Dec 2 2024
Using Google Merchant Center Next For Competitive Analysis via @sejournal, @gilgildner

In Google Ads, where every click can be a potential sale, understanding your competition isn’t just strategic, it’s also absolutely necessary for creating a profitable ad campaign.

For our ecommerce clients, Google Merchant Center has long been a critical tool for managing unwieldy amounts of data.

When some ecommerce clients can stock thousands of SKUs or maybe even millions of SKU iterations, it enables us to manage shopping campaigns that would otherwise be impossible.

With new evolutions of machine learning and AI-powered Shopping on the horizon, making sure your store remains competitive in the massive landscape of ecommerce advertising is more important than ever.

Enter Merchant Center Next, which is the next evolution of Google’s product listing management tool. It’s designed to give ecommerce retailers a sharper edge in the competitive arena.

Here’s how you can use this tool not just for managing product feeds, but also for identifying huge opportunities in your competition.

Merchant Center Next is an upgraded platform that allows ecommerce stores to manage how their products appear on Google Shopping, both paid and organic.

But for this post, we’ll focus more on its analytics and insights features, which are a gold mine for competitive analysis.

How To Use Competitive Analysis Features In Merchant Center

First, you need to make sure your account actually has access to Merchant Center Next.

Although Google first announced a full rollout by September 2024, not all accounts have access yet. The integration with Google Ads is seamless, so it’s an easy click.

Second, take a look at the competitor visibility section. This section is reached by navigating to Analytics > Products, and then looking at different content tabs, labeled Traffic, Competitors, Popular Products, Pricing, and Promotions.

This shows you cards that highlight how your products stack up against the competition in terms of overall visibility. You can see who among your competitors is getting more clicks, where their ads rank, and how your own traffic compares.

Third, take a look at price competitiveness. Google Merchant Center Next provides insights into how product prices align with the overall market.

Are your SKUs priced above, similarly, or below the average price across the internet? The data within this section will help you adjust your pricing strategy easily.

Google Merchant Center Price CompetitivenessResearching Price Competitiveness Within Google Merchant Center. Screenshot from Google Merchant Center, November 2024.

Next, look at search trends. This section allows us to have a closer look at and to understand what consumers are looking for in aggregate.

It’s not just about products or individual SKUs, but also entire categories and product niches you may not be aware of.

Doing a deep dive into product performance can be massively valuable.

Best Sellers allows you to identify products flying off your virtual shelves. If competitors are selling items you don’t currently offer, this is a good indicator to consider product line expansion.

Out-of-stock Insights gives you a heads-up that you may need to restock a product – inventory management is always a huge issue with popular ecommerce stores.

How To Interpret Data For Real-World Use

One of my favorite metrics in Google Merchant Center Next is the Ad/Organic Ratio Analysis. This metric tells us how much of the traffic per product is paid versus organic.

You can infer competitor ad spend from this. If you can see a competitor has a high ratio of paid to organic, it means they’re possibly spending a lot more on ads than you, so it might be time to ramp up your Google Ads spend (something you’ve likely heard from plenty of Google reps).

Ad/Organic Ratio AnalysisAd/Organic Ratio Analysis in Google Merchant Center. Screenshot from Google Merchant Center, November 2024.

Since Merchant Center isn’t only about paid traffic, you can also use search term insights in the Analytics > Summary tab to help with your ecommerce store’s SEO performance.

Use these insights into keywords to refine product titles, descriptions, or even URLs. If a competitor’s product with a similar title is ranking higher, this can indicate possible opportunities for improvement.

Continuous monitoring and adapting to the current market are critical. Nothing seems to change faster than the digital advertising landscape.

Using Merchant Center Next to identify market shifts means you can discover new entrants, changing consumer preferences, seasonal trends, and more.

Merchant Center Product TrendsUsing Merchant Center Next to identify changing product trends. Screenshot from Google Merchant Center, November 2024.

Using this newly available data within Merchant Center can help you outsmart the competition – spotting gaps where you may be able to see that competitors are missing out on certain categories or price points.

If you can see that no other competitor offers free shipping, or aren’t bundling products in unique ways, these are all ways to leverage the data for your own benefit.

More Data Is Coming For Shopping

One of the biggest complaints over time has been that Google Ads seems to continually remove granular data from our fingertips, making it harder to optimize and improve campaigns.

This is especially important to ecommerce advertisers who often have unwieldy amounts of SKUs and transaction data to analyze.

Google Merchant Center Next actually seems to be bringing some of this data back into the fold. By leveraging this data – specifically the competitive analysis tools – you cannot only keep up with the rest of the ecommerce market, but also maybe even jump ahead.

Plus, Google Ads has been making some major strides in consumer-focused customized experiences within Google Shopping.

These AI-powered custom shopping experiences are still in their infancy, but making sure your campaigns are fully optimized within Merchant Center Next is the first step to staying competitive even through these new changes.

After all, the data that Google uses to train these new experiences come directly from stores just like yours (which can sometimes feel like a double-edged sword, to be sure).

All indications seem to be that this data will continue to increase. Not only has Performance Max been offering more and more data recently, but shakeups at Google Ads seem to indicate that more granular data may be coming to us from more than one platform.

Ecommerce knowledge and data aren’t just power – they are profit!

More resources:

Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Dec 2 2024
5 Content Marketing Ideas for January 2025

January is a month of new opportunities. In 2025, content marketers can kick the year off right, focusing on resets, AI-driven repurposes, cheese, hobbies, and even opposites.

Content marketing is the act of curating or creating articles, videos, or podcasts to attract, engage, and retain customers.

For merchants, content is often a key to successful search engine optimization and the foundation for social media marketing.

What follows are five content marketing ideas your business can try in January 2025.

January Reset

Female exercising using resistance bands

January is a good time for content marketers to encourage and support potential customers.

The new year is synonymous with fresh starts. Roughly 30% of American adults set resolutions to be healthier, more productive, or better organized.

Ecommerce marketers can publish articles, podcasts, and videos to support those resolutions. The content could be both uplifting and promotional to a store’s products.

Here are a few examples.

