an opportunity to invest in the company.

He accepted. Since 2010, Uber's valuation has soared from $5.4 million to around $72 billion, netting Walsh huge returns on paper, which he declined to share with Business Insider.

Today, Walsh helps runs Structure Capital, an early-stage venture fund that he started in 2013 with some of the earnings from his Uber deal. The fund invests almost exclusively in sharing economy companies whose goal is to reduce waste by putting under-utilized assets — such as people, spaces, and vehicles — to work. He manages the firm alongside partners Jillian Manus and Jacob Shea.

Together, they call themselves the "architects of the zero waste economy."

Companies backed by Structure Capital range from Wag, an "Uber for dog-walking" app, to Peerspace, which lets users book meeting rooms, event venues, and filming locations by the hour, to Honk, a company that provides on-demand roadside assistance as fast as Uber hails a car. As a cohort of startups, they aim to make the sharing economy the dominant marketplace.

We talked to Walsh and his partners, Manus and Shea, about how Structure Capital came to be.

Structure Capital raised a VC fund on the back of Uber's success

In 1999, Walsh cut his first check as a hobby venture capitalist to a little-known cloud software company called Salesforce.com. He said he used the company's product as a customer first and liked it.

After Salesforce went public in 2004, Walsh, who was then running Leverage Software, a startup that brought social networking to enterprises, sold half of his stock and continued to build his company. He had already given the other half to his dad, a plumber, as a birthday present.

Lightning struck twice when Walsh signed on as one of the first committed investors in Uber in 2010 and saw massive returns, which encouraged him to focus full-time on venture. He pitched a couple of venture firms on taking him on as a partner, but they weren't hiring, Walsh said.

Instead, he started his own fund. He put about $300,000 of his Uber stock into the pot and offered to share the returns with other limited partners who invested in the fund. It was a "marketing tool," Walsh said. Within six months of starting the fund, his Uber investment grew to $3 million as new investors gave the ride-hailing startup higher and higher valuations.

Structure Capital raised $10 million from dozens of investors for its first fund.

Uber is worth around $72 billion. Thomson Reuters

Walsh later recruited Shea, a veteran coder who previously held consulting positions at Dell Computers, Qualcomm, the NFL, and Pixar, to bring technical expertise. Manus, a prolific angel investor in her own right, joined the firm as managing partner in 2013 and put in $1 million of her own money. She is a marketing guru who knows everyone, according to Walsh.

Here's why the sharing economy matters

Walsh had built a reputation for spotting billion-dollar-plus "unicorns." In the early days of Structure Capital, he was already receiving around 100 pitches per month. At first, he only took meetings with sharing economy companies simply as a way to "filter" his inbox, Walsh said.

But a more concrete investment thesis started to take shape: The sharing economy was good for the environment, the community, and the pocket book, Walsh said he began to realize.

"Growing up in a lower-middle class neighborhood in the industrial town of Worcester, Massachusetts, I was accustomed to hand-me-downs, sharing of things like tools and shovels, and — at times — even taking advantage of free food programs. My dad hustled to make a living, but oftentimes, there just wasn't enough work to go around in the mid-70s," Walsh said.

His background taught him "a couple really valuable lessons" at the core of his thesis.

He went on, "People, generally, want to do whatever they can to provide for their loved ones. Skills marketplaces allow people to find work to supplement their incomes or try new things. Uber, Wag, Feastly, and Laurel and Wolf are great examples of this. These companies allow individuals to earn an income while 'waiting' for things to turn around, or to discover new passions."

He added that the sharing economy helps people and companies "do more with less" — a necessity as the global population grows and the world's natural resources deplete.

"The bonus is that our companies make money and we benefit, as do our investors," Walsh said.

Structure Capital wants to build a new wave of 'Ubers'

Structure Capital reaches into all corners of the sharing economy — a market that's expected to reach $40.2 billion in revenue in 2022, up from $18.6 billion in 2017, according to Juniper Research. Its portfolio companies let hair stylists rent salon space, freelancers find a meeting room, and women invite other women into their homes for unique networking opportunities.

