Macy's American Apparel and Gilt Groupe began reaching out to Chinese consumers during the week of Black Friday to expand from the U.S. to a whole new series of online shoppers looking for discounts around the holidays. The move -- based on a partnership with Alipay, the payments processor tied to Alibaba Group Holding -- allows U.S.-based retailers to more easily sell and promote their products to Chinese buyers.

Google has finally given marketers insight into how Google translates pictures into words from searches. MIT reports that the search engine uses the same machine learning technique as traditional search. It automatically generates picture captions that accurately describe the content of images.