  • A DTC fitness brand might publish a blog post titled “10 Simple Ways to Stick to Your Fitness Resolutions in 2025.” The post could feature the brand’s products, such as yoga mats and resistance bands.
  • A home organization retailer could create a short-form video series showcasing “decluttering challenges” that include helpful tools and products.
  • A woman’s apparel boutique might write “How to Refresh Your Wardrobe for the New Year,” an article linking to blouses, skirts, or shoes.

AI-driven Repurposes

Generative AI can reproduce and transform content into new formats.

OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 20, 2022, and in surprisingly little time, generative artificial intelligence has become an almost unreplaceable tool for some content marketers.

Many businesses avoid using AI to produce entire articles but often deploy it to reuse or repurpose content.

With the spirit of resets and resolutions in January, content marketers might resolve to remake some content with AI. Here are three examples.

  • Convert videos into text. Multiple AI tools can convert a video into blog posts, email newsletters, or social media posts.
  • Spotlight written content for social media. Marketers use automation workflows with tools such as Zapier, ChatGPT, and Buffer to generate and schedule dozens of X, Threads, and Facebook posts from a single article.
  • Transform chat into FAQs. Another technique is employing AI to anonymize and remake customer chats into FAQs.

National Cheese-lovers Day

Photo of a female eating cheese

Content marketers have an opportunity to celebrate cheese lovers in January 2025.

January 20, 2025, is National Cheese-lovers Day and an opportunity for content marketers to celebrate shoppers who thoroughly enjoy that item.

This pseudo-holiday is often confused with its close kin, National Cheese Day, which is in June, but there are differences. National Cheese Day commemorates the longstanding (perhaps 7,000 years) cheese-making tradition and celebrates a beloved food. Meanwhile, January’s National Cheese-lovers Day focuses on folks who eat cheese.

While this particular celebration will make the most marketing sense for retailers and ecommerce shops in the food or kitchen supply segments, clever marketers from nearly any segment should be able to produce some tasty content about cheese consumption.

Here are a few potential article ideas.

  • Kitchen supply shop: “10 Perfect Recipes for the Cheese Gourmond.”
  • Pop-culture store: “Which Celebrities Love Cheese? These 20 Sure Do.”
  • Luggage merchant: “15 Destination Vacations for Traveling Cheese Lovers.”

‘What If’ Articles

Image of a dog walking a small boy on a leash.

“What if” articles could be a fun way for content marketers to celebrate Opposite Day.

While entertainment is certainly a valid form of content marketing, most folks working in the retail and ecommerce businesses rarely aim to amuse.

January 25, 2025, however, might be a rare opportunity to do just that. National Opposite Day is a whimsical event based on the children’s make-believe game.

To celebrate the occasion, folks might wear clothes backward, walk in reverse, or behave unexpectedly.

Interestingly, a literary form that feels like Opposite Day is the “what if” article, which explores hypothetical scenarios and asks “what if” questions about almost anything one could imagine.

For example, a pet supply store could publish an entire series on the premise “What if dogs owned humans?”

National Hobby Month

Photo of a female knitting

January is National Hobby Month.

January is National Hobby Month. It is a time for folks to embrace new interests, rediscover forgotten pastimes, or tackle a hobby they’ve always wanted to try.

Hobbies provide relaxation, personal growth, and even social connections. It’s an excellent opportunity for ecommerce businesses to inspire customers while showcasing products that make it easy to start or improve hobbies.

Hobby-focused content might include articles, videos, or even online courses. Each could be associated with a product bundle or “starter kit” connecting content and commerce.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Dec 1 2024
New Report Shows AI Overviews Trends Are Stabilizing via @sejournal, @martinibuster

As we enter the holiday season, October’s data reveals significant shifts and stabilization across industries in AI Overviews (AIOs). Critical insights from October reveal growth in certain sectors, stability in others, and strategic changes in content types and sources. These insights offer actionable strategies for marketers aiming to optimize for AIOs during this critical period.

YouTube Citations In AI Overviews: September Through October

YouTube AI Overviews citations surged in September by 400 – 450% more than the baseline from August when YouTube citations were first tracked. The level then stabilized in October at a level of about 110% to 115% of the August baseline. This gives the impression that this level of YouTube AIO citations may represent a new normal.

The kinds of video content that Google AIO tended to cite were:

  • How-to’s
  • In-depth reviews
  • Product comparisons

BrightEdge’s report observed that YouTube AIO citations in November continued to be stable:

Current State (November): Stabilized at approximately 115-120% with minimal day-to-day variation (±3%).

The next few months will show how satisfied users are with YouTube citations. Presumably Google tested YouTube citations before rolling them out so expectations for dramatic a change should be kept in check because the volatility of YouTube AIO citations was low, indicating that Google may have found the sweet spot for these kinds of citations. So don’t expect this level of YouTube citations to drop although anything is possible.

This trend highlights the continued importance of YouTube video channel as a way to expand reach and the continued evolution away from purely text content. If you embed video on web pages then it’s important to use Video Schema.org structured data.

Massive Growth In Travel Industry AIO Citations

Travel AIO citations surged by 700% from September through October. This may reflect Google’s confidence in AI for making travel recommendations.

BrightEdge offered this advice:

“To capture AIO visibility, travel brands should optimize content around seasonal travel, local events, and specific activities. Many of the keywords that are part of this surge start with “Things to do” which then triggers an unordered list.”

Localized and Activity-Specific Travel Queries

Google AIO is showing citations for more localized travel related queries that are more specific and longtail, which may mean that AI Overviews is handling more of the local travel type queries as opposed to the big destination queries that drilled down to the neighborhood level.

BrightEdge explained:

“Initially, travel AIOs were dominated by broad, general queries focused on major tourist destinations. However, as the month progressed, there was an increase in more localized, activity specific, and seasonal travel searches, reflecting a deeper level of user intent. By November, AIOs were increasingly focused on niche travel queries covering smaller cities, specific neighborhoods, and unique local activities.”

Examples of the pattern of travel queries that triggered AIO are:

  • Top attractions in
  • Things to do in
  • Family friendly activities in
  • Fall festivals in

AIO Is Stabilizing And Maturing

Another interesting insight from the BrightEdge data is that the daily growth of AIO citations slowed down to 1.3%, indicating that we are now entering a more stable phase.