Some companies have a more literal interpretation of the "zero waste economy." A company spun out of MIT called LiquiGlide invented a slippery coating that allows viscous liquids (think toothpaste, ketchup, and glue) to slide out of any container with ease. Structure Capital said the company will start supplying the material to a top toothpaste brand for a percentage of every tube sold.

Another portfolio company, Copia, sends drivers to pick up uneaten food from enterprises and events and delivers it to nonprofits in need. Its customers then get to write off the donation as a tax deduction. Copia recovered enough food from the Oscars last year to feed 1,000 hungry people.

Structure Capital has invested in approximately 140 companies to date.

Walsh said one of the first thing he asks himself when he's evaluating a startup is: "Do we think we know a thousand people, socially, who will use this thing?"

Ultimately, the decision of whether or not to invest comes down to a gut check.

He asks himself if the founders are "people we want to hang out with" and, most importantly, people who "treat people the way we think people should be treated," Walsh said.

Carlos Ghosn, the man who leads the world's largest car company, says people no longer care about range anxiety with electric cars, they just need to be less expensive.

Ghosn made the comments during a news conference in Hong Kong this week, where he also argued that autonomous-driving technology isn't a priority for consumers either.

"We have seen that consumers do not talk anymore about range or autonomy as long as you guarantee more than 300 kilometers (about 186 miles)," Ghosn told reporters, according to the Nikkei Asia Review.

Ghosn helms the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, which is the parent company of Nissan, the French automaker Renault and Mitsubishi. While he was CEO of Nissan from 2001 to 2017, Ghosn oversaw the development of the Nissan Leaf, the company's first mass-market electric car.

The Leaf eventually became the best-selling electric vehicle in the world. The second generation of the Leaf hit the US market earlier this year with a base price just under $30,000 and a range of about 151 miles. A longer-range, 225-mile version is expected in 2019.

2018 Nissan Leaf. Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

Ghosn's remarks come as Tesla struggles to produce its own mass-market EV, the Model 3 — a car that starts at $35,000 with a minimum range of 220 miles on a single charge.

However, due to Tesla's rollout schedule and some well-documented production challenges, Tesla is only producing the longer-range (310 miles), more-expensive version of the Model 3, which can top out at nearly $60,000.

While Ghosn is less concerned with delivering a tech-heavy EV, the new Leaf does offer some industry standard features like intelligent cruise control and a so-called "e-Pedal," which effectively lets driver accelerate and stop the car using just one pedal. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has touted his company's Autopilot technology which operates much the same way, with some additional functionality.

That the Leaf is the world's best-selling electric vehicle, in a market where EVs barely make up about 1% of global auto sales, says quite a lot, especially as Tesla struggles to meet its own goal of producing 5,000 Model 3s per week by the end of June.

During his talk with reporters this week, Ghosn took a moment to flex a little, explaining how he came to learn what he knows about selling electric cars, and it could be read as a subtle jab at Tesla: "You could not have guessed this through studies," Ghosn said, "You had to have 500,000 [electric] cars on the ground to understand," he said.

Netflix's "A Christmas Prince" is getting a royal wedding.

2017's "A Christmas Prince" was made in the vein of a Lifetime Christmas movie and gained a lot of popularity over the holiday season. It also proved that the streaming service was some serious competition for networks like Lifetime and Hallmark.

In December, we wrote about how terrible the protagonist, Amber, a journalist, is at her profession. But that didn't hold back people from watching it over and over. Netflix even expressed concern about subscribers who were watching the movie on repeat — some over 50 times in a matter of two weeks.

At the end of "A Christmas Prince," Amber and Prince Richard of Aldovia (a fictional country in Europe) get engaged.

The movie was so successful that Netflix has apparently decided to make a sequel inspired by the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry on Saturday. The sequel will come out "this holiday season."

On Friday, Netflix tweeted a video with the characters from "A Christmas Prince" watching Meghan and Harry's wedding, along with an announcement for the next movie, "A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding."

"The other royal wedding is almost upon us," the video says. "You're actually invited to this one."

Netflix confirmed to Business Insider that this movie is actually happening, and not just a royal wedding marketing stunt.

Here's the tweet which has the video:

Kids are spending more time online than ever.Shutterstock

Keeping your children safe online seems to get more difficult by the day. Children as young as five are getting tablets and smartphones. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and other apps have become essential to how kids and teens communicate with each other.

