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As the holiday season approaches, small business owners will be relieved to hear about Google Chrome’s latest autofill improvements. With the hectic pace of end-of-year shopping and planning, anything that reduces friction during online transactions is particularly welcome. Google aims to transform troublesome tasks into seamless experiences, allowing you to fill in forms faster and more efficiently than ever. In a recent press release, Google announced four key enhancements to Chrome’s autofill functionality. These updates address everyday challenges that many small business owners face, especially as they juggle digital tasks with momentous year-end responsibilities. The new features are designed to save clicks, streamline processes, and ultimately free up valuable time. The first major enhancement caters specifically to those who are signed into their Google Accounts. Chrome now has a deeper integration with Google services, meaning it can seamlessly access essential information like your name and email address when needed. This is particularly important for busy entrepreneurs who regularly sign up for new services, platforms, or newsletters. “The improvements aim to manage and anticipate user needs better, especially during high-demand times, such as the holidays,” a Google spokesperson noted. With automatic population of forms with previously saved information, owners can save precious minutes that can be redirected toward expanding their businesses or enjoying holiday festivities. Moreover, these autofill updates are set to apply not just to personal accounts but also to business accounts. This means elements like business emails and branded company information can similarly be filled in, making for a quicker onboarding process for new services. One less step means more time to focus on what really matters—growing your business. For small business owners who take e-commerce seriously, these changes are vital. Streamlined customer experiences directly translate into increased sales, as potential customers are often deterred by complicated checkouts. By ensuring that customers can swiftly input their information without tedious form-filling, businesses effectively reduce cart abandonment rates and improve overall user satisfaction. However, while these updates seem beneficial, some potential challenges merit attention. One consideration is data security and how much personal information entrepreneurs are comfortable allowing Chrome to access. The more personalized autofill becomes, the more sensitive information could be at stake. Small business owners should take the time to review their autofill settings and understand what personal data is being shared, so they can make informed decisions on its use. Another aspect small business owners may want to consider is the learning curve associated with these new tools. While Google aims for simplicity, there may be a transition period as users adapt to the updated features. The interface might manifest slight differences that require user familiarity. For a busy owner who may not have time for a longer adaptation phase, initial obstacles could create temporary disruptions. Despite these challenges, the potential for efficiency and time savings remains significant. As businesses gear up for holiday sales and promotions, having a reliable, fast, and easy method for both themselves and their customers to navigate online forms can lead to immediate rewards. Embracing technology that simplifies repetitive, administrative tasks can create a competitive edge during the busy shopping period. As Google Chrome continues to evolve, the implications for small business owners become increasingly pertinent. These autofill improvements can not only enhance personal productivity but also lead to better customer experiences—keys to thriving in today’s digital marketplace. To learn more about these enhancements from Google, you can visit the original post here. The holiday season is often a make-or-break time for many small businesses, making efficiency optimization all the more essential. Embracing innovations like Chrome’s autofill can ultimately create a smoother, more gratifying experience for both business owners and their customers. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Chrome’s New Autofill Features Simplify Holiday Shopping and Travel" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

As the holiday season approaches, small business owners will be relieved to hear about Google Chrome’s latest autofill improvements. With the hectic pace of end-of-year shopping and planning, anything that reduces friction during online transactions is particularly welcome. Google aims to transform troublesome tasks into seamless experiences, allowing you to fill in forms faster and more efficiently than ever. In a recent press release, Google announced four key enhancements to Chrome’s autofill functionality. These updates address everyday challenges that many small business owners face, especially as they juggle digital tasks with momentous year-end responsibilities. The new features are designed to save clicks, streamline processes, and ultimately free up valuable time. The first major enhancement caters specifically to those who are signed into their Google Accounts. Chrome now has a deeper integration with Google services, meaning it can seamlessly access essential information like your name and email address when needed. This is particularly important for busy entrepreneurs who regularly sign up for new services, platforms, or newsletters. “The improvements aim to manage and anticipate user needs better, especially during high-demand times, such as the holidays,” a Google spokesperson noted. With automatic population of forms with previously saved information, owners can save precious minutes that can be redirected toward expanding their businesses or enjoying holiday festivities. Moreover, these autofill updates are set to apply not just to personal accounts but also to business accounts. This means elements like business emails and branded company information can similarly be filled in, making for a quicker onboarding process for new services. One less step means more time to focus on what really matters—growing your business. For small business owners who take e-commerce seriously, these changes are vital. Streamlined customer experiences directly translate into increased sales, as potential customers are often deterred by complicated checkouts. By ensuring that customers can swiftly input their information without tedious form-filling, businesses effectively reduce cart abandonment rates and improve overall user satisfaction. However, while these updates seem beneficial, some potential challenges merit attention. One consideration is data security and how much personal information entrepreneurs are comfortable allowing Chrome to access. The more personalized autofill becomes, the more sensitive information could be at stake. Small business owners should take the time to review their autofill settings and understand what personal data is being shared, so they can make informed decisions on its use. Another aspect small business owners may want to consider is the learning curve associated with these new tools. While Google aims for simplicity, there may be a transition period as users adapt to the updated features. The interface might manifest slight differences that require user familiarity. For a busy owner who may not have time for a longer adaptation phase, initial obstacles could create temporary disruptions. Despite these challenges, the potential for efficiency and time savings remains significant. As businesses gear up for holiday sales and promotions, having a reliable, fast, and easy method for both themselves and their customers to navigate online forms can lead to immediate rewards. Embracing technology that simplifies repetitive, administrative tasks can create a competitive edge during the busy shopping period. As Google Chrome continues to evolve, the implications for small business owners become increasingly pertinent. These autofill improvements can not only enhance personal productivity but also lead to better customer experiences—keys to thriving in today’s digital marketplace. To learn more about these enhancements from Google, you can visit the original post here. The holiday season is often a make-or-break time for many small businesses, making efficiency optimization all the more essential. Embracing innovations like Chrome’s autofill can ultimately create a smoother, more gratifying experience for both business owners and their customers. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Chrome’s New Autofill Features Simplify Holiday Shopping and Travel" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Santa keeps delivering for quantum computing investors this year. On Monday, shares of well-known quantum computing firms shot up by double digits, with D-Wave Quantum stock up almost 15% and Quantum Computing Inc. up 11%. Shares of IonQ Inc. and Rigetti Computing were likewise up roughly 10%. The exact catalyst spurring those increases is unclear. It may have initially been sparked in part by D-Wave’s Monday announcement that it would be attending the CES 2026 trade show next month. The Palo Alto-based company plans to showcase its “award-winning annealing quantum computing technology, hybrid quantum-classical solvers, and real-world customer use cases that are demonstrating measurable performance benefits, often beyond classical computing alone.” Quantum computing stocks have seen strong growth in 2025 Aside from that announcement, there may simply be ongoing excitement about the quantum space in general. Publicly traded quantum computing firms have captivated investors over the past year or more, despite the speculative nature of the underlying technology that some say will transform the computer industry. A June report published by McKinsey & Company dug into the appeal, saying that “surging investment and faster-than-expected innovation could propel the quantum market to $100 billion in a decade.” It added that as quantum computing startups have received more funding from both public and private sources, the technology itself has started seeing more commercial deployment, and companies are also making progress in patenting the technology they’re developing. Year-to-date growth for these stocks has been mostly impressive and in some cases eye-popping. As of Tuesday morning, D-Wave shares are up 235% since January 1. IonQ shares are up 25%, and Rigetti shares are up 34%. The outlier is Quantum Computing Inc., which has seen its stock price fall 35% year-to-date. Will the end-of-year quantum rally last? It’s unclear how long the holiday rally is going to last, but some profit-taking already seems to be underway. As of early trading on Tuesday morning, D-Wave shares had fallen roughly 3%, while Rigetti was down around 1.58%. Shares in Quantum Computing Inc. IonQ were roughly flat. View the full article

2025 is limping to a merciful end, so I'm taking a look back at the year in slang. Below are ten examples of youth patois, chosen for both their popularity and for what they reveal about generations A and Z. Like most slang, these words and phrases evolved over time, so while many didn't first appear in 2025, but this is the year they gained popularity. (If you want a more complete list of youth slang, check out my guide to Gen Z and Alpha slang.) 6-7By far the most popular slang word of 2025 was "6-7." These two previously unremarkable numerals rose to unprecedented popularity with young people this year, to the consternation of legions of educators and parents. It's perfect Gen A slang because it doesn't have a literal meaning, like a lot of younger people culture, but it's a sort of self-contained joke. Often, the idea is to use the phrase in conversation: if someone asks how tall you are, what you scored on a test, or what time it is, you might respond “six-seeeeeven.” Hilarious. 6-7 took off when Philadelphia artist Skrilla released "Doot Doot (6 7)" in February. From there, it was repeated in schoolyards and TikTok posts for no reason except maybe that it's fun to say. In a month or two, 6-7 reached full slang saturation, and everyone learned what it means (or doesn't mean). Dictionary.com named 6-7 its word of the year. It spawned spin-off numbers like 41 and 93. Older people waited for it to end, but 6-7 didn't end. We're almost a year in, and kids are still saying it constantly. So it means something to them. But what? 6-7's lack of literal meaning highlights the difficulty of defining a generation that seems uninterested in (or unable to) define itself. BrainrotBrainrot describes online content, usually videos and meme images, that are stupid and meaninglessness. They're generally loud and assaultive, too: Brainrot is not subtle. It also described the supposed effect that consuming this kind of material has on kids. One of the earliest and most well known pieces of brainrot is "Skibiddi Toilet," a series of YouTube videos that has billions of views. The genre has evolved from there, and now often consists of reframing and remixing obscure memes to create content that is almost entirely absent of meaning, like this Italian brainrot. Younger kids particularly spend a ton of time watching brainrot content, so it is likely shaping the collective worldview of Generation Alpha, but it's hard to say what the result will be. Slop"Slop" describes the hundreds of millions of cheesy-looking, unsettling, AI-generated images, videos, and songs that have hit the internet since artificial intelligence gained popularity over the last couple years. Ease of production means that slop is rapidly taking over human-produced content, and younger people will live in a slop-dominated future. As a generation, they may have more intellectual and artistic connection to machines than they will with other humans. MasonA Mason (or Mason 67 Kid) is a white, suburban Gen Alpha boy who plays baseball, rocks a fluffy “ice cream” haircut, and says "6-7" a lot. His sunglasses are Pit Vipers. He wears Yeezy slides. His polyester-as-hell ice cream shorts can be purchased at Dick's Sporting Goods. There's no way to know whether the word "Mason" will resonate enough to be remembered later, but it is, as far as I know, the first popular slang term to describe a dominant subculture in Generation Alpha. If it sticks around, it could be the equivalent of describing Boomers as "hippies" or Gen X as "slackers." "Reheating your own nachos"This slang phrase describes artists whose new works are seen as trying to recapture what was good about their previous artistic output. It's not a widely used phrase outside of online fandom communities, but I'm including it to represent the kind of hyper-specific slang that comes from the relative rarity of shared cultural experiences among young people. They're balkanized, and every fandom, hobby, and interest group has its own language that is often not understood outside of the specific group. SendyAn adjective that describes a person who does bold and/or exciting things, "sendy" is often used in the phrase "let’s get sendy," which means something like “let’s do something big/crazy.” It also often means "Iet's get drunk." It's an example of a slang word coming from a niche community and spreading into the larger culture. It started in rock-climbing communities in the '80s or '90s, where “ascend it" was shortened to "send it" and used to encourage people to "go for it. "Send it" was then adopted by skaters, snowboarders, and other action-sports fans, and eventually slid into the mainstream culture when it was used in this video from influencers The Nelk Boys. Being able to so often pinpoint the exact source of a slang word is another unique feature of Gens Z and A. 80/20 rule80/20 can refer to various scientific and organization principles, but that's not how kids usually use it. An axiom popular in online incel spaces, the 80/20 rule is the idea that 80% of women only date the "top" 20% of men. The "male loneliness epidemic" and increased social isolation resulted in many younger men accepting controversial, unproven ideas like this as empirical truth, and they have spread from online communities of misfits to the general population of Generations A and Z. Performative maleThis insult is aimed at young men whose tastes, hobbies, and lifestyle are seen as a performance aimed at obtaining societal approval, especially the approval of young women. Like the 80/20 rule, "performative male" came from online spaces dominated by incels, and has since spread to the larger culture and expanded in meaning to the point that even reading in public is seen as performative. The problem with "performative male" is that it only refers to one kind of performance. The opposite performance of masculinity—the "Alpha male" envisioned by Andrew Tate and various lesser Tate-lets—is thus seen as genuine. It's an illustration of younger people's growing toxic masculinity as well as the strict policing of self-expression that comes from every public moment ending in potentially viral online ridicule. Aura farmingThe flip side of the "performative male," aura farming is intentionally cultivating and projecting a cool, charismatic, or impressive image and getting away with it. It's generally seen as a good thing: Someone who is succeeding at their public "performance" of the self and actually coming across as cool to others is aura farming. Although one of pitfalls of aura farming is trying too hard, an experience that isn't native to younger generations—in the past, you might have called it "being a poser." "Beez in the trap""Beez" means something like "I am always" and "trap" comes from "trap house," but has a more broader meaning like "place of business." So "beez in the trap" means something like "I am at the place of business, hustling," but I'm not including it here for the words, but for how they took off online in 2025 and what it says about young people. The rest of the slang in this column paints a fairly bleak picture of youth, but we shouldn't forget the creativity, passion, and heart that also defines Generations Z and A. "Beez in the trap" is an example of how younger people are re-mixing and re-shaping the culture we've left them into something of their own that is often amazing. The meme works like this: Two people stand back to back. Person one passionately lip-syncs the chorus of 4 Non Blonde's song, "What's Going On." The camera rotates to person two, who chimes in with Nicki Minaj's less existentially angsty track. It's one of those things that just sparks joy in a way that defies explanation and is quintessentially "young person in 2025." Enjoy: View the full article