BrightEdge offers this insight:

“We are now six months into the AIO era and seeing macro-changes in AI overviews that are gerng smaller and smaller”

Another statistic that confirms that AIO are here to stay is that volatility in AIO citations decreased by 42%, another sign of stability. This is good news because it means more predictability for what keyword phrases will trigger AIO citations.

BrightEdge notes:

“The stabilization in AIO appearance allows brands to optimize for a consistent presence, par:cularly for evergreen holiday keywords. This benefit campaigns where a steady AIO presence can drive significant traffic and conversions. As AIOs stabilize, planning and incorporating them into strategies becomes easier. This is pivotal insight for marketers who wish to make AI Overviews part of their 2025 strategy.”

Education Topic Performance

Education topics were on a steady growth trajectory of a 5% increase in keyword that trigger AIO, representing 45-50% of keywords. The growth was seen in more complex educational queries like:

  • cybersecurity certification prerequisites
  • career options with a psychology degree
  • psyd vs phd comparison

B2B queries experienced modest growth of 2%, representing 45-50% of keywords and with less volatility in October than September. Healthcare AIO citations were similarly stable with only a 1% change in October and with 73-75% of keywords triggering AIO citations.

Read more about BrightEdge data here.

https://www.brightedge.com/ai-overviews

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Dec 1 2024
How Chrome Site Engagement Metrics Are Used via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google Chrome collects site engagement metrics, and Chromium project documentation explains exactly what they are and how they are used.

Site Engagement Metrics

The documentation for the Site Engagement Metrics shares that typing the following into the browser address bar exposes the metrics:

chrome://site-engagement/

What shows up is a list of sites that the browser has visited and Site Engagement Metrics.

Site Engagement Metrics

The Site Engagement Metrics documentation explains that the metrics measure user engagement with a site and that the primary factor used is active time spent. It also offers examples of other signals that may contribute to the measurement.

This is what documentation says:

“The Site Engagement Service provides information about how engaged a user is with a site. The primary signal is the amount of active time the user spends on the site but various other signals may be incorporated (e.g whether a site is added to the homescreen).”

It also shares the following properties of the Chrome Site Engagement Scores:

  • The score is a double from 0-100. The highest number in the range represents a site the user engages with heavily, and the lowest number represents zero engagement.
  • Scores are keyed by origin.
  • Activity on a site increases its score, up to some maximum amount per day.
  • After a period of inactivity the score will start to decay.

What Chrome Site Engagement Scores Are Used For

Google is transparent about the Chrome Site Engagement metrics because the Chromium Project is open source. The documentation explicitly outlines what the site engagement metrics are, the signals used, how they are calculated, and their intended purposes. There is no ambiguity about their function or use. It’s all laid out in detail.

There are three main uses for the site engagement scores and all three are explicitly for improving the user experience within Chromium-based browsers.

Site engagement metrics are used internally by the browser for these three purposes:

  1. Prioritize Resources: Allocate resources like storage or background sync to sites with higher engagement.
  2. Enable Features: Determine thresholds for enabling specific browser features (e.g., app banners, autoplay).
  3. Sort Sites: Organize lists, such as the most-used sites on the New Tab Page or which tabs to discard when memory is low, based on engagement levels.

The documentation states that the engagement scores were specifically designed for the above three use cases.

Prioritize Resources

Google’s documentation explains that Chrome allocates resources (such as storage space) to websites based on their site engagement levels. Sites with higher user engagement scores are given a greater share of these resources within their browser. The purpose is so that the browser prioritizes sites that are more important or frequently used by the user.

This is what the documentation says:

“Allocating resources based on the proportion of overall engagement a site has (e.g storage, background sync)”

Takeaway: One of the reasons for the site engagement score is to prioritize resources to improve the browser user experience.

Role Of Engagement Metrics For Enabling Features

This part of the documentation explains that Chromium uses site engagement scores to determine whether certain browser features are enabled for a website. Examples of features are app banners and video autoplay.

The site engagement metrics are used to determine whether to let videos autoplay on a given site, if the site is above a specific threshold of engagement. This improves the user experience by preventing annoying video autoplay on sites that have low engagement scores.

This is what the documentation states:

“Setting engagement cutoff points for features (e.g app banner, video autoplay, window.alert())”​

Takeaway: The site engagement metrics play a role in determining whether certain features like video autoplay are enabled. The purpose of this metric is to improve the browser user experience.

Sort Sites

The document explicitly says that site engagement scores are used to rank sites for browser functions like tab discarding (when memory is tight) or creating lists of the most-used sites on the New Tab Page (NTP).

“Sorting or prioritizing sites in order of engagement (e.g tab discarding, most used list on NTP)”

Takeaway: Sorting sites based on engagement ensures that the user’s most important and frequently interacted-with sites are prioritized in their browser. It also improves usability through tab management and quick access so that it matches user behavior and preferences.

Privacy

There is absolutely nothing that implies that Google Search uses these site engagement metrics. There is nothing in the documentation that explicitly mentions or implicitly alludes to any other purpose for the site engagement metrics except for improving the user experience and usability of the Chrome browser and Chromium-based devices like the Chromebook.

The engagement scores are limited to a device. The scores aren’t shared between the devices of a single user.

The documentation states:

“The user engagement score are not synced, so decisions made on a given device are made based on the users’ activity on that device alone.”

The user engagement scores are further isolated when users are in Incognito Mode:

“When in incognito mode, site engagement will be copied from the original profile and then allowed to decay and grow independently. There will be no information flow from the incognito profile back to the original profile. Incognito information is deleted when the browser is shut down.”

User engagement scores are deleted when the browser history is cleared:

“Engagement scores are cleared with browsing history.

Origins are deleted when the history service deletes URLs and subsequently reports zero URLs belonging to that origin are left in history.”

The engagement score for a website decreases over time if the user doesn’t interact with the site. This is called “decay” when the user engagement score drops in time. Engagement scores are forgotten which improves the relevance of the scores and how the browser optimizes itself for usability and the user experience.

The impact of user engagement scores that “decay to zero” is that the URLs are completely removed from the browser:

“URLs are cleared when scores decay to zero.”

