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The numbers$31 per share: Paramount’s updated bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, raised from $30 per share.10%—DTC growth for Paramount year over year, led by Paramount+.-5%—Losses at TV networks to $4.7 billion, compared to $4.98 billion the previous year.$30 billion—Paramount’s expected revenue for 2026.The watercooler talkDuring Paramount Skydance’s Q4 earnings call on Wednesday, CEO David Ellison noted that Paramount’s new all-cash bid for WBD is $31 per share, up from $30 per share. The Paramount CEO said the company looks forward to continuing to engage with WBD’s board but wouldn’t comment further during the call.Though Ellison skirted analyst questions about a…
Anthropic on Wednesday announced that it has acquired Vercept, an AI startup with deep roots to some of the biggest names in Seattle’s tech scene. The acquisition marks the latest after Anthropic acquired coding agent engine Bun in December to help scale Claude Code. Vercept had created tools for more complex agentic tasks, including its product Vy, a computer-use agent in the cloud that could operate a remote Apple MacBook. Vercept is one of the many startups working on re-imagining the personal computer for the age of AI agents. As part of the deal, Anthropic is shuttering Vercept’s product on…
In San Francisco, it feels like OpenClaw is everywhere. Even, potentially, some places it’s not designed to be. According to posts on social media, people appear to be using the viral AI tool to scrape websites and access information, even when those sites have taken explicit anti-bot measures.One of the ways they are allegedly doing this is through an open source tool called Scrapling, which is designed to bypass anti-bot systems like Cloudflare Turnstile. While Scrapling, which was built with Python, works with multiple types of AI agents, OpenClaw users appear to be particularly fond of the software. On Monday,…
The Numbers$847 million: Revenue for Q4 2025, up 14% year-over-year. Growth slowed compared to 22% YoY in Q4 2024.$2.9B: Revenue for 2025, up 18% YoY, down from 26% in 2024.$2.9B: Revenue for 2025, up 18% YoY$678 million: Revenue guidance for Q1 2026.Almost 100%: The number of clients using its core platform Kokai. The Trade Desk has previously stated it plans to move all clients to Kokai by end of 2025. Watercooler TalkCEO Jeff Green pointed to weakness among consumer packaged goods and automotive advertisers—two sectors that together account for more than a quarter of The Trade Desk’s business—as a key…
Over the last few years, web teams have been sold a familiar promise: break everything apart and you will move faster. Headless CMSs paired with front end frameworks. Visual editors layered on top. Composable stacks assembled tool by tool. The goal was flexibility, but for many organisations the result has been the opposite. More moving parts, more handoffs, more cost, and a growing operational burden that shows up everywhere from publishing workflows to governance. The complexity tax has come due. What makes WordPress in 2026 so interesting is that it offers a way out of this stalemate. Not by returning…
Salesforce pulled out all the stops to convince investors that the AI revolution won’t be its death when it announced fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday. Salesforce reported a solid quarter of $10.7 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year. For the year, it reported $41.5 billion in revenue, up 10% over the previous year, with both results boosted by its $8 billion acquisition of data management company Informatica last May. Net income landed at $7.46 billion, and the company offered strong guidance for the year ahead, projecting revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — a 10% to 11% increase. It also…
Riley Walz, a software engineer famous for his online stunts, is joining OpenAI to research and develop new ways for humans to interact with AI, WIRED has learned. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hire.Walz built a reputation as Silicon Valley’s jester and has created a series of viral web projects that double as social commentary. His most recent initiative, Jmail, lets users search Jeffrey Epstein’s emails as if they’re accessing his personal Gmail inbox. Another project, Find My Parking Cops, used publicly available data to reverse engineer San Francisco’s parking ticket system to show people exactly where each parking enforcement…
This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.By now you have surely heard of Clavicular, the live-streaming looksmaxxer whose internet-addled argot and obsession with physical appearance briefly captured the national spotlight.Or perhaps you have lately caught wind of TBPN, the live-stream technology podcast whose cohosts have attracted a wave of incredulous press coverage, documenting everything from their eye-popping sponsorship rates to their surprise Super Bowl spot.If both have escaped your attention, maybe you saw Kai Cenat hosting an unlicensed…