Across the country, a growing sentiment suggests the university degree is an artifact of a bygone era, a depreciating asset in an economy obsessed with speed. A recent Gallup poll confirms this shift, revealing that Americans’ confidence in the value of a college education has plummeted to a 15-year low. Nowhere is this skepticism louder than in my own backyard. In Silicon Valley, the “skip college” mantra has evolved from a “hot take” to accepted wisdom. Fueled by the rise of generative AI, the logic is seductive: If artificial intelligence can code, write copy, and analyze data faster than a junior employee, why spend four years and a small fortune on skills a bot will master before you graduate? It is a compelling argument. It is also fundamentally wrong. As the CEO of an AI company, I witness the trajectory of automation daily. I see exactly what our models can do, and I recognize the massive disruption coming for knowledge work. Yet, my conclusion is the exact opposite of the current narrative. As AI automates technical execution, the core purpose of the university sharpens. Far from making college obsolete, the AI revolution is making the benefits of higher education like wisdom, maturity, and the forging of mental models, the most critical economic differentiator a human can possess. THE COMMODITY OF “HOW,” THE VALUE OF “WHY” For the last two decades, higher education has been sold largely as vocational training. You go to school to learn a hard skill like computer science, accounting, or law, that you then trade for a salary. Under this transactional model, the skeptics are right. If college is just a place to download technical syntax into your brain, it is inefficient. AI is rapidly demonetizing the ability to simply do things. However, the university’s true value was never entirely the how but it was always the why. In an AI-native world, the technical barrier to entry is collapsing. Soon, natural language will be the only programming language required. When anyone can build an app, draft a legal brief, or design a product with a few prompts, execution becomes a commodity. The premium shifts to the ability to discern what to build, why it matters, and how it impacts the human ecosystem. This requires a type of thinking that is rarely self-taught. It requires the kind of broad, interdisciplinary exposure that a university curriculum provides. We don’t need more people who can optimize a sorting algorithm; we need people who can debate the ethics of that algorithm, understand the sociological impact of its deployment, and navigate the geopolitical landscape it operates within. COLLEGE AS SCAFFOLDING FOR THE MIND Beyond the curriculum, the “skip college” contingent ignores the university’s profound developmental role. They view the four-year degree as a delay of adulthood. I view it as the necessary scaffolding for it. The years between 18 and 22 are a neurological and psychological crucible. The brain is finalizing its development; identities are solidifying. The university environment provides a unique sandbox where young adults can collide with diverse philosophies, navigate complex social hierarchies, and fail in a relatively low-stakes environment. When I hire for leadership roles, I rarely seek the fastest coder in the room. I seek resilience. I seek the ability to collaborate with dissenting voices and the maturity to navigate ambiguity. These are traits honed in lecture halls, seminar debates, and student organizations just as much as they are in internships. THE SHELF-LIFE OF SKILLS VERSUS MINDSET Critics often weigh the cost of tuition against the starting salary of a graduate’s first job. But in a world of accelerating technological velocity, the specific skills learned at 20 are often obsolete by 25. To skip college for a specific trade or tech stack is to bet one’s career on a snapshot in time. A university education, particularly one grounded in the liberal arts and fundamental sciences, plays a longer game. It teaches you how to learn. It builds a mental operating system capable of updating itself. Consider the “hallucination” problem in large language models. To effectively use these tools, a human must possess critical thinking skills robust enough to audit the machine. They need a foundational knowledge of history, logic, and science to discern when the AI is fabricating reality. The worker who skips college risks becoming a passive consumer of AI output while the college graduate becomes its orchestrator. That is a difference in career trajectory that may not appear in year-one earnings, but compounds exponentially over a lifetime. A CALL FOR A HUMAN RENAISSANCE Silicon Valley loves efficiency. We love to optimize. And yes, the modern university is often inefficient, expensive, and bureaucratic. It is ripe for disruption and reform. But let’s not confuse the need for reform with the need for abolition. The “skip college” narrative is an oversimplification. It assumes that because machines are becoming more intelligent, humans can afford to be less educated. The opposite is true. As we hand over more cognitive labor to AI, we free humans to operate at the peak of their intelligence. We are entering an era where philosophy, ethics, creative synthesis, and interpersonal leadership will be the most high-value skills in the global economy. We should not encourage the next generation to skip the one institution dedicated to developing those traits. We should encourage them to go, but with a new purpose. Do not go to college just to get a job. Go to college to build the kind of complex, adaptable, and nuanced mind that no AI can replicate. The future isn’t about competing with machines. It is about becoming more human. That is an education worth the investment. Bhavin Shah is CEO and cofounder of Moveworks. View the full article

We used to argue whether design was about aesthetics or about functionality. But in 2025, those conversations seemed downright quaint. Simpler debates for a simpler time. Now we’re wondering if craft can survive the age of AI, and if we’ll ever escape the politicization of every brand and object again. For the December episode of our podcast By Design, I discussed these trends and more with Fast Company senior editor Liz Stinson. We were joined by some of our brightest friends in the industry who shared their biggest own moments in design for the year, including Paola Antonelli (senior curator at MoMA), Cliff Kuang (FC Design’s first editor and senior staff designer at Google), Forest Young (Global Design & AI Resident at Wolff Olins), and Elizabeth Goodspeed (editor-at-large at Its Nice That). Just try to guess who called out vibe coding, and who highlighted Sabrina Carpenter’s latest tour. Tune in through Apple or Spotify, and please give us a few stars if you like it. See you in 2026! View the full article

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Novo Nordisk’s weight-loss pill on Monday, giving the Danish drugmaker a leg up in the race to market a potent oral medication for shedding pounds as it looks to regain lost ground from rival Eli Lilly. The pill is 25 milligrams of semaglutide, the same active ingredient in injectable Wegovy and Ozempic, and will be sold under the brand name Wegovy. Novo already sells an oral semaglutide for type 2 diabetes, Rybelsus. The approval could help spur a turnaround for Novo after a rocky year of sliding shares, profit warnings and slowing sales of its injectable Wegovy amid intense competition from Lilly and pressure from compounded versions. U.S.-listed shares of Novo jumped 8% and Lilly fell 1% in extended trading after the approval announcement. A 64-week, late-stage study showed participants who took 25 mg of oral semaglutide once daily lost an average of 16.6% of their body weight, compared with 2.7% for those on a placebo. The pill was approved for chronic weight management in adults with obesity or overweight and at least one related health condition, broadening the potential patient pool at a time when insurers, employers and governments are wrestling with spiraling healthcare costs related to obesity. It could help open the door to tens of millions of untapped patients in a global market, forecast to be worth some $150 billion a year by next decade. “You’re going to see a huge uptake in the patient base as new indications open up and as oral versions hit the market,” said Anand Iyer, chief AI officer at telehealth firm Welldoc. Novo is banking on the pill’s first-to-market advantage to revitalize sales in the U.S., where it has lost ground to Lilly. Lilly’s next-generation weight-loss pill orforglipron could be approved as soon as late March. David Moore, Novo’s executive vice president of U.S. operations, said a daily pill could boost interest and uptake of the drug. Novo is manufacturing the pill in the United States in North Carolina and has been building up supplies of the pill “for some time” to ensure that it has “ample supply”, he said. Some 40% of American adults are obese, U.S. government data shows, and around 12% say they currently take GLP-1 drugs, according to a poll published last month by health policy research organization KFF. Novo had a first-to-market advantage with injectables, but initially struggled to meet explosive demand. Eventually, Lilly got ahead with its rival Zepbound, which now leads for weekly U.S. prescriptions. Novo and analysts say a weight-loss pill would address injection hesitancy and expand access. Analysts say pills could capture around a one-fifth share of the market by 2030, particularly among patients who prefer simpler and less invasive treatment options. “The pills will not displace or replace the injections,” said Christopher Chrisman, a managing director and partner at consultancy BCG, adding some patients may prefer to continue with weekly injections. “But pills offer clear advantages to some people. There’s travel convenience and no need for a fridge,” he added. PRICING AGREEMENTS Novo said the 1.5-milligram starting dose of the Wegovy pill will be available in early January. Novo and Lilly had agreed to offer starter doses of their weight‑loss pills at $149 per month for the U.S. government Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs and to cash-paying customers via the White House’s direct-to-consumer The PresidentRx site. Novo recently cut the cash price for Wegovy to $349 a month, from $499. U.S. list prices are about $1,000 per month or more. Novo CEO Mike Doustdar said in November that people using weight-loss drugs show more “consumer-like” behavior than its traditional diabetes patients, acknowledging that the company needs to adapt to this and bring in new expertise. Whether another semaglutide product can solve Novo’s current ills remains to be seen. Novo’s oral semaglutide needs to be taken in the morning on an empty stomach, 30 minutes before eating, drinking or using any other oral medication. Lilly’s pill does not have those restrictions. (Reporting by Maggie Fick, Patrick Wingrove, Mariam Sunny, Christy Santhosh and Mrinalika Roy; Editing by Adam Jourdan, Bill Berkrot, Rosalba O’Brien and Jamie Freed) —Maggie Fick and Mariam Sunny, Reuters View the full article

