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The silhouette could not change. This was the main parameter guiding the designers and engineers at KitchenAid as they set out to upgrade one of the brand’s hero product, the stand mixer. Used by amateur and professional bakers for more than 70 years, the classic stand mixer is a staple of the kitchen appliance world, and much of its staying power has to do with the consistency of the product, which has changed remarkably little in all that time. Most notably, the mixer’s bowl-hugging form factor has defined it since the start. So when the company decided to integrate some new features and functions into an updated version of the mixer—the Artisan Plus Stand Mixer, now on sale from $599—the design team knew that any change must not affect that signature look. “We’re in a unique spot here because we are really attached to the silhouette. We really don’t want to change the outside, which is a challenging engineering function when you say no, the package is fixed,” says Joseph Snyder, a system architect at KitchenAid. What’s new about KitchenAid’s stand mixer The changes included in the new Artisan Plus are the biggest improvements to KitchenAid’s stand mixer in its 70-year history, according to the company. Features include a new, slower ingredient folding speed, continuous speed control for smooth transitions between speeds, an automatic light focused into the mixing area, and a special mixing wand that simultaneously stirs and wipes the inside of the bowl. “Now you’ve got to put all this functionality in there. So we had to do a lot of work to fit this new control in here because we really couldn’t make any changes to the outside,” Snyder says. “We had to do this all inside.” Adding these new features required the equivalent of industrial surgery. Snyder says the designers and engineers realized they had to make a major change to the internal workings of the mixer, replacing what Snyder calls “tried-and-true” analog electromechanical controls with a computer-like microcontroller. But those analog controls also defined the mixer, in a way, with its tuned-weight system dictating a range of 10 distinct speeds. For this new version, KitchenAid was careful not to totally redefine the speed controls. “Some users are very attached to the way they do it today,” Snyder says. “I do this thing at speed two, I do this thing at speed four.” Recognizing that other users wanted more nuance in their mixing speeds, they introduced continuous speed control, which allows users to dial up and down the speed seamlessly, rather than speeding up or down in a jarring (and potentially messy) step change. Adding the microcontroller inside the mixer allows it to have both the preset speeds and the seamless transition. According to KitchenAid’s market research, another feature users have been asking for is the now 11th speed on the mixer, the extra slow “folding” speed, for gently mixing delicate ingredients into the bowl. Folding speed already exists on other KitchenAid mixers, but was not possible in the stand mixer before this upgrade. “We saw people taking our mixer and turning it on and turning it back off, turning it on and back off,” Snyder says. “They were sort of making a pulse mode on their own. We said, ‘we can help these people.'” A better beater Another new feature that has been used in other KitchenAid appliances is the new “double flex edge beater,” the silicone-edged wand that continuously scrapes the inside of the bowl, eliminating the need for users to manually scrape ingredients back into the center with a spatula. Snyder explains that the beater has a unique twist to its design that helps push the ingredients down into the center of the bowl during the mixing process. The silicone edges help prevent the ingredients from pushing out and climbing up. But making this all possible generates extra load on the machine—load the old analog controls couldn’t handle. The new microcontroller is able to generate the power needed to use this special wand, and the interior of the mixer’s body was tweaked to keep the system cool while doing so. “This is something we wanted to do for quite a while, but without making other changes, we really couldn’t. We had to be able to change the air flow and make some structural changes,” Snyder says. This new wand, he notes, can’t be used on older models of the stand mixer. Some of these design features have been in the works for years; folding speed, for example, has been a company goal for more than a decade. But Snyder says that even though some of the features aren’t exactly new, they’ve found the right moment to be combined into this new version of the stand mixer without completely reinventing the wheel. “It’s a very mature platform,” he says. “You’re always trying to thread that needle of adding new features without stepping away from your brand and what people recognize when they see that across the room.” View the full article

Small businesses are losing a lot of time scheduling meetings, and the problem is of their own making. Zoho Bookings partnered with Cint, the world’s largest global research marketplace, to launch a survey in March of 2025 asking how teams across departments and industries schedule meetings, both internally and with clients. Of the more than 1,700 respondents, 254 were from US-based small businesses, defined as having less than 250 employees. The results exposed a surprising amount of inefficiency still prevalent among small businesses. Despite acknowledging that AI can be a helpful scheduling tool and expressing comfort in the technology taking over this task, the vast majority of SMB respondents evaded dedicated scheduling software altogether, instead favoring old methods that are less efficient and more prone to error. Small businesses should take this survey data as a wake-up call to the value of technology, particularly for mission critical tasks like scheduling. Here’s more on what the survey found: Manual labor Despite advances in technology over the last few years, small businesses are sticking to tried-and-true methods for scheduling meetings, even if those ways have proven highly inefficient. According to the survey, 72.8% of SMB respondents primarily use email to schedule meetings and appointments, and 57.1% use phone calls. The process starts with gathering availability—another task that has yet to be optimized by the majority of small businesses surveyed. Zoho and Cint discovered that 51.6% of small businesses use email and messaging apps to check availability for meetings. And though 48% use a shared calendar dashboard, 43.3% still check colleague’s time manually. These trends feel more appropriate for a small business in its most nascent stage, before too many employees join the fray. But as companies grow, they would be wise to shift away from these time-consuming methods, which proves especially true for small businesses. Resources are severely limited and profit margins are razor-thin. The less time employees spend navigating cumbersome systems, searching through email threads, or tracking down responses, the better. Time to waste The survey further highlighted the toll that meeting scheduling takes on everyone’s time. According to its data, 46.5% of respondents were able to schedule meetings in less than one hour, but the majority were not, with 28.4% saying it took between 1-6 hours, 13.8% claiming to take 6-12 hours, and 8.3% taking up to 24 hours to get something on the books. Problems with scheduling are only half the battle. Almost half of respondents, 46.1%, claimed that back-and-forth scheduling hassles constitute the single biggest drain on their time. Once meetings are booked, 34.7% said no-shows were a significant problem, 31.9% viewed double bookings as a top challenge, and 23.6% had to deal with uneven team schedules. It’s not like meetings are only a once-a-week occurrence for small businesses. The vast majority of manual schedulers, 68.7%, said they maintain 1-5 appointments a day, with other respondents claiming more. Plus, as companies grow in size and complexity, it’s likely more meetings will need to occur throughout an average day. Benefits barely outweigh fears A third of small businesses surveyed, 34.7%, said they employ dedicated scheduling software, and these companies claim to have seen numerous benefits. The top five were scheduling automation, meeting management, employee productivity, team scheduling and coordination, and customer experience. All of these contribute not only to saving time but to growing a small business at its core. That’s not to say all small businesses that use scheduling software are content. Only 18.2% of those said their tool was meeting their needs. Of those who were unable to make the same claim, 40.9% want more AI capabilities added, 39.8% want more integrations, and 37.5% want better customer support. Available software options don’t capture all that small businesses would hope to achieve, but the demand still exists. The survey found that 59% of small businesses believed AI would be quite helpful for scheduling meetings, and 28.4% were neutral on the concept, perhaps not having seen it in action. Additionally, more than half of SMB respondents, around 53%, were comfortable with AI taking the scheduling reins, even if 51.2% of SMBs feared that AI scheduling would cause their companies to lose a human touch and 41.3% worried they’d lose control over decision-making. Scheduling success The barrier to AI adoption in scheduling software among SMBs isn’t technical skepticism; it’s a fear that automation will make a small business feel less like one—losing the personalization and camaraderie they’ve grown to value. As AI technology develops and folds into software of all stripes, the fear of lost autonomy should subside. Vendors are increasing the amount of context their AI agents receive, ensuring decisions are rooted in an employee’s reality within guardrails set by managers. Centralized dashboards unlock added visibility, allowing for changes to be made so the system can iterate on best practices. The survey demonstrates that small businesses can’t let themselves get in their own way. They believe scheduling software can save time and ensure meetings are as effective as they can be, but many have yet to take the leap, instead relying on outdated methods like email, spreadsheets, and endless phone tag. Small business growth relies heavily on teamwork, and there’s no better way to collaborate than having everyone in the same room, virtually or otherwise. AI-powered meeting software makes that happen. Image via Envato This article, "Top Scheduling Trends Reveal Reluctance to Embrace Efficiency—and it’s Time for a Change" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

