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Retail doesn’t stand still, and neither does Sam’s Club.In this episode of The Speed of Culture, recorded live at CES in Las Vegas, Matt Britton sits down with Diana Marshall, EVP and chief experience officer at Sam’s Club. Diana shares how Sam’s Club is building a human-led, tech-powered membership model, why experience is now the primary differentiator in retail, and how closed-loop data and AI-driven personalization are reshaping acquisition, loyalty, and retail media. The conversation explores the shift from frictionless to effortless retail, the power of associate experience, and what the future of buying looks like in an AI-enabled world.A 21-year Walmart…
Apple unveiled its latest slate of MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops on Tuesday morning, and in the case of the MacBook Pro, the new hardware comes with the announcement of new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. The specs on the new chips are impressive, featuring an 18-core CPU that Apple says is over 4x the peak GPU compute for AI compared to the previous generation. But consumers may be surprised to see the price of the new MacBook Pro devices. For the base MacBook Pro device, which has an M5 Pro chip, prices start at $2,199 and $2,699…
The invention that turned Apple into a world-beating, billion-selling, society-changing colossus was not a laptop or a music player; it was the iPhone. It seemed to appear in 2007, fully formed, beautifully conceived, self-assured, and conceptually obvious.But behind the scenes, the iPhone we know today was made possible by more than bold bets, fanatical attention to detail, brilliant design, and a vision for the future; there were also false starts, last-minute redesigns, and a few strokes of luck.For starters, the product Apple set out to build first was not a phone. It was a tablet.Interdisciplinary teams at Apple are always…
Why is my laundry taking two hours? Is this sunscreen water-resistant? Will my dishes be dry when the dishwasher finishes?In its first major marketing push in more than five years, the non-profit publisher Consumer Reports unveiled a $3 million, full-funnel brand marketing campaign on Tuesday rooted in addressing the everyday questions that pepper modern life.The initiative, part of a broader effort from the 90-year-old non-profit to emphasize its utility in a rapidly shifting information landscape, was developed with branding agency Red Antler and media agency Kepler, according to chief marketing officer Khalid El Khatib. It will be fully live by March…
Audible is rolling out a cheaper “Standard” subscription plan that costs $8.99 per month, the Amazon-owned company announced on Tuesday. The new plan is $6 cheaper than the platform’s existing “Premium” plan, which costs $14.95 per month. The Standard plan includes one audiobook per month from Audible’s catalog and unlimited listening from a curated library that includes a selection of Audible Originals. Under the new Standard plan, subscribers will lose access to the audiobooks they’ve consumed when they unsubscribe. The Premium plan lets users keep the audiobooks they’ve listened to even if they unsubscribe. The Standard plan also includes access…
The Apple Watch is not calibrated with a cuff. It takes 30 days of cardiac data from the existing optical PPG sensors, analyzes it, and gives you a probability that you might have hypertension. It’s also significant that this is the first year that the Apple Watch has had a true 24 hours of battery life, so you can wear it while you’re sleeping without taking it off to charge. I’ve turned this on with my Series 11 and have not yet gotten a notification (and hope I never will), but given that general awareness, screening, and detection of hypertension…
Bitter winter weather affected much of the country during the week of January 26, prompting many people to stay home and consume streaming content. This led to six titles surpassing a billion viewing minutes on Nielsen’s Top 10 Overall Streaming chart.The return of Netflix’s Bridgerton danced its way to the top of the chart with 3.032 billion viewing minutes for the recorded week. Season 4’s new episodes boosted the show’s total viewing, commanding 74% of the time, with Adult women (18+) representing 72% of the total.Bridgerton dethroned the popular Netflix series Stranger Things, which held the No. 2 position after…
Social network X is bringing its private messaging service, dubbed X Chat, to a standalone app. The company on Monday said the initial beta of the X Chat app was being made available to 1,000 users through Apple’s TestFlight testing platform. The beta program had reached full capacity two hours after the announcement. According to an X post by xAI product designer Michael Boswell, the company will expand the beta beyond the initial 1,000 users “soon,” though he didn’t offer an ETA. “For the past few months, we’ve been quietly building a standalone X Chat app for iOS,” Boswell wrote…
