• New iPhone models haven't sold out as quickly as they have in years past. 
• Citi analysts have used search trends to surmise that "customers are getting less excited for each new generation of iPhone."

Apple launched the iPhone XR at 3 A.M. in the morning on Friday, and when morning came, nearly all of the models were still in stock, according to Macworld. 

It's a change for Apple, which usually requires customers to wake up in the early morning to put in a pre-order if they want the new iPhone on the first day. Lines outside Apple stores when the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max went on sale were smaller than they were in years past. 

These data points can be taken as a sign that perhaps an iPhone launch doesn't generate as much buzz as it used to.

That's what analysts from Citi concluded in a note distributed earlier this week, based on Google searches.

"We observed there are significant spikes for web searches after the launch event each year. We also see the momentum has been decreasing over time," the analysts wrote.

"We believe this indicates the market has been maturing, and customers are getting less excited for each new generation of iPhone," they continued. "We suspect this is because of a slowdown in innovation and the saturation of iPhone in the addressable market."

Their research can be summed up in this chart: 

There are a lot of reasons why search traffic might be decreasing year-over-year, and it doesn't necessarily suggest that iPhone sales will sag. "We are not expecting a 'Super Cycle,' but we do believe sustainable single-digit unit growth of iPhone is achievable," the Citi analysts write. 

One issue might be that the overall smartphone market has matured. Apple's big new features include water-resistance, a facial recognition scanner called Face ID, and a display that covers more of the front of the phone. But none of those banner features represent as much of a jump as iPhones from 4 or 5 years ago, when the camera was improving by leaps and bounds and the displays were getting much larger on an annual basis. 

It's also possible that these search trends were collected before the iPhone XR went on sale. The iPhone XR comes in a bunch of colors, and starting at $749, is expected to be the most popular new iPhone this cycle.

Regardless of why, there certainly does appear to be less buzz around new iPhone launches. Perhaps that's why Apple is pouring so much money into research and development— to find the next big thing. 

SEE ALSO: Apple is spending billions on secret R&D projects — and it keeps spending more

Join the conversation about this story »

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• The World Economic Forum ranked each country according to its business environment and innovation.
• The United States took the No. 1 spot.
• The ranking considered the cost and speed of starting a business in each country, as well as attitudes toward risk, and the willingness of companies to embrace disruptive ideas.

If you're looking for the best place to build a business, you may not have to look far.

The United States was ranked No. 1 in "business dynamism" in the World Economic Forum's 2018 global competitiveness report on Tuesday, scoring a global high of 86.5 points out of 100 in the category.

The business dynamism ranking factored in several metrics, such as the cost and speed of starting a business in each country, the attitudes of entrepreneurs toward risk, and the willingness of companies to embrace disruptive ideas.

"An agile and dynamic private sector increases productivity by taking business risks, testing new ideas, and creating innovative products and services," the report said.

"In an environment characterized by frequent disruption and redefinition of businesses and sectors, successful economic systems are resilient to technological shocks and are able to constantly re-invent themselves."

Take a look at the best places in the world for innovative businesses:

SEE ALSO: The 13 worst job markets in America right now

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25. Czech Republic

Score: 70.2

24. Slovenia

Score: 70.3

23. Thailand

Score: 71.0

More than 1,200 miles from the coast of Japan, a 51-year-old Frenchman is swimming in the Pacific Ocean right now.

Or he's eating.

Those are pretty much the only two activities Benoît Lecomte does these days, as he attempts to become the first person to successfully swim across the Pacific Ocean.

"I wake up throughout the night because I'm hungry," Lecomte told Business Insider by phone from the 20-meter sailboat, called Seeker, that's traveling with him. 

Lecomte set out from Japan in June, and is making his way toward California. An eight-person crew is sailing along with him, collecting data about the health of both the ocean and Lecomte along the way.

Their mission is far less concerned about crushing records than it is with breaking bad habits.

"We're addicted to plastic," Lecomte said. "That's something we need to change."

The original plan was to finish this awareness-raising swim in December, but the quest has faced some hiccups. The crew had to turn back in July and take a 20-day break when a series of strong typhoons hit the area. 

Undeterred, Lecomte is back in the water now, and logging some of his longest daily swims thus far.

He said the journey hasn't gotten easier over time, but he and the crew have developed a routine that guides their daily activity. Here's what it's like.

SEE ALSO: A 51-year-old just began a 5,500-mile swim across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to San Francisco

Every day, Lecomte wakes up around 6 a.m. and prepares for another eight-hour day of swimming. He starts off with a hot bowl of oatmeal that's "loaded with nuts and dried fruit," he said.

Oatmeal has a high fat content, which helps keep Lecomte full while he swims in the 78-degree waters of the Pacific.

Before he gets in the water, he answers a few emails, does a bit of writing, rubs Vaseline on his skin to prevent chafing, and may work on some necessary repairs of his gear.

Then he and a crew of two others get in a rubber dinghy and head back to the precise spot where he stopped swimming the day before. (They monitor Lecomte's progress using a GPS tracker.) The crew members point him in the correct direction, and he plops into the water. 

Lecomte is a little over a fifth of the way through his journey.

He tries to swim 30 miles each day, but sometimes he falls short of that goal.

Swimming eight or nine hours per day makes Lecomte so hungry that he usually wakes up three or four times each night to nosh.

"Sometimes it's just water," he said. But he also drinks protein shakes and eats pasta leftovers as midnight snacks.

There is no wiggle room once you land on Mars. You either have what you need to survive, or you die.

That risk is dramatically portrayed in the sci-fi book and movie "The Martian," in which a stranded astronaut survives on leftover potatoes, freeze-dried feces, and a lot of gumption.

But the harsh realities of Mars loom in a fast-approaching future.

Elon Musk's aerospace company, SpaceX, aims to ship people to the red planet and colonize that world on an eyebrow-raising timeline— perhaps as soon as 2024. Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is pressing to colonize space with his spaceflight company, Blue Origin. Even NASA is working hard (though with some stumbles) to build a towering interplanetary rocket called Space Launch System.

That's where the upstart rocket company Relativity Space, which has backing from Mark Cuban, sees a vital opening for business.

"We feel like it's inevitable that if humanity is going out to colonize other planets, 3D-printing is really the only way to manufacture things like tools and replacement parts," Tim Ellis, a co-founder of Relativity Space, told Business Insider. Ellis is a rocket-propulsion engineer who formerly worked at Blue Origin.

"So that's what we're working on: How to 3D-print an entire rocket," he said.

Space colonization is a distant business venture for Relativity Space, though, since Mars-bound spaceships won't get off the ground until the 2020s at the very soonest.

Here's a look at what the company is doing right now and how it plans to achieve its long-term vision.

SEE ALSO: This speculative SpaceX timeline reveals roughly when, where, and how Elon Musk plans to colonize Mars

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Ellis helped bring 3D-printing to Blue Origin to quickly and cheaply build custom parts for the company. "That inspired me to see 3D-printing is the future of rockets," he said. "We saw the time savings in this totally new process to build rockets."

The kind of 3D-printing Ellis is referring to is called laser sintering. The system uses laser beams to bond powdered metal, layer by layer, into precise and complex structures that have minimal parts.

Ellis said that, so far, spaceflight companies are only dipping their toes into the technology. "They're only printing parts here and there and cannibalizing launch systems from the bottom-up," he said. "The problem with that approach is that there are close to 100,000 parts in a rocket."

• Two open-source database companies, MongoDB and Redis Labs, grew tired of seeing Amazon take their free software and make gobs of money on it, without much benefit to them.
• Amazon has every legal right to use their software in this way, because it is using the "open source" versions of their software, which is free to use.
• But many software licenses were developed before the rise of cloud computing, before cloud companies like Amazon, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent could offer that free software as a service at a profit.
• Now MongoDB and Redis Labs have introduced controversial new licensing that adds restrictions for companies or people trying to sell their software. And the move has upset a lot of programmers.

