👋 Remember to save up for a rainy day. You never know when unforeseen expenses will pop up, like the $1.5k Bend, Oregon, has spent on removing googly eyes from its public art sculptures. The culprit, known by local media as the Googly Eye Bandit, has affixed eyes to eight works of art since August.
🎧 On the pod: How Crumbl went from a single cookie shop to a $1B+ business.
NEWS FLASH
🚗 You wouldn’t download a car… but you could perhaps hack its license plate. Reviver has sold 65k digital plates nationwide, which allow owners to change frames to include messages or alerts. Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security company IOActive, found they can also be jailbroken to change the plate number, allowing shady users to evade tickets, tolls, or surveillance. Of course, someone would need the right know-how to do that, which Reviver claims is “highly unlikely” and would be illegal. Digital license plates are currently legal in California, Michigan, and Arizona, though other states are considering them.
🥘 New marketing strategy: Conagra Brands is adding “GLP-1 friendly” to the packaging of 24+ Healthy Choice meals. The labels indicate meals that are low calorie and high in protein and fiber to appeal to customers taking GLP-1 medications — such as Wegovy and Ozempic — for Type 2 diabetes or weight loss. Since such consumers eat less, Conagra will start with its smaller-portion Healthy Choice meals, but may expand across its product line in the future. Meanwhile, in May, Nestlé launched a new brand, Vital Pursuit, geared toward GLP-1 patients or other consumers focused on weight management.
🛰️ Starlink has some competition: The EU signed an $11B deal to launch 290 IRIS² satellites by 2030. The communication satellites will operate in medium- and low-Earth orbit, provide secure internet access to European users, and bring high-speed internet to dead zones. SpaceRISE — a consortium of EU satellite network operators — will oversee the IRIS² constellation. The new project will bring a healthy dose of competition to Elon Musk’s Starlink, which has launched ~7k satellites since 2018.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
TikTok’s annual carbon footprint may be larger than all of Greece’s, per a new report that found the average user spends 45.5 minutes per day scrolling, annually generating greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to driving 123 miles in a gas-powered vehicle.
Temu, the Chinese shopping app, was the most downloaded free app in the US for the second year in a row, according to data from Apple’s App Store. The app surpassed TikTok last year to take the No. 1 spot.
Starbucks is tripling its baristas’ paid parental leave to 18 weeks for birth parents, at 100% of their average pay. Nonbirth parents will receive the benefit for 12 weeks.
TOOLBOX
Clicking these links will totally land you on Santa’s nice list. OK, maybe not — but they’re worth a look, anyway:
On a budget? Your brand might still be able to invest in video marketing.
Make this next year one for the books: How to plan an epic 2025 in 56 minutes.
There are good days and bad in sales: But these three eternal truths — which most sellers avoid — remain the same.
THE BIG IDEA
Humans might finally be entering their battery era
1999’s The Matrix depicts a cyberpunk dystopia where human bodies are used to generate electricity for an army of machines.
Since then, spoilsports have pointed out that humans aren’t really a viable replacement for batteries.
Except…
… maybe they could be?
As wearable tech becomes more popular, companies have tried to solve this problem — though, hopefully not at the behest of our future machine masters.
Somewhat theoretical projects have indicated that it is possible, just not on the level of The Matrix’s human farms.
The latest advancement in human-battery tech comes from Australia’s Queensland University of Technology, perPopular Science.
Researchers have created a thermoelectric film using tiny “nanocrystals.”
Worn on the skin, they “turn the temperature difference between the human body and surrounding air into electricity.”
If the tech can be scaled, it could be used to power medical devices like pacemakers without ever replacing batteries.
It could also power clothing that actively cools the wearer, or obvious solutions, like putting it on a smartwatch or smart glasses.
But wait, there’s more!
The tech is potentially just as good for machinekind as it is for humankind:
Researchers suggest the film could also cool small computer chips, like those in phones, plus big data centers that rely on tons of water to avoid overheating, like the ones running LLMs and other AI platforms.
This could even cut down on tech’s environmental impact.
Imagine using a phone that is charged by contact with your hand, and the chip inside is cooled by the heat generated from the chip itself.
Now imagine that on a bigger scale, where you’re, say, stuck in a pod that generates electricity from contact with your skin, and it powers an army of robots. Fun and plausible, right?
Not every meeting should be an email, especially in sales.Beware of six of the worst questions to ask via email.
You want Google Docs hacks. Right? Our Google Docs master guide can speed up your workflow, with 25 hotkey commands, advanced features, and tons of little time-saving shortcuts.
DATA POINT
Corporate men go wrinkle-free: If you’ve spent too much time on Zoom, you know that you can’t help but notice every little flaw on your face in that dreaded self-view.
That could be why men in corporate America are increasingly seeking out cosmetic procedures to keep them looking young and beautiful, perBusiness Insider.
The number of men getting cosmetic procedures in the US increased by 8% from 2022 to 2023, according to a survey from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Botox — or should we say “brotox” — in particular saw a surge: procedures increased 5.55% among male patients between 2022 and 2023.
There might be more than vanity driving the wrinkle-busting trend. In a recent AARP study, ~64% of workers ages 50+ reported seeing or experiencing age discrimination in the workplace.
AROUND THE WEB
📖 On this day: In 1892, the first issue of Vogue was published with an illustration of a debutante on its cover.
🍞 How to:Bread lessons, but with the help of a full-stack engineer.
🗞️ Newsletter:Keep up with the rapid changes in AI and learn how to integrate it into your life.
🌍 That’s interesting:The Zamani Project is a digital archive of heritage sites across 18 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
