Labubus: The Toothy Toy That Took Over the World

In the ever-evolving world of collectibles, few phenomena have captured global attention quite like Labubus. What began as a quirky character in a storybook has transformed into a billion-dollar brand, a pop culture icon, and a symbol of modern collector culture. Labubus was born from the imagination of Kasing Lung, a Hong Kong-Belgian artist inspired by Nordic folklore. Originally featured in his illustrated series The Monsters, Labubu—the mischievous elf with sharp teeth and a scruffy charm—was brought to life as a vinyl figure in 2015. But it wasn’t until Lung partnered with Chinese toy giant Pop Mart in 2019 that Labubu truly found its audience.

The Power of Pink

A few weeks ago, I was able to catch a movie. I actually went to the movie theater. What movie caught my eye? What brought me out to a movie theater? You guessed it. The one and only – Barbie.

I had Barbies growing up, but I was not one of those fans who counted down the days until the movie’s release. In fact, I did not plan to watch it on the big screen, but the marketing team at Barbie had my social media buzzing.

The combined release of Barbie and Oppenheimer—dubbed “Barbenheimer”—became a pop culture sensation. There were memes left and right about Barbenheimer. The event possibly revived the movie theater industry. According to CNN, Barbenheimer led to the fourth highest-grossing industry weekend of all time in North America, totaling about $302 million.

The Power of Finding your Community on Twitter

What if I told you that a place existed where you could interact with hundreds of entrepreneurs, lawyers, accountants, bankers, investors and more, all from your seat on the couch? In that same place, these people share ideas, tips, and stories from their years of experience. And the best part—you can gain access to this vast base of knowledge at your fingertips, and all for free. That place is Twitter, and no matter what business or industry you’re in, you’ll likely find that there is a Twitter community catering to it.

It’s Whamaggedon Season Again…

If you are currently a participant in “Whamageddon,” do NOT click on this link. If you don’t know what Whamageddon is, it is a viral contest that has become popular every holiday season. The basic rules, which can be found here, involve trying to avoid hearing Wham’s “Last Christmas” (the original, not a cover) from December 1st through December 24th each year.

Under the “official” rules, you aren’t supposed to deliberately send your friends to “Whamhalla” (where participants go each year once they have heard the song). However, the Wikipedia page suggests that you could send someone a “Wham-bomb” by setting their smart device to play “Last Christmas” as an alarm on December 1st! Sometimes, people play with other songs, like Mariah Carey’s ubiquitous “All I Want For Christmas is You” or, in New Zealand, "Snoopy's Christmas."

Pickleball Just Keeps Getting Bigger

Frequent readers of my entreVIEW posts (a small but loyal group, no doubt) may recall that earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time before vaccination had become widely available, I wrote this post about my budding enthusiasm for Pickleball. My post detailed how Pickleball had become widely recognized as a perfect “pandemic pastime” and was showing explosive growth as the fastest growing sport in the US. I also detailed some Pickleball-related entrepreneurial ventures.

While I have become a true Pickleball enthusiast and continue to play regularly (having taught at least 50 Pickleball virgins to play), I couldn’t have anticipated that Pickleball was going to rapidly become such big business! I recently saw this article, which details a whole bunch of ways that my new favorite sport (my old favorites are still volleyball and slalom waterskiing) is becoming big business. There are dozens of new companies selling paddles and accessories, hundreds of venues opening around the country, technologists developing software to facilitate Pickleball enthusiasm (court finders, scoring assistants, and even “Tinder-like” apps designed to help you find Pickleball playing partners), along with tournaments and professional Pickleball.

First CCPA Enforcement Action by the California AG – Lessons Learned

The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) and other new state data privacy laws are set to take effect in 2023. If you needed an incentive to review your compliance obligations, the California Attorney General recently provided one in its $1.2 million settlement of an enforcement action under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), upon which the CPRA expands. Anyone with an e-commerce website should take heed.

Summary of the Enforcement Action. According to the California AG, Sephora, a French cosmetics brand, failed to disclose to consumers it was “selling” (a broadly defined term under the CCPA) their personal information; failed to honor user requests to opt out of sales via a user-enabled Global Privacy Control; and failed to cure these violations within the 30-day period allowed by the CCPA. In addition to the settlement amount, Sephora promised to report to the AG on its changes to its privacy regimen for a period of two years.