Takeaway: What Could Google Do With This Data?

It’s understandable that some people, when presented with the facts about Chrome site engagement metrics, will ask, “What if Google is using it?”

Asking “what if” is a powerful way to innovate and explore how a service or a product can be improved or invented. However, basing business decisions on speculative ‘what if’ questions that contradict established facts is counterproductive.

These metrics are solely for improving browser user experience and usability, the scores are not synched and are limited to the device, the scores are further isolated in Incognito Mode and the scores are completely erased when users stop interacting with a site.

That means that the question, “What if Chrome shared site engagement signals with Google?” has no basis in fact. The purpose of these signals and their documented use cases are fully transparent and well understood to be limited to browser usability.

Read the Chromium documentation:

For Developers > Design Documents > Site Engagement

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Dec 1 2024
These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own

Left to their own devices, an army of AI characters didn’t just survive — they thrived. They developed in-game jobs, shared memes, voted on tax reforms and even spread a religion.

The experiment played out on the open-world gaming platform Minecraft, where up to 1000 software agents at a time used large language models (LLMs) to interact with one another. Given just a nudge through text prompting, they developed a remarkable range of personality traits, preferences and specialist roles, with no further inputs from their human creators. 

The work, from AI startup Altera, is part of a broader field that wants to use simulated agents to model how human groups would react to new economic policies or other interventions.

But for Altera’s founder, Robert Yang, who quit his position as an assistant professor in computational neuroscience at MIT to start the company, this demo is just the beginning. He sees it as an early  step towards large-scale “AI civilizations” that can coexist and work alongside us in digital spaces. “The true power of AI will be unlocked when we have actually truly autonomous agents that can collaborate at scale,” says Yang.

Yang was inspired by Stanford University researcher Joon Sung Park who, in 2023, found that surprisingly humanlike behaviors arose when a group of 25 autonomous AI agents was let loose to interact in a basic digital world. 

“Once his paper was out, we started to work on it the next week,” says Yang. “I quit MIT six months after that.”

Yang wanted to take the idea to its extreme. “We wanted to push the limit of what agents can do in groups autonomously.”

Altera quickly raised more than $11m in funding from investors including A16Z and the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s emerging tech VC firm. Earlier this year Altera released its first demo: an AI-controlled character in Minecraft that plays alongside you.

Altera’s new experiment, Project Sid, uses simulated AI agents equipped with “brains” made up of multiple modules. Some modules are powered by LLMs and designed to specialize in certain tasks, such as reacting to other agents, speaking, or planning the agent’s next move.

Ai-generated Minecraft simulation of characters running

ALTERA

The team started small, testing groups of around 50 agents in Minecraft to observe their interactions. Over 12 in-game days (4 real-world hours) the agents began to exhibit some interesting emergent behavior. For example, some became very sociable and made many connections with other characters, while others appeared more introverted. The “likability” rating of each agent (measured by the agents themselves) changed over time as the interactions continued. The agents were able to track these social cues and react to them: in one case an AI chef tasked with distributing food to the hungry gave more to those who he felt valued him most.

More humanlike behaviors emerged in a series of 30-agent simulations. Despite all the agents starting with the same personality and same overall goal—to create an efficient village and protect the community against attacks from other in-game creatures—they spontaneously developed specialized roles within the community, without any prompting.  They diversified into roles such as builder, defender, trader, and explorer. Once an agent had started to specialize, its in-game actions began to reflect its new role. For example, an artist spent more time picking flowers, farmers gathered seeds and guards built more fences. 

“We were surprised to see that if you put [in] the right kind of brain, they can have really emergent behavior,” says Yang. “That’s what we expect humans to have, but don’t expect machines to have.”

Yang’s team also tested whether agents could follow community-wide rules. They introduced a world with basic tax laws and allowed agents to vote for changes to the in-game taxation system. Agents prompted to be pro or anti tax were able to influence the behavior of other agents around them, enough that they would then vote to reduce or raise tax depending on who they had interacted with.

The team scaled up, pushing the number of agents in each simulation to the maximum the Minecraft server could handle without glitching, up to 1000 at once in some cases. In one of Altera’s 500-agent simulations, they watched how the agents spontaneously came up with and then spread cultural memes (such as a fondness for pranking, or an interest in eco-related issues) among their fellow agents. The team also seeded a small group of agents to try to spread the (parody) religion, Pastafarianism, around different towns and rural areas that made up the in-game world, and watched as these Pastafarian priests converted many of the agents they interacted with. The converts went on to spread Pastafarianism (the word of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) to nearby towns in the game world.

The way the agents acted might seem eerily lifelike, but their behavior combines patterns learned by the LLMs from human-created data with Altera’s system, which translates those patterns into context-aware actions, like picking up a tool, or interacting with another agent. “The takeaway is that LLMs have a sophisticated enough model of human social dynamics [to] mirror these human behaviors,” says Altera co-founder Andrew Ahn.

Ai-generated Minecraft simulation of farming crops

ALTERA

In other words, the data makes them excellent mimics of human behavior, but they are in no way “alive”.

But Yang has grander plans. Altera plans to expand into Roblox next, but Yang hopes to eventually move beyond game worlds altogether. Ultimately, his goal is a world in which humans don’t just play alongside AI characters, but also interact with them in their day-to-day lives. His dream is to create a vast number of “digital humans” who actually care for us and will work with us to help us solve problems, as well as keep us entertained. “We want to build agents that can really love humans (like dogs love humans, for example),” he says.

This viewpoint—that AI could love us—is pretty controversial in the field, with many experts arguing it’s not possible to recreate emotions in machines using current techniques. AI veteran Julian Togelius, for example, who runs games testing company Modl.ai, says he likes Altera’s work, particularly because it lets us study human behavior in simulation.

But could these simulated agents ever learn to care for us, love us, or become self-aware? Togelius doesn’t think so. “There is no reason to believe a neural network running on a GPU somewhere experiences anything at all,” he says.

But maybe AI doesn’t have to love us for real to be useful.