Every year, large cloud companies like Amazon rake in billions of dollars — but some of their most popular cloud services comes from repackaging software projects created by other, smaller companies.

Amazon is repackaging what's known as "open source" software, which is software that is given away for free, meaning Amazon has every legal right to use it in this way. For instance, since 2013, Amazon had been offering the open-source database Redis as part of a popular cloud service called ElastiCache.

Still, some companies, like MongoDB and Redis Labs, are watching Amazon become the major benefactor of their work and feel they are not getting enough benefit in return. And they've come up with a controversial plan to change that.

MongoDB, another open-source database company, felt the same about how foreign tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu sell its software as a cloud service. MongoDB has invested $300 million into research and development for its open-source software and if these giants want to make money on the free versions, its CEO feels they should, at the very least, contribute back in some major ways.

While most open source licenses allow anyone to use the software for free, the users typically contribute back to the software project: fixing things, adding features, making the software better for everyone. 

"We see that more companies are testing the boundaries of open source,"Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB, told Business Insider. "They’re taking the value of what was built. Rather than litigating this to the core, we believe it makes more sense to focus our resources on building great products for our companies."

Strip mining

Although those major cloud companies technically aren’t breaking any laws, if they are all take and no give, they are breaking the social rules of open source. Companies like MongoDB and Redis can give away big portions of their software because what they get in return is free labor from the software users to make the software better. That helps them improve the commercial versions of their software, the ones they do charge money to use.

There’s a term in the open source community for what the cloud companies are being accused of doing: strip mining. It means that companies are using free software code for their own gain, with no intention of contributing to the project.

“[Amazon has] taken Redis’ open-source project and packaged it as a service and monetized that,” Manish Gupta, CMO of Redis Labs, told Business Insider. “Their contribution to the open source is minuscule, not even in the 1 percent range.”

Previously, both Redis and MongoDB were licensed under the Affero General Public License (AGPL), a license that says any modifications made to the software must be released to the public.

That means large companies can still make money from and run those open-source projects, but the license just makes it slightly more inconvenient for them to do so. And if those companies don't make any changes and simply sell the software, they're not violating anything. Those companies also aren’t obligated to contribute to the projects beyond the social expectation that they do.

But Ittycheria believes that they could easily contribute.

"They don’t make enhancements that they’ve created available for the community while they’ve created a valuable franchise," Ittycheria said.

Now they're introducing new licensing

So both of these companies are trying to change their licensing to make cloud companies either pay up or roll up their sleeves and contribute to the work.

Two months ago, Redis Labs added a new licensing option for Redis modules. It uses an existing free software license called Apache and adds a term known as the Commons Clause, which forbids users from selling the software.

“People traditionally had a lot of choices in the open source world: give everything away for free. People traditionally had a lot of choices in the proprietary world: give nothing away to the world,” Kevin Wang, founder and CEO of FOSSA, which contributed the Commons Clause, told Business Insider. “Commons Clause is in the middle.”

And on Tuesday, MongoDB introduced a new software license called Server Side Public License (SSPL).

Under SSPL, users can still change and redistribute the software, but it explicitly states that if a person or a company wants to publicly offer MongoDB as a service, they must open source that service -- meaning they must make the code available to everyone for free. Otherwise, they must obtain a commercial license.

In other words, if those major cloud companies want to sell MongoDB as a service, they have to freely share their code for the full components of that service, giving everyone, even their competitors, a look at their technology.

This license will affect all versions of MongoDB’s community server released after Tuesday. Right now, MongoDB is waiting for approval for its new license from an organization that handles open source licenses, the Open Source Initiative.

Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of MongoDB, believes this license will not affect the vast majority of MongoDB’s users -- only the companies that are trying to sell MongoDB as a service.

“We want to continue investing heavily to build great products for our community,” Horowitz said. “All this time we spend litigating makes it harder to build and create products.”

Open-source licensing wars

Investors responded favorably to MongoDB announcing its new license. But within the open-source world, it has ignited some tension.

Likewise, when Redis Labs announced it was adding the Commons Clause, this also sparked wars on open-source licensing. This is because that while software that uses this clause may include code that's freely available, it no longer fully meets the definition of "open source." Even the Commons Clause website says, "to avoid confusion, it is best not to call Commons Clause software 'open source.'"

Some viewed the clause as harmful, arguing that if a project is offered as open-source, then it should stay completely open-source – and adding restrictions goes against the very meaning of open-source. Some developers even counterattacked by forking the code, meaning they are taking the free stuff and making their own, independent versions of it, not beholden to the original developer like MongoDB or Redis.

Ittycheria acknowledges that some of the legal aspects of open-source were not completely thought through before, but things have changed with the new cloud era. After all, Redis Labs and MongoDB are not the only companies impacted by large cloud companies. Other open-source projects, like Elasticsearch, Kafka, Docker, Hadoop and Spark have also been offered on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“The cloud provider is capturing all the value and giving little to nothing back to the community,” Ittycheria said. “We think this is bad for the open source industry.”

Now, more open source projects are considering adding similar licenses. For example, Neo4j, a database platform, added the Commons Clause. And database management systems CockroachDB and MariaDB have used similar multi-choice licensing models.

“We expect more of that activity,” Gupta said. “The biggest challenge is how do you protect your investment from being completely being poached by AWS or a vendor like them without them contributing back to the community? That’s the fundamental question that requires a solution.”

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

SEE ALSO: $20 billion Atlassian explains why it's blowing up its oldest product to evolve with today’s software teams

Join the conversation about this story »

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• Khabib Nurmagomedov got the biggest win of his career when he submitted Conor McGregor in four rounds at UFC 229.
• The victory preserved his unbeaten record, something he cherishes, as he has frequently said he is "the Floyd Mayweather of MMA."
• But there may be more to the comparison than a flawless combat sports record.
• Business Insider considers Nurmagomedov and Mayweather's upbringings, how they take little damage in fights, and the impact they have on their sport.
• Nurmagomedov is three fights away from a 30-0 record, and there are three massive opponents out there who can help him secure a clear legacy at the pinnacle of the UFC.
• If he wins all of those fights, he could easily retire as the best lightweight the UFC has ever seen, an unbeaten beast, and the Mayweather of MMA.

Khabib Nurmagomedov has frequently claimed that he's "the Floyd Mayweather of MMA."

When he said it most recently, at a press conference in September, his UFC 229 opponent Conor McGregor interrupted him by mocking his accent, telling him to shut his mouth, and calling him "dirt."

Maybe now, after Nurmagomedov destroyed McGregor in a dominant four-round victory at UFC 229, the comparison will be taken seriously.

Nurmagomedov's submission win over McGregor extended his extraordinary run to 27 wins from 27 fights — the most career wins without a single loss in mixed martial arts today, according to Fight Matrix.

The Russian is cherishing his undefeated record and his unbeatable aura, just like Mayweather did when he collected 50 wins from 50 professional boxing fights from 1996 to 2017.

But how similar are they?

Well, both fighters certainly had unconventional upbringings.

Mayweather learned to box as soon as he could walk, as a one-year-old boy punching the things he could reach like hanging plants and door knobs.

Just before Mayweather Jr.'s second birthday, his father, Floyd Mayweather Sr., held him up by the ankles to act like a human shield, the last line of defence against an angry relative with a gun. The relative was Tony Sinclair, Mayweather Jr.'s uncle. Sinclair spared Jr. and aimed lower, firing his 20.gauge shotgun at Mayweather Sr.'s leg. It ate a hole in his calf, and effectively ended his career as an elite welterweight fighter in 1979. He recovered well enough to fight another day, but never at the same level as he was able to before.