And yet, in the decades since children have been using the internet, a host of parental controls and devices have been developed to make it easier to monitor online use. And the new crop of parents are more familiar with the inner workings of the internet than ever before.

One of the most fearsome threats to kids is online luring — the act where a predator attempts to coerce or trick a child from the safety of their homes or schools, with the intention of committing sexual offenses or abducting them.

Parents should use what technology is available to protect their kids, but the most important thing parents can do, experts told Business Insider, is talk to their children about being safe online.

"The best parental control out there is talking to your kid," said Stephen Balkam, the founder and CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute.

Every child and teen is different. There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to keeping your kids safe.

"It has to be a really complicated and layered approach. It really is different for every family, every parent and every kid," said Paige Hanson, chief of identity education at Symantec.

Here's what you need to know about protecting your kids from online predators — including online luring.

NASA's lead watchdog testified on Capitol Hill this week, and what he said about future plans for the International Space Station — a roughly $150 billion laboratory in the sky — should worry future astronauts.

The ISS is the size of a football field, hovers from about 250 miles up (a region called low-Earth orbit), and has hosted more than 225 people since 1998. It was envisioned as a laboratory, though also as a possible pit stop for missions to the moon or Mars.

NASA has pumped about $100 billion into the project over the decades. However, the Trump administration said it wants to end US involvement in September 2024 — about four years before the lab's "use by" date of 2028, after which the ISS may be sent to the spacecraft graveyard.

On Wednesday, Paul K. Martin, NASA's Inspector General, spoke before and submitted six pages of written testimony surrounding Trump's decision to the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness. The subcommittee is chaired by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, where NASA's Johnson Space Center and its more than 14,000 jobs are located.

In his testimony, Martin highlighted a range of current problems with and future concerns about the ISS, including its biggest predicament: NASA spends $3-4 billion a year to use and maintain the ISS while it's trying to build next-generation rocket and spaceship.

The International Space Station hovers about 250 miles above Earth in the foreground, while the moon floats in the background.NASA

"For the past 20 years, NASA has used the ISS as a research platform in low Earth orbit essential for advancing its deep space ambitions. But such celestial research comes at a steep cost," Martin wrote.

He added: "[E]ach year the Station remains in orbit, NASA allocates roughly half of its total human space flight budget to ISS operations — an expenditure that limits the Agency's ability to fund development of systems needed to visit the moon and other destinations beyond low Earth orbit."

Martin also said NASA's effort to reduce costs by privatizing the ISS — i.e. handing off aspects of its control to commercial companies— doesn't appear to be working that well.

But most critically, he implied that Trump's current plan to end the ISS program early might endanger future astronauts.

"Important work on several human health risks and technology demonstrations will not be completed by 2024," he said.

A vacuum of industry at the space station

The aurora over southern New Zealand, as seen by astronauts aboard the International Space Station on September 17, 2011.NASA/JSC

Congress began deeply scrutinizing ISS costs in the early 2000s. By the mid-2000s, as the retirement of the space shuttle program loomed, an idea emerged to gradually hand over the space station's control to commercial interests — its crew transportation, cargo delivery, and even much of the time astronauts spend on experiments.

Driving commercial interest in space, NASA managers thought, would eventually seed enough industry to privatize the orbiting lab and free up billions in funding annually to get to the moon or Mars.

"This was a strategy and a policy whose major stepping stone was based on hope," a former NASA employee who was close to the decision told Business Insider. (He asked to remain anonymous due to his ongoing proximity to ISS research.)

That hope, as Martin's testimony suggests, has yet to materialize.

"Candidly, the scant commercial interest shown in the Station over its nearly 20 years of operation gives us pause about the Agency's current plan," Martin said in his testimony.

SpaceX's astronaut spacesuit next to the Crew Dragon capsule.Elon Musk/SpaceX; InstagramNASA's chosen space taxi providers, Boeing and SpaceX, may launch their first crewed missions to the ISS at the end of 2018. Yet Martin said even with this progress highlight, the bid to attract self-sustaining commercial interest has shown little sign of working.