“If the question is whether one of these simulated beings could appear to care, and do it so expertly that it would have the same value to someone as being cared for by a human, that is perhaps not impossible,” Togelius adds. “You could create a good-enough simulation of care to be useful. The question is whether the person being cared for would care that the carer has no experiences.”

In other words, so long as our AI characters appear to care for us in a convincing way, that might be all we really care about.

Update: We gave more detail on how Altera’s system combines LLMs with other modules.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Dec 1 2024
What’s next for NASA’s giant moon rocket?

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

NASA’s huge lunar rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), might be in trouble. As rival launchers like SpaceX’s Starship gather pace, some are questioning the need for the US national space agency to have its own mega rocket at all—something that could become a focus of the incoming Trump administration, in which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is set to play a key role.

“It’s absolutely in Elon Musk’s interest to convince the government to cancel SLS,” says Laura Forczyk from the US space consulting firm Astralytical. “However, it’s not up to him.”

SLS has been in development for more than a decade. The rocket is huge, 322 feet (98 meters) tall, and about 15% more powerful than the Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 70s. It is also expensive, costing an estimated $4.1 billion per launch.

It was designed with a clear purpose—returning astronauts to the moon’s surface. Built to launch NASA’s human-carrying Orion spacecraft, the rocket is a key part of the agency’s Artemis program to go back to the Moon, started by the previous Trump administration in 2019. “It has an important role to play,” says Daniel Dumbacher, formerly a deputy associate administrator at NASA and part of the team that selected SLS for development in 2010. “The logic for SLS still holds up.”

The rocket has launched once already on the Artemis I mission in 2022, a test flight that saw an uncrewed Orion spacecraft sent around the moon. Its next flight, Artemis II, earmarked for September 2025, will be the same flight but with a four-person crew, before the first lunar landing, Artemis III, currently set for September 2026.

SLS could launch missions to other destinations too. At one stage NASA intended to launch its Europa Clipper spacecraft to Jupiter’s moon Europa using SLS, but cost and delays saw the mission launch instead on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in October this year. It has also been touted to launch parts of NASA’s new lunar space station, Gateway, beginning in 2028. The station is currently in development.

NASA’s plan to return to the moon involves using SLS to launch astronauts to lunar orbit on Orion, where they will rendezvous with a separate lander to descend to the surface. At the moment that lander will be SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, a huge reusable shuttle intended to launch and land multiple times. Musk wants this rocket to one day take humans to Mars.

Starship is currently undergoing testing. Last month, it completed a stunning flight in which the lower half of the rocket, the Super Heavy booster, was caught by SpaceX’s “chopstick” launch tower in Boca Chica, Texas. The rocket is ultimately more powerful than SLS and designed to be entirely reusable, whereas NASA’s rocket is discarded into the ocean after each launch.

The success of Starship and the development of other large commercial rockets, such as the Jeff Bezos-owned firm Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, has raised questions about the need for SLS. In October, billionaire Michael Bloomberg called the rocket a “colossal waste of taxpayer money”. In November, journalist Eric Berger said there was at least a 50-50 chance the rocket would be canceled.

“I think it would be the right call,” says Abhishek Tripathi, a former mission director at SpaceX now at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s hard to point to SLS as being necessary.”

The calculations are not straightforward, however. Dumbacher notes that while SpaceX is making “great progress” on Starship, there is much yet to do. The rocket will need to launch possibly up to 18 times to transfer fuel to a single lunar Starship in Earth orbit that can then make the journey to the moon. The first test of this fuel transfer is expected next year.

SLS, conversely, can send Orion to the moon in a single launch. That means the case for SLS is only diminished “if the price of 18 Starship launches is less than an SLS launch”, says Dumbacher. SpaceX was awarded $2.9 billion by NASA in 2021 for the first Starship mission to the moon on Artemis III, but the exact cost per launch is unknown.

The Artemis II Core Stage moves from final assembly to the VAB at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, July, 6, 2024.

MICHAEL DEMOCKER/NASA

NASA is also already developing hardware for future SLS launches. “All elements for the second SLS for Artemis II have been delivered,” a NASA spokesperson said in response to emailed questions, adding that SLS also has “hardware in production” for Artemis III, IV, and V.

“SLS can deliver more payload to the moon, in a single launch, than any other rocket,” NASA said. “The rocket is needed and designed to meet the agency’s lunar transportation requirements.”

Dumbacher points out that if the US wants to return to the moon before China sends humans there, which the nation has said it would do by 2030, canceling SLS could be a setback. “Now is not the time to have a major relook at what’s the best rocket,” he says. “Every minute we delay, we are setting ourselves up for a situation where China will be putting people on the moon first.”

President-elect Donald Trump has given Musk a role in his incoming administration to slash public spending as part of the newly established Department of Government Efficiency. While the exact remit of this initiative is not yet clear, projects like SLS could be up for scrutiny.

Canceling SLS would require support from Congress, however, where Republicans will have only a slim majority. “SLS has been bipartisan and very popular,” says Forczyk, meaning it might be difficult to take any immediate action. “Money given to SLS is a benefit to taxpayers and voters in key congressional districts [where development of the rocket takes place],” says Forczyk. “We do not know how much influence Elon Musk will have.”

It seems likely the rocket will at least launch Artemis II next September, but beyond that there is more uncertainty. “The most logical course of action in my mind is to cancel SLS after Artemis III,” says Forczyk.

Such a scenario could have a broad impact on NASA that reaches beyond just SLS. Scrapping the rocket could bring up wider discussions about NASA’s overall budget, currently set at $25.4 billion, the highest-funded space agency in the world. That money is used for a variety of science including astrophysics, astronomy, climate studies, and the exploration of the solar system.

“If you cancel SLS, you’re also canceling the broad support for NASA’s budget at its current level,” says Tripathi. “Once that budget gets slashed, it’s hard to imagine it’ll ever grow back to present levels. Be careful what you wish for.”

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Dec 1 2024
This startup is getting closer to bringing next-generation nuclear to the grid

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

This is a busy time of year for all of us, and that’s certainly true in the advanced nuclear industry.

MIT Technology Review released our list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch less than two months ago. Since then, awardee Kairos Power has had three big announcements about its progress toward building next-generation nuclear reactors. 

