There’s a lot riding on Sonos’ first pair of wireless headphones; CEO Patrick Spence has expressed confidence that the new product category will be a huge revenue driver for his company after Sonos has faced cooling demand for its speakers. The headphones are expected to ship sometime next month, but today, we’re getting a first look at the hardware design — and we now know what they’ll be called.

You’re looking at the Sonos Ace headphones. These images were prematurely published by authorized Sonos parts dealer Schuurman. The main image reveals quite a few buttons on both ear cups, a toggle switch of some sort, and a premium build that seems fitting of headphones expected to be priced around $450. The Schuurman website shows a price of...

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Enlarge / A scene from the Prime Video original series Fallout. (credit: Prime Video/YouTube)

Amazon Prime Video subscribers will see new types of advertisements this broadcast year. Amazon announced today that it's adding new ad formats to its video streaming service, hoping to encourage people to interact with the ads and shop on Amazon.

In January, Prime Video streams included commercials unless subscribers paid $3 extra per month. That has meant that watching stuff on Prime Video ad-free costs $12 per month or, if you're also a Prime subscriber, $18 per month.

New types of Prime Video ads

Amazon has heightened focus on streaming ads this year. Those who opted for Prime Video with commercials will soon see shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive brand trivia ads, as Amazon calls them. Amazon said that advertisers could buy these new displays to be shown "across the vast majority of content on Prime Video, wherever it’s streamed." All the new ad formats allow a viewer to place advertised products in their Amazon cart.

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Wu Bingjian, better known in the west as ‘Houqua’, or sometimes ‘Howqua’, was the most successful Chinese merchant of his day.  As leader of the Cohong (gonghang), the guild of Chinese traders that had been authorized in the late 18th century by the Qing court to oversee trade with Western merchants at Canton (Guangzhou), he was at once the richest man in the world.  In 1834, Wu’s personal wealth was estimated at 26 million Mexican silver dollars (£6.24 million then, around (£680 million today).  To put this wealth in perspective, the contemporary European financier Nathan Rotschild held capital equivalent to US $5.3 million (around £1.06 million) in 1828.  Wu’s extraordinary ability to maintain a complex balance between his business interests, the Qing court and his Western partners, made him the most importnat player in Western countries’ trade with China for over half a century.

That is from the new and quite interesting Creators of Modern China: 100 Lives from Empire to Republic 1796-1912, edited by Jessican Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell.

The post Who was the wealthiest man in the world in the 1830s? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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US ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, has emphasized the remarkable success of Indian immigrants in the United States, noting that over 10% of Fortune 500 companmy CEOs as Indian immigrants who studied in the US.

Here is the link.  Via the excellent Samir Varma.

The post U.S.A.-India fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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