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A federal jury found Wednesday that Live Nation has been operating as an illegal monopoly — a verdict that could lead to the breakup of the entertainment giant and its ticketing subsidiary, Ticketmaster, and bring relief to concertgoers who are sick of dynamic pricing and inexplicable service fees. The ruling came as internal Slack messages surfaced during the trial showing Live Nation employees joking about taking advantage of customers — including one conversation about parking prices that prosecutors argued revealed the company’s true attitude toward its customers. The verdict is the latest development in a web of litigation that began…
To anyone with a pulse and a smartphone, it’s obvious that the internet has an AI slop problem. The issue has grown more severe since ChatGPT launched in 2022, with some social platforms flooded with AI-generated writing. Now, there’s data to back up the anecdotal evidence.A new preprint study published today from researchers at the Imperial College of London, Stanford University, and the Internet Archive found that approximately 35 percent of all new websites are either AI-generated or AI-assisted. The same study also found that online writing is “increasingly sanitized and artificially cheerful.” In other words, AI is making the…
Nuclear startup X-energy began its investor roadshow Wednesday as it works toward its IPO, setting its target price between $16 and $19 per share, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. If it lists at the high end, the startup could net about $814 million. X-energy and its peers have been riding a renewed wave of interest in fission power as demand for electricity has surged on the back of AI data centers and society-wide electrification. Amazon is one of X-energy’s biggest backers. The tech giant led a $500 million Series C-1 round and has pledged…
The online leak of a full version of Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender—a highly anticipated animated film in a multimedia fantasy franchise—has divided passionate fans while upsetting those who spent years working on the film.The leaks began on X late on Saturday night, about six months before Aang was scheduled to premiere on Paramount+. User @ImStillDissin posted two short clips from the film. “Nickelodeon accidentally emailed me the entire Avatar aang movie,” he claimed. He also threatened to stream the entire movie if Paramount didn’t release an official trailer and posted a still from the movie’s end credits, revealing previously…
Emma Grede is a serial entrepreneur, a podcaster, the founding partner of Kim Kardashian’s Skims, and now, an author. Her new book, Start With Yourself, hit shelves earlier this month.Just don’t call her a celebrity CEO. “I’m a CEO that’s done so well that you know my name,” she said on stage at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week conference in New York on Tuesday. Growing up in working class London, Grede began working at a young age, doing everything from interning to packing boxes. At one point, she sold Fendi bags that “fell off the back of trucks.”“I have an appreciation for…
Doug Field, the high-profile executive who shaped Ford’s electric vehicle (EV) and technology strategies over the past five years, is leaving the automaker. Field’s departure was announced Wednesday as part of a broader reorganization of the company’s leadership. Field joined Ford in 2021 with a robust resume from Silicon Valley that included leading Apple’s special projects team and serving as senior vice president of engineering at Tesla. His hiring was more than just a return to his professional roots. (Field began his career at Ford as a development engineer from 1987 to 1993.) The hiring was meant to drive Ford…
On April 7, Allbirds sent out a press release celebrating its new “canvas cruiser” collection and a partnership with Pantone, the color company. One week later, on April 15, Allbirds sent out a press release announcing that the brand will “pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure.” AI comes at you fast.In fairness, it’s been an eventful month for Allbirds. The startup’s fall from grace has been long-brewing and well-documented, but here’s the short version. While its comfortable-yet-presentable footwear propelled it to a $4 billion valuation when it went public in 2021, its sales never quite matched the hype. After…
Crisis communications authority Molly McPherson has been called in to handle no shortage of corporate fiascos. But while the brands vary, the incidents all have one thing in common: The first move is generally a sign of how well things will turn out. Or not.“If your first instinct is to blame, you’re not going to get through it,” said McPherson at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week summit on Wednesday. A crisis signals that “the public is feeling an emotion about [your brand]. You have to tap into that emotion.”All too often, however, brands fail to do that—and pay the price.McPherson cited…
Monarch Tractor’s assets have been acquired by construction giant Caterpillar, after struggling to pivot to a software services business, according to filings with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The acquisition, first reported by Bloomberg, caps a few tough years for Monarch as it went through multiple rounds of layoffs, was sued by three different dealers, and lost a major contract manufacturing partner in Foxconn. It also comes just a few weeks after co-founder and wine scion Carlo Mondavi said he was “pushed out” after disagreeing with CEO Praveen Penmetsa’s software-forward approach. Mondavi couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.…
The US federal government’s central energy information agency is planning to implement a mandatory nationwide survey of data centers focused on their energy use, according to a letter seen by WIRED. This survey would be the first effort of its type to collect basic information about data centers.The letter was sent to senators Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley on April 9 by the head of the Energy Information Administration, Tristan Abbey, and comes in response to a previous inquiry from the senators about the EIA’s plans to get more information about data centers. WIRED reported on Hawley and Warren’s letter…
Men’s grooming brand Manscape had a problem. It was really good at balls humor—but not much else. And as the company expanded further into the personal care space with hair and beard care products, it was stuck in a nether-region niche of its own making.Onstage at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, Jori Evans, Manscaped social media director, and Michael Miller, Consiglieri founder and head of creative, shared how the balls-trimmer brand broke out of its pigeon hole on social without abandoning its roots.Manscaped was a beta tester for Clamor, an AI tool created by Consiglieri to help brands understand social chatter…
Agentic AI is the tech industry’s newest success story, and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to give enterprises the tools they need to create these automated little helpers. To that end, OpenAI has now updated its agents software development toolkit (SDK), introducing a number of new features designed to help businesses create their own agents that run on the backs of OpenAI’s models. The SDK’s new capabilities include a sandboxing ability, which allows the agents to operate in controlled computer environments. This is important because running agents in a totally unsupervised fashion can be risky due to their…
If you’ve been waiting for Microsoft to update its Surface PC lineup—perhaps with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Elite processors—I’ve got bad news for you.Microsoft is shaking up its PC lineup, but it’s doing so by instituting big price hikes. This means you’ll be paying at least $1,500 for Surface devices that launched at $1,000 just two years ago and that Microsoft no longer offers new Surface devices under $1,000 at all.The 12-inch Surface Pro tablet that originally started at $799 and the 13-inch Surface Laptop that launched at $899 now cost $1,049 and $1,149, respectively, a $250 price increase. The higher-end…
SharkNinja, the company behind the Shark and Ninja household products brands, has hired Elizabeth Nolan as chief creative officer.She was most recently SVP and global creative director at Clinique, where she led visual merchandising, packaging, retail experiences, and digital platforms.In her new role, Nolan will build and lead a creative team at SharkNinja, shaping how the company tells its stories across 36 product categories, ranging from air fryers and vacuums to hair styling tools and more.Nolan will report to SharkNinka’s chief brand and experience officer, Michelle Crossan-Matos, who joined the business from Ulta Beauty last year.
Historically, marketers relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online ad campaigns. In late 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered service that allows marketing professionals to create custom content for brands such as Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify without involving brand design teams or ad agencies. The offering has been highly successful. Since introducing its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), it tells TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a total of $100 million in ARR. “Before Gen AI, it was impossible for someone…
Having demonstrated that it has the operational capability to transport humans safely to the moon and back, the United States is moving on to its next major aim: It wants nuclear reactors in orbit and on the lunar surface by 2030. For such a feat, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will have to work in conjunction with the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy.In a post on X, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) unveiled a document with new guidelines for federal agencies to establish the space nuclear technology road map for the…