The OpenAI GPT Store launched in January 2024 with more than 3 million custom GPTs. Ask any team how many they still use, and the answer is usually zero or one. Most business GPTs fail because they’re built like novelties rather than tools. They’re too broad, under-tested, and launched without a strategy, so they never become part of a team’s workflow. I’ve built and audited 12+ custom GPTs across marketing, SEO, and sales teams. The pattern is consistent: a small number get used daily, while most collect dust. Here’s how to build GPTs that do — from validating the right use case to structuring, testing, and launching in a way that drives real adoption. At a glance: The 15-minute version If you’re ready to jump in, you can start with these steps: Pick one task your team does 3x+ per week that takes 15+ minutes. Complete this sentence: “This GPT helps [role] do [task] by [method].” Write instructions in the Configure tab, not the Create tab. Upload a curated one- to two-page .md knowledge file, not a raw document dump. Add four specific conversation starters. Users who see specific options are significantly more likely to engage than those facing a blank input field. If they can’t immediately see what to do, they leave. Test with five questions before anyone else sees it. Share with three teammates. Watch them use it. Iterate within 48 hours. Want to see what a well-built business GPT looks like before building your own? Try Marketing Research & Competitive Analysis or MARKETING, both ranked in the GPT Store’s Research & Analysis category. I helped build these at Semrush and will reference them throughout, and they demonstrate the build patterns covered below. Need the full framework? Keep reading. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with What a business GPT actually is (and what it isn’t) A business GPT is a custom version of ChatGPT configured to do one specific, recurring job for a defined role on your team. Not “an AI assistant.” Not “a helpful tool.” One job. Think of it like hiring. A generalist can help with anything. A specialist who does one thing incredibly well is worth 10 times more for that specific task, because they’ve already internalized the context, the standards, and the constraints you’d otherwise have to explain every single time. That’s what a well-built business GPT does. It already knows your brand voice, output format, and when to stop and escalate instead of guessing. I’ve built and audited 12+ custom GPTs across marketing, SEO, and sales teams, and the pattern is consistent: the ones that get used daily are tightly scoped and predictable. The ones that aren’t collect dust. The one-sentence test: If your GPT needs more than one sentence to explain what it does, the use case is still too broad. Narrow it until the answer is obvious. “A GPT that drafts on-brand responses to negative customer reviews using our escalation framework” passes. “A general customer support assistant” doesn’t. That specificity is what makes it useful at the planning stage, where most marketing GPTs fall short. The same pattern shows up across the best GPTs in the store. Most are novelties. These aren’t. Each demonstrates a build pattern you can apply. Marketing Research & Competitive Analysis Ranked No. 2 in Research & Analysis. Drop in a competitor, an industry, or a business challenge, and you’ll get structured frameworks, SWOT analyses, positioning gaps, and audience breakdowns backed by cited sources. The build pattern worth noting: breadth within a defined domain. Most research GPTs do one thing. This one covers the full strategic stack, from competitive analysis to market research to strategic planning, without losing focus because the scope is bounded by “research and analysis” rather than “marketing” broadly. MARKETING Ranked No. 4 in Research & Analysis. Covers 14+ disciplines, including paid search, programmatic, out-of-home, influencer, and retail media. The build spans the full media mix rather than specializing in one channel. It’s useful at the planning stage, where most marketing GPTs fall short. It also shows how conversation starters can guide users to high-value use cases immediately, rather than leaving them staring at a blank input field. Write For Me Consistently top five globally across all GPT Store categories. This is strongest for blog posts, articles, and long-form content. The build uses front-loaded conversation starters to narrow scope at the session level rather than baking rigid constraints into the instructions. That makes it flexible enough to serve thousands of different users without losing focus. Data Analyst (by OpenAI) Upload a CSV and receive charts, summaries, and insights without writing a single line of code. This is the clearest live demonstration of Code Interpreter used well. This build demonstrates what the capabilities toggle actually unlocks in practice. Open it first if you want to convince a skeptical stakeholder. Automation Consultant by Zapier Describe a workflow problem in plain English and receive specific Zapier automation recommendations. The business model pattern here is as instructive as the build pattern: a tool-native GPT that generates qualified leads by solving the exact problem its parent product addresses. This is worth studying if you’re thinking about GPTs as a distribution channel, not just a productivity tool. Canva Create and edit designs, presentations, and social graphics through conversation. Beyond the practical utility, Canva’s GPT is worth studying as a forward-looking example of where the category is heading. It has evolved from a simple GPT integration to a full native ChatGPT app integration, showing what a mature tool-native deployment looks like when a brand commits to the channel properly. Validate before you build The biggest waste in GPT development is building something nobody needed badly enough to actually use. Before writing a single line of instructions, score your idea across four dimensions. CriteriaLow (1 point)Medium (3 points)High (5 points)FrequencyMonthly or lessA few times/weekMultiple times dailyTime costUnder 15 minutes15-45 minutes1+ hours each timeConsistencyNot criticalModerateMission-criticalContext requiredGeneric info worksSome internal dataDeep internal knowledge Score interpretation: 16-20 points: Build it this week. 10-15 points: Worth a prototype. Below 10: Skip it. The ROI math won’t justify adoption. The math is simple. A 45-minute task done five times per week is 16 hours per month. Anthropic’s November 2025 productivity research found that the median AI-assisted task delivered an estimated 84% time savings, with most tasks falling somewhere in the 50-95% range. Even at the conservative end of that range, a well-scoped GPT returns eight to 12 hours per person per month on that one task alone. The St. Louis Fed’s October 2025 survey research backs this up: One-third of workers who use AI tools daily report saving at least four hours every single week. Multiply either number across a team, and the ROI case writes itself. Tip: Audit your team’s weekly standup notes or Slack threads from the last 30 days. Tasks mentioned repeatedly (especially ones people complain about) are your best GPT candidates. They’re already annoying enough to surface unprompted, which means adoption motivation already exists. Build it right with the 6-layer framework Every effective business GPT is built on six layers. Skip one, and the output feels half-baked. Add unnecessary complexity to one, and adoption drops. Layer 1: Use case (one job. Full stop.) This is the filter every other decision runs through. ❌ A general coding assistant. ✅ A code reviewer that checks React components against our team's style guide. ❌ A marketing helper. ✅ A campaign brief generator that outputs our standard five-section brief format from a single one-line input. If you find yourself adding “and also it should…” more than twice during the build, you need two GPTs, not one bigger one. This is why Marketing Research & Competitive Analysis works. It could easily have tried to write copy, plan campaigns, and do SEO analysis. Instead, it stays in its lane: research and competitive intelligence. That constraint is what makes the output reliable enough to use in real strategy meetings. Layer 2: Instructions (your most important investment) Most people underinvest here by an order of magnitude. Your system prompt isn’t a description of what the GPT does. It’s the operating system that controls how it thinks, behaves, and responds. A weak system prompt produces generic, unreliable output. A strong one turns a blank ChatGPT into a domain expert. Go straight to the Configure tab. ChatGPT’s conversational builder (the “Create” tab) is fine for quick setup but gives you almost no control over formatting, behavior rules, or conditional logic. The Configure tab is where you actually build the thing. If you’re already using ChatGPT for SEO workflows, you know how much the quality of your prompts determines the quality of the output. The same principle applies tenfold with system instructions. For a deeper dive on prompt construction for SEO specifically, check out our guide to ChatGPT for SEO. Structure your instructions in this order: Role definition: Who is this GPT? What’s its point of view? What does it know deeply? Behavioral guidelines: What should it always do? What should it never do? Output format: How should responses be structured? What’s the ideal length? Tables, bullets, prose? Brand voice: What language does your brand use? What language is off-limits? Escalation paths: When should it recommend a resource, a tool, or a human instead of answering? One formatting trick that actually works: For rules that are truly non-negotiable, write them in ALL CAPS. It sounds aggressive in isolation, but it