My Neato D5 Connected was once a willing workhorse, but, today, things aren't looking so good. I recently caught an email from the company alerting me that it shut down my vacuum's cloud servers. Now, my once capable Neato is just a LiDAR-equipped vacuum with a soul that's been deprecated. Without cloud servers, the "smart" is gone. This could be the lobotomized future awaiting Roomba users. Earlier this month, the company behind the pioneering smart vacuum, iRobot, filed for bankruptcy. The remainder of the business will go to its primary manufacturing partner—the one it owes all that money to—Shenzhen Picea Robotics. It's a stark reminder that the longevity of a connected smart device depends entirely on the financial health of the company that made it. I'm not giving up, however. I'm now attempting to get the Neato D5 back into business. Whether you have a Neato, a Roomba, or another robot vacuum approaching the end of its connected, you can mirror my steps to keep your device cleaning. Switch your robot vacuum to manual The email that Neato sent out during Thanksgiving week letting me know my robot vacuum was done for. Credit: Florence Ion/Lifehacker Following the above email, I tried earnestly to get the Neato back online and back into a routine. I ended up reviving my original account by some miracle, though I have absolutely no access to the vacuum via the app as it currently is. Luckily, there is already a community of folks working to restore the cloud service that once enabled Neato's robot vacuums to schedule themselves. Neato-connected lets you use Home Assistant to manage the brand's devices without the cloud. This is the best choice for experts if the goal is to revive the robot vacuum to its full capacities. Neato has already said that the robots will continue to work manually. The D5 has LiDAR, so it can still physically "see" its way around a floor plan. And although you can't schedule the device or remotely control it, you can still get up and push a button to start a cleaning session. If you want to be super extra, Switchbot makes an affordable button-pushing gadget you can install near the vacuum dock to trigger it from your phone, essentially "hacking" a remote start. The other headache of trying to keep old hardware from going extinct is figuring out if its parts and mechanics still work. My Neato D5, for example, still hasn't successfully managed a manual cleaning session. After some troubleshooting, which involved several factory resets, disconnecting and reconnecting the battery, and cleaning debris from all the sensors, it turns out that one of the LiDAR turrets—the hat on top—needs a fix. The vacuum won't start until that's addressed, since it literally can't navigate without that system spinning at a precise speed. The Neato D5 is going to require some surgery. I am either going to fix it by stabilizing a band, or buy a replacement part from eBay and have someone more tech-savvy help with the install. There's always the option to donate it to a better cause, too. Rather than hold on to an eight pound paperweight rotting away in the utility closet, it can get a second life with a local robotics group, since Neato vacuums have a reputation for being highly scrappable due to their laser sensors. Until I get the Neato D5 serviced, it will not manually clean. Credit: Florence Ion/Lifehacker Even cheaper robot vacuums, like an Ecovacs, can find a second life this way. While they aren't as easily "hackable" as Neato (or a Roomba), there are plenty of high school robotics teams that can disassemble the devices to retrieve motors and wheels. Never throw a robot vacuum into the trash. If the device is truly dead and unusable for parts, look into responsibly recycling the Lithium-ion battery as well as the plastic and metal shell with an e-waste recycler. Preparing for the end of RoombaIf you own a Roomba, you aren't offline yet. iRobot is currently undergoing a restructuring, and the company has stated that app functionality and firmware updates will continue as usual. But inevitable change is coming if Neato's trajectory is any indication. We don't know exactly how Roomba's business will go now that it has changed ownership. Existing Roombas rely on the cloud for much of their flagship functionality, like Smart Maps, which help with specific room targeting. Losing the ability would be a major blow to the hardware's legacy. You should prepare for what's to come, even if it involves a little over-preparing. Stockpile replacement parts now, while they're still available. Although Roomba's manufacturer has taken over the business, older models will fall by the wayside as a new generation of robot vacuums is introduced. If you want to get a few more lives out of your Roomba, buy at least a two-year supply of authentic, first-party brushes, rollers, and HEPA filters. Skip the third-party stuff. You'll also want to invest in Roomba's dual-mode virtual wall barriers. Buy them used on eBay. These will come in handy if Roomba's servers ever go offline, since they act as infrared lighthouses to help direct the Roomba's path. You'll be able to use these with Roomba's "Clean" button, its manual mode that doesn't require the internet to start. You'll also want to look into downloading your Smart Maps, in case you can integrate them later. If that isn't enough for you, there is a vibrant community of tinkerers who have long been dedicated to liberating Roombas from the clutches of the cloud. Projects like rest980 and dorita980 let tech-savvy users host their own local control servers, though this often involves a third-party device such as a Home Assistant hub. Ending the e-waste cycleHistory tends to repeat itself in the gadget world. You can at least future-proof your buying decision by recognizing that obsolescence is a possibility down the line. This applies to any connected gadget, from big-name brands to small ones. Matter, the smart home specification that's been quietly rolling out over the past few years, will be more helpful for aging smart gadgets like this, especially since its latest release. It now enables local smart-home control for robot vacuums, so you don't need a cloud service to connect. The vacuum talks directly to your phone or smart hub instead. There are also brands like Roborock that advertise that their robot vacuums have local-only modes. You can even install another community-managed project, Valetudo, on those brands and go completely corporate-free. Or, you could go offline. Most connected home gadgets have variants that use a physical remote control instead. Eufy still makes versions of its robot vacuums without wifi, with no cloud features to worry about going extinct. I'm waiting before I buy eBay parts for the Neato D5 Connected. I need to see if I can fix what's broken with some finagling. It's a bummer I didn't think of preparing for the end of the device's life earlier—like when Neato's parent company announced its eventual shutdown two years ago—to give it a second life and save it from abject hardware failure. If all else fails, I can find it a good home with a robotics team or educational program that can put its parts to good use. I will have considered that a well-lived life for a connected gadget. View the full article

Figure surpassing expectations was boosted by spending related to healthcare and artificial intelligenceView the full article

Markets are flat early Tuesday in holiday-thinned trading before head of the release of new data on how the U.S. economy fared in the third quarter. Futures for the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq are all essentially unchanged before the opening bell. Shares of the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk jumped more than 7% overnight after U.S. regulators approved a pill version of the blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy, the first daily oral medication to treat obesity. Novo’s Wegovy is a GLP-1 drug that works like widely used injectables to mimic a natural hormone that controls appetite and feelings of fullness. Again touching new records, the price of gold rose 1.2% early Tuesday to $4,523.30 an ounce, adding to its consistent gains throughout the year. Silver rose 1.7%, to $69.71 an ounce. Oil prices edged higher early Tuesday after jumping more than 2% on Monday when the U.S. Coast Guard said it was pursuing another sanctioned oil tanker in the Caribbean. U.S. benchmark crude added 4 cents to $58.05 per barrel. The price of Brent crude, the international standard, gained 7 cents to $62.14 per barrel. Even after five straight days of gains, oil prices are down about 19% since the beginning of 2025 with demand lagging. U.S. factory conditions are weakening with activity readings hitting five-month lows, according to S&P Global. Markets in the U.S. will close early on Wednesday and remain closed on Thursday for the Christmas holiday. Yet several economic reports during the shortened week could shed more light on the condition and direction of the U.S. economy. The government on Tuesday releases the first of three estimates on gross domestic product, a reflection of how the broader U.S. economy fared in the third quarter. Also, the Conference Board will offer results from its December consumer confidence survey. Wednesday will bring a weekly update from the Labor Department on applications for jobless benefits, a proxy for U.S. layoffs. In Europe at midday Germany’s DAX edged 0.1% higher, while the CAC 40 in Paris slipped 0.2%. Britain’s FTSE 100 was unchanged. In Asian, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 was flat at 50,412,87 and the dollar fell against the Japanese yen after officials in Tokyo warned they would intervene if the yen weakened further. The dollar traded at 155.95 yen, down from 157.04 yen late Monday. Instead of gaining after the Bank of Japan raised its key policy rate on Friday, the yen had weakened, drawing the usual objections from the Finance Ministry to larger than usual currency fluctuations. “The hint of currency intervention proved to be such a serious threat that the yen, which had been significantly oversold after the Bank of Japan meeting, rose from the ashes,” Alex Kruptsikevich of FXPro said in a commentary. The euro climbed to $1.1797 from $1.1762. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gave up early gains to fall 0.1% to 25,774.14. The Shanghai Composite index edged 0.1% higher, to 3,919.98. South Korea’s Kospi added 0.3% to 4,117.32. Shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean’s shares jumped 12.5% after President Donald The President said it would help build a new class of U.S. battleship at the Hanwha Philly shipyard. The S&P/ASX 200 in Australia jumped 1.1% to 8,795.70. In Taiwan, the Taiex advanced 0.6%, while India’s Sensex was nearly unchanged. —Elaine Kurtenbach and Matt Ott, AP Business Writers View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The Sony ULT Field 5 is currently $191.95 on Amazon, down from $349.99, and that price drop is what finally makes this speaker feel properly positioned. Sony ULT Field 5 Wireless Portable Bluetooth Speaker $191.95 at Amazon $349.99 Save $158.04 Get Deal Get Deal $191.95 at Amazon $349.99 Save $158.04 At full price, it was competing with larger, louder options that offered more raw power for the money. With this discount, it makes more sense as a mid-size outdoor speaker that prioritizes bass, durability, and flexibility. PCMag gave it an “excellent” rating, largely because it delivers deeper low-end sound than most speakers in its size class without becoming unwieldy. This is neither a pocket speaker nor a party cannon. It is designed to strike a balance between portability and sound impact, where both are important. Physically, the Field 5 feels built for abuse. The rectangular body is wrapped in a tough fabric mesh, with passive radiators on each end and subtle LED lighting around them. Those lights can be customized or turned off entirely. The speaker is rated IP67, so dust is a non-issue, and brief drops into water should not cause panic. On top, the controls are simple and tactile, including a large ULT button that changes how the bass behaves. ULT 1 leans into deeper rumble, while ULT 2 pulls things tighter for a more punchy sound. Bass is the clear strength here. It hits harder than you would expect from a speaker this size. The trade-off is in the highs, which can sound a little thin unless you tweak the EQ. Connectivity is where the Field 5 shows its versatility. Bluetooth 5.3 supports multipoint connections, and Sony’s Party Connect lets you link multiple compatible speakers, though they all need to be from Sony, since this speaker does not support Auracast. There is also a 3.5mm AUX input, which is becoming rare on portable speakers and is useful for wired sources. Codec support includes SBC, AAC, and LDAC, which is a plus for Android users who care about audio quality. Battery life is rated at up to 25 hours, and fast charging delivers about two hours of playback from a 10-minute charge. The USB-C port can also charge your phone in a pinch. This speaker is still pricey compared to simpler Bluetooth options, and it favors bass over balanced clarity. Still, if you want a rugged speaker with strong low-end and flexible inputs, this deal makes it far easier to justify. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $199.00 (List Price $249.00) Sony WH-1000XM5 — $248.00 (List Price $399.99) Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ 10.9" 64GB Wi-Fi Tablet (Graphite) — $139.99 (List Price $219.99) Apple Watch Series 11 [GPS 46mm] Smartwatch with Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band - M/L. Sleep Score, Fitness Tracker, Health Monitoring, Always-On Display, Water Resistant — $329.00 (List Price $429.00) Blink Outdoor 4 1080p 3-Camera Kit With Sync Module Core — $74.99 (List Price $189.99) Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Plus — $29.99 (List Price $49.99) Meta Quest 3 512GB Mixed Reality VR Headset with Controllers — $499.00 (List Price $499.00) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