Each of these bits of news represents an interesting aspect of the process. So let’s dig into the announcements and what they mean for where nuclear technology is going.

First, a quick refresher on Kairos Power: While nuclear plants today overwhelmingly use pressurized water to keep reactors cool, Kairos is using molten salt. The idea is that these reactors (which are also smaller than those typically built today) will help generate electricity in a way that’s safer and more efficient than conventional nuclear power.

When it comes to strategy, Kairos is taking small steps toward the ultimate goal of full-size power plants. Construction began earlier this year on Hermes, the company’s first nuclear test reactor. That facility will generate a small amount of heat—about 35 megawatts’ worth—to demonstrate the technology.

Last week, the company announced it received a construction permit for the next iteration of its system, Hermes 2. This plant will share a location with Hermes, and it will include the infrastructure to transform heat to electricity. That makes it the first electricity-producing next-generation nuclear plant to get this approval in the US.

While this news wasn’t a huge surprise (the company has been working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for years), “any day that you’re getting a permit or a license from the NRC is an unusual and special day,” Kairos CEO Mike Laufer told me in an interview.  

The company is developing a plan to work on construction for both Hermes and Hermes 2 at the same time, he added. When I asked if Hermes is still on track to start up in 2027 (as we reported in our profile of the company in October), Laufer said that’s an “aggressive timeline.”

While construction on test reactors is rolling, Kairos is forging ahead with commercial deals—in October, it announced an agreement with Google to build up to 500 megawatts’ worth of power plants by 2035. Under this agreement, Kairos will develop, construct, and operate plants and sell electricity to the tech giant.

Kairos will need to build multiple reactors to deliver 500 MW. The first deployment should happen by 2030, with additional units to follow. One of the benefits of building smaller reactors is learning as you go along and making improvements that can lower costs and make construction more efficient, Laufer says. 

While the construction permit and Google deal are arguably the biggest recent announcements from Kairos, I’m also fascinated by a more niche milestone: In early October, the company broke ground on a salt production facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that will make the molten salt used to cool its reactors.

“Salt is one of the key areas where we do have some unique and specialized needs,” Laufer says. And having control over the areas of the supply chain that are specialized will be key to helping the company deliver electricity reliably and at lower cost, he adds. 

The company’s molten salt is called Flibe, and it’s a specific mix of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride. One fun detail I learned from Laufer is that the mixture needs to be enriched in lithium-7 because that isotope absorbs fewer neutrons than lithium-6, allowing the reactor to run more efficiently. The new facility in Albuquerque will produce large quantities of high-purity Flibe enriched in lithium-7.

Progress in the nuclear industry can sometimes feel slow, with milestones few and far between, so it’s really interesting to see Kairos taking so many small steps in quick succession toward delivering on its promise of safe, cheap nuclear power. 

“We’ve had a lot of huge accomplishments. We have a long way to go,” Laufer says. “This is not an easy thing to pull off. We believe we have the right approach and we’re doing it the right way, but it requires a lot of hard work and diligence.”

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

For more details on Kairos and its technology, check out our profile of the company in the 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch package from October. 

If you’re dying for more details on molten salt, check out this story I wrote in January about a test system Kairos built to demonstrate the technology. 

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | GETTY, ADOBE STOCK

Another thing

Donald Trump pledged to enact tariffs on a wide range of products imported into the US. The plans could drive up the cost of batteries, EVs, and more, threatening to slow progress on climate and potentially stall the economy. Read more about the potential impacts for technology in the latest story from my colleague James Temple. 

Keeping up with climate  

The UN climate talks wrapped up over the weekend. In the resulting agreement, rich nations will provide at least $300 billion in climate finance per year by 2035 to developing nations to help them deal with climate change. (Carbon Brief)
→ This falls well short of the $1 trillion mark that many had hoped to reach. (MIT Technology Review)

Utilities might be spending a lot of money on the wrong transmission equipment on the grid. Dollars are flowing to smaller, local projects, not the interstate projects that are crucial for getting more clean energy online. (Inside Climate News)

Sustainable aviation fuel is one of the only viable options to help clean up the aviation industry in the near term. But what are these fuels, exactly? And how do they help with climate change? It’s surprisingly complicated, and the details matter. (Canary Media)

Automakers want Trump to keep rules in place that will push the US toward adoption of electric vehicles. Companies have already invested billions of dollars into an EV transition. (New York Times)

There’s a growing chasm in American meat consumption: The number of households that avoid meat has increased slightly, but all other households have increased their meat purchases. (Vox)

Trump has vowed to halt offshore wind energy, but for some projects, things take so long that a four-year term may not even touch them. (Grist)

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Dec 1 2024
The moon is just the beginning for this waterless concrete

If NASA establishes a permanent presence on the moon, its astronauts’ homes could be made of a new 3D-printable, waterless concrete. Someday, so might yours. By accelerating the curing process for more rapid construction, this sulfur-based compound could become just as applicable on our home terrain as it is on lunar soil. 

Artemis III—set to launch no earlier than September 2026—will not only mark humanity’s return to the moon after more than 50 years, but also be the first mission to explore the lunar South Pole, the proposed site of NASA’s base camp. 

Building a home base on the moon will demand a steep supply of moon-based infrastructure: launch pads, shelter, and radiation blockers. But shipping Earth-based concrete to the lunar surface bears a hefty price tag. Sending just 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of material to the moon costs roughly $1.2 million, says Ali Kazemian, a robotic construction researcher at Louisiana State University (LSU). Instead, NASA hopes to create new materials from lunar soil and eventually adapt the same techniques for building on Mars. 

Traditional concrete requires large amounts of water, a commodity that will be in short supply on the moon and critically important for life support or scientific research, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. While prior NASA projects have tested compounds that could be used to make “lunarcrete,” they’re still working to craft the right waterless material.

So LSU researchers are refining the formula, developing a new cement based on sulfur, which they heat until it’s molten to bind material without the need for water. In recent work, the team mixed their waterless cement with simulated lunar and Martian soil to create a 3D-printable concrete, which they used to assemble walls and beams. “We need automated construction, and NASA thinks 3D printing is one of the few viable technologies for building lunar infrastructure,” says Kazemian. 

curved wall being built in a lab by a 3D printing arm withwaterless concrete
A curved wall is 3D printed from waterless concrete.
COURTESY OF ALI KAZEMIAN

Beyond circumventing the need for water, the cement can handle wider temperature extremes and cures faster than traditional methods. The group used a pre-made powder for their experiments, but on the moon and Mars, astronauts might extract sulfur from surface soil. 