"[I]t is unlikely that a private entity or entities would assume the Station's annual operating costs, currently projected at $1.2 billion in 2024," he said. "Such a business case requires robust demand for commercial market activities such as space tourism, satellite servicing, manufacturing of goods, and research and development, all of which have yet to materialize."

More importantly, insiders say the commercialization effort has shrunk the time and resources available to NASA for its own research into ways of protecting astronauts during long-duration, deep-space missions.

'NASA may have to accept higher levels of risk'

An artist's concept of NASA's Deep Space Gateway (left) space station near the moon.NASA

NASA has the precarious responsibility of pushing human boundaries while also keeping a close eye on safety, especially following the losses of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle crews.

The agency is currently working on a $23 billion disposable rocket program, called Space Launch System, in hopes of sending astronauts to the moon or Mars starting in the 2030s.

But Martin said that research on the space station to support such missions is now years behind, given Trump's new schedule for leaving the ISS.

"[R]esearch for at least 6 of 20 human health risks requiring the ISS for testing and 4 of 40 technology gaps will not be completed by the Station's planned retirement in September 2024," he said. "In addition, research into 2 other human health risks and 17 additional technology gaps is not scheduled to be completed until sometime in 2024, meaning that even minor schedule slippage could push completion past the Station's planned retirement date."

An artist's depiction of NASA's Space Launch System rocketing a crew toward orbit.NASA/MSFCMartin said an extension (back) to 2028, or possibly beyond this, might help close the gap for "on-orbit research into human health risks" and demonstrating new technologies that deep-space missions require.

"NASA must redouble its efforts to maximize the potential of whatever time remains on the Station," he said. If the space agency can't finish its basic research programs, though, Martin added that "NASA may have to accept higher levels of risk than planned for future exploration missions" — in other words, more dangerous missions for astronauts.

But Martin ultimately kicked the can back to the White House and Capitol Hill. "The sooner Congress and the Administration decide on a path forward for the future of the ISS, the better NASA will be able to plan," he said.

The former NASA employee we spoke with, who still performs work with the space agency, said the space agency needs to refocus the ISS on fundamental research, not privatization.

"We're squandering a research asset that has a limited timeframe of viability, now through 2024," he said. "We have scientific problems to address. If we're really serious about human exploration, we need to stop getting distracted by fantasies of ... commercial activities in space."

REUTERS/Steve Marcus

Nvidia is crazy expensive compared to its semiconductor peers, and the stock may be worth the stretched price thanks to autonomous vehicles, Cowen says.

The firm launched coverage on Nvidia this week, giving the chipmaker a $325 price target and "outperform" rating. That’s about 31% above where shares were trading Friday afternoon.

"While we recognize shares are expensive, currently trading with a ~50% premium over peer multiples, we would argue NVIDIA’s growth potential and ties to multiple AI -driven growth vectors warrant an even higher multiple," analyst Matthew Ramsay told clients this week. Nvidia's estimate price-to-earnings ratio for 2018 is 31.71 verus the sector average of 21.84, according to Bloomberg data. 

Among those artificial intelligence drivers is Nvidia’s role in powering autonomous vehicles, something Cowen says is only in the extremely early stages.

"NVIDIA’s technology and thought leadership has placed it in a prime position to take meaningful share of the autonomous driving processing market in the future," said Ramsay. "We believe (1) the vast majority of personal and enterprise vehicles will have autonomous capability by 2035, and (2) significant computing (both in-car and in-datacenter) will be required to bring this ecosystem to market."

The company already has a robust network of over 20 partners using its technology, including names like Tesla, Audi, Mercedes, and Volvo. What’s more, it’s not just something to look forward to, revenue from autonomous driving could kick in as soon as next year, Cowen estimates.

"While investors rightly focus on datacenter and gaming, we believe the next leg of growth for NVIDIA as a company and NVDA shares will come in C’19-’21 in the automotive franchise," said the firm.

Nvidia was one of the best-performing stocks of 2017, contributing to its stretched valuation, and have already risen 22% in 2018 thus far.

Markets Insider

American consumers are buying personalized lip glosses from brands they only been exposed to on Instagram, or custom mattresses they've never touched or laid up on, or curated subscription boxes of form-fitting apparel.