works. The model reads formatting signals. “NEVER recommend a competitor product” lands harder than “try not to mention competitors.” Use it for your three to five most critical behavioral guardrails. Examples: ❌ Write professional emails to clients. ✅ You are a B2B sales rep at a SaaS company. Tone: confident, concise, no buzzwords. NEVER use the word "synergy." Format: Subject line, three short paragraphs, clear single CTA. ALWAYS end with a specific next step, not a vague "let me know." Budget 10-15 hours of system prompt iteration before you call a GPT production-ready. That’s not a typo. Test against normal cases, edge cases, and adversarial inputs — the kinds of things a skeptical user or an off-script question will throw at it. Layer 3: Knowledge files (what makes it yours) Without knowledge files, you’ve built a custom-named version of standard ChatGPT. The knowledge layer is what gives your GPT institutional memory: the brand voice, the internal frameworks, the context that doesn’t exist anywhere on the public internet. What to upload: Brand voice guides and style examples. Internal process docs and frameworks. Competitor positioning notes. Product one-pagers and FAQs. Past high-performing examples of the output you want. File format matters. Plain text (.txt) and Markdown (.md) outperform PDFs for retrieval accuracy. Never dump a raw 500-page document. The model can’t efficiently parse messy formatting or irrelevant context. The cheat sheet rule: If a source document is longer than 20 pages, use AI to distill it into a focused, five-to-10-page summary specifically for the GPT to reference. Shorter, curated context outperforms raw data dumps every time. The transcript trick most teams miss: If your company has recorded webinars, training videos, or internal demos, those transcripts are ready-made knowledge files. Open the video on YouTube, click “Show transcript,” toggle off timestamps, copy the full text, paste into a Google Doc, and download as .txt. A 45-minute video becomes a high-quality knowledge source in about 10 minutes. Layer 4: Capabilities (enable what you need. Nothing else.) There are three built-in toggles: Web Browsing, Code Interpreter, and DALL-E. Don’t enable them all “just in case.” Each one adds surface area for the model to go off-script. CapabilityEnable whenSkip whenWeb BrowsingGPT needs live data: prices, news, current URLsGPT should only draw from your uploaded knowledge filesCode InterpreterUsers will upload CSVs, run analysis, generate chartsGPT is purely text-basedDALL-EGPT creates visual assets as part of the workflowGPT is analytical or copy-focused Code Interpreter is the most underrated of the three. A GPT with it enabled can accept CSV uploads, run analysis, generate charts, and return downloadable files, replacing hours of manual reporting. If any part of your workflow involves structured data, this is worth experimenting with. A note on web browsing: Web-enabled GPTs will confidently pull and present outdated or wrong information. If accuracy is important, disable web browsing entirely and rely only on your curated knowledge files. You control what’s in them. You can’t control what the web returns. Layer 5: Actions (one integration for V1) API connections to external systems — CRMs, project management tools, databases, calendars — are where GPTs start to feel like real automation infrastructure rather than fancy chat interfaces. For V1, connect exactly one integration. Not five. Scope creep at the actions layer is where GPT projects stall before launch. Pick the single integration that would deliver the most immediate value, typically where the GPT’s output currently has to be manually copied somewhere else. Layer 6: Evaluation (test before anyone else sees it) Write five to 10 test questions before you share the link with anyone. Include normal cases, edge cases, and at least two adversarial inputs, the kinds of questions a frustrated user or an off-topic request would generate. ❌ Hello, what can you do? ✅ Here is a furious customer email accusing us of fraud. Draft a response using our de-escalation framework without admitting liability. Test cases should reflect the hardest version of the job, not the easiest. If the GPT can handle the edge cases, the normal cases will be fine. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. The most common GPT mistakes (and exactly how to fix them) #MistakeWhy it failsThe fix1Scope too broadTries to do everything, does nothing wellOne GPT = one job. No exceptions.2No example outputs in instructionsGPT guesses your preferred formatInclude one to two “golden” examples of ideal output directly in your system prompt3Raw document dumpsModel can’t parse 500-page PDFs reliablyCurate five to 10-page Markdown cheat sheets instead4No conversation startersUsers stare at a blank prompt field and close the tabAdd four specific starters that showcase different use cases immediately5No evaluation before launchEdge cases surface publicly and erode trustWrite five to 10 test cases before sharing, including adversarial ones6Wrong capabilities enabledWeb Browsing introduces hallucination riskEnable only what the workflow actually requires7Build and forgetInstructions go stale as your business evolvesRevisit instructions monthly, update knowledge files quarterly The department playbook: Highest-ROI opportunities by team Start with the department that complains most about repetitive work. Their pain is your adoption fuel. A GPT that eliminates a universally-hated task markets itself through word-of-mouth faster than anything you could announce in a Slack channel. Marketing Campaign copy assistant: Input one brief. Receive ad copy, email subjects, and social captions formatted by channel. Upload your brand guidelines as the knowledge file. This replaces 30-45 minutes of copy concepting per campaign. Semrush integration opportunity: Feed in keyword data from Keyword Magic Tool to ensure copy is aligned with how your audience searches. Competitor messaging analyzer: Paste competitor copy or a landing page URL. Get a structured summary of their positioning, the gaps they’re ignoring, and angles your brand can own. Semrush integration opportunity: Pair with Traffic Analytics data to qualify which competitors are worth analyzing by actual share of voice. If you want to skip the build and get competitive intelligence right now, Marketing Research & Competitive Analysis handles exactly this workflow out of the box. Drop in a competitor and get a structured SWOT, positioning gaps, and audience breakdown in a single conversation. SEO Content brief generator: This turns a keyword into a structured brief covering audience, search intent, recommended outline, and competitor content gaps. It replaces 30-45 minutes of manual brief writing per piece. At 20 briefs per month, that’s 10 to 15 hours returned to your team. Semrush integration opportunity: Build the brief template around Semrush’s SEO Content Template output. The GPT populates the strategic rationale, Semrush provides the keyword and competitive data. Technical SEO audit assistant: Paste a page’s content and meta information. Receive a prioritized fix list with title tag rewrites, internal link suggestions, and schema recommendations formatted exactly the way your team tracks them. Semrush integration opportunity: Pull the audit inputs directly from Semrush’s Site Audit exports. If you’re already using ChatGPT for SEO work, our collection of SEO prompts for ChatGPT is a good starting point for building the system instructions for either of these GPTs. Sales Prospect research brief: Input a company name. Receive a pre-call brief with recent company news, likely buying signals based on firmographic patterns, and tailored talk tracks for the likely objections. A sales rep I worked with spent 20 minutes per prospect doing this manually before every cold call. The GPT produces the equivalent brief in 90 seconds. That means he spends his actual working hours on the only part that earns commission: the call itself. Win/loss analyzer: Upload anonymized CRM deal notes. Surface patterns in why deals close or fall apart: which objection categories are fatal, which talk tracks correlate with wins, where in the funnel deals die. Customer support Ticket response drafter: Paste a customer ticket. Receive an on-brand draft response using your de-escalation framework. Rep reviews and sends in three minutes instead of 12. At 30 tickets per day, that’s 2.5 hours returned to a support rep’s day. Policy Q&A bot: Upload your HR handbook or policy documentation. This will answer common employee questions instantly, reducing the repetitive Slack messages that eat 30-60 minutes from HR and ops leads per week. Operations OKR reviewer: Paste a team’s OKRs and get scores and rewrites. Are the objectives inspiring? Are key results actually measurable? Enforces rigor at scale without requiring a senior leader to manually review every team’s draft. Meeting structurer: Input a topic and attendee list. Output a tight agenda with pre-reads, decision points, and follow-up templates. For organizations where meeting bloat is a recognized problem, this one tends to spread fast. How to prevent your GPT from making things up Hallucination (the model generating confident-sounding incorrect information) is the single most-cited concern from teams considering custom GPTs. It’s a manageable risk if you build correctly. Add an explicit guardrail sentence in your instructions. Something like: “If you do not know the answer from the provided knowledge files, say so directly. Do not invent information. Direct the user to [specific resource] instead.” Simple. Effective. Dramatically reduces the instinct to fill gaps with plausible-sounding fabrication. Disable Web Browsing when accuracy matters. A web-enabled GPT will pull and confidently present outdated, incorrect, or hallucinated source material. If your GPT’s value depends on accuracy, including policy Q&A, compliance guidance, and product specs, turn off Web Browsing entirely and rely only on the knowledge files you’ve curated and can verify. Test for it systematically before launch. Ask your GPT questions you already know the answers to. Ask it something outside its defined scope. Ask an edge-case question that isn’t covered by your knowledge