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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…
Advertising giants WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu on Wednesday agreed to an order from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and a handful of U.S. states over allegations that the groups illegally colluded since 2018 to implement brand safety standards that would direct advertisers’ budgets away from certain media platforms and publishers. Collusion on these brand safety standards led to an effective boycott of conservative media platforms, the government concluded. “The ad agencies’ brand-safety conspiracy turned competition in the market for ad-buying services on its head,” FTC chair Andrew Ferguson said in a statement. “The antitrust laws guarantee participation in a market free…
Glydways, a San Francisco-based startup developing personal autonomous pods designed to operate on dedicated 2-meter-wide lanes in cities, has raised $170 million in a Series C funding round. The round was co-led by Suzuki Motor Corporation, ACS Group, and Khosla Ventures. Existing investors Mitsui Chemicals and Gates Frontier, and new investor Obayashi Corporation also participated. Now it seems the startup is already in discussions to raise another $250 million in funding that would push its valuation to more than $1 billion, Bloomberg reported. Glydways has made progress on its concept, which it claims can move up to 10,000 people per…
Nvidia is the undisputed king of AI chips. But thanks to the AI it helped build, the champ could soon face growing competition.Modern AI runs on Nvidia designs, a dynamic that has propelled the company to a market cap of well over $4 trillion. Each new generation of Nvidia chip allows companies to train more powerful AI models using hundreds or thousands of processors networked together inside vast data centers. One reason for Nvidia’s success is that it provides software to help program each new generation of chip. That may soon not be such a differentiated skill.A startup called Wafer…
Dr. Squatch has teamed up with actress and model Megan Fox to remind men there are healthier choices when it comes to deodorant.A new campaign from the Unilever-owned men’s personal care brand, “Dr. Squatch’s Foundation for Odor eXcellence,” is a six-part series starring Fox as Professor Fox, head professor at The Dr. Squatch Foundation for Odor Excellence, also known as The F.O.X. Dressed in a black leather outfit, she strolls through campus, educating her all-male students on the virtues of natural personal care products with a mix of innuendo and a riding crop.In “Manliness 101,” Professor Fox commands the classroom…
VCs love to chase after the hottest startups, but startups aren’t always interested in selling more shares. So it is with Anthropic, sources tell Bloomberg. VCs have been offering the OpenAI competitor a preemptive funding round that would value the company at $800 billion or more — almost matching, or perhaps even surpassing, its rival. In February, OpenAI closed a record-breaking $110 billion round that gave it an $852 billion post-money valuation. Just a few weeks earlier, Anthropic announced a $30 billion round (which, in another era, would have been record-breaking, too), at a $380 billion valuation. But so far,…
On Tuesday, Amazon announced it would be acquiring Globalstar, a company that manufactures and operates low Earth orbit satellites with the spectrums needed to communicate with devices on the ground. Amazon also says it is partnering with Apple, which has relied on Globalstar to provide off-grid emergency communication features on devices like its iPhone and Apple Watch.The $11.57 billion deal is Amazon’s latest effort to take on Elon Musk’s Starlink. It comes at a time when satellite internet is becoming critical to the spread of AI tech, but it also adds to concerns about what happens when our orbit fills…
Subway Takes, the Instagram account where people share their hot takes while riding the New York City Subway, has grown to more than 2 million followers and booked A-list celebrity guests like Cate Blanchett and Jason Bateman. And host Kareem Rahma isn’t changing the show’s premise or format, no matter how big it gets.“I’ve been always pushing against changing the show, against any new variation of it,” he said on stage at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week in New York. “I’ve always been very aggressive about trying to keep the DNA of the show to be mostly independent comedians, independent writers, independent…
Motorola has filed a lawsuit in India against social media platforms and content creators over posts it alleges are defamatory, raising concerns it could dampen critical coverage of the company, experts say. The lawsuit, filed in a Bengaluru court and obtained by TechCrunch, names platforms including X, YouTube, and Instagram along with dozens of content creators, and seeks takedown of the content as well as broader restraint on what it describes as false or defamatory material related to the company’s devices. In its over 60-page filing, Motorola has sought a permanent injunction restraining the defendants from publishing or sharing what…
For months now, it seems that every day brings with it a new faction of MAGAworld getting angry with President Donald Trump over something he says or does.In recent memory, to name a few, podcaster Joe Rogan has compared ICE raids to Gestapo operations; conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has questioned Trump’s cognitive abilities; former US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed Trump had “gone insane;” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson called the president a “slave” to Israel; and conservative influencer Candace Owens claimed Trump belongs “to the Epstein class.”Even on Truth Social, a social media platform created by Trump as…
Nearly two months after its Legendary February, NBC Sports is still digesting all the accomplishments from the 17 days of sports coverage featuring Super Bowl LX, the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, and NBA All-Star Weekend.During Tuesday’s program at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, Justin Karp, vp of social media at NBC Sports, spoke engagingly on the Main Stage about the lessons his team learned from one of the events NBC covered during Legendary February: the Winter Olympics.“Our mantra all Games long was that our target audience was anybody with a smartphone,” said Karp.He spoke about how their executive and marketing leadership group…
After selling its shoe brand and assets last month for $39 million, Allbirds is pivoting to AI. Of course, the company is also changing its name, since the footwear brand “Allbirds” was part of the sale. Introducing: NewBird AI, a “fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider,” the company announced via its investor relations site on Wednesday. The rebranded AI company also announced a $50 million investment from an undisclosed institutional investor in the form of a convertible financing facility. It’s objectively pretty funny that Allbirds is becoming an AI company — not because it’s unusual for companies to…
The Top 5 GoPro Hero Cameras ComparedGoPros to AvoidGoPro doesn’t sell anything older than the Hero 12, but there are plenty of Hero 11s and even Hero 10s out there for sale on the internet. We suggest avoiding them. They may work fine, but modern accessories designed for later models won’t work, and these cameras have likely been through the wringer. (They are action cameras, after all.)GoProHero 11 BlackGoPro no longer sells the Hero 11, but it’s still commonly available on Amazon and other retailers. Unfortunately, it’s usually the same price as the Hero 12 (around $300) and therefore not…
The inbox, once dismissed as a digital graveyard, is having a moment.At ADWEEK’s Social Media Week 2026, a panel of brand and media executives argued that the newsletter renaissance is less a nostalgia play than a direct response to the broken state of social platforms.Speaking to an audience of social media practitioners in a discussion moderated by content strategist Lauren Finney Harden; Rare Beauty chief marketing officer Ashley Murphy; Betches co-founder and chief brand officer Sami Sage; and Gen Z expert and UTA executive Shaina Zafar discussed the merits of email and why this relic of the early internet has…
Days after Meta shut down its internal “tokenmaxxing” dashboard following news of the AI leaderboard leaking to the press, LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman came out in support of the concept that’s recently taken Silicon Valley by storm. An AI token is a small chunk of data that an AI model processes when it’s trying to understand a prompt and generate a response. It’s also the unit that’s used to measure AI usage and determine how much AI services cost. As a result, many companies have begun internally tracking which employees are using the most tokens as a…