1) CGI British Penguin Goes Viral and Captures Our Hearts

It only took 24 hours for the British retailer’s new commercial to hit 1.3 million views and for Twitter to fawn over #MontyThePenguin 60,000 times. With the addition of a hyper-realistic CGI penguin, John Lewis stuck with it’s tried-and-true formula of soft pop, nostalgia and sap- proving that sometimes you don’t have to do something different if you can do the same thing very, VERY well. Watch #MontyThePenguin and feel your heart melt.

2) Google Reinvents the Email Wheel with Inbox App

In the past two weeks, Google has been teasing us with an app that attempts to make the email experience more intuitive. What could be more intuitive than seeing your emails in the order they were received? Well, Inbox “bundles” similar messages together, and highlights more important emails, sets reminders, “snoozes” messages, and puts it all into a Facebook-esque newsfeed featuring image thumbnails. Sounds like great news for people like me, whose brain immediately forgets everything it reads on a phone screen, and for email marketers who will have to deal with promotional emails being bundled with the other ads. But we won’t know quite yet because Inbox is still invite-only. Read the Tech Crunch review here.

3) Amazon Unveils Echo, A Standalone Personal Assistant and Music Player

The already-sprawling Amazon continues to reach in all directions with the introduction of Alexa, your personal concierge to the Amazon ecosystem. The device, called “Echo” but answering to “Alexa,” will tell you the time, weather, add items to your Amazon wishlist, purchase music and stream that music on-demand. Over time, Alexa is supposed to get to know you and become smarter (i.e., store more of your data). Sound enticing? Between the lukewarm reception of the Fire Phone, the content-rich but not-so-buzzed-about music, TV and movie streaming and, of course, the drones, it seems like Bezos is throwing anything and everything in our direction, hoping something will stick.

4) CSR and Tracking the Internet of Things

In an era of corporate social responsibility, combining the emergence of the “internet of things” and strong growth in the digital marketing sector, BMW is priming itself for the future. BMW is working to create charging stations that are integrated into streetlights in order to foster the “seamless charging infrastructure” necessary for the wider adoption of electric vehicles. This creates plenty of opportunity for BMW to leverage digital to promote itself as eco-friendly and to add digital to streetlights worldwide. As online marketers, we realize that if it’s digital- we can track it.