At the same they're ordering household items in bulk with a few mindless clicks on Amazon.

And the TV industry is still focused on selling the whole country the same soap, beer or chips.

Marketing is going through a revolution, as upstart brands chip away at the business of legacy giants in nearly every category. As chronicled in a recent Interactive Advertising Bureau Report, these newbie brands are focused on selling directly to consumers, using data, sophisticated targeting and primarily digital media.

They buy ad space using automated software. And they only buy ads when they want to sell more stuff.

Yet as the top broadcast and cable networks rolled out splashy presentations of their upcoming shows in New York this past week at the fabled upfronts, it seemed clear that the TV business doesn't have a plan.

Sure, most of the sales chiefs at the big broadcast players paid lip service to data and so-called advanced TV this past week, though more often they criticized social platforms for how they misuse data. But primarily their pitches were more heart than science, hoping to get brands to tell their stories to as many people as they can alongside TV's comedies and dramas.

That may make sense for now, as the Cokes and Budweisers and General Motors and Procter and Gambles of the world still have massive media budgets compared to every indy purse maker or craft hot sauce purveyor selling products one by one on Facebook or Instagram.

The big brands will be big for a while, and TV is still a $70 billion plus market. And they'll still want to buy loads of TV ad space up front, since TV ad space is a shrinking commodity, given how ratings continue to slide.

Yet TV advertising had its first down year in a while, reported Bloomberg.

And what happens when these giant brands start fading into the background? What does TV do then?

The brands of the future look very different than the past few decades IAB

It's the biggest change to marketing in decades

Dave Morgan, CEO of the TV tech firm Simulmedia, said the shift from mass marketing to direct brands is the biggest he's seen in 15 to 20 years in the ad business.

It's not easy to quantify, but the IAB recently noted that "non store retailing" (which includes direct selling on the web, catalogs, etc.) accounted for less than 4% of retail sales in the early 1990s. That figure swelled to 9.4% of a $5.3 trillion retail economy as of 2015.

Is TV ready for this?

"TV remains an extraordinarily efficient way of connecting brands and retailers to consumers," said IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg. "That said, the broadcasters must be aware that the big, television-centric consumer brands are being challenged by direct brands ... they must adapt their capabilities and processes to be more appealing both to these disruptor brands, and to the giant incumbents."

That's why this week's upfront presentations were striking - for hardly talking about this new reality.

"It's not inevitable that these brands get to TV," Morgan said. "But for TV's sake they better get there or it's going to lose its growth."

There's no going back for direct brands

Take Evereden, a new skin care brand for babies.

Kim Ho, the cofounder and CEO said that the company spent hundreds of hours brainstorming marketing strategies before launching, and "never once did TV come up" as an option.

To be sure, Evereden isn't exactly spending hundreds of millions of marketing dollars. But regardless, the company sees TV as simply not viable for its data-driven approach.

"We grew up on social, and we have people shopping on Facebook," she said. "We don't think about TV, because not only is our demographic hard to reach there but the analytics are just lagging."

"On Facebook, we know who is buying what, who is abandoning purchases, what people are interested in. There is no way TV could ever tell me that."

Ho's point of view regarding TV advertising is increasingly common, even among larger direct brand marketers like Warby Parker, Casper, and Dollar Shave Club.

Terry Kawaja, CEO of Luma Partners, explained the mentality of a new generation of marketing leaders this way: "The nature of the person who controls ad budgets at Airbnb is not a chief marketing officer. They're a growth officer. They're a revenue person."

Jackson Jeyanayagam, CMO of the e-commerce startup Boxed, said there's often another factor at play for these disruptive brands. Many are backed by venture capital.

"Digital is the best way to track exactly what you're going to get," he said. "When you are spending other people's money, TV's very difficult to measure and justify."

If you're Casper, what's is the point of an upfront?

For decades, the big TV networks have been able to sell roughly 70% of their annual ad inventory during just a few short weeks in the spring, at the so-called upfront. Marketers like Unilever wanted to lock up ad space, get preferred rates and importantly, not get shut out, since the amount of ad space in linear TV is finite. There are just 24 hours in a day after all.