Mayweather wanted to escape a violent childhood, he dreamed of becoming one of the successful fighters he had pinned up on his bedroom walls as a kid, and it was boxing that allowed him to bring home the sort of money that his family never seemed to have.

Mayweather's two uncles, Roger and Jeff, and father, Floyd Sr., all fought at a national level or above, and passed their knowledge and expertise to a young and impressionable Jr. Boxing was always in his life and his blood. Perhaps it was always inevitable that Mayweather would grow up to see his name mentioned alongside the defensive greats of the game like the former four-weight world champion Pernell Whitaker, the Hall of Fame featherweight Willie Pep, and the greatest of all time Sugar Ray Robinson.

The role models in Nurmagomedov's family are similar, all you have to do is replace boxing with grappling. The Nurmagomedov men all had a passion for hand-to-hand combat. Nurmagomedov's father, Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov, won national championships in judo, sambo, and freestyle wrestling, according to Bloody Elbow, and it was not long before he was able to share that passion and expertise with his son.

When young Khabib was seven, Abdulmanap and his three uncles moved their families to a three-storey house in the Dagestan capital Makhachkala, according to ESPN. There were 16 boys under one roof but no women as they kept it "old school" and "like the military." All the boys wrestled and trained in combat sambo.

But it wasn't just siblings and cousins Nurmagomedov would roll around with. At nine, he began wrestling bears.

Like Mayweather in Michigan, violence could often have just been around the corner for a young Nurmagomedov on the streets of Makhachkala. "All guys are tough and everybody is ready to fight all the time," he told ESPN in 2015.

But, just like Mayweather, Nurmagomedov channeled his desire to fight into an arena that allowed it. Away from the streets, and into competition. For Mayweather, that began with amateur boxing, something that culminated with a bronze medal at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. For Nurmagomedov, it was wrestling drills at eight-years-old before national titles in sambo and judo. But it was a success in the exotic and foreign sport MMA that Nurmagomedov craved most.

Pretty Boy in a ring riot

Mayweather was already 35-0 and a three-weight world champion when he fought Zab Judah, a fellow American who, like Mayweather, was considered brash and flash at the time. They met in Las Vegas for a 12-round welterweight title fight in 2006, which had the IBF and IBO championship belts on the line.

At this point in his career, Mayweather had long established himself as the "Pretty Boy" of boxing. This is because he hardly took any damage and retained his youthful looks thanks to a Philly Shell defensive technique that allowed him to roll his shoulder and slip shots.

He had an adaptive style where he could press forward for a stoppage like when he bloodied Arturo Gatti in 2005 or coast to a simple decision. Regardless of the route he chose, he had only really been tested once when he met José Luis Castillo for the first time in 2002. He beat Castillo easier in the rematch and would rarely be tested ever again.

Against Judah, Mayweather came-from-behind to coast toward one of those decision wins. It would have been just another routine points win had it not been for Judah throwing a low blow with 10 seconds to go before the end of the 10th round.

Judah followed the shot to the groin with an illegal punch to the back of the head. Mayweather, visibly in pain, doubled over in the ring. The fighter's uncle, Roger Mayweather, then jumped through the ropes and confronted Judah. All hell broke loose when Judah's people did the same to protect their guy. The ring ended up looking like the WWE's annual Royal Rumble event — a feral free-for-all. The New York Times reported that over a dozen security and police officials were needed to restore order to the chaos.

Boxing was given a black eye.

If you can look beyond his puffy cauliflower ears, Nurmagomedov may well be the "Pretty Boy" of MMA.

Like Mayweather, Nurmagomedov's skillset is so enhanced he is rarely tested within the confines of his battleground — the octagon. Before he fought McGregor on October 6, Nurmagomedov had won every single round of every one of the 26 fights that he had competed in— and he did so while absorbing a minimal amount of damage. Again, just like Mayweather. He even had an adaptive style where he could secure a knockout, lock in a submission, or coast to a routine decision win.

Unlike Mayweather, the ring riot that Nurmagomedov was involved in at the weekend was sparked by his action.

You could argue it was a reaction to all the pre-fight trash-talk that McGregor had subjected him to in the six months leading up to fight night, but even after making McGregor tap with a tight neck crank in the fourth round of a wildly entertaining UFC 229 main event, Nurmagomedov refused to celebrate his greatest triumph.

Instead, he jumped the octagon fence and charged at McGregor's cageside friend Dillon Danis. While this was going on, a brawl erupted in the octagon, with McGregor and members of Nurmagomedov's team exchanging punches.

When Nurmagomedov finally returned to the cage and calm had been restored, the UFC boss Dana White could be heard telling the Russian that there was no way he could let him leave with the UFC lightweight championship belt wrapped around his waist as he feared what an angry Las Vegas crowd could do. Instead, Nurmagomedov was escorted out of the arena by the city's police.

MMA now had a black eye of their own.

A 'TBE' record

There have been many incantations of Mayweather. From the "Pretty Boy," to "Money," and finally, "TBE"— which stands for "The Best Ever." The acronym is braggadocio. There are fighters superior to Mayweather in the annals of history, and the nickname is just a riff on Muhammad Ali calling himself, "The Greatest." But, regardless, Mayweather may well have earned the right to call himself TBE of a specific weight class.

Mayweather had his biggest and most lucrative victories in and around the welterweight division (Manny Pacquiao in 2015 and McGregor in 2017 are the two best-selling pay-per-views in history), but his greatest work was through his reign as a super featherweight champion. After all, he is ranked the second-best ever champion at this weight by the WBC, and the best ever at this weight by Proboxing-fans.com and BoxingScene.com.

Nurmagomedov is approaching this kind of pedigree. He is considered the second-best athlete in the entire stable of fighters that the UFC currently has to offer, regardless of weight classes.

And, with a successful defence of his UFC lightweight title under his belt, a massive scalp in McGregor on his résumé, and an intriguing future ahead of him — the 30-year-old is realistically just three wins away from becoming the best 155-pound fighter the UFC has ever seen. "TBE" at lightweight.

His path to TBE is already clear.

Assuming the Nevada Athletic Commission follows the UFC boss Dana White's advice and slaps Nurmagomedov with a $250,000 fine and a six-month ban from competition for the role he played in the UFC 229 riot, he will still be the UFC lightweight world champion, and will, let's presume, be allowed to compete in the United States.

This means his 28th professional fight would likely be against Tony Ferguson. Ferguson is the fighter who survived the blood-and-guts brawl with Anthony Pettis. The UFC 229 undercard bout between Ferguson and Pettis was a brutal slobberknocker, and one Ferguson prevailed in by way of technical knockout in the second round.

Ferguson has the record for most wins in UFC lightweight history, is on a killer run at the weight, and is bang in-form. Ferguson even features on UFC's top 15 pound-for-pound list (see above). A fight with Nurmagomedov would rank amongst the highest quality MMA you could ever see as it would pit Ferguson's collegiate-level wrestling, jiu-jitsu black belt, and stingingly accurate strikes, against Nurmagomedov's jab, thumping overhand right, and nasty ground-and-pound techniques.

Should Nurmagomedov dispatch of Ferguson, he would have beaten four of the fighters currently ranked in UFC's top ten list at lightweight, meaning he will have cleared out the most interesting, relevant, and competitive names in the division.

This could leave Nurmagomedov looking for a legacy fight — and there may be no legacy victory more definitive than one over fellow top-level wrestler Georges St. Pierre, the former two-weight world champion.

St. Pierre is heralded as the best welterweight fighter ever, and the most accomplished mixed martial artist of all time, according to Fight Matrix.

Along with Michael Bisping, St.Pierre holds the record for the most wins in UFC history (20) and came out of a four-year break to beat Bisping, the reigning UFC middleweight champion at the time, wrestling the belt away from the Englishman's waist in convincing fashion in 2017.