In December 2024, our survey with Harris Poll asked B2B marketers to share their top areas for investment in 2025. Artificial intelligence tools were at the top of the list. It also wasn’t surprising to see the AI architects named Time magazine’s Person of the Year as the ripple effects of the technology continue across every sector. And in 2026, we will see B2B decision makers do something new: return to basics andembrace AI to reimagine what’s possible. This approach reveals a compelling duality in how marketers are planning for 2026. There’s a return to what we’ve always known while also betting big on AI as a force not only reshaping work, but rewriting today’s B2B marketer and modern buyer playbook. According to our most recent Harris Poll survey, next year will bring a clear acknowledgement that while the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed, the way we execute these absolutely will. THE PENDULUM SWINGS BACK For years, marketers have chased the next shiny object: new formats, new platforms, new channels. But the pendulum is swinging back. According to the survey, leaders say their biggest 2026 investments will focus on customer experience and brand building—not the newest social platform or the latest ad tech novelty. There’s a collective realization happening. In an environment of AI-enabled disruption, the brands with the strongest emotional equity and deepest buyer trust will win. By doubling down on loyalty, automation, and reputation, organizations can differentiate and ensure that every marketing dollar contributes to sustainable, long-term growth. Loyalty isn’t a metric anymore; it’s a moat. But this return to what works doesn’t necessarily mean a return to traditional tactics. AI ISN’T REPLACING STRATEGY More than half of marketing decision-makers (55%) expect AI to reshape both the development and execution of marketing strategies. That’s not a subtle shift. It means strategy will move from something built in quarterly cycles to something that updates dynamically based on behaviors, signals, and real-time learning. This shift requires marketers to embrace AI, not fear it. When positioned as a strategic input, AI enables strategy to evolve with the market and puts leaders in the strongest position to reach today’s modern buyer at the right time and place. AI becomes the connective tissue unifying audience data, creative insights, content intelligence, and activation. Audience understanding becomes dynamic as AI continuously interprets signals and behaviors to identify who’s truly in-market. Content and messaging adapt in real time as AI learns what resonates across channels. Orchestration becomes predictive, determining where buyers are most likely to engage next and routing the right message to the right surface. Measurement shifts from backward-looking to forward-driving, surfacing early signals that guide creative, budget, and activation decisions. The strategy itself becomes fluid, evolving, and continuously optimizing. Instead of asking, “Is my strategy right?” marketers will ask, “Is my strategy learning fast enough?” ZERO-CLICK IS RESHAPING BRAND COMPETITION Nearly half of marketing leaders (45%) believe AI-powered search and assistants will dramatically change how customers discover brands. That means marketers are beginning to understand a new reality: In 2026, competition happens before the click. In a zero-click environment, the buyer journey is no longer linear. People are forming opinions inside AI Overviews, chat assistants, recommendation engines, and result pages that summarize expertise without ever sending traffic your way. The “search → click → read → evaluate” journey marketers built their strategies around has been replaced by one where discovery and evaluation happen simultaneously—often without a website visit. Buyers may never land on your page, yet they’ve already developed a perception of your credibility, authority, and relevance. This shift demands a fundamentally different approach to visibility. It’s no longer enough to create great content; brands must create signals. Reputation, authority, and consistency become the new KPIs, because AI systems rely on patterns across the broader ecosystem, not just what lives on your domain. Zero-click environments reward brands that show up with clarity and coherence across every channel, not just the ones they own. The brands that win are the ones influencing the answer long before a user ever reaches a brand webpage. This isn’t a retreat from brand building; it’s an evolution of it. AI DOESN’T REPLACE THE BASICS, IT AMPLIFIES THEM The survey findings tell a clear story: AI doesn’t exempt marketers from doing the hard work of brand building; it makes that work even more essential. Rather than overshadowing fundamentals like loyalty, reputation, and customer experience, AI deepens their impact. It enables personalization at a level previously impossible and transforms audience understanding by replacing static personas with living intelligence. With AI orchestrating channels dynamically instead of treating them as disconnected tactics, the longstanding divide between brand and performance marketing collapses. The two disciplines become interdependent, each strengthened by AI’s ability to learn, predict, and adapt across the entire customer journey. But recognizing AI’s potential and operationalizing it are two very different things. The real competitive advantage in 2026 won’t come from experimenting with a handful of tools; it will come from embedding AI across the full lifecycle, including strategy, creation, activation, measurement, and optimization. Marketers already feel this shift coming. AI is becoming the operating system of modern marketing, not an accessory. The question for the year ahead isn’t whether marketers will use AI; it’s whether they will scale it in a way that elevates the core principles that have always distinguished the strongest brands. BACK TO BASICS, BUT SMARTER The headline for 2026: AI is making the basics matter more. Marketers are rediscovering that trust, loyalty, and brand still determine winners, while embracing AI to execute those fundamentals with far greater intelligence, speed, and impact. And next year, the brands that thrive will be the ones that combine timeless principles with transformative technology—going back to basics, but this time with an engine powerful enough to take them further than ever before. Great marketing and advertising have always been an art. AI doesn’t diminish that; it simply elevates it. Keith Turco is CEO of Madison Logic. View the full article

In the fall of 2024, six college students joined forces to start an AI company together. Five of them had met while studying computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The sixth, its CEO, was pursuing a degree in childhood and adolescent development at Sacramento State, with an eye on becoming a grade-school teacher. That wasn’t the only thing that made him an outlier. He also happened to have been in the tech industry for well over thirty years—longer than his fellow founders had been alive. The Georgia Tech students are Ian Boraks, Jacob Justice, Drake Kelly, Ella McCheney, and Abhinav Vemulapalli, all of whom happen to be 21. The Sac State student/tech veteran is Bill Nguyen, whose past startups amount to a guided tour of Silicon Valley trends over the years, from “push” technology to unified messaging to digital music to social networking to telehealth. Their new company, Olive.is—Olive for short—is developing technology to make AI better at grasping the full meaning of spoken communications, as conveyed by elements, such as inflection and dialect, that current models may gloss over. It plans to offer its tech as a service for enriching AI-powered applications in education and other areas. Olive’s name references the company’s ambitious hope of fostering better understanding—an olive branch, if you will—between humans and machines. It’s still in the process of researching and developing its AI model, and has raised $5 million in seed funding from education-focused venture capital firm Owl Ventures and Georgia Tech. The unusual founding team was a selling point to Owl, which also backed one of Nguyen’s previous ventures, Hazel Health. As students themselves, the Georgia Tech founders “are deeply connected and have a lot of recency with the ideal cohort of potential users that are going to benefit from all this technology,” says Owl’s Lyman Missimer. “But Bill is giving this team the full kind of Silicon Valley hustle out in the middle of Atlanta.” More than words can say When I first met Nguyen in 2006, he was already a Silicon Valley vet and burbling with enthusiasm for a company he’d founded called Lala, which helped people trade CDs through the mail. (It later moved into music streaming and was acquired by Apple in 2009.) His knack for high-energy pitchmanship helped his next company, the location-based, photo-centric social network Color, raise $41 million from firms such as Sequoia. It was ultimately best known for crashing and burning, as detailed in a 2011 Fast Company feature by Danielle Sacks. Today, Nguyen is as exuberant as ever when discussing Olive’s goals and origin story, and doesn’t seem to have aged nearly 20 years since our earliest encounter. As he explains it, AI models for turning speech into text, such as OpenAI’s Whisper, have gotten uncannily good at correctly transcribing the literal meaning of what they hear. Yet the words we choose hardly convey our intent all by themselves. Elements such as inflection matter, too—and are sometimes absolutely crucial to understanding what someone is trying to say. “There’s definitely a lot in human conversation that gets chopped off by LLMs,” says Nguyen. “For example, if you ask me a question and I go, “Yeeeeeees?”—he infuses the word with uncertainty—“it’s not really a ‘Yes.’ But an automated speech recognition system will basically truncate all that nuance, get rid of it, and just put it as a ’Yes.‘” If existing LLMs struggle with some of the subtleties of how we talk to each other, it’s at least in part because they’ve been trained on material that’s publicly available in vast quantities, such as podcasts. Such recordings “probably sound really, really clean and they’re great audio,” says Nguyen. “But that’s not how we actually converse.” Nguyen’s interest in this current limitation of AI is intertwined with his long-standing passion for education. Years before he went back to school to become a teacher himself—he’s halfway to earning his degree—he cofounded a public charter school near Lake Tahoe. As a result, he learned that few doctors in the area accepted Medicaid, greatly limiting student access to healthcare. That helped catalyze Hazel Health, which provides telehealth services through K-12 schools. It now serves 5,000 of them in 19 states. Bill NguyenElla McChesney The Hazel experience left Nguyen attuned to the real-world challenges schools face as they adopt technology. He provides an example relating to speech recognition. “In a school district, one of the things that they have to focus on is the ability to understand when to do an intervention for a student around reading,” he says. In theory, AI might help by analyzing audio of them speaking. But only if it understands what they’re saying, regardless of whether ”a student has a Mexican-American vernacular, African-American English vernacular, or Hawaiian vernacular.“ To complicate matters, “Children are especially hard [for AI to understand], because they have very limited vocabulary,” says cofounder McChesney. “So in order to express themselves, they find more creative ways to use words. And so what we’ve seen is that that can mean that models misinterpret them more, which can have negative consequences, especially when teachers are trying to leverage these tools to help them bring better experiences to the classroom.” The glimmer of opportunity in the idea of training AI models using audio that reflects how real people talk—especially students—led to Olive’s founding. How Nguyen, based in Tahoe, ended up collaborating with a bunch of young techies in Atlanta is a story in itself. At first, he noodled on the idea with Justice, who is his son as well as a fellow Olive founder. As they forged ahead, the project expanded to include more people from Justice’s social circle. McChesney, whose credentials include high-school work at the Department of Defense and four years interning at Lockheed Martin, had recently returned from a study trip to Korea when she joined the effort, right as Nguyen was prepping to pitch the company to investors. “I got a text while I was in Costco from Drake, and he’s like, ‘Bill wants your résumé, send it in the next 10 minutes,” she remembers. “Which would’ve been great if I wasn’t in a Costco with my phone at 5% and no cell service, because Costco is a giant steel box.” She Airdropped her CV to a friend, who sent it to Nguyen just in time. The Atlanta-based cofounders do much of their partnering with Nguyen over Discord, though they quickly ran into the limitations of typed messages as a form of collaboration. In their minds, that only underlined the richness of verbal communications and the importance of teaching AI to comprehend it. “We’d always end up doing late-night calls, because that was the easiest way to communicate amongst ourselves, and the easiest way to really get our ideas across and understand what people are saying,” says McChesney. “There’s no ambiguity, the way there is in a lot of these text messages, and we can iterate faster. That really inspired what we’re trying to do here.” It’s all in the data To overcome current AI models’ limitations when it comes to capturing how humans express themselves verbally, Olive had to start with better data. More specifically, it had to start with raw audio of people talking to each other in unscripted situations. “Our whole idea was if we can get really clean data sets, if we don’t remove any of the information, if we train a model that actually retains all of this context, then we can solve these mission-critical cases,” says Nguyen. More specifically, it decided to start with audio recordings of students engaged in conversations with professionals such as teachers and therapists—recorded, it stresses, with the participants’ permission and awareness that they could be used for training. As the company was finding sources of such material, Nguyen’s background at Hazel Health came in handy. “We worked with school districts, we worked with universities,” he says. “The data set is pretty extensive now. It’s north of 40,000 hours.” The company also built an iPhone app of its own, which I tried in pre-release form. Taking advantage of the beefy AI capabilities of Apple’s newest smartphone chips, it builds an understanding of the user’s needs by applying Olive’s models to verbal input. All processing is done on the phone, and input isn’t used for training purposes. Olive doesn’t see this app replacing other AI tools so much as enhancing them. For instance, you could talk into the Olive app at length about an app you’d like to create, then have it turn your verbal meanderings into a product requirements document to feed into a vibe-coding platform. “You‘re using your voice to have a more engaging conversation and actually hash it out,” says McChesney. “That’s what makes this so cool.” However, Olive isn’t building its business around this iPhone app. Nor does it intend to provide fully-baked applications based on its technology. Instead, it plans to offer its AI model as a cloud-based service. Other companies will be able to use it as a technological layer in their own creations, providing them with a deeper understanding of speech than they’d get by relying entirely on existing voice models. Along with possible uses in education—ranging from tutoring to helping scale up college counseling—Olive is targeting hiring, healthcare, and finance as areas where it hopes to find customers. “These are all high stakes, and they’re all regulated in terms of what you can do,” says Nguyen. They’re also all places where the limitations of existing AI may introduce harm that Olive hopes to overcome through better, fairer comprehension of a wider range of communications styles. “You want AI access to be more equitable,” says McChesney. “You want everyone to be able to leverage these tools, because these tools are inherently part of our workforce.” The company’s home page is currently devoted to a sobering blog post, “Covert Racism: The Voice Inside the Machine.” Heavily footnoted, it cites research that shows how prejudices are baked into AI in ways that can be difficult to detect even if its creators are actively trying to combat bias. “The part of it that’s mind-blowing to me is people are not getting jobs,” Nguyen says. “People are getting declined on loans. People are having adverse health effects. And no one knows why.” Olive’s potential to steer AI in a better direction might be particularly relevant in education, where the technology is still in the process of finding applications and the company has a shot at being foundational. ”Every major new technological shift is developed, built, and scaled, and then 10 years later it finally finds its way into education,” says Owl Ventures’ Missimer. “When we saw what Bill and team were building, we knew that the edtech market couldn’t wait 10 years for this type of technology, especially in a time where voice is becoming such a larger part of the technological stack.” With that in mind, Owl is helping to introduce Olive to other companies in its portfolio of education startups. They include Amira Learning, a 2025 Fast Company Next Big Things in Tech honoree that offers a suite of AI and neuroscience-based reading aids. Given that Olive’s strategy is to provide its AI model as an ingredient for other companies’ products, those kinds of relationships have everything to do with its long-term fate. For now, it remains tiny, though it’s already grown to nine people. Nguyen says he’s reveling in the hands-on experience of running something so tiny. At his previous, larger startups, “I, as the founder, was pretty separated from the actual engineering process,” says Nguyen, who is not an engineer by background. “But now I’m not. I’m in the code base. I check it every day. I know what’s happening with it.” Once again, he exudes enthusiasm. Once again, he’s working on something that taps into the tech industry’s current obsession. Nguyen, who dubbed himself “the Don Quixote of startups” in Sacks’ 2011 article, may not be destined to run Olive forever. (Did I mention his intention to become a grade-school teacher?) But if this startup takes flight, having helping his youthful cofounders get it off the ground will be a legacy in itself. View the full article

