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Musicboard, an app for music discovery and recommendations, has been struggling, according to its users. Over the past several months, users said the app experienced outages, the website went offline, and the Android app disappeared from the Play Store. This has concerned its devoted, if small, user base. (The app has been downloaded around 462,000 times to date, according to market intelligence provider Appfigures.) On Reddit, users have been recommending alternatives and offering each other support as they wait for any update. While it’s not surprising for an app to shut down, when there’s still an active user base, apps…
Streaming quality was better than expected, given the tiny size of the Zeals, with a separate three-bar equalizer available while listening to media, independent of the hearing aid equalizer. It has no noise cancellation capability to speak of, which means you won’t be using these to stream on an airplane or at the gym—even with the closed ear tips my audiologist suggested. (I normally wear hearing aids with open ear tips.) The closed tips proved to be the right call, and I did not experience much, if any, occlusion—the uncomfortable booming sensation caused by blocked ear canals—during my time with…
When it comes to the celebrities in Super Bowl commercials, you gotta catch ’em all. Lady Gaga serenaded millions alongside the Pokémon Jigglypuff, Matthew McConaughey was in a food conspiracy debate with Bradley Cooper, and Ben Affleck starred in an AI-driven Dunkin’ fever dream.But with brands spending between $7 million and $10 million for Super Bowl spots, how much did they pony up to make sure a famous face was hawking their Dunkaccinos? Well, yesterday’s price certainly isn’t today’s.ADWEEK reached out to four industry insiders to learn how much celebrities are making in this year’s Big Game.The first thing to…
After launching a “Home Safe” feature that lets users notify friends and family when they’ve arrived home safely, Snapchat is now introducing additional alerts to inform others when users have arrived at other destinations. The social media giant announced on Monday that with its new “Arrival Notifications,” users can now set one-time or recurring alerts for locations beyond their home, providing an automatic way to share when they’ve arrived at specific places. “Arrival Notifications now work for everyday moments — like letting someone know you’re back for the night while traveling, or automatically sharing when you arrive at a weekly…
They do sound good in open mode. When they’re not covering your ear canals, the Aerofit 2 Pro rank among the best open earbuds in their price class, with an airy sound signature that naturally focuses on the upper registers. While no open earbuds I’ve tried accentuate bass as well as regular buds, the Aerofit 2 Pro have more resonance down low than most, accompanied by splashes of keen instrumental detail and clear stereo separation.Wandering NoisePhotograph: Ryan WaniataThe biggest issue I have with these “best of both worlds” earbuds is noise cancellation that’s not only limited but also unstable and…
While many brands fought for attention during the Super Bowl, McDonald’s targeted the morning after, when millions of Americans nurse hangovers and call in sick to work.The fast-food giant launched “Horizontal Breakfast” today (Feb. 9), a cheeky campaign from Wieden+Kennedy New York that literally turns its creative on its side to match the posture of exhausted fans still sprawled on their couches.The campaign taps into a cultural moment: With record numbers of Americans expected to skip work or arrive late the Monday after the Super Bowl, McDonald’s is positioning its breakfast—particularly its hot honey sausage and egg biscuit, hash browns,…
YouTube on Monday introduced lower-priced YouTube TV plans that that will allow subscribers to better tailor their plans to their own interests in areas like sports, news, and entertainment. The company said that it will offer more than 10 different plans to choose from, all priced below the $82.99 per month main YouTube TV plan that has access to more than 100 networks. The new plans will start rolling out this week. While that main plan will not go away, the new plans will allow customers to pick what matters most and what they could do without in return for…
Over 160 companies in New York state have filed notices of mass layoffs since last March. None—in a group that includes Amazon, Goldman Sachs, and other employers that are adopting AI tools—attributed their workforce cuts in those filings to “technological innovation or automation.”That option was added 11 months ago to a required question on paperwork that businesses with 50 or more employees must file with the state to notify of sizable job losses. New York’s Department of Labor told WIRED that, as of the end of January, no employer had marked tech as the reason for their workforce reduction.Over the…
