Fashion stylists have had their heyday: From Rachel Zoe to Monica Rose, it's been all about how to woo the press without making a gaffe and making sure their clients elegantly rep high-end brands. But not anymore: SK Planet's Machine Intelligence Lab is set to debut a search engine for fashion products that relies upon artificial neural networks by late 2016, as first reported by Quartz. The machine SK Planet built understands how to match clothes and sizes, and has a sense of what's considered stylish, as it's learned to copy looks from photos of outfits put together by big stylists. For online retail, this means that many of the headaches surrounding what consumers want might be alleviated. This new tool comes on on the heels of other recent machine learning news.

More U.S. shoppers are rushing to their phones and tablets rather than to physical stores on Black Friday than ever before. U.S. consumers spent a record $1.2 billion via mobile on Friday, according to a new report from Adobe. This represents a generous 33% increase from last year. Online spending as a whole also blasted through previous records, with shoppers spending $3.34 billion overall, a 21.6% jump over last year. The best-selling electronics on Black Friday were Apple iPads, Samsung 4K TVs, Apple MacBook Air, LG TVs and the Microsoft Xbox, according to the report. It appears that video games and consoles were hot-ticket items, with the Nintendo NES Classic, the Playstation VR bundle, and the Playstation 4 Call Of Duty: Black Ops bundle being quick to sell out.

By some estimates, 80% of an organization's data is unstructured content. This content includes web pages, call center transcripts, surveys, feedback forms, legal documents, forums, social media, and blog articles. Therefore, organizations must analyze not just transactional information but also textual content to gain insight and boost performance. A powerful way to analyze this textual content is by using text mining. Text mining typically applies machine learning techniques such as clustering, classification, association rules and predictive modeling.

Update, Nov. 25, 2016: We noticed that the Robovac 10 has frequently been sold out on Amazon. The Robovac 11 cleans just as well as its predecessor, but has a longer battery life. Our overall favorite affordable robot vacuum is the Anker RoboVac 10. This model retails for only $199, it gets positive user reviews, and it did exceptionally well in our tests. In fact, it outperformed the popular iRobot Roomba 770 and 880, and was only barely beat by models from Dyson and Samsung that cost up to five times as much.

From artificial intelligence to virtual reality, emerging technologies are rewriting the retail playbook at a rapid pace, suggests J. Walter Thompson Intelligence in a new report called Frontier(less) Retail. Launched in collaboration with WWD, the report explores the idea that brands and retailers are increasingly putting innovation at the core of their strategies. This relates to everything from digital integration through to the more future-looking technologies helping to shift their businesses forward. Rebecca Minkoff has boosted sales with smart mirrors in dressing rooms, it notes, while Kate Spade has had a hit with Everpurse, a smartphone-charging handbag. It also attributes the success of Under Armour in part to its positioning as a tech-forward brand, and references Topshop's new incubator program, Top Pitch, as a clever bid to achieve the same at a time when its young consumer base is more likely to spend on smartphones than splurge on streetwear. Within all this, however, it is keeping abreast of change that is proving one of the industry's biggest challenges.

The war rages on over the connected home--an idea that home appliances and accessories will all be connected to the Internet. Soon, your fridge will send a text message when the milk is running low. For most people, that prospect is still far from being today's reality. But this Black Friday will spark the first battle between Amazon Echo and Google Home. Both products bill themselves as a Wi-Fi speaker and a sort of Siri-in-a-tube that answers users' spoken questions.

With advances like 4K and HDR, it's been a big year for TVs. But like any new technology, separating the good from the bad is a tough task. We've spent hundreds of hours testing all the top TVs on the market in our state-of-the-art test labs with the goal of providing you with the very best recommendations. So whether you want a big-screen TV for the big game or a budget TV for catching up on your favorite Netflix shows, we've got you covered. These are the absolute best TVs we've tested all year, and the ones that we think you'll be happiest about putting in your living room. LG's 4K, HDR OLEDs dominated our top spots again this year, but as good as the G6, E6, and C6 OLEDs are, our favorite is by far the "mid-range" B6.

To most people, artificial intelligence (AI) is represented in terms of robots with human-like similarities. Today's reality is that of AI powering technologies and driving companies to complete tasks and make things easier. Companies are using AI more than ever, even for tasks that you may not consider. To understand how AI impacts your business, it's important to understand exactly what artificial intelligence is. According to Merriam Webster artificial intelligence is, "an area of computer science that deals with giving machines the ability to seem like they have human intelligence."

Today, IBM completed its first Cognitive College Virtual Holiday Workshop, exploring how artificial intelligence and cognitive systems can help customer engagement. Top influencers and IBM experts weighed in on how technology is reshaping the relationship between business and customers, and the expectations of the customers themselves. Last year, online shoppers spent $4.45bn on Black Friday and Thanksgiving. Obviously, that's a lot of inventory to monitor, and there's nothing worse from a retailer's perspective than turning away healthy demand for hot products that are out of stock. John Lawson points out that only 31% of customers think that their brand really understands them.

The holidays have traditionally been an important time for the consumer tech world, with electronics makers placing big bets that shoppers will venture into Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales with open minds and open wallets. But for some manufacturers, this year might be more important than others. Products in categories that consumers aren't yet familiar with -- think digital home assistants, like Amazon's Echo -- tend to bank the most on a successful holiday season, according to retail analysts. But those encountering competition for the first time -- again, think Amazon's Echo -- face a double whammy. First, they need to convince the public their product is more than a novelty, then they convince the public to choose theirs and not its rivals.