To test whether the concrete can stand up to the moon’s harsh environment, the team placed its structures in a vacuum chamber for weeks, analyzing the material’s stability at different temperatures. Originally, researchers worried that cold conditions on the dark side of the moon might cause the compound to turn into a gas through a process called sublimation, like when dry ice skips its liquid phase and evaporates directly. Ultimately, they found that the concrete can handle the lunar South Pole’s frigid forecast without losing its form. 

Some conditions, like reduced gravity, could even work toward the concrete’s advantage. The experiment tested structures like walls and small circular towers, each made by stacking many layers of concrete. “One of the main challenges in larger-scale 3D printing is a distortion of these thick, heavy layers,” says Kazemian “But when you have lower gravity, that can actually help keep the layers from deforming.” 

Kazemian and his colleagues recently transferred the technology to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to implement their design on a larger-scale robotic system and test construction in larger vacuum chambers. If adopted, the concrete will most likely be used for taller lunar structures like habitats and radiation shields. Flatter designs, like a landing pad, will probably use laser-based technologies to melt down lunar soil into a ceramic structure. 

There may only be so much testing we can do on Earth, however. According to Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist at University of Central Florida who recently retired from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the concrete’s efficacy may falter with the shift from simulant to real soil. “There’s chemistry in the samples of these planets that the simulants cannot perfectly replicate,” he says. “When we send missions to these planetary bodies to test the technology using the real soil, we may find that we need to further improve the technology to get it to work in that environment.”

But Metzger still sees the sulfur-based concrete as a vital foundation for the tall orders of upcoming planetary projects. Future missions to Mars could demand roads to drive back and forth from ice-mining sites and pavement around habitats to create dust-free work zones. This new concrete brings these distant goals a touch closer to reality. 

It could benefit construction on Earth, too. Kazemian sees the new material as a potential alternative for traditional concrete, especially in areas with water scarcity or a surplus of sulfur. Parts of the Middle East, for example, have abundant sulfur as a result of oil and gas production. 

The technology could become especially useful in disaster areas with broken supply chains, according to Metzger. It could also have military applications for rapid construction of structures like storage buildings. “This is great for people out there working on another planet who don’t have a lot of support,” Metzger says. “But there are already plenty of analogs to that here on Earth.”

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Dec 1 2024
The risk of a bird flu pandemic is rising

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

How worried should we be about bird flu? It’s a question that I’ve been asked by friends and colleagues several times over the last couple of weeks. Their concerns have been spurred by some potentially worrisome developments in the US, including the continued spread of the virus among dairy cattle, the detection of the virus in a pig as well as cow’s milk, and—most concerning of all—the growing number of human infections.

I’ll admit that I’m worried. We don’t yet have any evidence that the virus is spreading between people, but the risk of a potential pandemic has increased since I last covered this topic a couple of months ago.

And once you combine that increased risk with an upcoming change in presidential administration that might leave US health agencies in the hands of a vaccine denier who promotes the consumption of raw milk, well … it’s not exactly a comforting thought.

The good news is we are in a much better position to tackle any potential future flu outbreaks than we were to face covid-19 back in 2020, given that we already have vaccines. But, on the whole, it’s not looking great.

The bird flu that is currently spreading in US dairy cattle is caused by the H5N1 virus. The virus is especially lethal to some bird populations and has been wiping out poultry and seabirds for the last couple of years. It has also caused fatal infections in many mammals who came into contact with those birds.

H5N1 was first detected in a dairy cow in Texas in March of this year. As of this week, the virus has been reported in 675 herds across 15 states, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (also known as APHIS).

Those are just the cases we know about. There may be more. The USDA requires testing of cattle before they are moved between states. And it offers a voluntary testing program for farmers who want to know if the virus is present in their bulk milk tanks. But participation in that program is optional.

States have their own rules. Colorado has required testing of bulk milk tanks in licensed dairy farms since July. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture announced plans for a program just last week. But some states have no such requirements.

At the end of October, the USDA reported that the virus had been detected in a pig for the first time. The pig was one of five in a farm in Oregon that had “a mix of poultry and livestock.” All the pigs were slaughtered.

Virologists have been especially worried about the virus making its way into pigs, because these animals are notorious viral incubators. “They can become infected with swine strains, bird strains and human strains,” says Brinkley Bellotti, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. These strains can swap genes and give rise to new, potentially more infectious or harmful strains.

Thankfully, we haven’t seen any other cases in pig farms, and there’s no evidence that the virus can spread between pigs. And while it has been spreading pretty rapidly between cattle, the virus doesn’t seem to have evolved much, says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. That suggests that the virus made the leap into cattle, probably from birds, only once. And it has been spreading through herds since.

Unfortunately, we still don’t really know how it is spreading. There is some evidence to suggest the virus can be spread from cow to cow through shared milking equipment. But it is unclear how the virus is spreading between farms. “It’s hard to form an effective control strategy when you don’t know exactly how it’s spreading,” says Bellotti.

But it is in cows. And it’s in their milk. When scientists analyzed 297 samples of Grade A pasteurized retail milk products, including milk, cream and cheese, they found viral RNA from H5N1 in 20% of them. Those samples were collected from 17 states across the US. And the study was conducted in April, just weeks after the virus was first detected in cattle. “It’s surprising to me that we are totally fine with … our pasteurized milk products containing viral DNA,” says Lakdawala.

Research suggests that, as long as the milk is pasteurized, the virus is not infectious. But Lakdawala is concerned that pasteurization may not inactivate all of the virus, all the time. “We don’t know how much virus we need to ingest [to become infected], and whether any is going to slip through pasteurization,” she says.

And no reassurances can be made for unpasteurized raw milk. When cows are infected with H5N1, their milk can turn thick, yellow and “chunky.” But research has shown that, even when the milk starts to look normal again, it can still contain potentially infectious virus.