Search is changing again. Not because people have stopped looking for information, products, or services online, but because the way they look is evolving fast. In 2026, more discovery starts with a question asked to an AI assistant rather than a query typed into a search engine. And that shift has major implications for enterprise organisations. Because visibility is no longer only about rankings. It’s about whether your organisation shows up in the answers. This is where GEO comes in. What is GEO? GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. In simple terms, GEO is the practice of ensuring your content,…
As AI-powered search tools reshape how businesses are discovered online, India-founded startup Gushwork is helping companies capture customers from platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity — with early traction that is beginning to draw investor support. The two-year-old startup said Thursday it had raised $9 million in a seed round led by Susquehanna International Group (SIG) and Lightspeed, with participation from B Capital, Seaborne Capital, Beenext, Sparrow Capital, and 2.2 Capital. The round values Gushwork at $33 million post-money, up from about $7.5 million following its Lightspeed-led $2.1 million pre-seed in July 2023, a person familiar with the matter…
At the beginning of the year, The Cut kicked off a brief discourse cycle by declaring a new lifestyle trend: “friction-maxxing.”The idea, in a nutshell, is that people have overconvenienced themselves with apps, AI, and other means of near-instant gratification—and would be better off with increased friction in their daily lives, which is to say those mundane challenges that ask some minor effort of them.Whatever your feelings on that philosophy, the use of “maxxing” as a suffix assumed to be familiar or at least intelligible to most readers of a mainstream news outlet is evidence of another trend: the assimilation…
From $0 confidence to CEO of one of the most well-known brands in the world, Build-A-Bear CEO Sharon Price John’s story is nothing short of inspiring.In this episode of Marketing Vanguard, recorded on the Brandweek 2025 stage in Atlanta, Sharon reveals her unconventional career journey and how that evolution directly shaped the turnaround and reimagining of an iconic experiential brand.What you’ll learn: How to transition from functional expertise to CEO-level thinking Why CMOs must adopt a “business-first” mindset to advance The confidence gap that holds high-potential women back from applying for stretch roles How to unlock brand equity by understanding…
Meta is shutting down its standalone Messenger website, the company shared in a help page. Starting April 2026, the website will no longer be available. If users still want to send and receive messages on the web, they can do so while logged into Facebook. “After messenger.com goes away, you will be automatically redirected to use facebook.com/messages for messaging on a computer,” the help page reads. “You can continue your conversations there or on the Messenger mobile app.” If you use Messenger without a Facebook account, then you’ll only be able to continue your conversations on the Messenger mobile app. Users can restore…
The Department of Homeland Security struck a $1 billion purchasing agreement with Palantir last week, further reinforcing the software company’s role in the federal agency that oversees the nation’s immigration enforcement.According to contracting documents published last week, the blanket purchase agreement (BPA) awarded “is to provide Palantir commercial software licenses, maintenance, and implementation services department wide.” The agreement simplifies how DHS buys software from Palantir, allowing DHS agencies like Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to essentially skip the competitive bidding process for new purchases of up to $1 billion in products and services from…
SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy is expected to build a massive 9.2 gigawatt natural gas-fired power plant on the Ohio-Kentucky border, according to a report from Bloomberg. If completed, it would be the largest power plant in the U.S., capable of powering around 7.5 million homes. With a price tag of $33 billion, the project would be more expensive than recent natural gas-fired power plants, which have skyrocketed in cost, Bloomberg notes. It’s unclear who will ultimately foot the bill, though traditionally rate-payers have shouldered the burden for new generating capacity. The Japanese investor is a partner in the Stargate project…
The exterior screen is still large enough to see widgets, notifications, and even to look at a few apps without opening the whole thing up. Flip phones are great because they’ll feel like normal handsets once opened up, but they fold down to be super compact. There are some slight improvements to durability on this Razr, and you get a nice, bright screen with battery life that lasts a full day with average use.The cameras can take some decent photos, but they’re not a strong point of the base Razr (for better cameras, look at the Razr Ultra). Still, the…