The gap between middleweight, where St.Pierre last fought, and lightweight, where Nurmagomedov currently campaigns, is vast. However, eagle-eyed fans noticed that St.Pierre had massively slimmed down in September, and looked like he was preparing his body to challenge the winner of UFC 229. As the winner is Nurmagomedov, St.Pierre may want to fight him at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Quebec, or even Las Vegas.

Beating GSP would leave Nurmagomedov just one fight away from reaching 30-0, and there would be no better opponent to step-up than his old foe McGregor. A rematch in Dublin, Ireland, or St.Petersburg in Russia, would be huge, bringing together a rivalry that refuses to go away.

If Nurmagomedov gets to the end of that gauntlet run of opponents and is still undefeated, then he will easily have become the best lightweight ever to grace the UFC, and at 30-0 will have backed-up his claim that he is, without question, the Mayweather of MMA.

Who knows, maybe it is Mayweather who will have been the Nurmagomedov of boxing all along.

SEE ALSO: Khabib Nurmagomedov made Conor McGregor tap with a tight neck crank — he then jumped the cage and almost incited a riot

DON'T MISS: 'Putin is very proud of me' — Khabib Nurmagomedov talks to the press after the wild brawl that followed his submission win over Conor McGregor

UP NEXT: 'S--- happens' — Khabib Nurmagomedov's manager reacts to the chaotic violence that followed his fighter's win over Conor McGregor

Join the conversation about this story »

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• Marijuana startups are mimicking tech companies' style of marketing and branding. 
• Chris Burggraeve, a former Coca-Cola and AB InBev executive-turned cannabis startup founder, estimates that people seeking the "Apple Store experience" for marijuana make up a $50 million opportunity. 
• Brands like Toast, Herbessntls, and MedMen are among the many companies taking a page out of Apple's playbook. 

With legal marijuana sweeping the United States and Canada, cannabis industry players are taking it on themselves to make cannabis not just okay, but completely normal. 

That means a proliferation of brands pushing all the markings of a tech startup — brightly colored products, an emphasis on quality, and open, airy shops — to joints, vaporizers, and dispensaries.

According to Chris Burggraeve, a former Coca-Cola and AB InBev executive-turned cannabis startup founder, weed companies adopting minimalist colors and clean lines makes perfect business sense. Marijuana carries a historical baggage that most of its category rivals, from alcohol to pharmaceuticals, lack.

As an increasing number of states legalize marijuana, companies have the opportunity to not just sell weed but create brands in an explosive industry. While marijuana is not quite a blank slate, companies have the chance to decide whether they want to market it with its old, stoner-centric image or to adopt the trappings of a tech brand like Apple. 

"Think about the breakdown: What proportion of people want the Apple Store experience?" Burggraeve told Business Insider. 

According to Burggraeve's estimates, customers seeking the stoner vibe make up a roughly $2 million market. Those who would feel more at home at an Apple Store that sells marijuana products instead of iPads account for $50 million. 

This theory helped Burggraeve in shaping Toast, an upscale marijuana brand he cofounded in 2016. A "slice" of Toast is marketed as the equivalent of a glass of champagne, a classy indulgence that will leave the customer just slightly buzzed. But, Burggraeve isn't alone in his thinking.

Défoncé is making artisanal chocolate edibles while Lord Jones produces"small batches from single origin Ecuadorian dark chocolate, imported natural European fruit essences and full-spectrum phytocannabinoid-rich CBD extract derived from specially selected organically grown hemp."

Herbessntls packages CBD-infused skincare in chic white bottles. And, MedMen is on its way to becoming perhaps the first American $1 billion marijuana startup thanks in part to its chain of slick, high-end marijuana dispensaries. 

"We want the store to show our vision of the future for cannabis," Daniel Yi, a senior vice president at MedMen, told Business Insider earlier this year.

Yi's vision — like the vision of dozens of other marijuana startup founders — is a sleek place you'd be comfortable visiting with your grandmother and tween cousin alike. The only question is which companies will get a slice of the $50 million payout. 

SEE ALSO: 'The new avocado toast': A former Coca-Cola and AB InBev executive reveals why every food and beverage boardroom needs to be talking about cannabis

Join the conversation about this story »

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• Mall operators are scrambling to point out how Sears' downfall is a positive development for their businesses.
• They include Seritage, the real-estate spin-off from Sears. The company stands to lose rental income from closed stores but says an investment from Warren Buffett would help it stay afloat.
• The 125-year-old retailer filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday, and a handful of real-estate companies were quick to point out how prepared they are to capitalize on it.

The ink on Sears' bankruptcy filing hasn't dried, but some companies are already telling their shareholders what they stand to gain.

That's partly because the news on Monday was no surprise. After years of declining sales, Sears announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and closing 142 stores before the end of the year. The 125-year-old company added that Eddie Lampert would step down as CEO but remain chairman.

Sears' downfall has created potential winners, notably its direct competitors: big-box retailers like JCPenney, TJMaxx, and Marshalls. Because the bankruptcy filing had been a long time coming, they'd already picked up some of the customers who had been fleeing Sears as it crumbled.

Another group of companies — mall operators — have also positioned themselves to benefit from Sears' downfall by gradually reducing their exposure to its stores.

Now that Sears has filed for bankruptcy, they're spotlighting what they stand to gain from the stores that will be emptied. In particular, Sears' departure could allow them to lease the same stores at much higher prices and to tenants that generate more sales.

But this process won't be cheap: Real-estate investment trusts (REITs) could require $100 to rebuild every square foot Sears leaves behind. This could add up to $12 million per store, according to Reuters.

Here's a rundown of what some major mall owners are telling their investors:

SEE ALSO: Global investors haven't been this bearish on the economy since the financial crisis — and Bank of America says there's only one way to play it

Seritage Growth Properties

Seritage has the most at stake.

Sears' Lampert founded the company in 2015 as a real-estate spin-off. And in August, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway agreed to lend the company up to $2 billion.

The company said in a statement on Monday that it has been working to diversify its income away from Sears-operated properties, and about 70% of its signed-lease income was from non-Sears tenants. Even Lampert owns just 2% of the company, according to a regulatory filing.

Seritage tried to assure investors that it would be able to make up for the shortfall of Sears store closings, partly because of Buffett's cash injection. It said it's been able to raise rents by up to four times on space formerly leased by Sears.

"The completion of our redevelopment projects brings our signed leased income on-line and will replace any potential lost income from Sears Holdings," Seritage CEO Benjamin Schall said.

Kimco Realty

In a statement on Monday, this REIT said it had proactively reduced its shopping centers' exposure to Kmart and Sears stores.

It added that it was able to raise rents by an average of 211% on stores that Sears and Kmart vacated.

The company said Sears and Kmart rents were among the cheapest in its portfolio — an average of $5.25 per square foot versus $15.95 overall — suggesting that it expected a minimal hit to its rental income.

"Today's announcement may afford us the long-awaited opportunity to recapture boxes with significant mark-to-market potential in our core markets, and sparks several new redevelopment opportunities within our portfolio," Conor Flynn, Kimco's CEO, said in the statement.

Washington Prime

Washington Prime Group CEO Lou Conforti did not hold back on his thoughts about Sears' bankruptcy. Conforti said in a statement on Friday:

"We've worked diligently to address unproductive department store space over the previous couple of years and recent reports of an imminent Sears bankruptcy filing shouldn't come as a surprise to any landlord unless they own a few Zayre or E.J Korvette locations trapped in a space-time continuum where the Sansabelt clad relax on shag carpeting, illuminated by the warm glow of a lava lamp while they drink Tang and vodka and listen to The Moody Blues."

