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It came in just a few pieces (seat, handlebars, front wheel, pedals), all of which I’ve already assembled and adjusted in my analog bikes. I still wrangled two friends for assistance, which proved helpful since it is somewhat unwieldy to wrestle the heavy frame in place with everything aligned.Unlike the other bike in this line, the Ranger S ($1,099), you don’t need the HeyBike app to use the Ranger Pro. The app lets you change the bike settings, update firmware, and track rides, but it’s not necessary to activate the bike. It charged to 100 percent in just three hours…
Brands are rethinking the traditional social media playbook, trading reach for credibility as they look to crack Reddit.The shift comes as the 21-year-old platform draws renewed interest from marketers, driven by a mix of user growth, ad demand, and its growing role in shaping how content surfaces in search and AI-generated answers.Onstage at ADWEEK’S Social Media Week, Reddit’s global head of insights Rob Gaige laid out how brands like Netflix, Dove, Nike, and Philadelphia Cream Cheese are finding traction, often by doing less. “If you post more than three times a week, your brand sentiment falls off a cliff,” Gaige said,…
AI video generation startup Luma has launched Innovative Dreams, a production company built in partnership with Wonder Project, a streaming service that produces religious films and TV on Amazon Prime. The tie-up’s first show will be called “The Old Stories: Moses,” starring British actor Ben Kingsley and set to launch this spring on Prime Video. “Innovative Dreams is a production services company where seasoned filmmakers from director Jon Erwin’s team and Luma’s creative technologists work with great studios and filmmakers to help them realize ambitious ideas,” Luma said Thursday in a social media post. The company envisages creative teams collaborating…
The UK government has launched a venture fund for investing in domestic AI startups, part of a bid to minimize the country’s dependence on foreign-made technology.The fund, Sovereign AI, will invest roughly $675 million in homegrown startups in fields ranging from model development to agentic AI to drug discovery. In addition, portfolio startups will gain access to the UK’s fleet of supercomputers, free visas for international hires, procurement opportunities, and advice from specialists within government.Sovereign AI will be led by James Wise, a partner at VC firm Balterdon Capital, and Joséphine Kant, formerly of Dogwood Ventures and Y Combinator, an…
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign and subsequent win for New York City mayor last year has become a case study in how politicians can use social media.At ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, a trio of people behind Mamdani’s social videos—including the creative duo of creative and production agency Melted Solids and Donald Borenstein, director of video at the Zohran for NYC campaign—broke down what made the mayor’s videos break out. Melted Solids is made up of co-founders and executive producers Anthony DiMieri and Debbie Saslaw.Throughout his campaign, Mamdani stuck to his social video strategy instead of treating it as a one-off, said Borenstein.…
Reed Hastings, the co-founder and chairman Netflix, is leaving the company’s board when his term expires this summer. Hastings is stepping aside to focus on “philanthropy and other pursuits,” the company said in a letter to shareholders. The departure was revealed in the company’s first-quarter earnings report published Thursday. Hastings will officially leave the board when his term is up in June, according to the filing. “Netflix changed my life in so many ways, and my all‑time favorite memory was January 2016, when we enabled nearly the entire planet to enjoy our service,” Hastings said in a statement included in…
If you could travel back in time, what year would you choose? What would you change about history? For a surprising number of Chinese people, their answer turns out to be the same: Use what they know today to save China from its unglorious past.In a new book titled Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism, Rongbin Han, a Chinese politics professor at the University of Georgia, examines a popular science fiction genre where people travel back in time to rewrite Chinese history. Han looked at the 2,100 most popular titles on a top web novel review…
The numbers$2.8 billion — Netflix’s payment received for Warner Bros. Discovery backing out of merger deal in favor of Paramount’s offer.2X — Netflix ad revenue projected to double, reaching $3 billion in 2026.16% — Netflix revenue growth in Q1 year over year, due to membership growth, price increase, and increased ad revenue.$50.7 billion- $51.7 billion — Projected 2026 revenue.The watercooler talkIn its Q1 earnings report, Netflix noted its ads business is expected to double this year, reaching $3 billion in revenue. In a letter to shareholders, the company noted that building the ads business has been a priority, and the…
