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As GLP-1 medications become increasingly mainstream, digital health platform Noom is betting on psychology-backed behavior change as its biggest competitive advantage in a crowded space. That strategy underpins “Lose For Keeps,” the company’s new campaign fronted by actor Rebel Wilson.Created by Mekanism, the campaign argues that lasting weight loss comes from combining GLP-1 medication with healthier habits. As Noom looks for an edge in the market, it is “putting our flag down in the conversation and differentiating who we are,” said chief brand officer Rachel Mahoney.Somewhere between the diet culture of the early 2000s and today’s GLP-1 boom, Noom emerged as…

More Family Board GamesPhotograph: Simon HillThere are so many family board games. Here are a few more we liked.In a World for $28: Someone reads out an “In a World,” card which might say “where we are setting up a colony on a distant planet,” and then the players read out “We want” cards like “a lifetime supply of bananas” or “a thriving coffee shop.” It’s a family-friendly twist on Cards Against Humanity (with similar weaknesses), but players also try to sell their card as the best pick which adds a nice twist.Cat in the Box Deluxe Edition for $31:…

From the rise of AI to shrinking client budgets, agencies are arguably facing their biggest inflection point yet. The pressure to figure out what’s next is creating a new dynamic of collaboration and knowledge sharing in an industry that has historically been highly competitive.After successfully building out the Marketing Vanguard program, an invite-only club for chief marketing officers that provides networking, knowledge-sharing, intelligence, and inspiration, Jenny Rooney, chief brand and community officer at ADWEEK, knew the agency space was the next area ripe for where her team could help.“It’s sort of an existential reality right now for agencies,” Rooney said. “Now…

Mushroom hunting is cool and fun, but you know what’s not cool and fun? Having slugs or other mushroom hunters discover your secret spot. Or, worst of all, accidentally collecting the wrong kind of mushroom that could make you quite sick—or worse.Ideally, you’d be able to grow your favorite kind of mushrooms safely in your own home or yard, whether that’s shiitakes, morels, or lion’s manes, just like you would vegetables. But like many gardening-adjacent pursuits, it’s not that simple. Mushrooms, like all fungi, need just three things to grow: spores, a food source, and a humid environment.However, because mushrooms…

Retailers’ latest test is figuring out if creative services can boost their advertising businesses.A few years into the retail media boom, sellers seeking growth and bigger ad budgets from marketers hope that services and features, like new creative formats and branded content, will increase brand awareness and ultimately, ad budgets.Still, it’s early days. These offerings are largely viewed as experimental, and it’s not yet clear they can more effectively drive sales.“Most brands who are starting to play with these retailer-hosted creative services are dipping their toes in the water to see what the performance is like,” said Ross Walker, director…

A recent examination of hundreds of mobile apps marketed toward US military personnel found more than one in eight contained software built by companies in China, Russia, or other foreign nations, raising fresh concerns that adversary governments could harvest data revealing where service members live, work, and deploy.According to researchers at Purdue University, the US Military Academy at West Point, and Florida International University, one popular app used by service members to rate living conditions on their own bases include code from Huawei, the Chinese telecom that US regulators flagged as a national security threat in 2020. Two others were…

In a new regulatory filing, Netflix revealed that it paid $587 million in cash for InterPositive, a startup co-founded by actor and director Ben Affleck. The streaming company announced the acquisition in March, with a statement from Affleck saying he wanted to “protect the power of human creativity.” According to Affleck, InterPublic’s AI tools help filmmakers improve their footage in post-production, particularly when it comes to making up for “real-world production challenges such as missing shots, background replacements or incorrect lighting.” At the time, Netflix announced that the entire InterPositive team would be joining the company, with Affleck joining as…

Nvidia’s chief Jensen Huang spent two days — July 15 and 16 — in Tokyo, courting Japan’s industrial and chip-supply elite, weeks after a keynote in Taiwan, and months after a visit to South Korea. He left with deals spanning Japan’s entire tech ecosystem: a national AI factory, partnerships with the country’s leading robotics companies, and agreements with the chip-material suppliers powering Nvidia’s next generation of AI chips. His message was clear. Nvidia is targeting Japan’s factory floor, and many of the country’s biggest manufacturers are joining in. AI’s next chapter, Huang said, belongs to factory floors, robots, and machines,…

Apple recently filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the AI company of a pattern of misconduct aimed at getting current and former Apple employees to share confidential information. (In response, OpenAI said it is “not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit.”) On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I debated whether this lawsuit will cast a shadow over OpenAI’s much-discussed plans to get into the hardware business (starting with a mobile smart speaker) and go public. “Even setting aside whether or not the court grants any kind of injunctive…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Last week, I wrote about Uber and Waymo and how their partnership appears to be deteriorating. I predicted the two companies would end up on opposing sides of autonomous vehicle policy. That wasn’t a guess. For the past several weeks, I’ve been talking to sources and digging through correspondence Uber sent to the D.C. Council, which is evaluating a proposed bill…

Christopher Nolan, the Oscar-winning director whose new version of “The Odyssey” is currently conquering the box office, said it’s been “pretty encouraging” to see deep skepticism of AI, especially from young people. Nolan was responding to a question from interviewer Hugo Travers, who publishes on YouTube under the name HugoDécrypte. Travers brought up the legendary Trojan horse, which plays a key role in Nolan’s film — just as the horse was a gift concealing murderous Greek invaders, he wondered if AI might be something “that you welcome in your daily life” only to see it become “something else and something…

A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a dying plant. She wants to research it on the internet but she doesn’t speak English. She shouldn’t have to. That’s the type of problem a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building open, public AI infrastructure. In February at the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division. The result became Suno Sutra, Hindi for “listening chronicles,” a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, no internet required. “In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects,…

It was all Chris Martin’s idea.During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the Coldplay frontman called Hugh Evans, the CEO of Global Citizen, for whom he curates the Global Citizen Festival, with something new to pitch. “Wouldn’t it be incredible,” Evans recalls Martin saying, “if we could do the first-ever halftime show for the World Cup?” Evans agreed, and connected with FIFA president Gianni Infantino at the organization’s headquarters in Switzerland to sell him on Martin’s plan. He didn’t need to.Infantino had already had a similar idea—and was a Coldplay fan. “So he actually had already independently decided that he…

Spotify, it’s fair to say, has made some weird user-experience choices.There are a number of panels in the app, and the layout is confusing. The service constantly tracks your activity. The app also seems to have an odd hostility to playing actual albums. This all works to create a general feeling that Spotify’s designers are trying to push you into using the service in a particular way.It’s understandable, then, that some people are annoyed with the way music videos have been added to the platform. For the most part, they would start to play by default, in the background, whenever…

Astronomers have confirmed for the first time the existence of a rocky planet with an atmosphere that also happens to be in what’s known as the habitable zone.Located 48 light-years away, the exoplanet—that is, a planet outside our solar system—may be the most similar thing to Earth that researchers have come across. If not a twin then certainly a family member.Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics were able to detect signatures of helium around LHS 1140 b, an exoplanet circling a cool red dwarf. The previously identified body has a rocky composition and is far enough from its host…

The end of the biggest World Cup ever is almost here. Following 100 matches, there are just four teams left and two more games to play.The tournament has been hosted by three countries: Mexico, Canada, and the US. All of those host countries are now out of the running. The final teams are France, Spain, England, and Argentina. Those teams will play two more games: one to determine who gets third place, and a final match to decide the winner and the runner-up.Going into this year’s World Cup, FIFA anticipated that it would be the most watched tournament in the…