Contractual provisions of a 2018 agreement between the companies meant only selected resellers were allowed to sell Apple and Beats products on Amazon.it.

Both Apple and Amazon said they plan to appeal against the fines.

The authority imposed a fine of 68.7 million euros on Amazon and 134.5 million euros on Apple, ordering the companies to end the restrictions to give retailers of genuine Apple and Beats products access to Amazon.it in a non-discriminatory manner. Representatives of Apple commented:

“To ensure our customers purchase genuine products, we work closely with our reseller partners and have dedicated teams of experts around the world who work with law enforcement, customs and merchants to ensure only genuine Apple products are being sold.”

Amazon’s representatives added:

“We reject the suggestion that Amazon benefits by excluding sellers from our store, since our business model relies on their success. As a result of the agreement, Italian customers can find the latest Apple and Beats products on our store, benefiting from a catalogue that more than doubled, with better deals and faster shipping.”

Today, companies large and small are navigating their way through these changes with obvious or subtle adjustments to their business models. One such example is Apple. When consumers think of Apple, what comes to mind is the iPhone. However, behind the scenes, Apple has been developing subscription products and even changing the way it sells its flagship iPhones to bolster the most important component for any business: cash flow.

Here are three ideas that you can implement into your own business, and borrow from Apple’s success.

1. Offer a perpetual product or service to your existing clients.

What Apple has been focused on, and how this can help your business, is to shift from that transactional model to a journey-based one that continually maps to the ongoing or anticipated needs of the client, and is steeped in brand trust.

This results in a relationship where the customer doesn’t just come to the business when they need a finite problem solved. Instead, they develop an ongoing partnership with the business as a resource to help them in a particular area of life.

Netflix has modeled this well by becoming the go-to entertainment resource for movies and television, and they have seen their small, simple subscription model skyrocket to a $30 billion success.

One way to look at this is to simplify your business model. Instead of offering a menu of different products and services that provide different solutions, you can bundle them into a subscription service that makes financial and emotional sense for your customers, who get peace of mind with round-the-clock access as well as money savings in the long run.

2. Upgrade offers

Offer access to your existing products or services in an “upgrade program” where customers are on a payment plan that renews when they gain access to iterations or updates to your products or services.

Apple did this when it made a significant move to offer Apple Card, a credit card with a 3% cashback option on purchases made on Apple products. Without discussing the potential value of having this purchase data on their customers, this offers users the ability to pay for products over time, reducing the barrier to entry and increasing the ease and feasibility of upgrading year after year.

Additionally, Apple introduced the iPhone upgrade program, where users still buy the iPhone, however they opt into a plan where it makes sense for them to continue to acquire the new phone every year. This psychological hook is extremely powerful and it’s something you can offer in your product or service business.

If you provide services such as massage therapy or personal training, you can offer your clients an automatic billing program where they get a certain number of sessions included that would exceed the value compared to paying a la carte. You can set these sessions to expire each month, giving an additional incentive for the customer to use them, boosting the perceived value of saving money.

What helps the relationship most is that this approach also adds value by helping with the very benefit you’re offering — getting them to look after their body and stay compliant.

3. Support services

Look at how you can add a new level of support as a bolt-on to your existing offerings. Apple does this with iCloud and Apple Music. You already use the product you purchased, so adding on these subscriptions improves your user experience. With iCloud, Apple promises that you will never run out of storage space at a time when a rare, never-again moment would occur and you might otherwise miss out on capturing a photo.

If you are finding it increasingly difficult to attract new customers month after month, consider adding a subscription offer to your strategy. This is one of the best things you can do to stabilize your bottom line while helping you grow your business.

Take the time to look into at least one of these models, as the return on your investment is making a single sale that continues to pay month after month, year after year.

Can you tell us more about Parkinc.?

Christian: When we were brainstorming ideas and how to improve the city life, because the topic of the hackathon was Smart Cities, we came up with this idea, because it’s really close to us. As we know, in Sofia there is a big problem with parking spaces, especially in the downtown area, because they are reserved for the ones who live or work there. So our idea was to make the process of finding a parking space much easier and faster, so people don’t lose their time, energy and money and pretty much – make lives easier.

How does it work from a more technological point of view?

Stefan: Basically me and David focused on the ML model, using PyTorch. We feed an image, taken from a stationary angle from a CCTV camera, then we would pick out spots from legal parking spaces and feed this to a binary classification model, which would evaluate whether or not the space is occupied or vacant. We designed this to connect and update the counters for vacancies through a backend SQL server, which we had connected to a web socket to our website that Stoyan had made.

How do you develop such a thing in just two days? Was it hard?

Stefan: Basically David and I did a huge Crash Course on the PyTorch library and it was a very rudimentary model since this was my first time making a successful convolutional neural network. But once you have the basics done, you just have to play around with the parameters and get your model to work at an accuracy that you desire. For our case it was around 85%.