In today’s competitive environment, effective business strategies can set successful companies apart. Consider how Best Buy transformed its stores into mini warehouses to improve customer experience, or how Nike‘s pricing strategy capitalizes on brand loyalty. Each of these seven examples illustrates unique approaches that nurture growth and adaptability. Comprehending these strategies is essential for anyone looking to improve their own business practices. What can you learn from these industry leaders? Key Takeaways Best Buy transformed stores into mini warehouses, enhancing product availability and customer shopping experiences through efficient operational strategies. Nike’s premium pricing strategy leverages strong brand loyalty and exclusive products, aligning with consumer trends to bolster customer loyalty. Starbucks uses technology for seamless engagement via a loyalty app, creating a welcoming atmosphere that encourages repeat visits and enhances customer satisfaction. Tesla drives innovation in electric vehicles with high-performance models and advanced manufacturing, establishing leadership through sustainability and cutting-edge technology. Amazon’s continuous adaptation, from bookselling to e-commerce and cloud computing, illustrates the importance of aligning business strategies with market trends and consumer needs. What Is a Business Strategy? A business strategy is fundamentally a blueprint that defines how a company plans to achieve its goals. It acts as a roadmap, aligning employees in the direction of common objectives during guiding decision-making processes. To determine the best business to purchase or the best small business to buy, you need a clear strategy. Effective strategies help identify strengths and weaknesses, utilizing research methods like SWOT analysis to assess internal and external factors. By focusing on service business ideas, you can tailor your strategy for competitive advantage. A well-executed business strategy increases profitability and market share, as demonstrated by companies like Amazon, which diversified its offerings since its launch. In the end, a solid strategy enables businesses to navigate challenges and seize opportunities effectively. Best Buy’s Strategic Shift to Enhance Customer Experience Best Buy has made a significant strategic shift by transforming its stores into mini warehouses, which improves product availability and shipping efficiency for you as a customer. This approach not just enhances your shopping experience but furthermore encourages convenient pick-up options, making it easier for you to get what you need. Moreover, by integrating vendor showrooms into their retail spaces, Best Buy provides cost-effective marketing solutions that benefit suppliers while boosting overall customer satisfaction. Mini Warehouses Strategy Transforming storefronts into mini warehouses, Best Buy has adopted a strategic approach aimed at enhancing customer experience through improved product availability and expedited shipping times. This shift allows you to pick up products in-store, increasing your willingness to pay because of immediate access. Business examples, like Best Buy’s strategy, demonstrate how optimizing operational efficiency can create a competitive edge against online retailers and big-box competitors. By lowering the willingness to sell for vendors through in-store showrooms, Best Buy has additionally provided cost-effective solutions during securing product discounts. This not only contributes to overall revenue growth but also guarantees that you receive a more convenient shopping experience. In this way, Best Buy is redefining retail amidst strong competition. Vendor Showroom Integration By integrating vendor showrooms into its retail spaces, Best Buy has greatly improved the customer experience in addition to increasing product visibility. This strategic shift offers several advantages: Enhanced Product Availability: Customers can see a wider range of products directly from suppliers, improving their shopping convenience. Stronger Vendor Relationships: By allowing vendors to create dedicated spaces, Best Buy encourages collaboration, leading to better pricing and cost-effective solutions. Improved Shipping and Pickup: Utilizing storefronts as mini warehouses accelerates shipping times and simplifies customer pickups, raising overall satisfaction. This approach not only counters revenue losses from online competition but likewise drives Best Buy’s growth, benefiting both customers and vendors through a more engaging in-store experience. Nike’s Brand Power and Value-Based Pricing Approach Nike’s success in the athletic apparel market stems largely from its strategic use of value-based pricing, which justifies premium prices through strong brand loyalty and perceived quality. By comprehending market influence, Nike improves customer willingness to pay for products like Air Jordans, creating a perception of exclusivity and status. This approach not just boosts revenue but additionally nurtures deep connections with consumers, ensuring long-term loyalty and competitive advantage. Premium Pricing Justification When consumers perceive a brand as synonymous with quality and prestige, they’re often willing to pay more for its products. Nike exemplifies this with its premium pricing strategy, which hinges on several key factors: Brand Image: Nike’s strong brand identity and influence help justify higher prices, as consumers associate it with top-tier quality. Exclusive Offerings: Limited-edition products, like Air Jordans, greatly increase consumers’ willingness to pay, creating a sense of urgency and exclusivity. Strategic Marketing: Sponsorship of elite athletes improves perceived value, allowing Nike to command premium prices as it maintains higher profit margins than competitors. Brand Loyalty Enhancement Building on the premium pricing strategy, brand loyalty plays a significant role in Nike’s ongoing success and market dominance. In 2021, Nike’s global revenue surpassed $44 billion, largely owing to its effective value-based pricing strategy, which capitalizes on consumer perceptions of quality and brand image. The company’s products, known for innovative design and performance, justify their premium pricing by nurturing a high perceived value. Exclusive items, such as Air Jordans, augment brand loyalty, increasing consumers’ willingness to pay. By emphasizing brand prestige and social influence, Nike maintains its competitive edge in the athletic apparel market. Furthermore, aligning marketing strategies with consumer trends and lifestyle aspirations effectively bolsters customer loyalty as it maximizes pricing influence. Market Influence Understanding Grasping market influence is crucial for any brand aiming to establish a strong presence, and Nike exemplifies this through its strength and value-based pricing approach. The company’s success hinges on several key factors: Consumer Perception: Nike leverages its brand prestige and quality, leading to higher willingness to pay (WTP) for products. Athlete Associations: Collaborations with high-profile athletes improve brand image and raise status for consumers. Innovation and Trends: By focusing on product quality and social influence, Nike justifies its premium pricing, positioning its items as symbols of performance. This strategic comprehension of market influence allows Nike to nurture strong brand loyalty, contributing to long-term growth and profitability. Starbucks: Transforming Customer Engagement and Loyalty Starbucks has markedly transformed customer engagement and loyalty by leveraging technology and innovative product offerings, ensuring that you have a seamless experience from the moment you enter the store or use their app. Their loyalty app stands out as the most used among major restaurant chains, driving customer retention and satisfaction. By introducing products like the Frappuccino and seasonal beverages, Starbucks improves your experience as well as boosting sales growth. Their commitment to sustainability and ethical sourcing resonates with socially conscious consumers, further strengthening brand loyalty. With thousands of locations worldwide, Starbucks offers convenience for coffee lovers. Moreover, consistent investments in store atmosphere and customer service create a welcoming environment, encouraging repeat visits and nurturing long-term loyalty. Tesla’s Innovative Approach to Electric Vehicle Manufacturing As Tesla continues to redefine the electric vehicle environment, its innovative approach to manufacturing sets it apart from traditional automakers. The company emphasizes performance and sustainability, integrating state-of-the-art technology into its processes. Here are three key strategies that illustrate Tesla’s manufacturing innovation: High-Performance Models: The Model S achieves over 370 miles on a single charge, setting industry standards. Advanced Manufacturing Techniques: Utilizing robotics and data analytics improves efficiency and reduces costs within production. Gigafactories: Tesla’s Nevada facility is expected to produce enough batteries for 500,000 vehicles annually by 2030, showcasing its commitment to scaling production. With these strategies, Tesla has become the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, delivering over 1.3 million vehicles in 2023. Amazon’s Evolution From Bookseller to Retail Giant Since its inception in 1994 as an online bookstore, Amazon has undergone a remarkable transformation, evolving into one of the world’s largest retail giants. Initially promoting itself as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” Amazon focused on offering a vast selection of books. In 2000, the launch of Amazon Marketplace allowed third-party sellers to list products, greatly increasing variety and revenue. The introduction of Amazon Prime in 2005 offered fast, free shipping and exclusive content, enhancing customer loyalty. Furthermore, Amazon expanded into cloud computing with Amazon Web Services (AWS), generating over $62 billion in revenue by 2021. The Importance of Adapting Business Strategies in a Changing Market In a swiftly changing market, companies must recognize that adapting their business strategies is vital for long-term success. Businesses that fail to evolve risk falling behind their competitors. Here are three key reasons why adaptation is imperative: Consumer Expectations: As seen with Amazon Prime, adapting service offerings can improve customer loyalty and satisfaction. Market Trends: Companies like Netflix shifted from DVD rentals to streaming to align with digital consumption trends, ensuring relevance. Innovation Necessity: Ford’s pivot toward electric vehicles illustrates the need for legacy companies to innovate and embrace sustainability in response to environmental concerns. Frequently Asked Questions What Is Apple’s Business Strategy? Apple‘s business strategy focuses on creating a cohesive ecosystem of products and services that improves customer loyalty. You’ll notice they prioritize premium pricing, backed by a strong brand image and high product quality. By diversifying into services like Apple Music and Apple TV+, they greatly boost revenue. Additionally, Apple emphasizes design and user experience, ensuring products, like the iPhone, remain competitive during maintaining a strategic approach to product launches for quality and innovation. What Are the 5 P’s of Business Strategy? The 5 P’s of business strategy are Plan, Ploy, Pattern, Position, and Perspective. A Plan outlines the actions needed to meet objectives, whereas a Ploy refers to tactics that outmaneuver competitors. Pattern highlights consistent behaviors over time, showcasing how strategies evolve. Position defines your competitive stance in the market, and Perspective reflects the mindset that guides your strategic choices. Together, these elements help shape a thorough approach to achieving business success. What Is a Real Life Example of Strategy Implementation? A real-life example of strategy implementation is Best Buy’s use of its storefronts as mini warehouses. This approach improved customer convenience by ensuring faster shipping and better product availability. By allowing customers to pick up items directly from stores, Best Buy increased its willingness to pay, enhancing overall customer satisfaction. This strategic move demonstrates how adapting physical resources can effectively meet consumer needs and drive business growth in a competitive market. What Is a Good Example of a Strategy Statement? A good example of a strategy statement is Amazon’s, which emphasizes its commitment to customer obsession and operational excellence. This statement clearly defines Amazon’s purpose, focusing on delivering an exceptional customer experience during efficient operations. By articulating these core values, Amazon aligns its organizational efforts and guides decision-making. This strategic clarity allows the company to adapt to market changes as it continuously aims for growth and long-term success in the competitive retail environment. Conclusion In summary, these seven businesses highlight the critical importance of effective strategy in achieving success. By enhancing customer experiences, leveraging brand loyalty, and adapting to market changes, companies like Best Buy, Nike, and Tesla demonstrate that a well-defined strategy can drive growth and maintain competitiveness. As markets evolve, businesses must remain responsive and innovative, ensuring their strategies align with consumer needs and industry trends. In the end, strategic thinking is crucial for sustained success in any business environment. Image via Google Gemini This article, "7 Inspiring Business Examples That Boost Strategy" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