So you can see why they'd be hesitant to change their approach.

But direct brands don't think ahead that way. They buy ads online where there's always plenty of inventory. And they buy at the last minute.

"The upfronts were built on the idea of scarcity," said prominent media investor and former top News Corp and AOL executive Jon Miller. "If you wanted to secure the best environment and context for your messaging, which for a long time was adjacent to high quality TV, you needed to participate in the upfront."

But on platforms like Facebook and Google, marketers buy ads through programmatic tools, and space is sold via an auction, not upfront.

"Some of the larger brands will continue to need this kind of lock in, but many if not most brands will and are gravitating to a pay as you go model," said Miller.

Booking.com is a big-budget direct brand that actually does some TV advertising. But upfront buying? "Probably never will unless TV's ad tech fundamentally changes," said Pepijn Rijvers, chief marketing officer at Booking.com

"This type of buying does not give us the flexibility nor the inventory nor the prices we need."

Advertisers still buy ads in shows like "NCIS: New Orleans" upfront CBS

TV advertising is not a platform

The fundamental difference between TV advertising and digital is that TV ads are sold, while digital ads are purchased. Meaning that the bulk of TV advertising is still negotiated between ad buyers and sellers on the phone and over lunches.

Compared to Facebook, Google, Pinterest and others, there's no way for a small brand to log onto a self-serve platform and start buying primetime ads on Fox. The process is largely analogue, and the cost of entry is high.

Yes TV advertising is changing. Just slowly

To be sure, all of the major TV networks are experimenting with selling more ads using sophisticated data. For example, Disney announced recently the formation of a new division, Luminate, focused on helping bring more sophisticated targeting to its networks.

And CBS announced plans to use tech to insert ads dynamically into live TV, a la digital advertising.

Turner, NBCU, Fox and Viacom are working together on an initiative called Open AP which aspires to help marketers better define specific audiences to run ads against.

But these initiatives are tiny in the grand scheme of things. According to eMarketer, addressable TV advertising (which uses cable boxes to deliver ads to specific households) is growing fast, but represents less than 2% of the US market.

"The scale is just not there yet," said Courtney Lawrie, director of brand & integrated marketing at Wayfair.

Jeyanayagam, who before joining Boxed ran digital marketing for Chipotle, said he's excited about the potential of more automated, targeted TV ad buying.

"The networks are more progressive than they get credit for," he said. "But they are going to have to move faster."

A Microsoft data center. Microsoft

There's also the Amazon factor

Ok, so new brands are not drawn to TV upfront buying. But plenty of legacy giants still are. Procter and Gamble and Unilever and others still need to sell paper towels and kitchen cleaners and the like to the whole country.

So that's a win for the TV ad business. That is, "until you just buy all that stuff on Amazon," said digital ad veteran Eric Bader.

"I really have to question whether the P&Gs, Unilevers, and multi-brand conglomerates are prepared for the next decade," he said. "They are mostly still using the formula developed over the last 70 years. These changes are significant and they are not changing fast enough."

Jeramey Lende / Shutterstock.com

But wait. This could be good for the TV networks - someday

Kawaja sees a huge opportunity for TV, if it can eventually embrace opening up its ad sales process to technology as more people stream TV shows over the internet."You may see a democratization of TV ad spending," he said.

That may require the TV business to lower pricing in some areas, so that small brands can buy ads in piecemeal. Easier said than done.

Indeed, it would be a a huge mental shift for these networks, going from selling $10 to $20 million ad packages to a few hundred advertisers to letting thousands or even millions of brands buy ads on TV whenever they want, like they do on Facebook and Google

A scary plunge for sure, but one that could reduce operational costs, said Morgan. "That kind of platform buying will actually be very good for networks since their cost of sale will be much lower," he said. "They won't have commissions, bonuses and heavy customer service costs."

Small brands like the aforementioned Evereden would love to jump on board if TV goes fully programmatic some day. "This is the future of marketing," said founder Ho. "So 100% we'd be interested."

The biggest game in the world is finally coming to the biggest mobile platform in the world — "Fortnite" is expected to arrive on Android phones this summer.

At least that's the plan.