Microsoft’s football-themed Super Bowl 60 appearance depicted NFL recruiters using Copilot in Excel to analyze player stats and narrow down their picks for the best linebacker available among a group of prospects.The ad, tied to Microsoft’s long-running NFL partnership, was an extension of an existing campaign rather than standalone Super Bowl work. It was a timely push to boost Copilot adoption, which currently reaches only a small fraction of Microsoft 365’s massive user base.The 30-second spot was created in partnership with the agency Panay Films and directed by filmmaker Walt Becker.But in a Super Bowl dominated by AI ads, Microsoft’s…
Gather AI, a startup that offers an AI platform for warehouse cameras and drones, has raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Smith Point Capital. That’s the VC firm founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block. The Gather team first met Smith Point a year ago at a logistics conference, and “it took Keith and his team five minutes to get what we’re doing,” co-founder and CEO Sankalp Arora told TechCrunch. What Gather AI is doing is unusual. The four founders met as PhD students at Carnegie Mellon University, where they built one of the first autonomous…
Ive says that the emphasis on physical buttons, each with a singular purpose, is to let the driver keep their eyes on the road and off the screen. “When you look at this, you are not wondering, ‘How many layers deep am I going to have to go to find something to make my bottom warm?’” he said.“You don’t touch anything but aluminum, glass, or leather,” multiple Ferrari employees said multiple times over the event. (The only bits of plastic they owned up to were a couple of gears in the control panel.)The result is a truly tactile experience. Everything…
THE AD: Salesforce’s Super Bowl ad starts with MrBeast — Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson — announcing he’s locked $1 million inside a vault. From there, the spot plays less like a traditional commercial and more like a teaser trailer built for the internet. There’s no neat narrative arc or product pitch: instead, viewers are prompted to pause, rewind and decode what they’re watching, turning a passive TV moment into an interactive one.The ad closes by nudging viewers to scan a QR code to keep the challenge going. In doing so, Salesforce turns its Super Bowl buy into the opening move for…
Some bike lock makers provide their own internal security ratings for guidance. Those can be helpful, but the most secure locks we’ve tested use standard ratings from objective sources, including Sold Secure, which offers ratings of multiple vehicle types between Bronze and Diamond, and ART, which uses a number scale from 1 to 5.So what do these ratings actually mean? Here’s a guide to two of the top lock-security firms and their rating systems:Sold Secure was established in 1992 by Northumbria and Essex police in the UK. The brand is now owned and operated by the Master Locksmiths Association, a…
Every Super Bowl Ad Ranked by EDO’s TV Outcomes EDO’s TV Outcomes Score measures the impact of every Super Bowl LX ad on the immediate consumer engagements most predictive of future sales. The TV Outcomes Score for each airing is indexed so that the median-performing Super Bowl ad is scored at 100. Thus, a TV Outcomes Score of 342 indicates that brand’s ad had 342% as much engagement vs. the median spot during Super Bowl LX. By granularly measuring these proven, investment-grade ad engagement signals, the TV Outcomes Score shows which Super Bowl ads were most effective at driving consumers…
For half a century, the world’s nuclear powers relied on an intricate and complex series of treaties that slowly and steadily reduced the number of nuclear weapons on the planet. Those treaties are gone now, and it doesn’t appear that they’ll be coming back anytime soon. As a stopgap measure, researchers and scientists are suggesting a bold and weird path forward: using a system of satellites and artificial intelligence to monitor the world’s nukes.“To be clear, this is plan B,” Matt Korda, an associate director at the Federation of American Scientists, tells WIRED. Korda has written a report at FAS…
Red Bull is one of the few brands that doesn’t overthink the Super Bowl. A 30-second spot that ran during the fourth quarter was so instantly recognizable and tonally consistent that it required no planned press coverage or amplification.The ad follows a flirtatious dog named Charlie who, upon being summoned by his owner, gulps down a can of Red Bull and wraps his owner around a tree so he can continue courting his companion.In the brand’s signature hand-drawn animation style, and closing on the “Red Bull gives you wiiings” slogan it adopted nearly 30 years ago, it’s a timeless ad that…