Alongside its price-friendly iPhone 17e and M4 iPad Air yesterday, Apple just announced a few updates to the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and its rarely-refreshed desktop display line. Apple seems to be holding its rumored new entry-level MacBook for tomorrow’s in-person event in New York City, but today’s announcements should make potential upgraders happy.The MacBook Air has now been updated to the latest M5 chip. It’s a fairly modest upgrade, but it brings it up to speed with Apple’s latest processor that debuted in the MacBook Pro last fall. There are no other major hardware changes—it now comes with 512…
McDonald’s chief executive (CEO) Chris Kempczinski’s LinkedIn unveiling of the Big Arch Burger went viral last week, though not quite as intended. The spotlight wasn’t so much on the sandwich as the leader’s visible apprehension at taking a bite.There’s a potentially useful lesson here for brands: Don’t cast your chief executive in a role better played by someone else. It’s a lesson McDonald’s, not incidentally, has learned before.30 years ago, the fast-food chain launched the Arch Deluxe to correct widespread perceptions that its restaurants were mostly for kids. (A reasonable impression, given the McDonaldland characters and PlayPlace jungle gyms.) Enter…
There’s no carpet on my main floor, but I have some upstairs. To move the Shark upstairs, I had to move the base and vacuum and prompt the vacuum to delete its map and remap my home, since Shark’s vacuums can only store one map at a time. It would be one thing if I didn’t need to move the base, but having to move both makes it a pain; if you were hoping for a vacuum that can clean multiple floors of your home, this isn’t it.But if carpet is on the main floor of your home, the Shark…
Data collaboration platform LiveRamp is now enabling customers to integrate their AI agents of choice. LiveRamp customers—including major ad agencies, big brands like Uber and Coca-Cola, publishers like Paramount, Netflix, and Spotify, and tech partners like The Trade Desk and Index Exchange—will be able to plug in specialized agents to interact with any partner on the platform. This is a new capability; previously, agents would need to call the LiveRamp API to access their data on the platform. With the direct integration, agents can be used to automate audience planning and segmentation and help marketers measure and optimize their campaigns. They will…
For months, there has been talk that Silicon Valley’s billionaire class was recruiting a candidate to take on Representative Ro Khanna. Early Tuesday morning, that candidate made it official. Ethan Agarwal (pictured above), a 40-year-old tech entrepreneur with no political background, told TechCrunch on Monday evening that he is running for California’s 17th congressional district. That process is likely to set up what may become one of the most lavishly funded primary challenges of the 2026 cycle. The race puts a spotlight on Khanna, a 49-year-old Democrat widely seen as a possible 2028 presidential candidate, who has publicly backed a…
While there are countless types of ergonomic keyboards, the most common are typically going to be angled keyboards and split keyboards. Angled keyboards, often referred to as “Alice”-style keyboards in the mechanical keyboard world (named after the TGR Alice), split the alphanumeric keys along the middle, positioning the two halves at an angle from one another while keeping the modifier keys (backspace, enter, shift, and so on) in their standard positions. The angle will vary between keyboards, as will the number of keys, but the main constant in an Alice-style keyboard is that, despite the halves being separated from one…
There is more to pubs than beer on tap. Beyond the heavy, creaking door lies a sanctuary from the cold, a vital meeting place for old friends, and a support network for those in need. Just imagine the upset caused when one shuts for good—then times that by 2100, the number of pubs that disappeared in Ireland between 2005 and 2025.As a beer brewer, Heineken naturally wants to stop the closure of struggling pubs. Its latest platform, “For the Love of Pubs,” is created by LePub Worldwide and devised to safeguard pub culture and social connection. It kicks off with a…
Anthropic experienced widespread disruptions on Monday morning, with thousands of users reporting problems accessing Claude services. The outage seems to be affecting Claude.ai as well as Claude Code, though the company said the Claude API is working as intended. Most users experienced the error when attempting to log in, as in the screenshot below. Image Credits:TechCrunch “The issues we are seeing are related to Claude.ai and with the login/logout paths,” the company’s status page reads. Anthropic has not yet detailed what caused the outage, though the company said it has identified an issue and is implementing a fix. The disruption…