In today’s competitive environment, effective business strategies can set successful companies apart. Consider how Best Buy transformed its stores into mini warehouses to improve customer experience, or how Nike‘s pricing strategy capitalizes on brand loyalty. Each of these seven examples illustrates unique approaches that nurture growth and adaptability. Comprehending these strategies is essential for anyone looking to improve their own business practices. What can you learn from these industry leaders? Key Takeaways Best Buy transformed stores into mini warehouses, enhancing product availability and customer shopping experiences through efficient operational strategies. Nike’s premium pricing strategy leverages strong brand loyalty and exclusive products, aligning with consumer trends to bolster customer loyalty. Starbucks uses technology for seamless engagement via a loyalty app, creating a welcoming atmosphere that encourages repeat visits and enhances customer satisfaction. Tesla drives innovation in electric vehicles with high-performance models and advanced manufacturing, establishing leadership through sustainability and cutting-edge technology. Amazon’s continuous adaptation, from bookselling to e-commerce and cloud computing, illustrates the importance of aligning business strategies with market trends and consumer needs. What Is a Business Strategy? A business strategy is fundamentally a blueprint that defines how a company plans to achieve its goals. It acts as a roadmap, aligning employees in the direction of common objectives during guiding decision-making processes. To determine the best business to purchase or the best small business to buy, you need a clear strategy. Effective strategies help identify strengths and weaknesses, utilizing research methods like SWOT analysis to assess internal and external factors. By focusing on service business ideas, you can tailor your strategy for competitive advantage. A well-executed business strategy increases profitability and market share, as demonstrated by companies like Amazon, which diversified its offerings since its launch. In the end, a solid strategy enables businesses to navigate challenges and seize opportunities effectively. Best Buy’s Strategic Shift to Enhance Customer Experience Best Buy has made a significant strategic shift by transforming its stores into mini warehouses, which improves product availability and shipping efficiency for you as a customer. This approach not just enhances your shopping experience but furthermore encourages convenient pick-up options, making it easier for you to get what you need. Moreover, by integrating vendor showrooms into their retail spaces, Best Buy provides cost-effective marketing solutions that benefit suppliers while boosting overall customer satisfaction. Mini Warehouses Strategy Transforming storefronts into mini warehouses, Best Buy has adopted a strategic approach aimed at enhancing customer experience through improved product availability and expedited shipping times. This shift allows you to pick up products in-store, increasing your willingness to pay because of immediate access. Business examples, like Best Buy’s strategy, demonstrate how optimizing operational efficiency can create a competitive edge against online retailers and big-box competitors. By lowering the willingness to sell for vendors through in-store showrooms, Best Buy has additionally provided cost-effective solutions during securing product discounts. This not only contributes to overall revenue growth but also guarantees that you receive a more convenient shopping experience. In this way, Best Buy is redefining retail amidst strong competition. Vendor Showroom Integration By integrating vendor showrooms into its retail spaces, Best Buy has greatly improved the customer experience in addition to increasing product visibility. This strategic shift offers several advantages: Enhanced Product Availability: Customers can see a wider range of products directly from suppliers, improving their shopping convenience. Stronger Vendor Relationships: By allowing vendors to create dedicated spaces, Best Buy encourages collaboration, leading to better pricing and cost-effective solutions. Improved Shipping and Pickup: Utilizing storefronts as mini warehouses accelerates shipping times and simplifies customer pickups, raising overall satisfaction. This approach not only counters revenue losses from online competition but likewise drives Best Buy’s growth, benefiting both customers and vendors through a more engaging in-store experience. Nike’s Brand Power and Value-Based Pricing Approach Nike’s success in the athletic apparel market stems largely from its strategic use of value-based pricing, which justifies premium prices through strong brand loyalty and perceived quality. By comprehending market influence, Nike improves customer willingness to pay for products like Air Jordans, creating a perception of exclusivity and status. This approach not just boosts revenue but additionally nurtures deep connections with consumers, ensuring long-term loyalty and competitive advantage. Premium Pricing Justification When consumers perceive a brand as synonymous with quality and prestige, they’re often willing to pay more for its products. Nike exemplifies this with its premium pricing strategy, which hinges on several key factors: Brand Image: Nike’s strong brand identity and influence help justify higher prices, as consumers associate it with top-tier quality. Exclusive Offerings: Limited-edition products, like Air Jordans, greatly increase consumers’ willingness to pay, creating a sense of urgency and exclusivity. Strategic Marketing: Sponsorship of elite athletes improves perceived value, allowing Nike to command premium prices as it maintains higher profit margins than competitors. Brand Loyalty Enhancement Building on the premium pricing strategy, brand loyalty plays a significant role in Nike’s ongoing success and market dominance. In 2021, Nike’s global revenue surpassed $44 billion, largely owing to its effective value-based pricing strategy, which capitalizes on consumer perceptions of quality and brand image. The company’s products, known for innovative design and performance, justify their premium pricing by nurturing a high perceived value. Exclusive items, such as Air Jordans, augment brand loyalty, increasing consumers’ willingness to pay. By emphasizing brand prestige and social influence, Nike maintains its competitive edge in the athletic apparel market. Furthermore, aligning marketing strategies with consumer trends and lifestyle aspirations effectively bolsters customer loyalty as it maximizes pricing influence. Market Influence Understanding Grasping market influence is crucial for any brand aiming to establish a strong presence, and Nike exemplifies this through its strength and value-based pricing approach. The company’s success hinges on several key factors: Consumer Perception: Nike leverages its brand prestige and quality, leading to higher willingness to pay (WTP) for products. Athlete Associations: Collaborations with high-profile athletes improve brand image and raise status for consumers. Innovation and Trends: By focusing on product quality and social influence, Nike justifies its premium pricing, positioning its items as symbols of performance. This strategic comprehension of market influence allows Nike to nurture strong brand loyalty, contributing to long-term growth and profitability. Starbucks: Transforming Customer Engagement and Loyalty Starbucks has markedly transformed customer engagement and loyalty by leveraging technology and innovative product offerings, ensuring that you have a seamless experience from the moment you enter the store or use their app. Their loyalty app stands out as the most used among major restaurant chains, driving customer retention and satisfaction. By introducing products like the Frappuccino and seasonal beverages, Starbucks improves your experience as well as boosting sales growth. Their commitment to sustainability and ethical sourcing resonates with socially conscious consumers, further strengthening brand loyalty. With thousands of locations worldwide, Starbucks offers convenience for coffee lovers. Moreover, consistent investments in store atmosphere and customer service create a welcoming environment, encouraging repeat visits and nurturing long-term loyalty. Tesla’s Innovative Approach to Electric Vehicle Manufacturing As Tesla continues to redefine the electric vehicle environment, its innovative approach to manufacturing sets it apart from traditional automakers. The company emphasizes performance and sustainability, integrating state-of-the-art technology into its processes. Here are three key strategies that illustrate Tesla’s manufacturing innovation: High-Performance Models: The Model S achieves over 370 miles on a single charge, setting industry standards. Advanced Manufacturing Techniques: Utilizing robotics and data analytics improves efficiency and reduces costs within production. Gigafactories: Tesla’s Nevada facility is expected to produce enough batteries for 500,000 vehicles annually by 2030, showcasing its commitment to scaling production. With these strategies, Tesla has become the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, delivering over 1.3 million vehicles in 2023. Amazon’s Evolution From Bookseller to Retail Giant Since its inception in 1994 as an online bookstore, Amazon has undergone a remarkable transformation, evolving into one of the world’s largest retail giants. Initially promoting itself as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” Amazon focused on offering a vast selection of books. In 2000, the launch of Amazon Marketplace allowed third-party sellers to list products, greatly increasing variety and revenue. The introduction of Amazon Prime in 2005 offered fast, free shipping and exclusive content, enhancing customer loyalty. Furthermore, Amazon expanded into cloud computing with Amazon Web Services (AWS), generating over $62 billion in revenue by 2021. The Importance of Adapting Business Strategies in a Changing Market In a swiftly changing market, companies must recognize that adapting their business strategies is vital for long-term success. Businesses that fail to evolve risk falling behind their competitors. Here are three key reasons why adaptation is imperative: Consumer Expectations: As seen with Amazon Prime, adapting service offerings can improve customer loyalty and satisfaction. Market Trends: Companies like Netflix shifted from DVD rentals to streaming to align with digital consumption trends, ensuring relevance. Innovation Necessity: Ford’s pivot toward electric vehicles illustrates the need for legacy companies to innovate and embrace sustainability in response to environmental concerns. Frequently Asked Questions What Is Apple’s Business Strategy? Apple‘s business strategy focuses on creating a cohesive ecosystem of products and services that improves customer loyalty. You’ll notice they prioritize premium pricing, backed by a strong brand image and high product quality. By diversifying into services like Apple Music and Apple TV+, they greatly boost revenue. Additionally, Apple emphasizes design and user experience, ensuring products, like the iPhone, remain competitive during maintaining a strategic approach to product launches for quality and innovation. What Are the 5 P’s of Business Strategy? The 5 P’s of business strategy are Plan, Ploy, Pattern, Position, and Perspective. A Plan outlines the actions needed to meet objectives, whereas a Ploy refers to tactics that outmaneuver competitors. Pattern highlights consistent behaviors over time, showcasing how strategies evolve. Position defines your competitive stance in the market, and Perspective reflects the mindset that guides your strategic choices. Together, these elements help shape a thorough approach to achieving business success. What Is a Real Life Example of Strategy Implementation? A real-life example of strategy implementation is Best Buy’s use of its storefronts as mini warehouses. This approach improved customer convenience by ensuring faster shipping and better product availability. By allowing customers to pick up items directly from stores, Best Buy increased its willingness to pay, enhancing overall customer satisfaction. This strategic move demonstrates how adapting physical resources can effectively meet consumer needs and drive business growth in a competitive market. What Is a Good Example of a Strategy Statement? A good example of a strategy statement is Amazon’s, which emphasizes its commitment to customer obsession and operational excellence. This statement clearly defines Amazon’s purpose, focusing on delivering an exceptional customer experience during efficient operations. By articulating these core values, Amazon aligns its organizational efforts and guides decision-making. This strategic clarity allows the company to adapt to market changes as it continuously aims for growth and long-term success in the competitive retail environment. Conclusion In summary, these seven businesses highlight the critical importance of effective strategy in achieving success. By enhancing customer experiences, leveraging brand loyalty, and adapting to market changes, companies like Best Buy, Nike, and Tesla demonstrate that a well-defined strategy can drive growth and maintain competitiveness. As markets evolve, businesses must remain responsive and innovative, ensuring their strategies align with consumer needs and industry trends. In the end, strategic thinking is crucial for sustained success in any business environment. Image via Google Gemini This article, "7 Inspiring Business Examples That Boost Strategy" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