Spectacular Failures: Case Studies of Business Implosions

For those of us who are avid multitaskers and prefer to consume our media aurally, podcasts are a great source not only of entertaining content but also new and valuable information. It can be intimidating to jump in on a long-running podcast with potentially hundreds of episodes, so I’d like to highlight a shorter series consisting of twenty standalone episodes: Spectacular Failures.

This podcast by American Public Media and the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota examines one corporate catastrophe in each episode, taking an irreverent but educational approach to documenting each business’s rise and fall. Many episodes trace the collapses and scandals of corporate giants such as Pan Am and Forever 21, but others examine events involving smaller, more local businesses, such as the Los Angeles-based restaurant Squirl’s moldy jam scandal that went viral in 2020. The “spectacular failures” covered in the podcast range in date from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 to the current state of the NYC taxi industry, illuminating key points in the history of American business over the past century.

TikTok: A Resource for Small Business

For many small businesses, social media can bring significant value. It can allow businesses to engage with customers in a cost-effective way, collect and track customer engagement, gain insight into competition, and develop and grow their brand.

Because of these advantages, many small businesses now utilize one or more of the many social media platforms out there – LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, to name a few of the most popular. TikTok, a relatively new social media platform, has also started to grow in popularity. 

The Kids are Alright

As Lori Wiese-Parks — my fellow entreVIEW blogger and Lathrop GPM colleague — so eloquently recounted in her June 29 post, now, for the first time, student-athletes will be allowed to profit from endorsement deals using their own name, image, and likeness. 

Already, in less than a month, we have seen a slew of local and national endorsement deals — some notable, others less so. With more than 400,000 NCAA athletes now on the market, it is clear we are only scratching the surface, but, since you are here, take a look at some of the early deals of the brand new “NIL Era” in NCAA sports: 

The Big Box Brands

Trey Knox and PetSmart: On July 1, Trey Knox, an Arkansas Razorbacks wide receiver, signed a promotional partnership deal with PetsSmart. With his Siberian Husky, the 6’5” wideout, who has 12,900 followers on Instagram, will promote PetSmart through coordinated social media posts and behind-the-scenes videos. Knox played in 11 games for the Razorbacks last year, starting six and recording seven catches — proof that you don’t have to be a superstar to get a superstar deal. Sometimes all you need is an incredibly photogenic dog and a bit of initiative. 

Haley and Hanna Cavinder and Boost Mobile: Another deal from day one of the NIL era: by way of a billboard in Times Square, Boost Mobile announced their partnership with the Cavinder sisters, all-conference twin guards at Fresno State. It is yet to be seen how the Cavinder sisters fit into the plans of Boost Mobile, the wireless telecommunication subsidiary of Dish Network, but with the twins’ more than four million followers on social media, it is clear Boost Mobile will have to fight for the Cavinder sisters’ time.

Darknet Diaries: Valuable Lessons from a Cyber Security Podcast

In the past few years, podcasts have come to dominate my personal media consumption, and I am far from alone: as of 2021, 57% of Americans have listened to a podcast and about 28% listen to podcasts weekly. As a person who is perpetually trying to do too many things at the same time, podcasts are appealing because I can listen to them while commuting, exercising, or working around the house.

I am particularly fascinated by podcasts that feature experts in a complicated topic discussing that topic and their experiences. I find that these podcasts are often a great way to both learn about a topic and hear from a variety of people with different experiences. One of my favorite podcasts in this area is Darknet Diaries, a podcast created by Jack Rhysider, that covers a variety of cybercrime and Internet topics, and often features fascinating interviews with hackers and security professionals.

More than just covering the titular “darknet,” each episode of the podcast contains valuable lessons even for those of us who stick to the surface web. For example, in one recent episode titled “The LinkedIn Incident,” Rhysider covered the 2012 LinkedIn hack that eventually resulted in the posting of 117 million user details to the public. The hacker got access to LinkedIn’s user information by using publicly available information such as social media to identify a site engineer at LinkedIn, locate that engineer’s personal website, trace information from that site to the engineer’s IP address, and find a doorway into that engineer’s personal computer that the engineer used to do remote work for LinkedIn. From there, the hacker was able to use the user information in LinkedIn’s database to also access data from Dropbox and Formspring, likely because some LinkedIn users who worked at those other tech companies were re-using their passwords across multiple sites. 

