This is an announcement for the paper "Asymptotic geometry of Banach spaces and uniform quotient maps" by S. J. Dilworth, Denka Kutzarova, G. Lancien, and N. L. Randrianarivony. Abstract: Recently, Lima and Randrianarivony pointed out the role of the property $(\beta)$ of Rolewicz in nonlinear quotient problems, and answered a ten-year-old question of Bates, Johnson, Lindenstrauss, Preiss and Schechtman. In the present paper, we prove that the modulus of asymptotic uniform smoothness of the range space of a uniform quotient map can be compared with the modulus of $(\beta)$ of the domain space. We also provide conditions under which this comparison can be improved. Archive classification: math.FA math.MG Mathematics Subject Classification: 46B80 (Primary), 46B20 (Secondary) Submitted from: nrandria@slu.edu The paper may be downloaded from the archive by web browser from URL http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/1209.0501 or http://arXiv.org/abs/1209.0501