The most concerning development, though, is the rise in human cases. So far, 55 such cases of H5N1 bird flu have been reported in the US, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Twenty-nine of those cases have been detected in California. In almost all those cases, the infected person is thought to have caught the virus from cattle or poultry on farms. But in two of those cases, the source of the infection is unknown.

Health professionals don’t know how a teenager in British Columbia, Canada, got so sick with bird flu, either. The anonymous teenager, who sought medical care for an eye infection on November 2, is still seriously ill in hospital, and continues to rely on a ventilator to breathe. Local health officials have closed their investigation into the teen’s infection.

There may be more, unreported cases out there, too. When researchers tested 115 dairy farm workers in Michigan and Colorado, they found markers of recent infection with the virus in 7% of them.

So far, there is no evidence that the virus can spread between people. But every human infection offers the virus another opportunity to evolve into a form that can do just that. People can act as viral incubators, too. And during flu season, there are more chances for the H5N1 virus to mix with circulating seasonal flu viruses. 

“Just because we [haven’t seen human-to-human spread] now doesn’t mean that it’s not capable of happening, that it won’t happen, or that it hasn’t already happened,” says Lakdawala.

So where do we go from here? Lakdawala thinks we should already have started vaccinating dairy farm workers. After all, the US has already stockpiled vaccines for H5N1, which were designed to protect against previous variants of the virus. “We’re not taking [the human cases] seriously enough,” she says.

We need to get a better handle on exactly how the virus is spreading, too, and implement more effective measures to stop it from doing so. That means more testing of both cows and dairy farm workers at the very least. And we need to be clear that, despite what Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current lead contender for the role of head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, says, raw milk can be dangerous, and vaccines are a vital tool in the prevention of pandemics.

We still have an opportunity to prevent the outbreak from turning into a global catastrophe. But the situation has worsened since the summer. “This is sort of how the 2009 pandemic started,” says Lakdawala, referring to the H1N1 swine flu pandemic. “We started to have a couple of cases sporadically, and then the next thing you knew, you were seeing it everywhere.”

Now read the rest of The Checkup

Read more from MIT Technology Review’s archive

The US is planning to stockpile millions of doses of H5N1 vaccines. But our current approach to making flu vaccines is slow and cumbersome. New vaccines that don’t rely on the use of eggs, or make use of mRNA, might offer a better alternative.

Flu season is already underway in the US, where bird flu is spreading among cattle. That has virologists worried that a person infected with both viruses could unwittingly incubate an all-new strain of the virus.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already spread harmful misinformation, pseudoscience and fringe theories about AIDS and covid-19.

Some researchers are exploring new ways to prevent the spread of H5N1 in poultry. The gene editing tool CRISPR could be used to help make chickens more resistant to the virus, according to preliminary research published last year.

From around the web

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Jay Bhattacharya for his pick to lead the US National Institutes of Health, an agency with a $48 billion budget that oversees the majority of medical research in the country. Bhattacharya was one of three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto published in 2020 arguing against lockdowns during the height of the covid-19 pandemic, and supporting a “let it rip” approach instead. (STAT)

An IVF mix up left two families raising each other’s biological babies. They didn’t realize until the children were a couple of months old. What should they do? (Have the tissues ready for this one, which is heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure) (New York Times)

Why do we feel the need to surveil our sleeping babies? This beautiful comic explores the various emotional pulls experienced by new parents. (The Verge)

Australia’s parliament has passed a law that bans children under the age of 16 from using social media. Critics are concerned that the law is a “blunt instrument” that might drive young teens to the dark web, or leave them feeling isolated. (The Guardian)

Lab-grown foie gras, anyone? Cultivated meat is going high-end, apparently. (Wired)

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Nov 30 2024
Automattic Quietly Intensifies WP Engine Tracker Site via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Automattic quietly updated the WP Engine Tracker website with an activity log showing a continuously updated list of domains that have switched away from managed WordPress host, WP Engine. This update is part of Mullenweg’s self-described “nuclear war” against WP Engine, with the Tracker site actively promoting competitors by offering links to their hosting promotions.

WP Engine Tracker

Automattic created a website for the purpose of tracking how many sites have abandoned WP Engine six September 21st, 2024, the date that Matt Mullenweg started went “nuclear” on WP Engine after they rebuffed his request for $32 million dollars. The website promotes deals with other web hosts for moving away from WP Engine, and a CSV spreadsheet with the domain names of the sites that have left WP Engine.

At some point after launching the website was updated with a list of the top web hosts that WP Engine customers have migrated to and a constantly updated list of sites that have recently moved.

WP Engine Tracker “Activity Log Today”

Automattic escalated what the WP Engine Tracker website does by adding an additional feature that shows a continually updated running list of domains that have migrated away from WP Engine and the destination host.

Screenshot Of Activity Log Today Feature

WP Engine Lawsuit

The WP Engine Tracker website, created by Automattic and Matt Mullenweg to publicly monitor and offer links to promotions to other web hosts, was cited in a preliminary injunction filed by WP Engine as evidence of Mullenweg’s purposeful “attack on WPE” as part of his “nuclear war” against the managed WordPress host.

The preliminary injunction filed by WP Engine explains:

“Just last week, in an apparent effort to brag about how successful they have been in harming WPE, Defendants created a website—www.wordpressenginetracker.com—that “list[s] . . . every domain hosted by @wpengine, which you can see decline every day. 15,080 sites have left already since September 21st.

September 21 was not selected randomly. It is the day after Defendants’ self-proclaimed nuclear war began – an admission that these customer losses were caused by Defendants’ wrongful actions. In this extraordinary attack on WPE and its customers, Defendants included on their disparaging website a downloadable file of ‘all [WPE] sites ready for a new home’—that is, WPE’s customer list, literally inviting others to target and poach WPE’s clients while Defendants’ attacks on WPE continued..”

But available transcripts of the preliminary injunction hearing of November 26th do not show that it was mentioned. The judge at that hearing asked the plaintiff and defendants to return to court on Monday December 2nd with an agreement on a narrow and specific scope for a preliminary injunction, having said that the original request was too vague and consequently unenforceable.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Gearstd

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments