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TBPN, the hourslong daily tech podcast hosted by the young, brash entrepreneur-investors Jordi Hays and John Coogan, spun up significant cultural cachet—and big sponsorship dollars—in the year-and-change since its debut. Now, the show has bought a regional Super Bowl ad, set to air on broadcast across the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. The 15-second spot, produced in-house, showcases previous TBPN guests, opening with interview clips of Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, investors Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and others—before panning out to show a colorful collage of business logos that come together to…
Voice AI company ElevenLabs said today it raised $500 million in a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital, which was an investor in the startup’s last secondary round through a tender. Sequoia partner Andrew Reed is joining the company’s board. The startup is now valued at $11 billion, more than three times its valuation in its last round in January 2025. Earlier in the year, the Financial Times reported that the startup was looking to raise at that valuation. The company said that existing investor a16z quadrupled its investment amount, and Iconiq, which led the last round, tripled it.…
If the words “sleeper sofa” still conjure images of a musty, squeaky, lumpy pull-out mattress with the thickness and support of a peanut butter sandwich, you may want to take a look at what’s been going on in the world of convertible furniture lately.Modern-day sleeper sofas now come with luxe, real mattresses, like the Tempur-Pedic in Joybird’s Eliot, or offer multiple sitting and sleeping configurations, like the Koala Wanda. The Neptune, from Montreal-based, direct-to-consumer home goods brand Cozey, aims for something entirely different: a couch with modular components that can be moved or added to, along with seats that pull out to…
Manscaped, the men’s grooming company founded in 2016, is marking its first decade in a big way: by airing its first-ever Super Bowl ad – and it’s a memorable one.The 30-second spot, “Hair Ballad,” was created by Quality Meats, ADWEEK’s 2024 Small Agency of the Year. It features clumps of anthropomorphized human hair, freshly shaved off of various body parts, singing a melancholic ballad about their brief relationships with their male counterparts. With lyrics like, “I was your scruff, your loyal friend,” the spot gives the hair monsters a surprisingly emotional existence.“Hair Ballad” will air right before kickoff at Super Bowl…
Adobe is putting on hold its plan to discontinue Adobe Animate following intense backlash from its customers after it announced plans to shut down the 2D animation software amid an increased focus on its investments in AI. “We are not discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate. Animate will continue to be available for both current and new customers, and we will ensure you continue to have access to your content,” the company wrote in a post on Wednesday. Adobe’s Monday announcement about discontinuing Animate was met with incredulity, disappointment, and anger, and users aired concerns about the lack of…
Micro RGB TVs should still offer better contrast than their mini-LED rivals, as their smaller size can theoretically offer more dimming zones for better overall black levels. They may also more readily provide naturalistic and granular color shifts, though we won’t know just how much better or different they are until we’ve spent more time with each variety. Samsung’s 2025 prototype was impressive in the short time I spent with it, with fantastic colors, clarity, and brightness. You can currently buy Samsung’s first Micro RGB TV in a 115-inch size for a cool $30,000, but 2026 will see more accessible…
AI company Anthropic is making its Super Bowl ad debut with a promise that its chatbot Claude will remain ad-free.The new campaign, “A Time and a Place,” created by Mother LA and directed by Jeff Low, launches today (Feb. 4) with four spots that pose the question: Does advertising belong everywhere? Two of the ads will run before and during Super Bowl 60 on Feb. 8. The first, “How Do I Communicate With My Mom?” will air in the 30 minutes before kickoff, while a second commercial, “Can I Get a Six-Pack Quickly?” will run during the first quarter of the…
Most of what we know about the ocean just skims the surface, literally. We’ve gathered a large quantity of data on the oceans from satellites, but most of that is based on the top layer of water. Below that, the picture gets murkier. Buoys, ships, and some autonomous rovers have recently added some detail, but it’s nothing like what we get from satellites today. It’s frustrating to everyone from fishermen to the Coast Guard, meteorologists to offshore wind developers. “Getting data from the subsurface ocean has always been really hard,” Ravi Pappu, founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, told TechCrunch.…
Honorable MentionsWe haven’t tried a vacuum yet that we absolutely hate. These ones below are solid vacuums, and in some cases are much cheaper than our top picks, but we didn’t like them quite as much.Bissell IconPet Turbo Edge for $366: Bissell’s OG stick vacuum is a popular model that’s been around for a while. It does a good job picking up hair and cat litter, and easily turns into a handheld vac too. The battery lasts a little longer, but former WIRED reviewer Medea Giordano wasn’t impressed by its Cheerio-gathering skills, and it can’t stand up on its own.Bissell’s…
The Equinox campaign starts with a strong, timely idea: in an AI-saturated world, question what you see and trust your own efforts and discipline. Using exaggerated, AI-generated imagery to contrast what’s fake with what’s meant to be real is a compelling insight for a fitness brand built on performance and personal commitment.For me, the challenge is in the execution. The AI imagery is so obviously fake that it feels like a callback to earlier AI experiments, rather than engaging with the more subtle ways AI now shapes perception and blurs the line between real and artificial. At the same time, some of…
Spotify on Wednesday announced changes to its built-in song lyrics feature, which includes making lyrics translations globally available, offering the ability to view lyrics when offline, and relocating the feature in the app. The changes follow other tweaks the streamer has made to lyrics over the years, hoping to leverage the feature as a tool to push free users to become subscribers. That began with Spotify trying to paywall lyrics in 2024, before loosening its grip later in the year after numerous complaints. Now, the company hopes that the new offline lyrics feature — which will only be offered to…
“On the matchmaking app, if we ask you a question and your tonality changes in the response, it cues to us that you may not be telling us the full truth. And so we’ll ask you that same question in two or three different ways throughout your experience,” Cohen-Aslatei says. “We built this to mimic what a matchmaker would do for a client. The LLM is tracking pitch and tone change in your voice because we want to make sure that we have an accurate understanding of who you are and what you’re looking for.”After answering dozens more questions about…
Every year, about 60 brands spend millions—in 2026, up to $10 million— to advertise in the Super Bowl. They try to shock, delight, surprise, confuse, and inspire the upwards of 127 million-strong audience in the hopes that they’ll be remembered long after the Big Game ends.Jon Evans thinks those advertisements have room to improve. “The average Super Bowl ad on our five-star scale is actually only three stars,” said Evans, chief customer officer at behavioral science research firm System1. His advice for making a better ad: “Spend the money on making sure that you create emotion and the right memory.”Ahead of Super…
Henry Soong is trying to make vertical microdrama series that don’t suck. That makes the Watch Club founder quite unique within this multibillion-dollar industry of apps that churn out formulaic, cringe-worthy content and use aggressive tactics to maximize in-app spending. “Ninety percent of these stories are, ‘I’m a poor girl! I fell in love with a secret billionaire! He’s a werewolf, and his mother is a vampire, and she disapproves of me!’” Soong told TechCrunch. “There’s a market for that, and we shouldn’t laugh at that, but I think this can be so much bigger than just sloppy, AI-adjacent romance…
I’ll confess I would have a nerdy admiration for ExpeDry down even if it didn’t work, just for its use of basic chemistry, which even I dimly remember from high school but for some reason never made it into a product until recently. What’s even better is that it does work.I don’t have a lab, and I’m not particularly interested in what happens in one anyway, but I am a backpacker, living in a cold climate, with a deep dislike for being cold. In the real world, where I live, if your jacket loses loft and you get cold, bad…
After logging off from his job as integrated media supervisor at North Carolina agency Luquire, Dominique Robinson shifts into planning mode for his golf apparel brand Urban Eagle. Instead of media strategies and client KPIs, he’s thinking about shirt designs or planning the brand’s next community activation. Robinson, along with two fellow golf-loving friends, co-founded Urban Eagle in January 2025 as their way of making the sport more inclusive—and maybe find more partners to add to their tee time. Robinson often golfs at public courses, where many of the strangers he’s been paired with have become his friends. “I can’t tell…