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Cryptocurrency’s frictionless, transnational, low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever before, that anything includes human beings: victims of human trafficking forced into scam compounds and the sex trade on an industrial scale, bought and sold in crypto deals carried out with impunity, often in full public view.In new research published today, crypto-tracing firm Chainalysis found that crypto-funded transactions for human trafficking—largely forced laborers trapped in compounds across Southeast Asia and coerced into working as online scammers, as well as sex-trafficking prostitution rings—grew explosively in 2025. According to the firm’s…
Rivian is, by every measure, a maker and seller of EVs. But in 2025, it was the company’s software and services that helped its annual revenue grow by 8%. Rivian reported Thursday $5.38 billion in total revenue in 2025, up from $4.97 billion from the prior year. That rosy picture dulls a bit when looking just at its automotive revenue, which fell 15% to $3.8 billion in 2025. The fall was fueled by a $134 million drop in regulatory credit sales and lower vehicle deliveries, which were partially offset by higher average selling prices, according to Rivian. Meanwhile, software and…
MokoBlue Twill Kindle CaseThis soft case has nice details on the cover, plus it has both a kickstand and a strap so that you can easily hold it or prop it up. There’s a magnet to close it that will sometimes wake the Kindle up when you open it, though not always in my experience. PopSocketsPopCase Kindle and PopGripPopSockets has a new Kindle case collection with built-in MagSafe attachments, so you can easily add on a PopGrip or other attachment if you wish. The Bookish designs are fun, and there are two collections of designs to enjoy. This one’s the…
While the artificial intelligence industry touts that AI will replace entry-level jobs, not every company is scaling back hiring these positions. In IBM’s case, it’s going all in. Hardware giant IBM plans to triple entry-level hiring in the U.S. in 2026, according to reporting from Bloomberg. Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM’s chief human resource officer, announced the initiative at Charter’s Leading with AI Summit on Tuesday. “And yes, it’s for all these jobs that we’re being told AI can do,” LaMoreaux said. These jobs will look different than the entry-level jobs IBM used to offer, she explained. According to LaMoreaux, she went…
Last week I covered the best TV deals you could find ahead of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, and one of them, the TCL QM6K, has somehow remained at this impressively discounted price. You can grab the 65-inch QM6K from Best Buy for just $530, just $30 from a 50 percent markdown, with discounts on the larger versions of the screen as well.While there are certainly fancier models with higher brightness and price tags to match, we think the QM6K offers a balanced image at a great price point. It has incredible black levels that help create a deep,…
NBCUniversal was going for gold with its Winter Olympics advertisers.The broadcaster sold out its Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics ad inventory with a month to go before the games, setting a new Winter Olympics ad sales record, with the highest linear and digital revenue it’s ever recorded.In addition, NBCU’s ads president, Mark Marshall, recently told ADWEEK that the company was strategic in its upfront offering, bundling its Olympics inventory along with the Super Bowl. As a result, 70% to 75% of the advertisers in the Big Game will also show up in the Winter Olympics, with some even carrying on…
It’s the middle of February, and the air is dry. There are fine lines emerging on my forehead, maybe because I don’t moisturize enough, but maybe as a harbinger of something greater: Each day I grow closer to my own death. Soon, I will be 30. I will never be younger than I am right now. Fintech-founder-turned-longevity-guru Bryan Johnson has an offer that has caught my attention. For the low, low price of $1 million per year, I can pay him to show me the ropes of the “exact protocol” he’s followed for the last five years. He calls the…
After a long time of resisting significant price drops, the Asus Zenbook S 16 has finally dropped down to $1,000, which is $500 off its retail price.It’s normal for laptops to dip in price toward the end of their lifespan, close to when an update comes out. But the Asus Zenbook S 16 has held on. To be fair, it’s an extremely high-end Windows laptop, one of the prettiest to come out last year. It’s sleek, portable, and has a striking design. It even gets fantastic battery life, on par with a MacBook. Speaking of MacBooks, this Zenbook is the…