The use of social media information is a common theme in these episodes. This sort of public information can be used in connection with a type of “social engineering,” a phrase used in information and cyber security to essentially mean using deception to “hack” people and convince them to give up private information. Its use ranges from gaining access to individuals and their computers, entering physical buildings, convincing people to give out sensitive information such as PINs over the phone, or forming relationships with potential whistleblowers.

Some People Try to Find Love by Casting a Wide Net; Dating Apps Use the Same Strategy to Get Your Business

Many people recently celebrated Valentine’s Day with that special someone. Others celebrated Singles Awareness Day on February 15. And, although only a few days have passed since Valentine’s Day, it’s very likely there are some recently single folks out there who were not single on February 14. For those single people, after you’ve had a good dose of some classic country heartbreak hits (try Hank Williams – “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” or Miranda Lambert – “Kerosene”) to see you through these bleak times, take heart and read on. This article is here to help you understand the lay of the land for dating apps, so you’ll be ready for February 14, 2022.

Numerous iconic brands that surround us on a daily basis are owned by a relatively small number of large conglomerates. The auto industry is a great example. Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep and Maserati are just some of the brands owned by Stellantis N.V. Volkswagen AG owns Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche and Volkswagen, to name a few. There are large players with huge brand portfolios that dominate the alcohol industry. ABInBev’s massive list of brands includes Goose Island, Michelob and Modelo. The consumer goods industry is no different. Brands that Proctor & Gamble has an ownership interest in include Charmin, Febreze and Tide. Unilever plc counts Dove, Lipton and Ben & Jerry’s as some of the recognizable names under its roof.

Just as these automobile, alcohol and consumer goods conglomerates have a wide spectrum of offerings, so do dating apps. Dating apps have been designed to be inclusive and cover a wide swath of users’ backgrounds. As parent companies acquire dating apps for their brand ownership portfolios, they increase their reach and are able to capture more users. As seen in the examples below, many of the commonly known dating apps are just one of many in a portfolio owned by a parent company. However, there are some key players that are notable exceptions to having a portfolio of many brands. One such exception is Bumble, which was listed on the Nasdaq exchange on February 11, 2021 and was valued at $13 billion.

What Is an ATDS and Why Should I Care?

The Supreme Court had more on its plate last week than considering how to respond to election fraud claims made by Donald Trump. On December 8, the court heard oral arguments in Facebook Inc. v. Duguid, a case that has been anticipated by many who have had to determine what they could do when using phone calls or texts to reach customers.

For 10 months, Facebook sent text messages to Noah Duguid, without his consent, alerting him that someone was trying to access his Facebook account. An account Noah did not even have. Noah Duguid sued Facebook.

Such phone calls or texts are governed by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA), one of the few privacy-related laws that allow for a private right of action. Multi-million dollar lawsuits have stymied businesses who have failed to comply with the consent requirements of the TCPA.

At issue in Facebook Inc. v Duguid, is whether the TCPA definition of an “automatic telephone dialing system” (ATDS) encompasses any device that can “store” and “automatically dial” telephone numbers, even if the device does not “use a random or sequential number generator.”

Facebook argued that the equipment it used to send the text messages to Noah was not an ATDS and it was therefore not in violation of the TCPA. Facebook also contended its First Amendment rights would be violated if it were found liable.  

USING E-COMMERCE TO SURVIVE COVID-19

Businesses have been forced to close their brick and mortar stores. We are all practicing safe distancing. People are working remotely. COVID-19 has already had a significant impact on how we conduct business. 

While the digital transformation was well underway before COVID-19, the transition to more vigorous and expansive e-commerce has never been more apparent. Amazon was set to hire over 100,000 new employees by April 1. Zoom has replaced all face-to face business meetings. Virtual interactions are the new norm. 

Nearly all companies now use some form of online or mobile websites and social media to promote their businesses, sell goods or services, conduct business transactions, and connect and communicate with customers, clients, or other businesses. 

For businesses that already enjoyed a robust e-commerce presence, now is a good time to review and enhance e-commerce strategies. For those businesses with a limited or non-existent online presence, their very survival may require a fresh look at e-commerce.

From Flats to Bags, Rothy’s Innovates with Sustainable Styles

By now, you’ve probably heard of Rothy’s, the footwear startup famous for creating stylish, comfortable, washable flats out of recycled water bottles.

The brand is beloved by commuters from coast to coast, as well as celebrities, including Meghan Markle, who is often spotted wearing a pair of Rothy’s pointed flats. Even Vogue Magazine, fashion’s ultimate arbiter, declared: “not only are these among the most politically correct shoes on our beleaguered planet, they are also adorable.”

Founded in 2016, Rothy’s is one of the world’s fastest growing brands. In 2018, they sold more than 1 million pairs of shoes, generating revenue of more than $140 million and securing a $35 million investment from Goldman Sachs. Time Magazine included Rothy’s recycled shoes on its list of Best Inventions of 2019. 

Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls and the Fight for Privacy on the Internet

by Leeja Miller and Amanda McAllister

 Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls is part memoir, part call to arms by Carrie Goldberg, a victim’s rights lawyer whose Brooklyn law firm, C.A. Goldberg, has seen staggering growth since its founding in 2014. This is due largely to Goldberg’s larger-than-life personality and her fierce and compassionate work representing victims of cybercrime, a notoriously difficult area of law for victims to find any sort of recourse. Nobody’s Victim recounts some of the most grisly cases Goldberg has faced during her career, including her own, as a means to highlight the egregious shortcomings of our legal system’s ability to provide justice to victims of cybercrime. 

Through Goldberg’s tales of hard-fought battles, many of which were lost, the book highlights the feeling of empowerment her clients can find in legal representation, as well as the statutory, technological, and societal obstacles standing in the way of meaningful remedies. Those obstacles include the notorious Communications Decency Act § 230 (“CDA 230”), tort law’s inability to accommodate rapidly-changing tech and the abuse that comes with it, and schools, workplaces, and law enforcement that are woefully undertrained to deal with cyber and sexual abuse. Without well-trained institutions, adequate resources, and well-written laws to hold criminals accountable, victims are left to fend for themselves in a civil law landscape that shields tech companies from liability and provides little recourse against judgment-proof defendants. Despite the bleak picture she paints, Goldberg encourages us all to join the fight, and this book is a testament to the uphill battle yet to unfold.

Deepfakes, Privacy, and Deception

by Amanda McAllister and Navin Ramalingam

A “deepfake” is an ultrarealistic fake video made with artificial intelligence software. The term is a portmanteau of the concept of machine “deep learning” and the word “fake.” Essentially, it is the end-product of a computer program “learning” the map of the target subject’s face, finding common ground between two faces, and stitching one face over the other in a video editing process. 

Manipulating video is not necessarily a recent invention. Hollywood has been doing it many years, such as when film effects were used to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt look like a young Bruce Willis in the film Looper, or the digital recreation of a young Carrie Fisher on actress Ingvild Deila for the Princess Leia cameo in Rogue One. Face-morphing features are also an essential part of multimedia messaging applications like Snapchat.

While the technology may not be inherently illegal or unethical, some manifestations of deepfakes do have the potential to be illegal, to create liability, to spread misinformation, or to violate the privacy of subjects of deepfakes.

For instance, people have been using facial recognition apps and deepfake technology to superimpose faces of well-known celebrities and ordinary people over that of actors in pornographic films or over nude photos to create nonconsensual pornography. The past year has seen several deepfake consumer apps being released permitting its users to create their own deepfakes, including one disturbing app that provided its users the opportunity to create nonconsensual pornography by “undress[ing] photos of women” and making them look “realistically nude.” Fortunately, this app has since been taken down.

Advertising Law and Social Media Law – A Case Study for Entrepreneurs

By Jonathan Husted and Kirsten Donaldson

All startups and budding entrepreneurs want to get the word out about their business, and social media makes advertising extremely accessible even for entrepreneurs with low marketing budgets.