He continued: "In addition, we need to disabuse the farcical notion of a Sears bankruptcy filing (whether or not it comes to fruition) will come as a surprise to us. We have taken the appropriate financial, operational and strategic measures, and as a result regard such events as an opportunity."

The company added that it had reduced its department-store exposure by half since 2015. After all, the industry hasn't fully figured out how to combat the challenges of e-commerce and Amazon.

• For over two years, Natasha "Tash" Feldman has been a private chef in Los Angeles, cooking for up to seven hours a day.
• When it's time to hit the grocery store, she employs two money-saving strategies: buy in-season produce and check out what's on sale.
• Feldman said this helps her create new and interesting recipes that are cost effective.

For over two years, Natasha "Tash" Feldman has been a private chef for families and tech entrepreneurs in Los Angeles. When she's not cooking for them, she's creating simple recipes to make after her workday and filming the YouTube show "Nosh with Tash."

Feldman has competed on Food Network's "Chopped University," as well as "Cutthroat Kitchen," but she told Business Insider she still believed TV-worthy meals should not be a dinner-at-home goal. After spending up to seven hours a day cooking for other people, she understands the struggle of coming home and cooking for herself. But she said America's obsession with dining out leads to unhealthy habits and empty wallets.

She created "Nosh with Tash" to showcase recipes that are easy to make with a quick trip to the grocery store and tools that are most likely already in your kitchen. Feldman wants her recipes to help home cooks make simple meals that match restaurant quality.

Feldman said that while shopping for groceries, she always buys in-season produce.

"You can get the most beautiful delicious produce at basically any grocery store for a good price at the peak of its season because they just get more of it at a low price," she said.

Feldman looks for someone working in the produce section and asks what's best and most fresh and what excites the person the most.

"For the most part, people who work in produce sections love produce and are more than happy to tell you about things and open up a nectarine and let you try it and sort of go on this journey with you," she said.

One of Feldman's best grocery-shopping hacks is checking out the sale aisle.

"Sometimes I like to make a 'Chopped' challenge just for myself where I'll go through the aisles and look for things on sale," Feldman said. She says she frequents markets like Whole Foods and Bristol Farms — stores Feldman says have "extraordinary" sale items daily.

After cooking for other people all day, Feldman said, it can get exhausting to think about returning home to make dinner.

"People often think when you work in food it's just so much easier, but the truth is you still have to make relatively easy recipes — like nobody just goes home and whips up an incredibly complex 12-course meal just because they work in food," Feldman said.

She also understands it can seem difficult to budget and plan meals for one person, but there's an easy solution.

"The thing about cooking for yourself is that it if you just do it for one meal, it can feel not particularly cost-effective," Feldman said. "So for me it's about making something that lasts for a few meals or finding ways to convert your lunch into a dinner or your dinner into a breakfast."

SEE ALSO: A private chef who spends up to 7 hours a day cooking says America's restaurant obsession has changed the way we treat food — and it explains why there's no millennial-era Martha Stewart

DON'T MISS: 19 grocery store hacks that will save you a ton of money on food

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NOW WATCH: Inside Ocado's new warehouse where thousands of robots zoom around a grid system to pack groceries

It's the battle of the big smartphones. 

Two tech powerhouses, Apple and Google, have released extra-large devices in the past month: the iPhone XS Max and the Pixel 3 XL, respectively. 

While the two phones have some key differences, they also have a lot in common, most notably their large size. 

So if you're someone who prefers a big phone — after all, a larger phone means a larger display — it may be a tough choice this fall. 

Here's how the iPhone XS Max and Pixel 3 XL compare: 

SEE ALSO: Google's Pixel 3 could be the last smartphone you ever need to buy

The iPhone XS Max has a slightly larger screen than the Pixel 3 XL.

The iPhone XS Max has a 6.5-inch OLED display, while the Pixel 3 XL has a 6.3-inch OLED display. 

The iPhone XS Max and Pixel 3 XL have nearly identical dimensions otherwise — except when it comes to weight.

The iPhone XS Max is 157.7 mm tall and 77.4 mmwide, while the Pixel 3 XL is 158 mm tall and 76.7 mmwide.

But the iPhone XS Max is significantly heavier than the Pixel 3 XL: it weighs 208 grams, while the Pixel 3 XL clocks in at 184 grams. 

The iPhone XS Max comes in more storage options compared to the Pixel 3 XL.

You can get an iPhone XS Max in three storage options: 64 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB.

By contrast, the Pixel 3 comes in only two storage options, 64 GB and 128 GB.

That said, Google has one-upped Apple with its cloud storage, at least when it comes to your pictures: Google offers free unlimited storage in Google Photos, while Apple makes you pay for iCloud storage if you want more than 5 GB.

• Successful people build habits by measuring their progress — and it can be as much of a hindrance as a benefit, according to productivity expert James Clear.
• There are three benefits to measuring your progress toward a goal, says Clear: It makes the behavior more obvious, creates an additive effect, and adds immediate gratification.
• But if you obsess about the measurement, it loses its benefits when it becomes the target — an concept known as Goodhart's Law.

When it comes to building a habit, measurement is a double-edged sword.

In a recent podcast hosted by Brandon of the Mad Fientist, who retired early at 34, productivity expert James Clear said measurement is one tool every successful person uses while forming a habit or working toward a goal — but if they're not careful, it can also be their downfall.

There are three benefits to measuring your progress, according to Clear, who recently published the book "Atomic Habits" and has 400,000-plus subscribers reading his advice via his weekly newsletter.

"The first is that measurement makes a habit more obvious. It makes a behavior more obvious. So by measuring something, you become aware of it," he said. "Secondly, when you're making progress, there's an additive effect to measurement. For example, by tracking each time you do a behavior, or each time you perform a habit, like if you put an 'X' in the calendar every day that you practice guitar, then you start to see those build up, and you get motivated to stick with it."

The third, he said, is that measurement makes a habit satisfying. "It adds an immediate bit of gratification to doing the work. So, even though you might not be able to play the piece in full yet, which is what the real thing you're working toward, it doesn't feel like you totally have to delay gratification because you still get the immediate gratification of measuring it and marking an 'X' off and so on."

But, there's a catch. 

"Now, the challenge is that — and this is something that's called Goodhart's Law — a measure ceases to be a good measure when it becomes the target," he said. "In other words, a measure is only useful when it informs you or when it is a bit of data that kind of nudges you toward the ultimate thing."

He continued: "But when it all becomes about the measurement, when the only thing that matters is hitting the quarterly numbers in the business, or hitting a particular number on the scale, then you start to sacrifice — like you don't even care about health anymore, you just care about hitting the number on the scale. And so you're over-focused on measurement."

"I would say that that can actually be a downside to deliberate practice, is that sometimes if you're so focused on measurement, it can pull you off course," he said.

Clear offers an example: If you measure weight loss, but fall into an obsession about the number on the scale, then you lose the productivity and benefits of the measurement. It can derail you, and it might be more beneficial to try a another type of measurement, like "non-scale victories" that aren't quantifiable — fitting into an old pair of pants, noticing a difference in your skin, or having an increased libido.

"One of the purposes the measurement should provide, is that it provides an emotional signal that you're moving in the right direction," he said." It provides a signal of progress. And that's really all that you're looking for."

"You may not be able to track it, but [ask yourself] 'How can I find a positive emotional signal that I'm making progress and I'm moving in the right direction?" he said. "The core point is that behaviors need to be satisfying for you to have a reason to repeat them."

SEE ALSO: The same question that can chart a path to early retirement is the one Warren Buffett used to build Berkshire Hathaway into a powerhouse

DON'T MISS: 50 damaging habits you should break before you turn 30

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• The market's volatility in early October brought to light a new milestone in how investors view the global economy, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
• The firm's monthly fund-manager survey, conducted during the sell-off, showed investors were their most bearish on the global economy since the November 2008 downturn.
• Bank of America's chief investment strategist offered a specific recommendation to clients alongside the survey findings.

