đ Single and ready to mingle? If youâre living in New York City, you might be feeling ready to mingle with a roommate. Singles in the Big Apple pay an average of $20.1k more annually to live alone, according to StreetEasy and Zillow, while couples who share a one-bedroom apartment save a combined $40.2k. The only thing more unfair than that is having to navigate New York Cityâs dating scene.
đ§ On the pod:This week in AI: from the Super Bowl and Nvidia to OpenAI.
NEWS FLASH
đ”ïž Might want to close out of Netflix: It seems your boss might also be watching. Demand for employee surveillance software ballooned 54% between March 2020 and June 2023, according to network comparison site Top10VPN. The spying goes deeper than knowing when your mouse is moving: 73% of employers reported using call recordings, emails, or messages as a factor in performance reviews and 37% said theyâd used a recording to fire an employee, according to an ExpressVPN survey. Does your Slack message making fun of the boss get a pass if it was really funny? Asking for a friend.
đ€ A handshake deal to end hand shakes: Rarebird â a Buffalo, New York-based startup hawking what it calls the âfirst-ever jitterless coffeeâ â is $1m closer to opening up its first roastery after securing funding through an accelerator program. Itâs a step forward for the 5-year-old company, sure, but the implications here carry meaning for the whole of Homo sapiens: Rarebird says its coffee tastes and brews the same as any other, except it eschews caffeine for a patented caffeine alternative, Px, which allegedly metabolizes faster, providing a full afternoon coffee buzz without that dreaded wired-at-midnight feeling. Accelerate faster, please.
Uber is suing DoorDash, alleging it threatened to raise fees or demote restaurants if they partnered with Uber Eats. DoorDash denied the claims, attributing them to Uber Eatsâ âinability to offer merchants, consumers, or couriers a quality alternative.â Harsh.
Cool? Nintendoâs alarm clock, Alarmo, is now widely available. The most prominent feature of the bright red device is that, yâknow, it uses sound to wake you up, just with Nintendo characters on it, and it costs $100.
FUTURE OF MARKETING
Wanted: More human marketing
Give the masses more of what they crave â bold brand values, vibrant visual content, and collabs with impactful creators.
The 2025 State of Marketing Report is your backstage pass to winning strategy. Learn exactly how operators at a16z, Asana, Graphite, and HubSpot plan to dominate inside their niches.
3 major points to remember:
Marketers are focused on younger customers.
Short-form video and visual storytelling are winning.
Teams are hiring for a content-rich, social-focused future.
Lock in, ya brand-building bums. See data spliced from 1.2k experts.
Itâs easy to know how humans are feeling, whether because they can talk or because they can point to the handy Wong-Baker Faces Scale.
But how do we know if animals are in pain?
Using tech, of course
You could teach an animal to âtalkâ (and become Instagram famous) with those viral buttons â but why do that when AI can interpret its body language?
Research shows animals do communicate how theyâre feeling with facial expressions.
Several AI tools are being developed to interpret these expressions, according to Science: for instance, by analyzing pictures of animals before and after surgery, or by (safely) inducing mild discomfort.
The systems focus on stuff like subtle differences in a horseâs jaw muscles, nostril shape, and ear positions that even an expert might miss.
For animals that donât really have facial expressions, like chickens, an AI model could interpret different levels of body heat.
AI models are also being used to analyze animal noises, listening for distress or attempting actual translation.
E.g., birds have distinct calls for songs and warnings, while prairie dogs âhave a system of nouns and adjectives to describe predators,â per Axios.
The tech could be appliedâŠ
⊠across livestock and pets.
One team of researchers are about to release an app that can interpret a catâs pain level by looking for tension in certain muscles. Finally, a way to decipher the imperceptible difference between an unhappy cat and any other cat.
Science also suggests that tech like this could be used in equestrian competitions to reward riders of happier horses, encouraging competitors to treat their animals well.
Once again, the march of technological progress is driven by dressage.
Negotiation is an art, and sometimes thinking unconventionally supplies that magic sauce. Thatâs why we tapped six experts for their âoutside the boxâ negotiation tactics.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
DoorDashâs 2024 gross order value, per Sherwood News.
In Q4 alone, the company racked up ~$21.3B in subscription fees and deliveries.
So, the company is cleaning up? Not quite. Once all the platformâs restaurants, stores, and drivers took their cut, DoorDash posted $10.7B in revenue for 2024 â operating at a $38m loss.
As far as what gobbled up profits in the last quarter:
The company spent $541m on sales and marketing ($2B+ total for the year).
It dropped $324m on general/admin costs.
And $297m went into R&D.
Whether that Super Bowl ad was worth it for the company, the big game was certainly kind to delivery drivers: US DoorDashers earned $50m+ during this yearâs Super Bowl, with Philly-based couriers taking home $390k.
AROUND THE WEB
đ On this day: In 1930, Pluto was discovered by astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona.
â Thatâs interesting:Inside the University of California, Davisâ Coffee Center, the nationâs only academic center focused on coffee.
đ Thatâs cool: âTable tennis best points of 2024â is the YouTube video you didnât know you needed.