Like everything else though, advertising — including advertising done on social media — must be truthful and nondeceptive and abide by a certain set of rules. What potential pitfalls might be waiting for a new business advertising on social media? Let’s take a look…

Meet Sally. Sally is excited to launch into her second career — operating a mobile ice-cream food truck called “Scoops in the City!” Sally used some of her savings to purchase and refurbish a used food truck, and is employing her daughter Madison specifically to launch her new venture’s social media presence. Sally loves her city, and she wants her ice-cream truck to be associated with the same charming aspects of the city that makes her call it home, including the well-known local baseball team. And you really can’t miss the truck — Sally commissioned a friend of hers to paint the truck to look like an ice-cream sundae, with bright and sparkly sprinkles all around. Now Scoops is ready for business!

Scoops plans to park outside the local baseball stadium before games to catch families on their way to and from the ballpark. One morning, Madison suggests that they have an informal photo shoot that evening when Sally takes the truck to the stadium so she can post pictures on various social media pages. Madison’s friend, Sawyer, has a camera and considers himself a semiprofessional photographer, and he’d be happy to stop by the stadium to take some pictures for Sally as a favor — no photography contract needed among friends, he thought.

Musings of a Privacy Professional

My random hopes, fears, thoughts, predictions, advice, and personal observations on GDPR, CCPA, NSA, and other privacy and data security matters:

• Despite the intense lobbying efforts of tech companies and others, Congress — fearful of the California Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CCPA), which becomes effective January 1, 2020 — will not pass a new comprehensive federal privacy and data security law this year.
• Plaintiffs’ lawyers will start gearing up for the class action lawsuits they hope to bring under the CCPA. Lawyers who have already benefited enormously from the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) private right of action for noncompliant text messages and robo calls will likely add this new lucrative specialty to their practices.
• Regarding the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), fatigue has set in and, except for one large fine against Google, we have seen limited enforcement actions by the Europeans. Expect to see more actions against companies who have failed to comply with GDPR requirements regarding transparency, data breach, cross-border data transfer, and data access requests. It is never too late to consider a GDPR compliance review.

What does the new EU Copyright Law have to do with my small business? Perhaps more than you think…

On April 15, 2019, the European Council approved the “Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market” — a major change to EU copyright law that was approved by the parliament of the European Union on March 26, 2019 with a vote of 348 yea, 274 nay, and 36 abstentions. The Directive’s next step will be publication in the Official Journal of the EU, after which member states will have two years to implement the Directive into their national laws.

What is the Directive and why might it matter for my small business?

The Directive is completely changing the copyright landscape in the EU – but given the global nature of the World Wide Web, it is likely to alter business practices around the world. 

The Directive’s greatest changes are to websites with user-generated content. Such websites include not only YouTube and Facebook, but also sites like Medium and blogs and commentary sites as well. If you have a website that contains user-generated content that touches the EU in any way, you may be responsible for making sure that content does not infringe copyright laws.

Over the last several months the Directive has been heavily criticized, particularly due to Articles 15 and 17 (formerly Articles 11 and 13), respectively the so-called “link tax” clause and “upload filter” clause. Prior to the vote by parliament, protestors took to the streets of Europe, cautioning that the Directive will “censor the internet.” Meanwhile, the author of the legislation and his supporters tout it as necessary to “protect and strengthen the rights of the creatives: authors, performers, singers, songwriters, journalists . . . all copyright-holders.”

#HASHTAG®: Can you file a federal trademark application for a #Hashtag?

Over the last 11 years (since the debut of the #hashtag in 2007), #hashtags have become commonplace in social media sites from Twitter to Facebook to YouTube to Instagram and everything in between. The primary purpose of a #hashtag is to improve “searchability” in the expansive Internet universe. But #hashtags have also become useful tools for companies to measure their otherwise amorphous social media activity and productivity, and a means for companies to manage their brands online. As described in this article, by using a hashtag, you can tap into a popular conversation that is relevant to your brand and become a key contributor to that conversation’s shape and consequences.

Companies are now cleverly using the success of the #hashtag to their own benefit. According to SproutSocial, tweets with hashtags get twice as much engagement as those without them, and 55% more Retweets. On top of that, 75% of people on social media use hashtags. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that #hashtags are no longer being used solely for searchability purposes (such as through generic #hashtags like #shopping or #fitness) but for brand identification (#CalvinKlein and #KateSpade), as well as targeted social media campaigns and online-only contests as well (such as #BlameMucus and #SayItWithPepsi).