files. If it confidently fabricates rather than saying “I don’t know,” fix the instructions before anyone else encounters it. The tighter the scope, the lower the hallucination risk. This is another reason the one-job rule isn’t just about UX. It’s about accuracy. A GPT that knows it’s only supposed to answer questions about your return policy has far less surface area to go off-script than one configured as a general business assistant. How to launch so your team actually adopts it Building the GPT is half the job. The failure mode most teams hit isn’t a bad build. It’s a bad launch. A GPT nobody can find is a GPT nobody uses. Phase 1: Build Define your one-sentence purpose. Write layered instructions with examples. Upload focused knowledge files. Configure one API action maximum for V1. Resist the urge to expand scope. Phase 2: Test Create five to 10 golden test questions. Run a pilot with three to five real users. Don’t send them a link and walk away. Watch them use it, note where they stall, and iterate two to three rounds before wider release. The feedback from watching someone use your GPT for the first time is worth more than any amount of solo testing. Phase 3: Launch Write your GPT store or sharing copy around the outcome, not the technology. “Save 45 minutes on every content brief” outperforms “an AI-powered SEO assistant.” Add four conversation starters that showcase different use cases immediately. Users who see specific options to click engage at a significantly higher rate than those staring at a blank input field with no idea where to start. Phase 4: Promote Record a two-minute Loom showing a before/after on the specific task the GPT replaces. Share through your team Slack with that before/after story, not a feature list. Create a one-page “prompt pack” with the 10 highest-value starting prompts for your GPT. The discoverability principle: Pin your GPT in the team Slack channel. Add it to onboarding docs. Demo it at the next all-hands. If someone can’t find it and understand what it does in five seconds, they won’t come back after the first session. Measuring what actually matters Tracking total conversations is the floor, not the ceiling. Here’s what actually tells you whether your GPT is working: MetricWhat it tells youTargetReturn rateOnce is curiosity. Twice is value. Weekly is a habit.50%+ returning after first useConversation depthTurns per session; longer = higher utility4+ turns average for complex tasksTime saved per useSurvey users or compare task completion times30-70% reduction vs. manualTeam adoption rate% of target users engaging weekly60%+ within 30 days for internal GPTsDownstream action rateAre users taking the next step you wanted?Defined per use case The ROI one-pager: Hours saved per use × frequency per week × team size × average hourly cost = monthly dollar value. Build this at the 30-day mark. It’s the most powerful artifact you have for justifying continued investment, or making the case for the next GPT. Where most B2B teams are right now Organizations fall into one of five stages: Exploring: Team members use ChatGPT ad hoc. No shared GPTs exist. Experimenting: One or two people have built a custom GPT. Usage is informal and person-dependent. Standardizing: Three to five GPTs are deployed with proper instructions, knowledge files, and evaluation criteria. This is where shared value starts to compound. Scaling: GPTs are integrated into defined workflows across departments. Usage is tracked. Iteration is systematic. GPT-Native: GPTs are the default starting point for designing new workflows, not an afterthought. Most B2B teams are at Level 1 or 2. The biggest ROI jump happens between Level 2 and Level 3. That’s the moment GPTs stop being personal productivity experiments and start becoming team infrastructure. See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with What separates useful GPTs from the rest Custom GPTs are a workflow infrastructure decision. It compounds over time when scoped correctly, and quietly disappears when it isn’t. The teams getting real ROI from them aren’t building the most technically sophisticated versions. They’re building focused ones: scoped to one job, launched with enough intentionality that their team can actually find and use them, and iterated based on real usage data, not assumptions. Start with the task your team complains about most. Score it against the framework. If it hits 12 or above, you have your answer. Build it this week. Run it for 30 days. That’s when it gets interesting. Ready to build your GPT? Start with a blueprint The GPT Blueprint Generator on Thinklet walks you through the validation framework above, generates a custom system prompt for your specific use case, and outputs a ready-to-paste knowledge file, all in one session. It’s built specifically as the hands-on companion to this guide. Or, if you want to see what a well-built GPT feels like before you commit to building one, start here: Try Marketing Research & Competitive Analysis. Competitive intelligence, market research, and strategic planning in one conversation. Try MARKETING. Full-stack marketing strategy across 14+ channels. Describe a campaign goal and get a channel plan, KPIs, and creative direction. View the full article

U.S. President Donald The President on Monday threatened widespread destruction of Iran’s energy resources and other vital infrastructure, including desalination plants, if a deal to end the war with Tehran is not reached “shortly.” On the ground, the conflict showed no sign of letting up: Tehran struck a key water and electrical plant in Kuwait, and an oil refinery in Israel came under attack. Israel and the U.S. launched a new wave of strikes on Iran. The President’s new threat in a social media post and earlier comments in an interview with the Financial Times that suggested American troops could seize the country’s Kharg Island oil export hub highlight a frequent tactic. On the one hand, he has repeatedly said that talks with Iran are going well — though Tehran denies negotiating directly. On the other hand, he has continually ramped up his threats, as thousands more Marines and other U.S. troops pour into the Middle East. It remains unclear where the diplomatic effort facilitated by Pakistan stands. Iran’s attacks on its Gulf neighbors could add another element of uncertainty to any talks. The United Arab Emirates — which has long billed itself as a beacon of safety and stability in a volatile region — has been hard hit in the war, and increasingly is signaling it wants Iran disarmed in any ceasefire. Iran’s theocracy likely won’t accept that. The President says diplomacy is going well but suggests military expansion is possible In a social media post, The President said “great progress is being made” in talks with Iran to end military operations. But he bristled that if a deal is not reached “shortly” and if the Strait of Hormuz is not immediately reopened, the U.S. would broaden its offensive by “completely obliterating” power plants, oil wells, Kharg Island and possibly even targeting desalination plants that supply drinking water. The strait is a crucial waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped in peacetime. In the interview with the FT, The President said his preference would be to “take the oil in Iran” — a move that would require seizing Kharg Island — the terminal through which nearly all of Iran’s oil exports pass. “Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t,” he continued. “We have a lot of options.” The U.S. already has targeted military positions on Kharg once. Iran has threatened to launch its own ground invasion of Gulf Arab countries and mine the Persian Gulf if U.S. troops land on its territory. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei on Monday acknowledged Tehran had been given a 15-point proposal from the The President administration, but said there had been no direct negotiations with Washington so far. Earlier, Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, dismissed the talks in Pakistan as a cover to get more U.S. troops into the region. He said Iranian forces were “waiting for the arrival of American troops on the ground to set them on fire and punish their regional partners forever,” according to state media. Twice during The President’s second term, the U.S. has attacked Iran during high-level diplomatic talks, including with the Feb. 28 strikes that started the current war. Iran launches attacks on Israel and hits more infrastructure in Gulf states Sirens sounded at dawn near Israel’s main nuclear research center, a part of the country that has been targeted repeatedly in recent days. Israel’s military also said it had taken out two drones launched from Yemen, where the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels entered the war on Saturday with their first missile attack. Later, a fire broke out at an oil refinery in the northern city of Haifa, either because of a missile strike or debris falling from an interception. The blaze was quickly extinguished. Iran kept up the pressure on its Gulf Arab neighbors, as Saudi Arabia intercepted five missiles targeting its oil-rich Eastern province, Bahrain sounded a missile alert, and a fireball erupted over Dubai, United Arab Emirates, as a missile was intercepted by defenses. In Kuwait, an Iranian attack hit a power and desalination plant, killing one worker and wounding 10 soldiers, the state-run KUNA news agency reported. Amid Iran’s continuing campaign against its Gulf neighbors, an Emirati government official offered another signal Monday that the United Arab Emirates wants more than just a ceasefire. “We want a normal neighbor,” Noura Al Kaabi, a minister of state at the UAE’s Foreign Ministry, wrote in a column published by the state-linked, English-language newspaper The National. “An Iranian regime that launches ballistic missiles at homes, weaponizes global trade and supports proxies is no longer an acceptable feature of the regional landscape.” She added: “We want a guarantee that this will never happen again.” Israel’s military, meanwhile, launched a new wave of attacks on Iran, saying it was striking “military infrastructure” across Tehran. Explosions were heard in the Iranian capital and Iranian state media reported a petrochemicals plant in Tabriz, in the north, sustained damage after an airstrike. Iran confirmed on Monday that the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s navy, Rear Adm. Alireza Tangsiri, had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, as Israel claimed last week. In Lebanon, which Israel has invaded, an Indonesian peacekeeper was killed and three others were wounded when a projectile exploded near a village in the south. Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military would widen its invasion, expanding the “existing security strip” in that country’s south as it targets the Iran-linked Hezbollah militant group. In Iran, authorities say more than 1,900 people have been killed, while 19 have been reported dead in Israel. Two dozen people have been killed In Gulf states and the occupied West Bank. In Lebanon, officials said more than 1,200 people have been killed, and more than 1 million have been displaced. Six Israeli soldiers have died in Lebanon, while 13 U.S. service members have been killed in the war. Oil prices rise again as concerns of global energy crisis grow Iran’s attacks on the energy infrastructure of the region and its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz have threatened global supplies of oil, natural gas and fertilizer. They have sent fuel prices skyrocketing and given rise to growing concerns about an energy crisis. The President has said that Iran had agreed to allow 20 oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz starting Monday as “a sign of respect.” There wasn’t any information on whether those ships were actually moving Monday. Brent crude oil, the international standard, was trading around $115 Monday, up nearly 60% from when the war started. Rising reported from Bangkok, Corder from The Hague, Netherlands. Associated Press writers Darlene Superville aboard Air Force One, Melanie Lidman, Tel Aviv, Israel, Giovanna Dell’Orto in Miami and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this story. —Jon Gambrell, David Rising and Mike Corder, Associated Press View the full article

Martin Thomsen’s departure comes ahead of arrival of oil major’s new chief executive this weekView the full article

Yields rebounded after the 30-year held near 5%, but the yield curve's flattening trend likely isn't over, according to the head of correspondent business development at AD Mortgage. View the full article

When developing a customer care business plan, it’s vital to focus on ten key elements that can greatly impact your success. By setting SMART goals and segmenting your customers, you can tailor your strategies effectively. Enhancing communication methods and integrating technology can streamline operations. Furthermore, collaboration across departments and measuring customer success metrics are important for continuous improvement. Comprehending these components will lay the groundwork for a robust customer care approach, ensuring you meet evolving customer needs. What comes next? Key Takeaways Establish SMART goals centered around customer needs to align with business objectives and improve customer satisfaction metrics. Utilize customer segmentation to develop targeted strategies addressing unique pain points and preferences for tailored support. Implement technology solutions like CRM software to enhance efficiency and track customer interactions effectively. Foster cross-department collaboration to ensure consistent messaging and a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints. Regularly measure customer success metrics, such as NPS and CSAT, to drive continuous improvement in service quality. Build the Foundation To build a strong foundation for your customer care business plan, you need to establish clear and measurable goals that align with your overall business objectives. Utilize the SMART criteria to define these goals, ensuring they’re specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This approach helps create a solid foundation for your customer success strategy, guiding your team’s efforts effectively. Focus on customer-centric metrics, like increasing your Net Promoter Score (NPS) by a certain percentage within a specified period. This drives customer loyalty and satisfaction. Moreover, encourage a shared comprehension among your team members about the importance of these goals, which promotes a unified approach to achieving success. Regularly review and adjust your goals to respond to changing customer needs and market conditions, keeping your retail shop business plan template pertinent and effective. This adaptability is essential for maintaining high standards in your customer care business plan and overall retail business plan. Understand and Segment Customers Grasping and segmenting your customers is essential for tailoring your support and services to meet their specific needs. Recognizing customer demographics and behaviors allows you to create targeted strategies that address unique pain points for each segment. For instance, using a retail store business plan template can help you outline how to gather and analyze customer data effectively. Regularly collecting feedback through surveys and reviews provides insights that inform your segmentation, ensuring your strategies remain relevant. In your retail business plan example, emphasize the importance of utilizing data analytics to identify customer preferences and trends. This enables you to anticipate the specific needs of different groups, driving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Effective segmentation can lead to increased retention rates, eventually contributing to your business’s overall success. By focusing on these elements, you set the foundation for a more engaged and loyal customer base. Enhance Customer Interactions Improving customer interactions is crucial for cultivating loyalty and boosting overall satisfaction, especially when you actively anticipate and meet customer needs. Proactive engagement can increase retention by 23%, underscoring the importance of addressing issues before they arise. Customized interactions, like personalized emails and product recommendations, make customers feel valued and understood, raising their satisfaction. By utilizing data analytics, you can identify customer behavior patterns, allowing you to create targeted strategies that effectively address unique pain points for different segments. Implementing a CRM system streamlines these interactions, ensuring all team members have access to pertinent customer data to support personalized service. Additionally, regularly measuring engagement indicators helps you identify at-risk customers, enabling timely outreach to strengthen relationships and mitigate churn. Speed Things up With Technology and Tools As businesses endeavor to improve their customer service, leveraging technology and tools becomes essential for boosting efficiency and responsiveness. Implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software allows you to track customer interactions and manage data efficiently, improving team collaboration and customer insight. In addition, utilizing customer success platforms like Custify can automate workflows and monitor customer health metrics, streamlining your support process and enhancing response times. Data analytics tools, such as Tableau, provide valuable insights into customer behavior and trends, enabling you to tailor your strategies effectively. Feedback collection tools, like Canny, facilitate gathering customer opinions and suggestions, driving product improvements and service upgrades. Moreover, communication tools such as Intercom guarantee timely and effective customer support, addressing inquiries quickly, which can increase customer satisfaction by up to 23%. By integrating these technologies, you can greatly improve your customer care operations and build lasting relationships. Collaborate With Other Departments Collaborating with other departments is crucial for creating a seamless customer experience. By aligning messaging across teams, you guarantee that customers receive consistent information, which builds trust and reliability. Furthermore, sharing insights and data helps identify customer needs and opportunities, allowing your organization to respond effectively and improve overall satisfaction. Align Messaging Across Teams Effective communication across teams is crucial for delivering a consistent customer experience. By collaborating with sales teams, you can gain valuable insights into customer needs and preferences, leading to better-targeted customer care strategies and upselling opportunities. Aligning messaging between marketing and customer support guarantees a unified brand voice, which helps maintain customer trust and consistency in communication. Engaging with the product team allows you to prioritize customer feedback on feature requests and bug fixes, aligning product offerings with customer expectations. Regular coordination between customer service and support teams streamlines processes, creating an all-encompassing knowledge base. This alignment across departments promotes a cohesive approach to customer success, eventually improving customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics. Share Insights and Data Aligning messaging across teams not merely improves communication but furthermore sets the stage for sharing insights and data effectively. Collaborating with departments like sales and marketing gives you valuable insights into customer needs, leading to improved customer care strategies. Engaging the product team allows prioritization of feature requests based on real feedback, whereas coordination with the support team creates an all-encompassing knowledge base. Regular interdepartmental meetings encourage alignment on objectives, ensuring all teams work in the direction of improving customer satisfaction. Department Insight Provided Sales Trends in customer purchasing behavior Marketing Customer engagement data and campaign feedback Product Feature requests based on customer feedback Support Common issues faced by customers during interactions Document Your Processes Documenting your processes is vital for maintaining consistency in service delivery, which directly impacts the customer experience. By having