eBay buys German fashion shopping site Brands4friends

By Geoff Duncan December 20, 2010

Online auction firm eBay is looking to expand its footprint in international online retailing: the company has just announced an agreement to acquire Germany’s Brands4friends, which claims to be Germany’s largest online shopping club for “fashion and lifestyle” that offers discounts and daily deals to more than 3.5 million members. eBay will be paying €150 million (about US$200 million) to acquire all shares of the company.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

“We want to give our customers the best possible fashion experience online,” said eBay’s VP for Europe Doug McCallum, in a statement. “With the acquisition of brands4friends, we will enter the online shopping club market with an established and dynamic partner who has the expertise, relationships, and passion to match our own ambition.”

Recommended Videos

As part of the acquisition, eBay also takes over Brands4friends’ stakes in the UK shopping club SecretSales.com as well as the Japanese version of Brands4friends.

The move bolsters eBay as European online fashion retailer; in the last year and a half the company has launched eBay Outlet sites in the UK and Germany, and has been working with designers to make collections available exclusively to eBay customers. eBay says its research shows that online fashion clubs like Brands4friends already account for about 20 percent of all online fashion sales in Europe, and that the company already generates more than $5.4 billion a year in sales of clothing, shoes, and fashion accessories worldwide.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Computing

How to know which Mac to buy — and when to buy it

The M4 Mac mini being used in a workplace.

If you’re in the market for a new Mac (or Apple display), there’s a lot of choice ahead of you. Maybe you're interested in a lightweight MacBook Air from the selection of the best MacBooks -- or maybe one of the desktop Macs. Either way, there’s a wide variety of Apple products on offer, including some external desktop monitors.

Below you'll find the latest information on each model, including if it's a good time to buy and when the next one up is coming.
MacBook Pro

Computing

AMD Ryzen AI claimed to offer ‘up to 75% faster gaming’ than Intel

A render of the new Ryzen AI 300 chip on a gradient background.

AMD has just unveiled some internal benchmarks of its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor. Although it's been a few months since the release of the Ryzen AI 300 series, AMD now compares its CPU to Intel's Lunar Lake, and the benchmarks are highly favorable for AMD's best processor for thin-and-light laptops. Let's check them out.

For starters, AMD compared the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 to the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V. The AMD CPU comes with 12 cores (four Zen 5 and eight Zen 5c cores) and 24 threads, as well as 36MB of combined cache. The maximum clock speed tops out at 5.1GHz, and the CPU offers a configurable thermal design power (TDP) ranging from 15 watts to 54W. Meanwhile, the Intel chip sports eight cores (four performance cores and four efficiency cores), eight threads, a max frequency of 4.8GHz, 12MB of cache, and a TDP ranging from 17W to 37W. Both come with a neural processing unit (NPU), and AMD scores a win here too, as its NPU provides 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS), while Intel's sits at 47 TOPS. It's a small difference, though.

Computing

This fps-doubling app is now even better than DLSS 3

Cyberpunk 2077 on the Sony InZone M10S.

Lossless Scaling is a $7 Steam app that's flipped the idea of frame generation on its head this year. Similar to tools like Nvidia's DLSS 3 and AMD's FSR 3, Lossless Scaling offers frame generation. However, it works with any game, and with any graphics card, and it can triple or quadruple your frame rate with this frame generation. And now, the app is going further with a feature that even DLSS 3 and FSR 3 don't have.

The developer posted the 2.12 beta to Steam on Wednesday, and it adds a couple of new features. The big one is a resolution scale for LSFG, the tool's own machine learning-based frame generation algorithm. This allows you to decrease the resolution of the input frames, leading to a very minor quality loss in exchange for a fairly large performance boost. The resolution of the game doesn't change at all. You're basically giving the frame generation algorithm slightly less information to work with.