"Fortnite" developer Epic Games is "targeting this summer" for the game's Android launch, and promises more information as soon as it's available. There's no hard release date, and it's not clear which Android phones are supported.

In the case of the iPhone, which got a version of "Fortnite" back in April, models going back to the iPhone 6S/SE are capable of running it. The equivalent on Android would mean flagship phones going back at least two years could potentially run the game — a Galaxy S7, for example, or Google's first Pixel phone. That remains to be seen.

Epic Games

It's likely that the Android version of "Fortnite" looks a lot like the iPhone version, in terms of graphics and control.

As seen above on an iPhone X, the controls are represented as virtual buttons on-screen. It's otherwise the same insane game you can play on PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One: A 100-player fight to the death in an environment that's getting smaller over time.

Though Epic Games hasn't said as much specifically, it's likely that the Android version will cost nothing to access like the other versions.

At 2 a.m. on Thursday, a crowd of people, mostly men, are lined up outside an exclusive burlesque nightclub, The Box, in downtown Manhattan.

"Who are all these people?" a dancer in spiky gold stilettos asks a security guard.

"There's some sort of cryptocurrency conference in town," he tells her.

"What the hell is cryptocurrency?"

"Like bitcoin and stuff," he says.

The group in question had just come from a cruise ship, the Cornucopia Majesty, where a pair of Aston Martins were awarded to two guests through random selection — glowing bracelets were distributed at the start of the cruise, and those lucky enough to receive the bracelets that glowed the longest were gifted the sports cars.

The crowd is visiting the city to attend Consensus, the sprawling blockchain conference that has attracted nearly 8,500 people.

Inside the club, where photos aren't allowed, women in corseted lingerie deliver bottles of vodka and Champagne to tables of reclining men in suits amid a fanfare of sparklers. Onstage, two naked women simulate fellatio as the crowd roars in approval. At one point, one of the women eats something seemingly designed to look like feces from the other's rear. A half-naked man wearing an enormous bear head gyrates against a woman whose breasts are ensconced in two clear plastic Madonna-style triangles. Bags of cocaine are passed underhand.

"If I offer you coke, do you promise not to write about it?" a woman asks.

The creator of an influential cryptocurrency explains the power of decentralized technology as a woman in a G-string undulates on the bar top beside us.

The mood is celebratory. Many of the people in attendance have gotten rich in the past decade through a technology often derided by the public. For many of them, the media's newfound captivation with cryptocurrencies is a form of validation: It is satisfying to be right.

As one man in attendance puts it: "Getting rich on crypto is something that most of us never expected. We weren't in it for the money. It's like, what do you do when you suddenly have a bunch of money that you never even thought you would have?"

For some, the answer to this question lies in an MDMA-fueled night of bottle service and entertainment at an exclusive adult club.

But for others, the money is a windfall to be spent on technologies that they believe will transform not only the internet, but the underpinnings of society itself.

Around 3 a.m., a nerdcore rapper who goes by the name YTCracker takes the stage to perform two cryptocurrency-themed rap songs, "Bitcoin Baron" and "Crypto Illuminati." He flew into New York expressly to perform at this event.

He raps:

Told you to snap up a modest position Of currency minted from factoring digits Which of you listened? Which of you listened?

In the red velvet booths below, his listeners raise glasses of Champagne.

"Blockchain is going to change the world, man," a man tells me, exuberant. "This is only the beginning."

While he's founded companies that are trying to define the future of transportation with electric vehicles, space exploration, and tunnels that would house high-speed transit systems, Elon Musk doesn't like flying cars.

During an event for his tunnel-digging company, The Boring Company, on Thursday, Musk explained why flying cars could be more trouble than they're worth. Musk said his biggest concerns are noise and the potential for a broken part to fall and hit someone on the ground.

"There will be zillions of these things flying all over the place and, inevitably, somebody's not going to service their car properly and they're going to drop a hubcap and it's going to guillotine somebody," Musk said. "And it's going to be noisy like a hurricane."

Musk has expressed similar concerns before, and believes it's better to address traffic congestion by building high-speed, underground transit systems like Loop and Hyperloop. On Thursday, Musk outlined how the Loop system might work.