As global markets try to recover from the sharp drop in stocks this month, Bank of America Merrill Lynch is urging investors not to immediately go on buying sprees.

Its view is informed by investors. The bank's monthly fund-manager survey for October was conducted October 5-11, in the thick of the sell-off. And it showed that global growth expectations plunged to their lowest levels since November 2008, when the US economy was stuck in its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

By one gauge, their caution on the economy is breaking records that go further into the past than the most recent recession; a record 85% of the investors surveyed said they thought the global economy was late-cycle. That's even higher than its previous peak in December 2007.

Bank of America received responses from 231 investors who collectively manage $646 billion in assets.

Investors saw a trade war as the global economy's biggest tail risk for a fifth straight month, amid the dispute that has seen the US slap tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods.

But the share of investors citing this concern fell in October, as another risk became more prominent: quantitative tightening.

In fact, the fear of higher interest rates and how they could crimp company borrowing was largely cited as a major trigger for the sell-off that has sent the S&P 500 down 5% this month.

With all of that in mind, Bank of America has an idea of how investors can be proactive and fight slowing growth.

"We sell Q4 rallies," Michael Hartnett, the bank's chief investment strategist, said in a note on Tuesday.

BlackRock, the $6 trillion investing giant, also sent a version of this message to clients, urging them to focus on portfolio resilience for the rest of the year.

Hartnett's note further showed that going long or betting on the S&P 500 or the big US and Chinese tech stocks (FAANG + BAT) and betting against US Treasurys were considered the most crowded trades. In other words, these could be most vulnerable in the event of a major sell-off.

Investors' contrarian trades included going long China via the IShares China Large-Cap exchange-traded fund, short the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, and short cash.

SEE ALSO: BlackRock's $6 trillion chief investment strategist lays out how to guard your portfolio against more losses as the risks of more market turmoil increases

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• A handful of recent studies are beginning to reveal the health effects of e-cigarette use, and they are not all positive.
• Some evidence has suggested that e-cigs may help adults quit smoking conventional cigarettes, but other studies have found that they might encourage teens to start.
• Regulators and health experts are particularly concerned about a device called the Juul, which packs the same nicotine content per pod as a pack of cigarettes.
• Despite capturing more than 70% of the e-cig market and being recently valued at $15 billion, Juul faces a growing backlash from the FDA and scientists who say the company intentionally marketed to teens.
• In studies of e-cigarettes that don't include Juul, researchers have found evidence of toxic metals like lead in e-cig vapor. Evidence also suggests that vaping may be linked with an increased risk of heart attacks.

Smoking kills. No other habit has been so strongly tied to death.

In addition to inhaling burned tobacco and tar, smokers breathe in toxic metals like cadmium and beryllium, as well as metallic elements like nickel and chromium — all of which accumulate naturally in the leaves of the tobacco plant.

It's no surprise, then, that much of the available evidence suggests that vaping, which involves puffing on vaporized liquid nicotine instead of inhaling burned tobacco, is at least somewhat healthier. Some limited studies have suggested that reaching for a vape pen instead of a conventional cigarette might also help people quit smoking regular cigarettes, but hard evidence of that remains elusive.

Very few studies look at how vaping affects the body and brain, however. Even fewer specifically examine the Juul, a popular device that packs as much nicotine in each of its pods as a standard pack of cigarettes.

But a handful of studies published in the last few months have begun to illuminate some of the potential health effects tied to vaping. They are troubling. Most recently, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine surveyed young people who vape and found that those who said they used Juuls vaped more frequently than those who used other brands. The participants appeared to be insufficiently aware of how addictive the devices could be.

Most e-cigs contain toxic metals, and smoking them may also increase the risk of a heart attack

Researchers took a look at the compounds in several popular brands of e-cigs (not the Juul) this spring, and found some of the same toxic metals (such as lead) inside the device that they normally find in conventional cigarettes. For another study published around the same time, researchers concluded that at least some of those toxins appear to be making their way through vapers' bodies, as evidenced by a urine analysis they ran on nearly 100 study participants.

In another study published this summer, scientists concluded that there was substantial evidence tying daily e-cig use to an increased risk of heart attack. And this week, a small study in rats suggested that vaping could have a negative effect on wound healing that's similar to the effect of regular cigarettes.

In addition to these findings, of course, is a well-established body of evidence about the harms of nicotine. The highly addictive substance that can have dramatic impacts on the developing brains of young adults.

Brain-imaging studies of adolescents who begin smoking traditional cigarettes (not e-cigs) at a young age suggest that those individuals have markedly reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex and perform less well on tasks related to memory and attention, compared to people who don't smoke. Those consequences are believed to be a result of the nicotine in the cigarettes rather than other ingredients.

Nicholas Chadi, a clinical pediatrics fellow at Boston Children's Hospital, spoke about the Juul at the American Society of Addiction Medicine's annual conference this spring. He said these observed brain changes are also linked with increased sensitivity to other drugs as well as greater impulsivity. He described some anecdotal effects of nicotine vaping that he's seen among teens in and around his hospital.

"After only a few months of using nicotine [these teens] describe cravings, sometimes intense ones. Sometimes they also lose their hopes of being able to quit. And interestingly, they show less severe symptoms of withdrawal than adults, but they start to show them earlier on. After only a few hundred cigarettes — or whatever the equivalent amount of vaping pods — some start showing irritability or shakiness when they stop," Chadi said.

A new survey suggests that teens who use Juul e-cigs aren't aware of these risks

The Juul, which is made by Silicon Valley startup Juul Labs, has captured more than 70% of the e-cig market and was recently valued at $15 billion. But the company is facing a growing backlash from the FDA and scientists who say it intentionally marketed to teens.

Yet very little research about e-cigs has homed in on the Juul specifically. 

So for a study published this week, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine surveyed young people who vape and asked them whether they used the Juul or another e-cigarette.

Their results can be found in a widely accessible version of the Journal of the American Medical Association called JAMA Open. Based on a sample of 445 high-school students whose average age was 19, the researchers observed that teens who used the Juul tended to say they vaped more frequently than those who used other devices. Juul users also appeared to be less aware of how addictive the devices could be compared with teens who vaped other e-cigs.

"I was surprised and concerned that so many youths were using Juul more frequently than other products," Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, a professor of pediatrics and a lead author of the study, said in a statement.

"We need to help them understand the risks of addiction," she added. "This is not a combustible cigarette, but it still contains an enormous amount of nicotine — at least as much as a pack of cigarettes."

SEE ALSO: Silicon Valley e-cig startup Juul 'threw a really great party' to launch its devices, which experts say deliberately targeted youth

DON'T MISS: Vaping instead of smoking still exposes you to toxic metals like lead — here's how worried you should be

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NOW WATCH: E-cigarette explodes in man's pocket leaving him with second-degree burns

• Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd has come out swinging after the company missed quarterly cloud revenue projections and faced questions about the exit of the company's top exec in charge of cloud.
• In an interview with Business Insider, Hurd explained how he's betting on big growth in the company's applications business.
• Oracle could double its application revenue from $11 billion to more than $20 billion if all it did was migrate existing customers from its on-premise software to its Software-as-a-Service cloud applications, Hurd said.

Oracle may be known for its databases, but co-CEO Mark Hurd has his eye on doubling the tech giant's applications business.

Applications were an $11 billion business for Oracle in fiscal 2018 but he sees it as an over $20 billion opportunity for the company, he said. Oracle's massive catalog of cloud and on premise software offerings includes accounting software, HR software, marketing software, supplier management software and so on. 

And it can become a big organic growth engine for the company, he said.

Oracle wants to get its entire userbase to abandon on premise software and start using cloud applications. This move will protect Oracle from losing its customers to cloud rivals like Workday or Salesforce and, at the same time, allow Oracle to earn more money from each customer, he believes.

By his calculations, simply moving existing customers to the cloud will grow Oracle's application revenue from $11 billion to more than $20 billion, he said.

"If we did nothing but move our historical userbase of applications, we will double our applications revenue," Hurd said. But he also said that Oracle isn't just moving its current roster. It is also adding new customers. He estimates that the current growth in SaaS is half existing customers, and half new customers.

While applications made up just 27% of Oracle's overall revenue in fiscal 2018, it's a growing segment for Oracle and one that Hurd believes could supercharge other areas of the business once it gains more momentum.

This strategy also allowed him to shrug off the company's ever-shrinking hardware business, down another 4% in its last quarter from the year-earlier period.

"You don't need servers, you don't need data centers, you don't need anything if it's not there to support applications," Hurd said. "So there is a further benefit business strategy wise to Oracle leading the applications business, in that it hooks into almost everything else our customers do in IT as the result of what applications they've got."

Application revenues are growing, while other areas suffer

Quarter after quarter, Oracle's greatest critics on Wall Street echo similar sentiments: the company isn't growing fast enough. Some have even suggested that management isn't up to the task. 

When asked about such criticism, Hurd said to look at the numbers. "Don't take my opinion," he said. "There's a whole set of numbers and facts that I think are irrefutable."

Indeed, application revenues grew 11% year-over-year in fiscal 2018, up from 6% growth in fiscal 2017. It's a booming area, especially as Oracle faces quarter-after-quarter declines in its hardware and licensing businesses.

When it comes to enterprise resource planning, one of Oracle's most successful application products, those numbers look promising. Its cloud ERP sales grew more than 30% in the first quarter of fiscal 2019. The company claims to have 30 times the number of ERP customers as Workday, a key cloud competitor. Although, to be fair, Workday is still more known for its cloud HR software than for its cloud accounting software known as ERP.

And in the last year, a number of large customers including Bank of America, the LA Lakers, Office Depot and Western Digital moved onto Oracle's ERP cloud from a competing ERP system, according to the company. 

Wall Street has one key issue when measuring progress

But for many analysts, there is a key set of numbers missing. In Q4 2018, which ended in May, Oracle stopped reporting out specific cloud revenues by blending cloud applications in with traditional software and blending cloud storage into traditional platform/infrastructure revenues. 

In other words, for all the chest pounding about cloud growth, Oracle has made the unusual move from showing it off to hiding it from view.

And that means, it's more difficult for analysts to trace how well Oracle is executing on its plans to move existing customers to its cloud, based on its quarterly results.

When asked about this reporting change, Hurd said bundled numbers are a more accurate way to understand Oracle's business strategy.

"We didn't try to change reporting just to change reporting," he said, mentioning that some of its products, such as "Bring Your Own License" on the technology side, make it difficult to report cloud numbers accurately. "The responsibility we have is to make sure we're reporting numbers that accurately reflect what we're trying to get done in the market." 

For anyone trying to follow Oracle's application strategy, Hurd suggested tracking three numbers: the licenses Oracle sells, which he describes as a "diminishing part" of the business; its SaaS revenue; and its support revenue. 

"Those three numbers add up to the total of our applications business," Hurd said. 

Read more about Oracle: 

• Oracle grew only 1% last quarter, and Wall Street is starting to question whether management is up to the job
• Oracle shares sink 7% as Wall Street freaks out over a surprise decision not to share specific cloud numbers
• Oracle changed the way it reports revenue a day after announcing its annual results and analysts say there has been 'confusion'
• Oracle founder Larry Ellison says its 'embarrassing' for Amazon that it relies so heavily on Oracle's technology
• Oracle recently offered an artificial intelligence expert as much as $6 million in total pay as Silicon Valley's talent war heats up
• Oracle's head of cloud left after butting heads with Larry Ellison, source says

SEE ALSO: Oracle is acquiring a tiny cloud startup backed by Qualcomm to build out its health science product suite

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• The 2018 FutureBrand Index ranked the brands that are best prepared for the future, based on the companies' corporate purpose combined with people's experiences of it. 
• While the retail apocalypse doesn't seem to be slowing down, some brands are a lot more likely than others to survive it. 
• Disney and Nike are among the consumer-oriented brands most likely to thrive in the future. See what other companies made FutureBrand's list.

The retail apocalypse doesn't seem to be slowing down, with more than 3,800 stores expected to close across the United States this year.

But, some brands are a lot more likely than others to thrive with the consumers of the future. 

The 2018 FutureBrand Index looked at the world's 100 most future-proof companies 10 years after the Great Recession. And while it seems as if companies like Google and Amazon are unstoppable, the FutureBrand Index argues that they may not be the brands best poised to thrive in the future.

Rather, long-established and reputable brands are leading the way. 

"The most future proofed companies are not defined by their age, their sector, their tech or data savvy-ness, but by their ability to consistently align the totality of the experiences they create with their wider corporate purpose," FutureBrand writes in its report.  

To asses which brands are the most ready for future success, FutureBrand looked at each company's corporate purpose combined with the experience it provides for consumers, explaining that these are the two factors driving profit and positive growth. 

The report looked at 100 brands in total. See which consumer goods and services companies are the strongest, according to the report: 

SEE ALSO: We visited ShopRite and Stop & Shop to see which was a better grocery store, and the winner was clear

10. Nestle

Rank in top 100: 24

9. Amazon

Rank in top 100: 21

8. Toyota

Rank in top 100: 19

• The floor collapsed at an apartment complex in South Carolina on Saturday night.
• Dozens of party-goers plunged to the basement, and at least 30 people were injured.
• The party was during Clemson University's homecoming weekend.

When college students celebrated Clemson University's blowout homecoming win at a crowded apartment clubhouse on Saturday night, the floor gave way, and dozens plunged to the basement.

At least 30 people were injured in the incident at The Woodlands of Clemson, a ritzy apartment complex about three miles from campus.

Videos posted to social media captured the moment the floor collapsed (some images are disturbing, and language is NSFW):

Clemson City Police said no one was trapped and none of the injuries appeared to be life-threatening.

Clemson sophomore Larissa Stone told the Independent Mail of Anderson that the room was "packed" and a popular song was playing when the floor collapsed.

"So everyone was jumping. The beat was about to drop and literally the whole floor collapsed," she said. "It happened so quickly. I stood up, and everyone was trying to climb out. People are under other people. People are hurt. People are bleeding. I had blood on my sneakers. It was really bad."

Partygoers screamed, and those who didn't fall stood on portions of the first floor that remained and gazed below in shock. Some people standing on the sidelines pulled out their cellphones to record the floor collapse.

A witness who attended the party said people were jumping and then suddenly he heard "a boom."

"All you seen was falling, everybody's hands up in the air," Franzie Pendergrass told WYFF News 4.

Leroy Pearson said he went to try to help injured people and saw what he thought looked like broken ankles and legs.

"It was crazy," Pearson said.

Police said the event was a private party by a group that had leased the clubhouse at the Woodlands Apartments.

Property manager Tal Slann told The Associated Press that the condominium complex was built in 2004-2005. He said he could not comment on whether there was a limit on the number of people who were supposed to use the clubhouse at one time.

"I can tell you there was a party. I can tell you there was a floor collapse. There were injuries. They were not life-threatening. Nobody was trapped," he said.

Police said they received a call at about 12:30 a.m. Sunday about the collapse. Ambulances were quickly called to the scene, and about 30 people were transported to local hospitals with injuries.

The university tweeted that student affairs representatives went to the hospitals to support students and that counseling was available for anyone affected by the incident. University president Jim Clements said he was monitoring the situation, as well.