There are a lot of methods to try in the never-ending quest for a way to sort through and slim down our bulging inboxes. They're different enough that there's certainly one out there that matches or comes close to matching your exact needs, but they do all have one thing in common: They rely on the chronology of when each email came in. Let’s try turning that approach on its head, and instead, sort by sender to weed through the mess. Why you should sort your inbox by senderWhen purging your messages, you probably have an organizational system you follow, like the 4Ds. You go through and decide what gets deleted, done, delegated, or deferred—but there’s not much pattern recognition if you’re just starting at the top and working your way down. Every day's demands or outreach might look different depending on what you have going on at that time. Sorting your inbox by sender instead of most recent helps you see whose (or what) messages you receive most. If it’s a newsletter or mailing list, you can delete them all in one go, but if it’s a specific person at work, you might get a signal that they tend to need a response from you. From there, you can prioritize their emails, maybe adding them as a favorite contact or paying special attention for new correspondence from them, since you know their messages are more consequential than others. Even if you're using the one- or two-touch methods, which call on you to open every single email the moment you get it, this can be helpful because you'll feel a sense of urgency around specific senders once you identify the patterns. So instead of deleting or delegating emails one by one, you can try nuking or dealing with entire batches from certain senders to make the sorting process faster. How to sort by sender in GmailIn Gmail, if you’ve already found a message from the person or entity whose emails you want to bundle up, you can right-click it from your inbox and hit “find emails from.” This brings you to an inbox only of messages from that sender. You can also access this inbox by typing “from:[their email address]” in the search bar, or clicking the advanced search button and entering their name into the “from” field. Unfortunately, you can’t sort your entire Gmail inbox by sender, and instead can only make bundles sender by sender, but it still helps with batching them up. How to sort by sender in OutlookOutlook is better than Gmail for this method. In fact, it allows you to sort your entire inbox not only by sender, but by other recipients, size, and more. At the top of the inbox, hit “Filter,” then “Sort by.” Depending on what version you’re running, you may have to go into the “View” tab and hit “From” in the Arrangement group. The emails will line up in your inbox by sender, making them easy to bundle and delete. View the full article

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You know the scenario: You have a bunch of unread emails . The more that come in, the more anxious you get—and the more you procrastinate on sorting through them. How do you decide which ones to reply to and in what order? Even when the amount of unreads isn't overwhelming, your choice can determine how your workday will go. In general, you should choose a side between a last in, first out (LIFO) or first in, first out (FIFO) approach—and, in my opinion, the best choice is LIFO. What are LIFO and FIFO?LIFO and FIFO are terms that come from the financial world—respectively, they stand for “last in, first out” and “first in, first out.” They’re often used by accountants to describe inventory but can refer to anything where items are coming “in,” like, well, emails. In this context, it refers to the practice of responding to either your oldest or your newest unreads first, then working your way in the opposite direction from there. Why is LIFO better than FIFO for email management?LIFO, or the practice of answering the most recent emails before older ones, is more common than FIFO for good reason: Your most recent emails are the ones most likely to be time-sensitive, relevant, or actively blocking someone else’s work as they go unanswered. Meanwhile, the older a message gets, the higher the odds are that the window for a perfect response has already closed. At that point, stressing over it doesn’t magically make you more punctual, it just slows you down. Focusing on what’s right in front of you helps you stay responsive and on top of your current workload, which is usually what your job (or life) actually rewards. "But what if I left the older ones too long?" you worry. Don't—if something from the past is truly urgent or important, you’ll get a follow-up and, even though that might be embarrassing for you, it’ll bump the older content at hand into LIFO territory anyway. LIFO essentially relies on the idea that the older problems will sort themselves out or be brought back to your attention if they have to be. It’s like giving yourself grace on what you missed and focusing instead on what you can take care of right now. It works best if you rely on it when you have to, but commit to dealing with incoming mail in a more timely way going forward. If you miss too many emails and have to get too many follow-ups, your reputation will take a hit. That's why LIFO works best in general: Once you create the habit of responding to the last-in, you'll eventually stop having first-in messages at all. Of course, there might be times when you don’t get a follow-up or really do miss something important from the past. One day a week or so, use the time that you’ve blocked out for your email management to work in FIFO mode, going through your emails reverse-chronologically to make sure you didn’t miss anything big. Using FIFO too consistently can have negative consequences, though. If you’re always working on tasks from the past, you risk missing newer, more urgent ones that need immediate attention. Save it for one day every once in a while and use your time to handle pressing matters on a day-to-day basis. An important element of either strategy is timing. Make sure to block out time for email management every day, ideally using a scheduling tactic like timeboxing. Dedicating specific, uninterrupted time to your inbox management makes it more doable and ensures you’ll actually handle the emails in the first place, whereas answering them sporadically through the day opens you up to the possibility of being distracted or procrastinating more frequently. If you're struggling to adopt a LIFO mindset, consider the "one-touch" method. With this more intense approach, you commit to opening every email as soon as you get it. It will force you to build a habit that results in you never letting any email get away from you. Open the email, respond to it, and either delete or archive it, depending on if you’ll need it later. If it requires no response, even better. Schedule any required tasks into your to-do list, then keep on moving. You're more likely to get the task done when you need to simply by virtue of being readily aware of it because you opened the message as soon as it came in. View the full article

Say what you will about Crumbl Cookies. It’s always sure to get a reaction. Earlier this month, when a sudden swirl of social media rumors began to suggest that the polarizing bakery chain was closing down, some of the online reactions were downright gleeful. “Too sweet and too expensive!” went one typical comment. The chatter was so loud that Crumbl cofounder Sawyer Hemsley took to TikTok to dispel the rumor, explaining that the fast-growing chain is just moving offices as it prepares for its next wave of expansion. But while reports of Crumbl’s demise may be premature, the chain has in fact closed a number of locations over the last few years following a period of accelerated growth. Here’s what to know: Is Crumbl Cookies still growing? According to Rhonda Bromley, Crumbl’s VP of public relations, Crumbl now has 1,103 locations in the United States and 25 in Canada, up from just 326 at the end of 2021. And the Utah-based chain will indeed continue to expand its footprint next year. “We have no plans for growth to stop and will be opening many more stores in both the United States and Canada in 2026,” Bromley tells Fast Company. Which Crumbl Cookies locations have closed? At the end of 2021, Crumbl hadn’t closed any of its locations, which speaks to the rapid, social media-fueled growth that it had famously experienced in its early years. But over the last few years, at least 19 locations have closed, according to a Fast Company review of media reports, online review platforms like Yelp, and Crumbl’s own store locator. The shuttered stores, which were located across 10 states, are listed below. A Crumbl spokesperson confirmed the closures. California 481 Madonna Rd Ste D San Luis Obispo, CA 93405 550 Woollomes Ave Ste 105 Delano, CA 93215 2750 41st Ave Ste E Soquel, CA 95073 12274 Palmdale Rd Ste 102 Victorville, CA 92392 8126 E Santa Ana Canyon Rd Ste 167 Anaheim, CA 92808 32545 Golden Lantern Ste C Dana Point, CA 92629 Connecticut 360 Connecticut Ave Unit 4 Norwalk, CT 06854 Colorado 1805 29th St Ste 1136 Boulder, CO 80301 3480 Wolverine Dr Ste G Montrose, CO 81401 Florida 1695 W Indiantown Rd Ste 22-23 Jupiter, FL 33458 Georgia 2615 Peachtree Pkwy Ste 210 Suwanee, GA 30024 Illinois 1441 N Wells St Chicago, IL 60610 1530 E Lake Cook Rd Wheeling, IL 60090 Ohio 3038 Westgate Mall #20 Fairview Park, OH 44126 34330 Aurora Rd Solon, OH 44139 Pennsylvania 3741 West Chester Pike Ste 103 Newtown Square, PA 19073 604 228th Ave NE Sammamish, WA 98074 Tennessee 8068 Hwy 100 Nashville, TN 37221 Utah 4211 Pony Express Parkway Suite 130, Eagle Mountain, UT 84005 It’s not unusual for restaurant chains to close locations even as they grow their overall footprint, as some stores will inevitably underperform or could succumb to other unfavorable location-specific factors. A Crumbl spokesperson did not directly respond to the question of why these stores have closed. Why did people think Crumbl was closing for good? Some of the online rumors appear to have been spread by AI-powered social media accounts that post misinformation for engagement, as Reddit users pointed out in the Crumbl subreddit. At the same time, a Bloomberg Businessweek story this month took a decidedly unflattering view of the brand and raised questions about its ability to sustain hypergrowth. The story may have added fuel to the rumors that Crumbl’s days are numbered. Crumbl, which was founded in 2017, is known for its substantial social media presence. It has almost 11 million followers on TikTok alone, so it makes sense that rumors about the company would spread quickly across the internet. Also, as stated earlier, controversy around Crumbl is not exactly new. It was more than a year ago that food blog Delish.com posed the question: “Has the Crumbl backlash begun?” We’ll let you decide the answer for yourself. View the full article

You quit the 9-to-5 to have more control over your time. You wanted flexibility, autonomy, and the freedom to structure your days around your life instead of someone else’s schedule. Yet here you are, apologizing to a client for not responding to a message immediately. Feeling guilty on a Tuesday afternoon when you’ve only worked for four hours that day. Checking Slack at 9:00 PM because that’s been your routine for most of your working career. Many solopreneurs don’t realize they’ve inadvertently recreated corporate life until they’re already living it. You traded a demanding boss for a dozen demanding clients. You swapped mandatory meetings for back-to-back Zoom calls. That freedom you craved? Doesn’t exist in your solopreneur world. To find actual freedom as a solopreneur, you have to recognize that you’re following a corporate playbook—and make a conscious decision to change. Identify your ‘corporate workday’ habits Corporate habits are deeply ingrained. We’ve worked that way for so long that they just feel like “how work is supposed to be done.” For me, it was the instant email (or Slack) response. In my corporate job, quick replies signaled that I was on top of things, engaged, and reliable. When I started freelancing, I brought that habit with me. If a client sent me an email, I’d reply immediately—even if I was in the middle of the grocery store. Here’s something to try: What would happen if you took an entire day off, unplanned? Not a vacation day you scheduled weeks in advance, but a spontaneous decision to step away from your client work on a Wednesday. Does that break your clients’ expectations around your response time? Does the idea make you feel a bit squeamish? Those feelings are your corporate habits talking. To embrace your freedom, you have to undo the rigid 9-5, “always on” mentality. Structure your work for outcomes, not time spent Corporate life is built around a 40-hour workweek. Even if you finish your work in less time, you’re often expected to fill the bucket of the workweek with more work. As a solopreneur, if you price your work by the hour, you’re invariably still tied to the amount of time you work—which has its limits. You’ll have more freedom if you can earn the same amount (or more!) even if you work less. Clients pay you for your expertise and outcomes, not the number of hours you put in. Over time, you’ll get more efficient, and each project will require fewer hours. You’ll have a shorter workweek (if you choose), and can break free from a 9-5 schedule even more. Build systems that protect your boundaries Corporate life often has no boundaries. Someone else dictates your workload, schedules your meetings, and approves your PTO. I’ll never forget the time a CEO texted me on a Saturday morning because he found a typo on a blog post and wanted me to fix it right that minute. No boundaries. When you work for yourself, you might assume boundaries will naturally emerge. They won’t, unless you choose to define and enforce them. The easiest way to do this is to build systems that make boundaries automatic. Turn off notifications. Set up email filters. Block off time for deep work and use a calendar scheduling app so clients can’t meet with you during that time. Boundaries are necessary if you don’t want to feel like you’re constantly working or letting other people control your schedule. Don’t let yourself fall back into old habits It’s easy to fall back into corporate habits because they feel familiar. It can be uncomfortable to shake things up at first. You should regularly review your work habits to see if you’re falling back into patterns that aren’t serving you or your business. You have to be intentional about the hours you work and how you interact with clients. The way to build a sustainable solo business is to find a schedule that works for you. Maybe you still follow a mostly 9-5 schedule, even if you’re more flexible with your days. Maybe you work best late at night or before the sun rises. Any of those decisions is fine, as long as you’re in control of when and how work gets done. View the full article