The numbers$1.32 billion — Q4 revenue, up 14% year-over-year (YoY), slightly under LSEG analysts’ projections of $1.33 billion. Full-year revenue for 2025 came in at $4.22 billion, up 14% over the same period.$541.5 million — Adjusted EBITDA for the period, coming in short of Wall Street’s expected $550 million. 619 million — Global monthly active users, a spike of 12% YoY in Q4. User growth accelerated in the second half of 2025, and Gen Z now accounts for over half of all Pinterest users.The watercooler talkPinterest shares fell around 20% in after-hours trading after the company reported a fourth-quarter earnings…
After a particularly poor performance on its fourth-quarter earnings, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready attempted to favorably compare the digital pinboarding site to the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. Trying to highlight its potential as a unique search destination, Ready asserted that the site sees larger search volume than ChatGPT. According to third-party data, ChatGPT sees 75 billion searches per month, while Pinterest sees 80 billion searches and generates 1.7 billion monthly clicks, he said. “That makes us one of the largest search destinations in the world. And importantly, more than half of those searches are commercial in nature, compared to, I…
Brian Barrett: They’ve got 80 billion or so to spend 75 billion of that I think they have to spend in the next four years. So yeah, they’re going to keep expanding. And when you think of how much of an impact 3000 agents officers had in Minneapolis alone, that’s like an eighth of the, they can repeat some version of that in a lot of different spots.Leah Feiger: And I’ve been fielding, honestly, shout out to the many local reporters around the country who’ve been contacting me in the last day or so, just to ask questions about the…
AI agents are moving beyond answering questions — they’re starting to complete tasks like booking flights or making purchases. This week, Google unveiled WebMCP, a protocol designed to help websites keep up with this shift.A Google spokesperson told ADWEEK the protocol is necessary because it provides the connection that AI agents need to perform more complex tasks more accurately on the open web. The protocol is currently available for early preview, which means developers can test the features before it officially launches.“The goal is to create a standard way for exposing structured tools, ensuring AI agents can perform actions on…
Anthropic has just concluded a $30 billion Series G fundraising round, the company announced on Thursday. The company’s new value is $380 billion — a huge jump from its previous Series F valuation of $183 billion. Some details of the round were reported earlier this week by Bloomberg. The new round was led by Singaporean wealth fund GIC and investment management firm Coatue, with a number of other prominent firms — including D. E. Shaw Ventures, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX — co-leading the round. Other significant investors listed include Accel, General Catalyst, Jane Street, and the…
Many people suspect that these bots are part of an AI company’s effort to collect training data from web pages. In 2025, AI bots accounted for a significant portion of overall web traffic, which crawl the internet for text and other information to feed to data-hungry large language models.But there are some key differences between these Chinese bots and other AI bots. First, there’s simply way more of them. King says on his website that the traffic from China and Singapore accounts for 22 percent of overall traffic, while all other AI bots account for less than 10 percent combined.Most…
Tim Spencer realized just how complicated manufacturing procurement can be while running Markai, an e-commerce startup in Asia, during the pandemic. “We had thousands of suppliers, and we were distributing products into dozens of countries around the world,” Spencer (pictured left) told TechCrunch. His staff was overwhelmed by the manual complexity of sourcing suppliers, negotiating pricing, tracking orders, and managing payments. “I found myself running this big team that was not really set up for success,” he said. He sold Markai in 2023, just as it was becoming clear that generative AI could streamline the most time-consuming procurement hurdles for…
Waymo needs some help, according to an email message the self-driving developer sent to residents of Washington, DC on Thursday.For more than a year, Waymo has been pushing city officials to pass new regulations allowing its robotaxis to operate in the District. So far, self-driving cars can test in the city, with humans behind the wheel, but not operate in driver-free mode. The Alphabet subsidiary—and its lobbyists—have asked local lawmakers, including Mayor Muriel Bower and members of the City Council, to create new rules allowing the tech to go truly driverless on its public roads. The company has previously said…