clear procedures in place, you not just streamline training and onboarding for new team members but furthermore improve overall efficiency within your organization. Moreover, keeping this documentation updated allows for ongoing process improvements, ensuring your strategies adapt to evolving customer needs and market demands. Consistency in Service Delivery Creating a consistent customer service experience hinges on clear and thorough documentation of your processes. Documenting these processes guarantees your team provides a uniform experience, reducing variability and enhancing customer satisfaction at every touchpoint. With clear documentation, new team members can quickly grasp their roles and responsibilities, allowing for efficient onboarding. Establishing a set of customer service workflows promotes accountability, clarifying who’s responsible for each aspect of customer interactions. Standardized processes not only streamline operations but additionally enable your team to respond to inquiries more quickly and accurately. By regularly updating documentation based on feedback and customer interactions, you guarantee your processes remain relevant, adapting to evolving expectations and service standards. Training and Onboarding Efficiency Efficient training and onboarding are crucial for a successful customer care team, as they directly impact service quality and employee performance. Documenting your processes improves onboarding efficiency, offering new team members a consistent reference point for handling inquiries. Well-documented workflows can cut training time by up to 25%, allowing quicker adaptation to roles. Standardized procedures in a customer care playbook guarantee uniform experiences for customers. Regular updates prevent knowledge gaps, equipping new hires with the latest best practices. A centralized knowledge base makes information easily accessible, boosting response times and service quality. Benefits Impact on Training Time Outcome Clear Documentation Reduces by 25% Faster Onboarding Standardized Protocols Guarantees Consistency Uniform Customer Experience Regular Updates Keeps Information Current Informed Employees Process Improvement Documentation When processes are clearly documented, it guarantees consistency in customer experiences and minimizes errors, which in the end improves the overall quality of service provided by your customer care team. Documenting workflows not only assists in onboarding new team members effectively but also boosts overall efficiency. Here are some key benefits of process improvement documentation: It provides a clear reference point for team members to understand their roles and responsibilities. Regular updates facilitate easier adjustments to strategies, helping you remain agile in response to changing customer expectations. Accountability is improved, ensuring all team members are aligned in their customer care efforts. Measure Customer Success Metrics Measuring customer success metrics is essential for grasping how well your business meets customer needs and expectations. Key metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) provide quantitative insights into customer perceptions and engagement. Regularly tracking NPS, which ranges from -100 to 100, allows you to identify areas for improvement and assess overall sentiment regarding your service. CSAT, often gathered through post-interaction surveys, helps you evaluate satisfaction immediately after a service experience, enabling timely feedback for adjustments. Analyzing CLV gives you an insight into the long-term value of acquiring and retaining customers, informing your marketing and customer service strategies. Establishing a routine for measuring these metrics encourages a culture of continuous improvement, ensuring your business remains responsive to evolving customer needs and expectations. Continuously Improve and Adapt To continuously improve customer care, you need to focus on ongoing data analysis and agile process adjustments. Regularly evaluating metrics like customer satisfaction helps identify areas for improvement, as you adapt quickly to feedback guarantees your services meet evolving customer needs. Ongoing Data Analysis Ongoing data analysis serves as a crucial element in refining customer care strategies, helping businesses stay responsive to their customers’ needs. By regularly tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer lifetime value (CLV), you can effectively assess your initiatives. Utilizing data analytics tools allows you to identify trends, enabling proactive adjustments. Key benefits include: Improved comprehension of customer behavior and pain points Creation of feedback loops for real-time service adaptations Enhanced customer retention rates through proactive engagement Regular reviews empower your team to make informed decisions, ensuring alignment with customer expectations and facilitating timely adjustments to service delivery methods. This ongoing analysis cultivates a culture of continuous improvement. Agile Process Adjustments Agile process adjustments are essential for businesses aiming to improve customer care by adapting swiftly to shifts in customer preferences and market dynamics. Implementing regular feedback loops lets you adapt your strategies based on real-time insights, nurturing a culture of continuous improvement. Analyzing customer success metrics, like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), provides actionable data to pinpoint areas needing improvement. Agile methodologies promote quick iterations, enabling your team to effectively respond to changing expectations. Regularly reviewing customer experience maps guarantees alignment with customer needs at every touchpoint. Moreover, utilizing data analytics tools like Tableau helps you uncover trends in customer behavior, supporting informed decisions for necessary process improvements. Effective Communication Strategies Effective communication strategies play a crucial role in enhancing customer care and satisfaction. By focusing on clear and empathetic interactions, you can greatly improve customer experiences and nurture loyalty. Consider these key elements: Active Listening: Truly understand customer concerns, resolving up to 90% of issues simply by acknowledging their emotions. Clear Language: Use concise communication to minimize misunderstandings, potentially boosting satisfaction scores by 25%. Proactive Outreach: Contact customers before they reach out for help, reducing the likelihood of minor issues escalating, which can improve retention rates by 23%. Additionally, maintaining consistent communication across all channels, such as phone, email, and chat, guarantees uniform service quality. This consistency is crucial for upholding your brand’s reputation and enhancing customer loyalty. Implementing these strategies can lead to a more effective customer care approach, eventually benefiting your business in the long run. Training and Empowerment of Customer Service Representatives Training customer service representatives is vital for guaranteeing they possess the skills needed to handle a variety of customer inquiries effectively. Your training programs should focus on fundamental skills, including product knowledge, communication techniques, and empathy. This equips you to address diverse customer needs. Empowering you to make decisions during interactions can greatly improve customer satisfaction, as trust leads to better service and quicker issue resolution. Prioritizing ongoing training guarantees you remain adaptable to changing customer expectations and industry trends. Incorporating role-playing scenarios during training improves your problem-solving abilities, preparing you for real-life situations and boosting your confidence. Moreover, providing access to updated resources is important, as it allows you to deliver accurate responses and maintain consistency across all customer interactions. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the 7 Key Elements of Customer Service? The seven key elements of customer service include clear communication, responsiveness, empathy, knowledge, consistency, personalization, and feedback. Clear communication guarantees customers understand your offerings. Responsiveness means addressing inquiries swiftly. Empathy helps in connecting with customers emotionally. Knowledge guarantees your team can provide accurate information. Consistency builds trust, whereas personalization tailors experiences to individual needs. Finally, seeking feedback helps you identify areas for improvement, guaranteeing your service evolves to better meet customer expectations. What Are the 5 Pillars of Customer Success? The five pillars of customer success are vital for nurturing long-term relationships and satisfaction. First, you need to understand customer needs by researching their preferences and pain points. Next, set clear, SMART goals that align with your business objectives. Effective communication is critical, so practice active listening and empathy. Leverage technology through CRM systems to improve engagement, and finally, promote continuous improvement to adapt your strategies and maintain customer loyalty. What Are the 7 Key Components of a Business Plan? To create a thorough business plan, you need seven key components. Start with an executive summary that captures your mission and vision. Next, conduct a market analysis to identify your target audience and competition. Outline your organizational structure to clarify roles. Develop a marketing strategy to attract customers, and include financial projections like income statements. Finally, assess risks and define your funding requirements to guarantee a clear path to success. What Are the 4 C’s of Customer Care? The 4 C’s of customer care are Care, Communication, Consistency, and Convenience. Care involves showing empathy and comprehension regarding customers, which builds trust. Communication guarantees you engage in clear, transparent dialogue, addressing customer needs effectively. Consistency assures that customers receive the same high-quality service across all channels, reinforcing reliability. Finally, Convenience focuses on making interactions easy and accessible, utilizing technology to streamline processes and improve the overall customer experience. Conclusion In summary, implementing these ten key elements in your customer care business plan can greatly improve customer satisfaction and drive growth. By establishing SMART goals, segmenting your customer base, and utilizing technology, you streamline operations and improve interactions. Collaboration across departments, effective communication strategies, and thorough training for your team guarantee consistency and efficiency. Regularly measuring customer success metrics and adapting your approach will keep you responsive to market changes, ultimately nurturing loyalty and long-term success. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "10 Key Elements of an Effective Customer Care Business Plan" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. One of the easiest ways to turn off the noise of the world is to outsource what the phone does to other devices—ones that aren't perpetually online or requiring a subscription to function. This led me to rediscover an old favorite: the MP3 player. MP3 players are now, not surprisingly, far more capable than they were two decades ago. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, many of which emulate the design of favorite legacy MP3 players, and are manufactured by companies you've likely never heard of, like FiiO and AGPTEK. They come with support for the latest music codecs, Bluetooth, FM Radio, built-in speakers, and even features that smartphone manufacturers have long since dropped, like expansion slots and the standard headphone jack. But if you're really nostalgic for the old days, you can recommission a vintage Apple iPod or a Microsoft Zune. There are even creative modders who will customize a traditional one. Whatever way you decide to participate, embracing the standalone MP3 player means joining a movement in defiance of the current trend of streaming everything. Here's how I got started with an MP3 player, and where to start if you're interested in reviving your own for modern-day use. These MP3 players are a turnkey solutionLet's be realistic: MP3 players are no longer the de facto gadget category they once were. You can't find them at brick-and-mortar stores or online the way you used to. But you can find some reasonably priced ones on Amazon and other global gadget markets. The most common and well-rated brand you'll see pop up on Amazon is AGPTEK. The company is based in Brooklyn and sells nearly everything in the gadget spectrum. It's one of those "parts bin" brands, which have access to reliable, off-the-shelf components to make reasonably priced gadgets without the high cost. AGPTEK A02 MP3 Player with Bluetooth 5.3, 1.8 inch Screen Portable Music Player with Speaker, FM Radio, Voice Recorder, Supports Expanded Up to 128GB(Purple, 64GB) $36.99 at Amazon Learn More Learn More $36.99 at Amazon AGPTEK offers several music players, but its most popular is the A02. It became a legend for its 70-hour battery life, and it's the one I brought home because of its impressive feature set. The AGPTEK A02 uses the latest Bluetooth 5.3 codec. I can move around the house with the player in my pocket or leave it on my desk, and I still have clear sound on the other side of the house. It uses USB-C for charging and data transfer, and there's a microSD slot that supports up to 128GB of storage if you need more than its 64GB internal storage. There's a physical lock switch to keep you from accidentally skipping a track, too. The Innioasis Y1. Credit: Innioasis/Amazon Innioasis is another brand you'll see floating around—they're known for their iPod knockoffs. They sell touchscreen MP3 players, too, but it's the "iPod tribute" ones that get the most traction. The most popular model is the Y1, which looks like an iPod Classic. The $50 device comes with USB-C and Bluetooth, rather than relying on a 30-Pin proprietary charging cable like back in the day. You don't need special software to drag and drop music onto the device. Most models come with 128GB of internal storage. Innioasis's touch-screen models are hybrid digital music players: They have wifi access so that you can download Spotify playlists and Audible audiobooks. They can't access the internet outside of that hot zone, however, so if you want new music and you're out on a run, you'll have to wait until you get back to the internet. These high-end options for great for audiophilesThe Sony Walkman NW-A306 is a premium digital music player. It has high-end internals like Sony's proprietary S-Master HX digital amplifier, which reduces distortion and noise across different frequencies, and high-quality film capacitors that make audio sound clearer than a phone's standard DAC (digital-to-analog converter). These are usually parts reserved for Sony's high-end home stereo systems, but here they're shrunk into a smaller footprint. For those on a tighter budget who still want a full-featured MP3 player, the brand FiiO is the current darling of the audiophile community. The JM21 player is slim and runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 chip, which you'd typically find in an Android phone. It has Dual Cirrus Logic CS43198 DAC chips, which means it delivers music with fully balanced audio, the same way Sony's music players do. It also features both a standard 3.5mm and a 4.4mm headphone jack if you have high-end studio cans you'd rather listen through. 160G MP3 Player, JadeAudio/FiiO JM21 Android 13 Hi-Res Music Player with Snapdragon 680, Bluetooth WiFi USB DAC 12.5H Playtime, up to 2TB (Black) $179.99 at Amazon $189.99 Save $10.00 Learn More Learn More $179.99 at Amazon $189.99 Save $10.00 Deciding between these two depends on whether you prioritize usability or power. Sony's players, like the NW-A306 and the slightly larger NW-ZX707, are small and offer up to 36 hours of battery life. They also feature a Sony-piloted AI-powered tool called DSEE Ultimate, which upscales low-quality audio to sound more high-resolution. That said, Sony users have complained that the device can feel sluggish compared to even a modern midrange Android device. It's not exactly high-powered. The FiiO is an easier sell because it just got refreshed. The JM21 has a 700 mW output, so it won't start crackling as your headphones get louder. Users prefer the interface to that of the Sony MP3 players, too. They've also mentioned that the soundstage, or the perceived "distance" between instruments, feels much wider. However, the MP3 player is a bit of a "brick" compared to Sony's lighter builds. The battery life is only 12-15 hours, and it doesn't have Sony's AI-assisted audio processing, so if your audio files are bad, you'll hear it all. Should you resurrect your iPod? If you aren't interested in buying something new, you might find yourself drawn to the do-it-yourself world of MP3 player revival. You take a twenty-year-old device, gut it, replace its parts with modern components, and then you have yourself Frankenstein's digital music player for the new age. Right now, iPods are the ones getting the most modding. The fragile, spinning mechanical hard drive of the original iPod Classic is typically the first thing to fail, so modders use iFlash adapters to load music from microSD cards instead. By removing that hard drive, you also make space for a battery, which can add more life to the iPod—some modders figured out how to run it for over 100 hours of continuous play. If you do decide to go this route, there are kits you can buy, like the Classic Connect 2, which lets you add Bluetooth, USB-C charging, and wireless charging to the classic iPod shell. Even if you have an older iPod lying around that's still working, you can break free from the ghost of iTunes by installing Rockbox. This open-source firmware, which finally landed a stable release in 2025, enables vintage iPods to play lossless FLAC files, add custom themes, and other shenanigans that you wouldn't consider doing to an mp3 player, but you can. People are also reviving Microsoft's original attempt at the "iPod Killer": the Zune. The Zune 30 is particularly popular for these modding projects because its internal layout is spacious. Modders can swap the original hard drive for a larger-capacity solid-state drive and drop in a bigger battery. And yes, they're bringing wireless charging to the Zune through aftermarket hacks, too. I am personally on a journey to attempt to revive a Sony Walkman NW-HD5. It has its own community of modders who have figured out how to replace the 1.8-inch drive with flash storage. That model also had a user-replaceable battery from the get-go, and you can find higher-capacity batteries on places like AliExpress to fully revive it. Rockbox also works with the Sony NW-HD5. It's a tinkering hobby that will keep me busy for a while. View the full article

