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LA STAMPA

The Zuckerberg Private Honeymoon Paradox

Why The Facebook Founder's Anonymous Roman Getaway With His New Bride Is Barely Worth A Tweet.

Mark Zuckerberg *likes the Sistine Chapel (Twitter)
Mark Zuckerberg *likes the Sistine Chapel (Twitter)
Gianluca Nicoletti

Mark Zuckerberg's honeymoon in Rome has quickly been added to the legend. The first evidence has been bouncing back on Twitter: it's a picture that could have been taken by or of anyone. The Facebook founder was captured at the Sistine Chapel next to his newly-married wife Priscilla Chan, sporting an ever casual t-shirt and jeans.

The ingenius digital hero here seems engaged in the most conventional honeymoon ever. The man who recognized them was stunned that the newlyweds did not have a police escort. It seemed impossible that a billionaire like him would travel without a security detail, especially here in Italy where any lowly member of parliament is followed by at least three well-armed bodyguards when out shopping at Ikea.

During his quick holiday in Rome, Zuckerberg confirmed that he continues to carry himself in the high aesthetics of low-profile, not much different than when he was a penniless student in Harvard. Who knows if someone told him that for 2,000 euros, he could have had a private, guided tour of the Michelangelo masterpieces.

And so it is that the biggest prophet of sharing one's private life with thousands of strangers enters, despite himself, through the back door of the media circuit, by way of a report on Facebook's biggest social network competitor: the more ascetic Twitter.

It looks even more ironic that the inventor of Facebook would be captured by a blurry picture of himself (and his wife) from behind, a sneaky snapshot taken with a smartphone, a circumstance that this time underlines a singularity. We could venture the hypothesis that all this could represent a strategy of anticipatory viral marketing. Yesterday, at the time when "the poor man's paparazzi" pictures were going viral, press agencies were reviving the news, with The New York Times as a source, that Zuckerberg was secretly tooling up to launch the Facebook Smartphone, to be be on the market within a year.

But maybe the only real thing is that Mark Zuckerberg, the man who annihiliated the concept of anonymity, can afford to travel totally incognito. The height of absurdity is that the God of Faces has a face that not many notice -- indeed, only one guy armed with a cell phone approached him. You can bet that if any low-ranking showgirl had taken the same Roman "love tour" with her new hunk of a husband, she would have been followed by professional photographers, and wound up on the front pages of newspapers and magazines...rather than uploaded for a passing tweet.

Read the original article in Italian

Photo – Twitter

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Future

Livestream Shopping Is Huge In China — Will It Fly Elsewhere?

Streaming video channels of people shopping has been booming in China, and is beginning to win over customers abroad as a cheap and cheerful way of selling products to millions of consumers glued to the screen.

A A female volunteer promotes spring tea products via on-line live streaming on a pretty mountain surrounded by tea plants.

In Beijing, selling spring tea products via on-line live streaming.

Xinhua / ZUMA
Gwendolyn Ledger

SANTIAGOTikTok, owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance, has spent more than $500 million to break into online retailing. The app, best known for its short, comical videos, launched TikTok Shop in August, aiming to sell Chinese products in the U.S. and compete with other Chinese firms like Shein and Temu.

Tik Tok Shop will have three sections, including a live or livestream shopping channel, allowing users to buy while watching influencers promote a product.

This choice was strategic: in the past year, live shopping has become a significant trend in online retailing both in the U.S. and Latin America. While still an evolving technology, in principle, it promises good returns and lower costs.

Chilean Carlos O'Rian Herrera, co-founder of Fira Onlive, an online sales consultancy, told América Economía that live shopping has a much higher catchment rate than standard website retailing. If traditional e-commerce has a rate of one or two purchases per 100 visits to your site, live shopping can hike the ratio to 19%.

Live shopping has thrived in China and the recent purchases of shopping platforms in some Latin American countries suggests firms are taking an interest. In the United States, live shopping generated some $20 billion in sales revenues in 2022, according to consultants McKinsey. This constituted 2% of all online sales, but the firm believes the ratio may become 20% by 2026.

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