👋 Mark your calendars: The Pop-Tarts Bowl is back this year, this time with three mascots competing to get eaten. Frosted wild berry, frosted hot fudge sundae, and a mystery flavor will duke it out to “ascend to mouth heaven.” Marketing has gotten weird, folks.
🎧 On the pod:How Walmart is crushing it right now.
NEWS FLASH
🛒 Walmartis cashing in on high earners: Long the shopping destination for those looking to budget, Walmart is growing more popular with customers making $100k+. The company’s profit grew 8.2% last quarter, and households making six figures or more annually accounted for 75% of gains. Walmart has been luring in cash-flush customers by driving down prices and investing in its grocery, clothing, electronics, and home furnishing offerings. Plus, it’s coming for Amazon’s domination with more robust online options — the company’s online sales grew 22% in the US last quarter.
🎤 Take that, Duolingo: Microsoft announced that Teams users will soon be able to clone their voices so they can speak in different languages during meetings. The Interpreter tool, launching in early 2025, can simulate voices in nine languages. It doesn’t store any biometric data or add sentiments not naturally present in a voice, and will only be enabled when a user provides consent. Now, if the tool could also make you sound smarter when talking to your boss, we’d really be in business.
🦆 A less controversial foie gras? Foie gras is often banned because its production requires force-feeding birds. But Vow, an Australian cultivated meat startup, makes lab-grown foie gras using Japanese quail cells, which it intends to sell in Singapore and Hong Kong. Cultivated meat is cost prohibitive to produce at scale, but Vow’s approach is to replicate what is already an expensive luxury product. Vow CEO George Peppou told Wired its market is restaurants or venues that want to use “ingredients to distinguish themselves” or an alternative to traditional foie gras.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Blackstone is buying Jersey Mike’s Subs in a deal that values the sandwich chain at ~$8B, including debt. It’s Blackstone’s latest food franchise move, following investments in 7 Brew Coffee and Tropical Smoothie Cafe.
Pizza Hut and Irvine’s Just Beyond Paradise Winery are partnering on a tomato wine with notes of basil, oregano, and garlic. Bottles are $25, or $60 for a gift set with two branded glasses and a wine key. Weird, but not so different from a bloody mary.
Oura is now valued at $5B thanks to an investment from glucose monitoring device maker Dexcom. The partnership will allow data sharing between both apps, with the first integration due in 2025.
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Juice up your chatbot-training skills. Steal Marketing Against the Grain’s playbook for building out custom GPTs that embody your brand.
How Pokemon Go will build a ‘large geospatial model’
Think back to summer 2016: Were you one of the 200m+ people wandering around with your phone looking for a Pikachu? If so, your “catch ‘em all” fever contributed to Pokemon Go creator Niantic’s location data.
Over 1m are available for use in its Lightship Visual Positioning System (VPS), which lets AR developers anchor virtual content to real-world locations with “centimeter-level accuracy.”
Each week, it receives ~1m more from its games and apps.
Now, Niantic is using this data to produce a “large geospatial model,” per404 Media.
What’s that mean?
ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM), which means it uses language to produce language. It trains on text scraped from the internet, then produces text, like when you ask it for a five-paragraph essay on why you should get a cat.
Niantic’s idea for a large geospatial model is to use all this location data to understand and navigate the physical world.
As Niantic explained:
Humans can usually imagine what a whole building looks like even if we’ve only seen one side because we have spatial intelligence.
Bots don’t. But a model could understand what the rest of the building probably looks like based on common characteristics of similar buildings and places, even if that side hadn’t been scanned.
I guess that’s cool, but what’s the point?
What’s interesting about Niantic’s data is that it comes via pedestrians, who can go into parks and down narrow alleys and other places cars cannot.
And though Niantic didn’t specify, there are myriad potential applications in the kinds of AR games and apps Niantic makes. It’d also be useful for developers of AR wearables, like the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
It would also benefit companies that rely on robot navigation — self-driving taxis, delivery bots or drones, etc.
Naturally, some people noted this could pertain to governments interested in robot-based warfare. So when you’re hiding underground from Skynet, just remember it was all because you had to have that Snorlax.
AI comes for sports analytics: ESPN is out here dropping FACTS — meet its new AI-generated avatar.
Ever heard of a loss leader? Let’s just say that those superlow turkey prices this Thanksgiving aren’t out of the goodness of retailers’ hearts.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
The amount of data that Brazilian startup BlueArk has moved from X to Bluesky in one month, perBusiness Insider. Software engineer Nicolas Castellani and his partner, Amos da Silva Bezerra, developed a way to scrape X accounts and export them to Bluesky after X was banned in Brazil.
The price varies; it cost ~$17 for BI reporter Adam Rogers to export his tens of thousands of tweets dating back to 2009. But with Bluesky’s recent explosion in popularity — app usage is up 500% since the US election — there is a backlog. Full ports currently take nearly two weeks to complete.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1999, the first Transgender Day of Remembrance was held as a vigil for Rita Hester, a trans woman murdered in Boston in 1998. It is now observed annually for all victims of transphobic violence.
