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We recently announced the winners of our inaugural Human Made Awards. Of all the categories we celebrated, there’s one we wanted to come back to and give a little more space: Technical Wizardry, won this year by Samantha Miller. Technical excellence sits right at the heart of what we do at Human Made. It’s why our clients trust us with business-critical projects, and it references the standard our team holds itself to every day.So when we asked everyone at the company to nominate the Human whose technical skill, problem-solving, and craft had set a new bar this year, it was…
Amazon announced the latest update to Alexa+ on Monday: the ability to generate podcast episodes on demand. The new feature, called “Alexa Podcasts,” is rolling out to customers in the U.S. today. Amazon describes the capability as a way to “turn any topic you’re curious about into a podcast episode, ready in minutes.” To use the feature, all users have to do is ask Alexa+ to create a podcast about a topic they’re interested in. Users don’t need to upload documents, write scripts, or plan anything ahead of time. Instead, Alexa+ researches the request, gathers information, and generates a quick…
A Miracle cancer therapy that involves engineering a patient’s own immune cells is being repurposed for HIV, and early results from two individuals hint at its promise for long-term control of the virus.As part of a clinical trial, scientists took people’s own immune cells and reprogrammed them in a lab to recognize and attack HIV in the body. After a single infusion of the modified cells, two individuals with HIV now have undetectable levels of the virus—one for nearly two years and the other for almost a year. Both have been able to go off HIV medications entirely.The two people…
DoorDash has a new chief marketing officer in Tim Castree. Castree joins the delivery platform from Amazon, where he was vice president of EU Prime and marketing for the ecommerce giant. Prior to that, Castree oversaw paid media and then served as a senior advisor at Hawkfish, the ad agency founded by Mike Bloomberg to support the billionaire’s 2020 campaign for president.In 2019, Castree spent a year as GroupM’s North America CEO. The exec also brings experience from Leo Burnett Australia, MediaVest, and Wavemaker.“Tim is a deeply customer-obsessed, naturally curious leader who brings a rare intellectual rigor to every dimension…
Grafana Labs, the maker of its eponymous popular open source web visualization software, confirmed it had been hacked but that it refused to pay the hackers who had threatened to release the company’s codebase. In a series of posts on social media, the lab said its investigation found that the hackers had abused a stolen token credential that allowed access to the company’s GitLab environment, which it uses for code development. The token did not provide access to customer records or financial data, but allowed the hackers to obtain the company’s repositories of source code. The company has since invalidated…
The note from the communications team then, quite remarkably, lists some stats in an attempt to paint the launch in a positive light, as opposed the retail bin-fire it seemingly was: “We have received millions of clicks on our website. This new collaboration is literally making social media explode, with over 6 billion views within one week; by now, it is already 11 billion. All in all, the Royal Pop Collection is captivating the entire world, not least because the Royal Pop is, quite surprisingly, not a wristwatch.”Audemars Piguet seems unhappy with how Swatch has handled the launch of its collaboration on…
Javier Campopiano, global chief creative officer, global clients for Omnicom Advertising Group (OAG), is stepping down from his role, ADWEEK has learned.Campopiano, the former McCann Worldgroup and McCann Worldwide chief creative officer, will leave Omnicom at the end of May. An Omnicom spokesperson said the company has no plans to replace his role.He departs six months after taking on the OAG role as part of Omnicom’s acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) in December 2025.Prior to that, Campopiano had been McCann’s global creative leader since 2023. During his tenure, he helped the agency network win clients including Ferrero, Ikea, Peroni Nastro Azzurro,…
Google I/O is imminent. This is the annual developer event and product showcase where Google shows off all the shiny new updates to its Android operating system and other platforms, as well as new features and improvements to its artificial intelligence models.The big announcements at Google I/O usually come in the form of a livestreamed keynote event at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, hosted by Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. That starts on Tuesday, May 19, at 10 am Pacific time (1 pm Eastern). You can watch the livestream on Google’s website or on YouTube. It will also be…