David: Also, because it’s a binary classification model it’s really easy to make it very close to a 100% accuracy, because it has only two outcomes and if we had more data, pictures of cars and vacant parking spaces, we could have done this model to work at 99% accuracy.

And how do you test the whole thing?

Stefan: In ML you have the three splits – the test set, the validation set, and the training set. The validation and training set work with each other while the testing set validates the results, using loss functions for training and validation. It’s all in the code and for us it is kind of intuitive.

Were there any challenges during the hackathon?

Stefan: Finding the data set and normalizing it for our standards. Originally, we found a data set, but it was not in the proper resolution to feed into our model and I had to resize all the images, because build-in library functions were not working for resizing. Those were the issues with the model.

David: There was also an inconvenience that some of the libraries that we used for the model like the Python libraries and everything else that was required for the environment, worked together with certain versions, so if there was a newer version of a particular library that is used in the software, it did not want to work with the other parts of the project, because it was not implemented for that yet. So we had to find the correct versions, the data set and normalize it. For us they had to be 150×150 and labeled too. So that was the challenge. Our model is 85% accurate, because we could only find 12 000 images of free and busy parking spots. There was actually a way way bigger data set – about 150 000 images, but the images weren’t labeled and we couldn’t really use it for a ML model. And now here are the challenges from the web developers.

Stoyan: The only challenge that we had was how to send the user data from our web app to PyTorch and get back the output to the people so they know how many spaces are there. Initially we did a web app, because in two days it’s very hard to do a cross-platform, so to do an iOS and Android in that time is very hard. But we managed to do it all, and everything worked, the socket worked, so basically it’s a done project. We just need the cameras.

Eva, can you tell us about the design part of the project?

Eva: We worked on it together with Stoyan and I also worked on designing a logo. I wanted to implement a new logo for our app and for that I used Illustrator.

Stoyan: For the design I used mostly CSS and JavaScript to make it look really nice.

Eva: We also used jQuery for some parts.

Stoyan: If you’ve seen our design you know that it’s simplistic, but it brings a nice aesthetic feel.

What benefits do you see in your product?

Christian: Our whole business and economic model was built on the fact that our service would be free for the mass of customers, which would be citizens of the big european cities. We know that american cities were built for cars and car usage, so they don’t have the infrastructure problem with the parking spaces. For example european cities like Sofia, really struggle with this which is a real problem for normal commuters, who probably go an hour early to their workplaces, just to make sure they have a parking space free to them. Our whole idea would be to add value for the commuters by saving their precious time. It also saves stress, because they don’t have to worry if there’s a vacant spot for them and also as an added benefit, we believe that our app can drastically shorten the commuter time spent in cars around the city center areas, that will also improve the air quality at least to a certain degree.

Will you continue to work on Parkinc. as a group? And what future do you see in the product?

Christian: Our product for now is very unique, because I think there is only one project like this, which is completed, but only in the Netherlands. So there is really a big gap for such products to start and actually provide value to the community. To continue our project we need funding, because the software is there and working – front-end, back-end and etc. Everything is nicely set, so maybe we only need bigger data sets and the infrastructure of CCTV cameras. When we were considering our business model, we did research on CCTV cameras and how expensive they are, and we concluded that with good funding we can make our project work in the foreseeable future. So the only thing for now that is stopping us from continuing improving and working is basically funding.

Were there other projects on the hackathon that you liked?

Christian: Personally, it was the project GeoShare that won the hackathon. The other one that I liked was Udoma – they won the second prize. I think that both of them can in a way communicate with our project and make a city really smart and efficient.

What do you think about the startup ecosystem in Bulgaria?

Christian: I think that here we have the environment to actually do startups. There are a lot of unexploited markets and fields of improvement. We definitely have the human capital of smart IT guys like my colleagues, who are able to build sophisticated ML Algorithms and code in a short period of time. We have the technical skills, we have the space to actually try something new. But the only problem in general would be the funding, because as far as i know there is no state funding for startups and any big commercial fund that would actually invest in startups in Bulgaria. But – yeah. Everything is here, except maybe money and publicity.

Final words from you guys? A conclusion?

Stefan: Basically I gathered these people for their talents. Two business model developers, two web developers and two backends, including myself. We all contributed and we ended up developing our idea to the specifications and to the scope of what we intended. If we had developed too niche of a problem, it wouldn’t have made sense economically.

Ain’t that the most important thing, that you’re not just developers? You all have a set of different talents.

Stefan: Indeed. We have to take into account all the aspects of the project and not just the development. Because David and I were part of the same team who got third place last semester. But we only did the development part and bombed the entire economic and design portion, because it was our first time attending.