Loop is a lower-speed alternative to Hyperloop, which was first proposed by Musk in a 2013 white paper. Hyperloop would be used for travel between cities, while Loop would carry passengers over shorter distances. Each would send passengers in pods through underground tunnel networks, but while Hyperloop pods would surpass 600 mph, Loop pods would travel at 150 mph due to differences in how the tunnels are pressurized.

On Thursday, Musk said Loop pods would hold 16 people. He also said a Loop system could be accessed by dozens of small stations that would transport passengers underground and take up as much space as a parking spot. Rides could cost as little as $1.

Some of Musk's competitors are developing aircraft that resemble flying cars. In early May, Uber unveiled a flying taxi prototype for its upcoming Uber Air service, which will transport passengers between rooftop landing pads the company refers to as "skyports." Uber intends to test the service in 2020 in Dallas and Los Angeles and begin offering commercial rides in those cities in 2023.

In an interview with CBS This Morning Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber plans to make Uber Air "affordable for normal people."

On Friday, Elon Musk offered more detail on The Boring Company's plan to dig tunnels for high-speed transportation beneath numerous major freeway arteries in Los Angeles.

Let's cut to the chase: The Boring Company's master plan is to "solve" the freeways by connecting all the cool places in town where relatively affluent Angelenos live and travel to, while also serving travelers who use the LAX and Long Beach airports. The idea is create a "Loop" system that could carry passengers and possibly cars.

The longest tunnel, as conceptualized, would connect Sherman Oaks to Long Beach, essentially creating a private thoroughfare that follows the path of the 405 freeway (coincidentally, Musk's commuting route takes him from his Los Angeles home in Bel Air to the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, which is a small municipality south of downtown Los Angeles and east of LAX, off the 105 freeway).

I lived and drove in Los Angeles for a decade, and, like Musk, I was often trapped in the circle of hell that the 405 can become during rush hour. But I also breezed along the freeways at times when traffic was limited.

Cool — if you live in Bel Air (between Sherman Oaks and The Getty) and need to get to Hawthorne. The Boring Company

It's worth noting that the Loop plan mirrors what Angelenos already have on the mass-transit front with the Metro rail system. But Metro trains can't go 150 mph and aren't routinely ridden, I'm assuming, by Musk.

Metro

The Los Angeles traffic problem is really one of 20th-century economic and business priorities colliding with population growth and geography.

Los Angeles isn't really a traditional city — it's a cluster of towns linked by a freeway system. None of this was planned; it just developed over a century. So Dodger Stadium, which should be someplace over by the beach, is instead tucked into a hard-to-access ravine north of downtown. Hollywood is blocked from the San Fernando Valley by a mountain. Downtown itself has to share "downtown" credentials with parallel downtowns on the Westside (Century City) and in the Valley. And don't get me started on how this sprawling, extemporaneously assembled "city" is now also linked to nearby urbanizing regions, such as the San Gabriel Valley to the east and to Orange County to the south.

The freeways addressed this geographical challenge — until they didn't. The big issue now is that the places where people work in Los Angeles are often not near where they live. This is especially true for poorer Angelenos, but it's also true for rich people such as Musk. The billionaire's rocket factory is just 18 miles from his house, but when the 405 gets gnarly, the drive can consume hours.

The solution isn't a multibillion-dollar tunnel system, even if high-speed rides cost just $1 (as Musk said they would). The solution is to abandon the 20th-century scheduling preoccupation that clogs Los Angeles' freeways from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Workplace flextime and telecommuting for those who are able (which, for Los Angeles' creative-class workforce, is a lot) would spread traffic volumes out over the entire day.

There's some research indicating that more telecommuting may reduce congestion only marginally (and bring some unintended consequences), but anything Los Angeles can do to get people off the roads and keep them staying closer to home would be a low-cost undertaking worthy of pursuing. In many cases, it may liberate the freeways for workers whose financial situation compels them to drive and alleviate some of the infamous "negative externality" problems related to public roads that are free for all to use.

As proposed, The Boring Company's plan looks like what we're seeing more and more of these days when it comes to transportation: a pay-into-it system for those who can afford these extra costs to avoid hassles, and a broken or stressed-out existing system for everybody else.