For a successful deep tech startup, the laboratory breakthrough is only the first step. To spin out an innovative technology into a scalable business, a founder has to navigate a complicated legal process. This week on Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen speaks with Capella Kerst, founder and CEO of geCKo Materials. Kerst was a Stanford PhD student, working on bio-inspired adhesives — materials modeled after the microscopic hairs that allow geckos to stick to walls. She wasn’t looking to be a founder but when she had a major breakthrough that made it possible to make the material rapidly and reliably, she…
A recent cosmological model combines two of the most eccentric ideas in contemporary physics to explain the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe. To understand it, it’s necessary to look beyond the Big Bang we all know and consider two concepts that rarely intersect: cyclic universes and primordial black holes.A Different Kind of MultiverseThere are different versions of the “multiverse.” The most popular model—that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—proposes that there are as many universes as there are possibilities and that these versions of reality are parallel.…
For brands, connecting with diverse audiences in resonant ways requires sustained community building. More than ever, that starts with giving more power to the people in those communities. That’s what experts at Social Media Week 2026 said onstage Thursday. “Brands can’t own culture—even if they want to, they can’t. People own [culture], and actually, people own brands, because at the end of the day, we are buying, we are consuming, we are the audience, so we make the decisions at the end of the day,” said Alejandra Salazar, founder and CEO of the women-led creative agency Croing. “So when a brand…
A coalition of global law enforcement agencies have sent emails to more than 75,000 alleged cybercriminals who paid for a service to launch cyberattacks that can knock websites offline. On Thursday, Europol announced the coordinated operation against several distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) for-hire services, which allow criminals to launch cyberattacks without needing to have any hacking skills, nor the need to run their own infrastructure. Part of the law enforcement action — dubbed Operation PowerOFF — included Europol sending warning emails and letters to more than 75,000 people who are suspected of using these DDoS-for-hire services. Europol said it obtained information…
The European online age verification app is ready.The app works with passports or ID cards, is built to be “completely anonymous” for the people who use it, works on any device (smartphones, tablets, and PCs), and is open source. “Best of all, online platforms can easily rely on our age verification app, so there are no more excuses,” said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen at a press conference on Wednesday. “Europe offers a free and easy-to-use solution that can protect our children from harmful and illegal content.”High Expectations“It is our duty to protect our children in the online…
Under Complex, Family Style has expanded from a single Los Angeles event into a seven-festival global circuit. Now, the brand is extending into a year-round content operation, Complex chief executive Aaron Levant told ADWEEK. On Wednesday, the streetwear brand launched a dedicated YouTube channel for Family Style with four original series, an expansion that marks the most aggressive push into food from Complex since it was acquired by NTWRK in February 2024.It also stakes out a distinct lane in a food media landscape currently split between legacy publishers leaning offline and a new wave of text-based editorial plays.
Last year, I was telegraphed a subliminal mandate from the indie rock powers that be: I was supposed to like Geese. The young Brooklynites make good music, but are they the saviors of rock and roll, the defining rock band of Gen Z, the second coming of The Strokes? The buzz around the band would suggest so. After their album “Getting Killed” came out in September, the band was unavoidable if you’re the kind of person who refers to concerts as “shows.” When frontman Cameron Winter played an “extremely sold-out” solo set at Carnegie Hall, people in the audience seemed…
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman will head to trial this month in an Oakland, California, federal courtroom, where nine jurors will settle a years-long dispute between the cofounders of OpenAI over the group’s founding mission. While spats between Silicon Valley’s most influential billionaires are notable in their own rite, former OpenAI employees and nonprofits have taken a special interest in this case because the ruling could influence how the world’s leading AI developer controls and distributes its technology.The stakes are especially high for OpenAI’s corporate future, as a bad outcome in this case could negatively impact its plans to…