To stand out amid the World Cup ad rush, Visa is going beyond sponsorship and logo visibility, inviting fans to “tap in” to exclusive activations, promotions, and prizes that celebrate the sport.The payment giant, a World Cup sponsor since 2007, has launched a campaign called “Tap In” featuring Ted Lasso star Jason Sudeikis. The name has double meaning: it’s a colloquialism for contactless payments and a soccer term for a goal scored from close range.“We want to be a brand that is showing up and powering participation,” Andrea Fairchild, svp of global sponsorship strategy at Visa, told ADWEEK. “Everything is…
Imagine you’re riding a motorcycle at 160 kilometers per hour when an arrow appears, floating on the road ahead, telling you exactly where to turn. No phone, no dashboard. Just your helmet, and a lens the size of a thumbnail. This is not a concept video. It’s heading to European roads as early as this year. And it’s one early glimpse of where smart glasses are heading. Over the past few years, Big Tech has been quietly (and not so quietly) placing its bets. Meta has been selling AI-enabled Ray-Ban glasses since 2023, Google is building Android XR, and Apple…
Anyone who has had chickenpox shares one distinct memory: the relentless, all-consuming itch.Ciara DiVita was only 3 years old when she caught the virus, but she remembers it well—along with the oven mitts she was made to wear to stop herself scratching. She also recalls being taken to hang out with her cousin while covered in blisters, in the hopes of deliberately infecting them.DiVita, now 30, was actually the second in the chain, having been taken by her parents to catch chickenpox from an infectious friend. “I imagine the chain continued and my cousin gave it to someone else at…
Landing a job in marketing has gotten more competitive and complex. For young people navigating AI, hybrid work, and an industry in constant transition, the barriers to entry are only increasing. The Effie Lions Foundation is addressing these challenges with Voices of the Future, a new fellowship program designed to prepare the next generation of marketing leaders. The fully funded, eight-month program launched in April and will provide 12 high school and college students with training in marketing, leadership, and AI fluency, as well as a trip to Cannes Lions and concluding with paid apprenticeship at global agencies and leading brands. The cohort…
The owner of a company that trained paramilitary Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents testified that he was involved in at least four lethal shootings, according to a 2021 deposition related to a lawsuit reviewed by WIRED.David S. Norman, the founder and proprietor of law enforcement training firm TruKinetics LLC, served as a Phoenix Police officer from the late 1990s until his retirement in 2020. Prior to founding TruKinetics the same year, according to records reviewed by WIRED, Norman was involved in six shootings while on duty that left four people dead and two more wounded. In every instance, the Phoenix…
Privacy will be a major theme when Apple unveils a new version of Siri at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The Siri relaunch is widely seen as Apple’s big chance to reestablish its relevance in artificial intelligence. As part of that effort, company executives will argue that they’re taking a more privacy-friendly approach than most other AI companies, Gurman said. Apple will reportedly launch the first standalone Siri app, powered by Google Gemini and offering users a chatbot experience reminiscent of ChatGPT. But compared to those other chatbots, the app is supposed to have…
Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI made their closing arguments this week, and now it’s up to jurors to decide whether OpenAI did anything wrong as it’s transformed into a slightly-more-for-profit organization. But as Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I noted on the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, a big theme in the trial’s final days was whether OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is trustworthy — for example, Musk’s attorney Steve Molo grilled Altman about whether statements he’d made during congressional testimony were truthful. Kirsten noted that Musk has made plenty of misleading statements of his own, and that trust…
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! There is a bit of a theme emerging in transportation — and really every industry: AI is creating jobs for some at the loss of others. General Motors, for instance, laid off more than 10% of its IT department, or about 600 salaried employees — in a deliberate skills swap. This won’t translate into a one-to-one exchange, which means there will likely be a net-negative job…