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• The difference between purchases made by Amazon Prime members and regular customers is widening, according to a new report by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.
• While Prime members buy an average of $1,400 a year worth of stuff on Amazon, regular customers only spend $600, the study found.
• Prime members are spending $100 more than a year ago on average, while others are spending $100 less on average.
• It shows that Prime is becoming more important to Amazon, though CIRP also reports that the company's membership growth is slowing.

Amazon Prime is becoming even more important to the e-commerce giant.

The difference between spending by Prime members and regular customers on Amazon is widening, according to a new report by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

While Prime members buy an average of $1,400 a year worth of stuff on the website, regular customers only spend $600. That's a wider gulf than was reported by CIRP last year, when Prime customers spent an average of $1,300 and other customers spent $700.

It shows how important Prime customers have become to Amazon, and how the membership creates loyalty to the site with irresistible perks like free two-day shipping.

At the same time, however, Prime's membership growth appears to be slowing in US, according to CIRP. The firm estimates that there are a total of 97 million Prime subscribers in the United States. Over the past 12 months, that number only grew 8%, which is the slowest rate recorded since CIRP started tracking Amazon Prime subscriptions in 2012.

"Prime membership growth has clearly flattened," Josh Lowitz, a cofounder at CIRP, said in a release. "Amazon Prime membership has now spread far beyond the early adopters who were presumably the most committed Amazon shoppers."

Prime is Amazon's golden goose, and the company keeps adding to the suite of benefits it provides its members to entice customers to join and then stay.

While many still associate Prime solely with its two-day-shipping guarantee, it also offers things like video and music streaming. And there are some items available only to Prime members, creating additional value.

In May, Prime members were given another perk: big discounts at Whole Foods. The rollout finished this summer.

The value of Prime has risen steadily over the years as Amazon has added these benefits. A recent JPMorgan analysis estimated that the service was actually worth $785 a year with everything it offers. That's about 6.5 times the actual cost of an annual Prime subscription, $120, even with this year's price increase.

"Prime delivers such massive scale and features that we believe it would be very difficult for any company to replicate and compete against, and Amazon continues to expand and add more value to Prime by adding new benefits and growing existing offerings," the analysts wrote.

That means that even if a customer doesn't take advantage of everything a Prime membership offers, they're still likely to perceive it as a good value.

SEE ALSO: 'Shark Tank' winners will now get a huge boost from Amazon — but there's a catch

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• Traders refuse to throw in the towel on the controversial short-volatility trade that's come under pressure multiple times this year.
• Morgan Stanley lays out why the trade is so ill-advised, especially amid current conditions, and offers alternative solutions.

Sometimes old habits die hard.

That's definitely the case when it comes to one hot-button trade that still has legions of participants despite an ugly blowup earlier this year.

We're referring, of course, to volatility short selling. After a market shock in early February caught traders off guard and forced them to cover positions, billions of dollars were erased from popular investment products. Some even dissolved entirely.

That carnage, in turn, worsened widespread selling pressure as those investors covered shorts in droves. And all of a sudden, the market had a new black sheep.

Those traders don't appear to have learned their lesson. As this chart shows, they've rebuilt a net short volatility position to rival the one seen before the February meltdown.

In fact, they went as far as to add to it during last week's market mayhem. The most recent weekly period in the chart ended Thursday, the day the Cboe Volatility Index, or VIX, reached a multimonth high.

Their hubris wound up costing them dearly last week, when the S&P 500 capped off a sharp six-day drop, pushing the VIX to 24.98, its highest since the mess eight months ago.

That cost volatility short sellers roughly $420 million, one expert told Bloomberg. It wasn't as bad as the February incident, which saw the VIX exceed 37, but it was still a tough pill to swallow for volatility bears.

Morgan Stanley is hardly a fan of the short-volatility trade. Strategists at the firm spoke out against it after last week's pan-market sell-off and accompanying volatility spike.

The firm argued that it could take five to six months to "build up cushions" against a reversion to the mean whenever there's a surge in price swings. Because of that, an increasingly volatile market can quickly undo progress.

Morgan Stanley is also cautiously watching the sudden rerating of so-called growth stocks — or companies seeing torrid earnings expansion. They say this is driving the ongoing uptick in volatility, which is hardly a fleeting trend, as traders increasingly pile into inexpensive value names instead.

These investors should instead be throwing in the towel on their beloved trade and going long volatility, Morgan Stanley says. The firm offers some specifics.

"Like in January, the equity market has been the most responsive to a sector rotation-driven drop," Andrew Sheets, Morgan Stanley's chief cross-asset strategist, wrote in a client note. "We have liked owning hedges on Russell 2000, which tends to underperform S&P 500 in drawdowns. Credit vols have also risen but are still below average levels, again suitable for a long vol bias."

That being said, common sense and expert advice haven't stopped short-volatility enthusiasts yet, and probably won't in the future. It's likely that they used the recent VIX spike to replenish their short positions — an inverse buy-the-dip strategy of sorts.

But their luck may soon run out, at least if a recent forecast from Bernstein comes true. Inigo Fraser-Jenkins, the firm's head of global and quantitative European equity strategy, thinks volatility will shift higher on a long-term basis.

It seems like a sound thesis based on how the past couple of years have played out. During 2017, the VIX averaged a record low of 11.10, implying that it had nowhere to go but up. Sure, it's still below its long-term average of 19.33, but any reversion to the mean would translate to more volatile conditions.

But if short-volatility traders have shown one quality over time, it's that they're a stubborn bunch. They're likely to go down swinging, no matter how dire the situation becomes.

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• On Thursday, Gigi Hadid stepped out in New York City wearing a pair of Vetements x Reebok sneakers that retail for $840.
• Designed to look like tube socks, the pull-on shoes feature thick rubber soles and white knit fabric.
• Hadid paired the sock sneakers with gray sunglasses, pink- and white-striped cut-off jeans, and a simple white long-sleeved top.
• She also accessorized with a white Prada handbag that retails for $2,390.

Like fellow model Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid is a fan of bold shoe designs.

On Thursday, the model stepped out in New York City wearing a pair of Vetements x Reebok sneakers that retail for $840. Designed to look like tube socks, the pull-on shoes feature thick rubber soles and white knit fabric.

Hadid paired the sock sneakers with gray sunglasses, pink- and white-striped cut-off jeans, and a simple white long-sleeved top.

She also accessorized the casual look with a white Prada handbag that retails for $2,390.

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• Fashion designer Giorgio Armani is worth $8.8 billion, according to Forbes.
• The 84-year-old has made his fortune not only in fashion, but also in accessories, perfumes, makeup, sportswear, interior design, real estate, restaurants, hotels, and even chocolate.
• Armani owns a 213-foot luxury yacht and homes in Italy, the French Riviera, and the Caribbean island of Antigua.
• Here's a look at how Armani makes and spends his billions.

Giorgio Armani, the co-founder and sole owner of fashion house Armani, is worth $8.8 billion, according to Forbes. 

His empire also spans industries that include accessories, perfume, makeup, interior design, real estate, restaurants, and hotels. The business mogul brought in $2.7 billion in revenue in 2017, according to Bloomberg, which looked at filings with Italy's business register.

The 84-year-old spends part of his fortune on multiple private homes all over the world, from Italy to the South of France to the Caribbean island of Antigua. He also owns a 213-foot luxury superyacht. 

Here's a look at what nearly $9 billion buys.

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Giorgio Armani is one of the richest people in the fashion industry, with a net worth of $8.8 billion.

Source: Forbes

Armani was born in the northern Italian town of Piacenza in 1934 and later attended medical school at Piacenza University for two years before leaving for his military service.

Source: Bloomberg

While on leave from the military, Armani got a job as a window dresser at Milan department store La Rinoscente, where he worked up to a buyer position, marking his first foray into fashion.

Source: Bloomberg