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It’s easy, for me at least, to be cynical about the state of design. Our visual environment can feel bland, everything from brands to buildings homogenized around similar styles. The ever-impending AI takeover can make the future of this work uncertain. My reading around design this year tended to focus on two things: looking back and looking ahead. In looking through design history, I was looking for glimpses of alternative ways of designing: the experimental, the absurd, the weird. And in looking forward, I was searching for hope in a dark time, for answers on how design, and the design industries, move beyond the stasis I feel like we’re in. The intersection of these interests is an attempt to understand what design is, what it has been, and what it could be next. The books that were my favorite this year are the books that show design as something fun, experimental, future-looking, and constantly in flux. The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram Maggie Gram’s excellent new book, The Invention of Design, is one of those books I’m surprised didn’t already exist, and now I don’t know how I’ve lived without it for so long. This is not a history book of famous designers or trends or movements but rather an intellectual history of how the “idea” of design came to be what it is today. Charting the major conceptions of design from beauty to problem solving, thinking to experience, Gram, a designer and historian, presents design as an inherently optimistic endeavor but one that often fails to live up to its promises. A *Co-*Program for Graphic Design by David Reinfurt What does it mean to teach graphic design today? Or better yet: what does graphic design even mean today? The designer and educator David Reinfurt thinks through these questions in this casual and conversational book built around three courses he’s taught and developed at Princeton University over the last decade. Jumping back and forth through design history, moving across formats and mediums, and inviting a range of voices to participate in the conversation, Reinfurt shows that graphic design continues to be an expansive, ever-shifting space in which to think about ideas and how they move through the world giving us a flexible framework to think through teaching the next generation of designers. The House of Dr. Koolhaas by Francoise Fromonot Perhaps the strangest book I read this year but also most delightful, Francoise Fromonot’s The House of Dr. Koolhaas is the first book from Gumshoe, a new series from Park Books that approaches architecture criticism as if it were a detective novel. Written and packaged like the pulpy genre—complete with over-the-top illustrated covers and cliff-hanging chapters—Fromonot does a close reading of Rem Koolhaas’s Villa Dall’Ava, untangling its place both in Koolhaas’s work and in the larger architectural media context. Propulsive, insightful, expansive, and highly illustrative, I can’t wait to see what buildings the series tackles next. Buildings For People and Plants by WORKac In this focused, highly visual monograph, the New York-based architecture office WORKac presents ten built projects that together can be read as the thesis for the firm’s ideas. Founded in 2003 by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, WORKac has worked across scales and contexts and styles but in this book, a coherent body of work emerges, showing how the studio has engaged with color and form, civic interests, and sustainability. Sparse on text and heavy on photographs (almost 200, total), Andraos and Wood make the case for an architecture that engages with the world—an architecture for people and plants, if you will—and they show us how they’ve done just that. Could Should Might Don’t by Nick Foster Nick Foster, futures designer, former design director of Google X, and self-described “reluctant futurist” writes in his great book that when we imagine the future, we often imagine images made by other people and those images have become strangely homogenized. Foster thinks that’s a problem. Through breezy chapters, he probes how we imagine the future, how it becomes reality, and most importantly, who has a stake in that future. In doing so, he makes the case for a more rigorous, thoughtful, and provocative way to think about the future and how we get there. Archigram: The Magazine You can’t talk about avant-garde architecture without talking about Archigram, the British collective that drew upon their interests in everything from pop art to Buckminster Fuller. Over 15 years, the collective also published Archigram, a lo-fi, experimental, and freewheeling magazine to share their ideas. Long hard to find, this gorgeously packaged box set includes facsimiles of all ten issues, including flyers, pockets, and pop-ups, alongside an excellent reader’s guide that features writing from Archigram founder Peter Cook, architecture writer Reyner Banham, and tributes from Kenneth Frampton, Norman Foster, and more. It might be a stretch to call this a “book” but it’s a worthy collectable for anyone interested in experimental architecture, design history, publishing, and zine culture. Enshittification by Cory Doctorow In 2023, the science fiction writer and pioneering blogger Cory Doctorow coined a term that seemed to perfectly describe the moment we seem to be stuck in: “enshittification.” Writing about online platforms, Doctorow described enshittification as the gradual worsening of so many services we’ve come to rely on. Two years later, he’s expanded that into a full book, looking at everything from Facebook to the iPhone App Store, to Twitter while also making the case that we, as users, can take back the internet we are losing. Though not explicitly a book about design, designers will certainly see themselves in these pages as Doctorow shows how the design of so many services have shifted from solving problems for users to padding the pockets of shareholders View the full article

A new extension for Chrome stops AI slop from invading your life. Called Slop Evader, it is a temporal firewall that modifies your Google search queries to exclude any results indexed after November 30, 2022. That is the day the ChatGPT asteroid hit the open web, upending culture and reality as we know it. Installing Slop Evader is easy: just add it to Chrome, toggle it on, and suddenly, the scroll of generative garbage vanishes. You are back in the “old” internet knowing that every article you read is not the product of simulated intelligence. It’s an enticing idea, especially given that the latest estimation is that more than 50% of all new articles on the internet are now generated by AI. But the digitally Amish lifestyle has an obvious flaw: You aren’t just evading slop; you are evading legitimate news, scientific breakthroughs, and culture itself. Which, on second thought, maybe is a good idea too. The Chrome extension works on a premise that is 50% brilliant, 50% useless, and 100% depressing. Slop Evader is a powerful statement, but not exactly a solution. It’s a vacation from the permanent doubt that comes from clicking on anything these days. Kill AI switch It doesn’t seem the AI slop will stop. Europol predicts that by 2026, 90% of online content could be synthetically generated. We are no longer surfing a web of human knowledge; we are drowning in a sea of hallucinations. We don’t need gimmicks. We need a way to access information without risk of being deceived by machines. We need a built-in toggle in every browser and platform to turn off the machine-generated trash. Since AI can no longer be detected by software, our only hope lies in proving what is real, not spotting what is fake. There are already some efforts to do exactly that. For images, videos, and sound, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authentication (C2PA) has proposed a digital birth certificate for every pixel and sound wave you encounter. The technology already exists to cryptographically sign media at the point of capture, creating an unbroken chain of custody from the camera lens to your screen. When I spoke to Ziad Asghar—SVP of product management at Qualcomm—to talk about the end of reality, he told me that fake audio and video content is a big concern for everyone. “As these [AI] technologies become more prevalent, this is going to be a challenge,” he says. He was right two years ago, he is even more right today. We need content that works like NFTs, using blockchain-like certificates to prove a video or an article wasn’t hallucinated by a GPU. Qualcomm has successfully integrated C2PA support directly into its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform. The chip uses cryptography to sign the actual pixels of your photos the moment you snap them. Sony, Canon, and Leica have also rolled out firmware updates that sign images right at the point of capture. If you shoot with a Sony Alpha 9 III or a Canon EOS R1 today, you can generate a tamper-evident digital birth certificate for that file. The problem is that most platforms shred this information when you upload. There are exceptions. TikTok supports C2PA and tells users what content was actually captured by a camera. Google has started integrating C2PA into its Search and Ads platforms, allowing the ‘About this image’ tool to verify provenance. And LinkedIn has the best option: The company says that it overlays an icon on C2PA-signed images that users can click to inspect the edit history. So it can be done. If there was another certification standard for other types of content—like this article—and if every platform supported the standards in full, users would be able to push the Kill AI switch. But, of course, you know where this ends. Yeah, it will never happen The same tech giants adopting these standards are simultaneously playing a cynical double game. While Meta and TikTok claim to be cracking down on AI slop by downranking third-party generated content, they are aggressively pushing their own AI tools. TikTok limits the reach of external AI videos while actively encouraging you to use its in-app AI filters. Meanwhile, Meta says it will “throttle down” AI content promotion, but they give users AI tools to create an eternal tsunami of slop. They aren’t trying to save the internet from AI. They are trying to secure their own monopoly on AI pollution. They want to ensure that the only slop you consume is the premium, high-margin slop they generated for you. It is all about revenue domination. If you use Midjourney, you are a spammer. If you use Meta AI, you are a “creator.” We can’t expect the companies profiting from AI creation to give us tools to deactivate the very content we create on their platform. So it seems, for now, our best (and imperfect) bet is something like Slop Evader—a time machine to transport you to a simpler time. View the full article

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. The average price net of incentives of new-builds sold by Lennar—America’s second largest homebuilder—came in at $386,000 in Q3 2025. That’s down -10.2% from $430,000 in Q4 2024 and down -21.4% from $491,000 in Q3 2022. While last quarter Lennar acknowledged that it will no longer be as aggressive in prioritizing volume over margin going forward, the giant homebuilder said that doing so (i.e., volume > margin strategy) over the past few years helped it gain market share while some other builders were more conservative. “During the past three years of difficult market conditions, we have maintained volume, we’ve grown market share, and we’ve re engineered our operating platform for a better and more efficient future when the market bottoms and normalizes, we’re extremely well positioned with very strong market share in strategic markets, and our margin is leveraged to the upside,” Stuart Miller, co-CEO of Lennar, said on the homebuilder’s December 17 earnings call. While there’s undoubtedly weakness in the housing market—in particular in pandemic era boomtowns in Texas and Florida—Lennar’s headline drop in home prices might be giving the impression of a greater home price correction than the homebuyer is actually seeing. See, Lennar’s average selling price, net of incentives, reflects the average selling price after incentives are deducted—it is not the actual price paid by the typical homebuyer before incentives. While some of the average selling price decline is due to outright price cuts and some to a mix shift toward smaller homes, the biggest driver is aggressive incentive spending—primarily through mortgage rate buydowns. To isolate the impact of incentives, ResiClub reverse-engineered Lennar’s sales-price math. ResiClub estimates that in Q3 2022, Lennar spent roughly $12,074 in incentives on a typical home sale. By comparison, in Q4 2025, typical incentive spending by Lennar had risen to about $62,837 per home. When accounting for incentive spending, the typical Lennar homebuyer in Q3 2022 paid around $503,074. In Q4 2025, the typical Lennar homebuyer paid about $448,690—roughly 10.8% less than in Q3 2022, which marked Lennar’s peak quarter. With incentives now accounted for, the outstanding question—which ResiClub can’t answer just yet—is how much of that 10.8% decline reflects mix shift versus outright declines in home prices? “As you may recall, last quarter, I noted that declining interest rates could signal the start of a market recovery. Unfortunately, that turnaround has not yet materialized. As [mortgage] rates slowly moderated in September, eased more in October and remained flat in November, the customer response remained fairly tepid, suggesting that a combination of affordability and consumer confidence issues were continuing to limit demand,” said Miller on the earnings call. Miller added that: “While traffic was consistent, customers were both hesitant and limited by what they could afford to purchase. With that said, our fourth quarter results show the continued softening of market conditions and affordability. Sales volumes have been difficult to maintain, and required additional incentives to achieve our expected pace and to avoid an unintended buildup of excess inventory.” View the full article