Creating an effective software satisfaction survey is vital for grasping user experiences and improving your product. By crafting clear, targeted questions, you can gather valuable insights on key features. It’s likewise fundamental to distribute the survey quickly after user interactions and personalize invitations to boost responses. Anonymity can encourage honest feedback, which leads to actionable results. As you explore the components of a successful survey, consider how each element contributes to a thorough comprehension of user satisfaction. Key Takeaways Incorporate diverse question types, such as rating scales and open-ended questions, to capture comprehensive user feedback. Ensure questions are clear and concise to minimize confusion and encourage honest responses. Distribute surveys soon after key user interactions to enhance the accuracy of feedback. Utilize multiple channels for distribution, including emails and in-app notifications, to reach a wider audience. Analyze results collaboratively, prioritizing impactful suggestions and measuring the effectiveness of any changes implemented. Understanding the Importance of Software Satisfaction Surveys Comprehending software satisfaction surveys is fundamental for any organization looking to improve its products and services. These surveys provide insights into user perceptions, allowing you to measure happiness and loyalty toward your software. By incorporating well-structured program survey questions, you can capture direct feedback on usability, functionality, and overall user experience. A well-designed survey for software not only highlights areas needing improvement but likewise tracks changes in user sentiment over time. This ongoing assessment aids in benchmarking progress and evaluating the impact of software updates. Furthermore, collecting user feedback demonstrates your commitment to valuing and responding to their needs, which can improve customer relationships. Implementing changes based on insights from your software satisfaction survey can greatly boost user satisfaction, leading to higher customer retention rates and reduced churn. Therefore, incorporating these surveys into your strategy is vital for long-term success. Key Components of an Effective Survey To gather meaningful insights from your software satisfaction survey, it’s important to include several key components that can improve the effectiveness of your questions. Here are five essential elements to take into account: Variety of Question Types: Mix rating scales, multiple-choice, and open-ended questions to capture diverse user insights. Clarity and Conciseness: Guarantee each question is straightforward, allowing respondents to easily understand and provide accurate feedback. Targeted Relevance: Focus on specific aspects of the software experience to gather actionable insights that align with user needs. Timing of Distribution: Send the survey shortly after significant software interactions to yield more accurate responses. Anonymity Assurance: Communicate the survey’s purpose and make sure users feel safe providing honest feedback without fear of repercussions. Crafting Thoughtful Questions for User Feedback How can you secure your software satisfaction survey effectively captures user feedback? Start by crafting clear and concise questions that respondents can easily understand, reducing any ambiguity in their answers. Incorporate a mix of question types—rating scales, multiple-choice, and open-ended questions—so you can gather thorough insights into user experiences and preferences. Focus your questions on specific software features and user interactions, targeting key areas like usability, functionality, and support to guarantee you collect actionable feedback. Use unbiased and neutral phrasing to avoid leading respondents in specific directions, allowing the data to accurately reflect genuine user sentiments. Finally, keep your survey length between 8 to 12 questions, making it quick and manageable for users. This approach improves response rates and encourages more participants to complete the survey, eventually providing you with valuable insights for enhancing your software. Best Practices for Survey Distribution and Engagement Gathering user feedback through surveys is only as effective as the methods you use to distribute them. To maximize your reach and engagement, consider these best practices when distributing your software satisfaction survey: Use a mix of distribution channels, like in-app notifications, emails, and social media. Time your surveys right; send them shortly after significant user interactions or milestones. Personalize survey invitations based on user behavior and demographics to increase relevance. Offer incentives, such as discounts or prize draws, to motivate participation. Monitor response rates and adjust your approach based on user feedback patterns. Analyzing and Acting on Survey Results Analyzing survey results reveals crucial insights into user satisfaction and potential areas for improvement within your software. You’ll want to aggregate data to identify trends and patterns that pinpoint critical feedback. Sharing these findings with relevant stakeholders is fundamental, as it encourages accountability and collaborative action on identified issues. Action Description Identify Trends Look for recurring themes in user feedback. Share Findings Communicate results with teams to promote action. Prioritize Feedback Focus on the most impactful suggestions first. Measure Impact Assess the effects of implemented changes. Frequently Asked Questions How to Create a Satisfaction Survey? To create a satisfaction survey, first, define your main objectives, like gauging overall satisfaction or pinpointing improvement areas. Next, choose a variety of question types, such as rating scales and open-ended queries, to gather thorough feedback. Make sure your questions are clear and concise, avoiding jargon. Finally, distribute the survey at opportune moments, like after purchases, and analyze the results to identify patterns that can inform actionable changes for enhancing user satisfaction. What Is the 5 Point Scale for Customer Satisfaction Survey? The 5-point scale for customer satisfaction surveys ranges from 1 (Very Unsatisfied) to 5 (Very Satisfied). This scale allows you to quantify customer sentiments effectively, making it easier to analyze overall satisfaction trends. A score of 4 or 5 typically indicates a positive experience, suggesting potential customer loyalty. What Are 5 Good Survey Questions? To gather meaningful insights, you should consider these five survey questions: First, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with the overall experience?” Next, ask, “How likely are you to recommend our service to others?” Furthermore, inquire about valuable features with, “Which features do you find most useful?” Follow this with a value assessment: “Do you believe the service is worth its price?” Finally, ask for suggestions: “What improvements would you recommend?” What Are the 7 Steps to Creating a Good Survey? To create a good survey, start by defining your objectives to guide your questions. Next, craft clear and concise questions using straightforward language. Incorporate a variety of question types—like multiple-choice, rating scales, and open-ended—to gather diverse insights. Test your survey with a small group to identify any issues and make necessary adjustments. Finally, analyze the data thoroughly, focusing on actionable insights that can lead to meaningful improvements based on user feedback. Conclusion In summary, an effective software satisfaction survey is essential for comprehending user experiences and improving your product. By focusing on key components, crafting thoughtful questions, and employing best practices for distribution, you can gather valuable feedback. Analyzing the results allows you to identify areas for improvement, ultimately enhancing user satisfaction. Remember, engaging users through personalized invitations and maintaining anonymity can greatly impact response rates and the quality of the insights you receive. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Creating an Effective Software Satisfaction Survey" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

At last, after seven months of public beta testing, Turntable is available today in the latest release of Adobe Illustrator. Presented at the 2024 edition of the Adobe Max conference as a sneak preview, the tool uses generative AI to transform any 2D vector illustration into a 3D object that you can turn around its vertical axis, as if it were on a clay modeling turntable. When it came out, its magicks left every Illustrator user cheering. If you have ever used Illustrator to craft a vector illustration—from a logo design to an animation character—it’s understandable why people were so excited. “The idea for Turntable originated from a consistent theme we heard directly from customers around the time and effort required to manually redraw characters and illustrations from multiple angles, often taking hours,” says Deepa Subramaniam, Adobe’s Vice President of Product Marketing for Creative Professionals. It’s a perfect use case of generative AI actually helping human creators to save an incredible amount of time without sacrificing their artistic vision. To understand Turntable’s wow factor, you need to understand why it is so hard to modify a 2D illustration. Drawing something complex with a stylus and a tablet using Photoshop requires very little time. It is as easy as drawing it with pencils and a notepad. But with Photoshop you can’t zoom in or out of a drawing infinitely without seeing pixels and jagged curves. With Illustrator, you can zoom-in infinitely, and it will always look perfectly smooth, but that benefit comes at a very high time cost. Unlike raster hand drawing, it’s very hard to create an image using mathematical lines and fills, requiring you to endlessly pull from little handles that shape curves add or subtract basic geometry like rectangles and ovals into a new, more complex shape. Doing that again and again, to change the perspective of a faux 3D object, or to create 40 different versions of a 2D character from different angles, is truly maddening. That is precisely why people love Turntable, a generative AI technology that runs in Adobe’s Creative Cloud to interpret what your mess of lines and shapes is—let’s say, an astronaut—and rotate it around 360 degrees to show its sides or back without you ever having to redraw the entire thing, all while keeping its infinitely-zoomable vector nature. Vital time saver When you feed a flat vector into this engine, it does not just blindly stretch the image. It perceives your mathematical anchors and curves like a constellation of stars mapped on a cosmic grid, intelligently recalculating the coordinates to reveal the hidden sides of the universe you built. The sheer shock of seeing an algorithm correctly guess the unseen geometry of a flat drawing stunned the industry. As the editorial team at CreativePro Network noted when it came out, the collective reaction “was a fascinating mix of pure shock, genuine excitement, and a healthy dose of professional skepticism.” Unlike the messy chaos of prompt-driven image generators that vomit random pixels, this utility has a laser-focused mandate. This singular focus turns a grueling marathon into a sprint, establishing Turntable as a brutal weapon against tight production deadlines. “Animation teams can quickly create character turnarounds for pitch decks, game designers can generate 360-degree assets for concept art and social media teams can create GIFs and micro-animations in seconds, all within Illustrator,” Subramaniam tells me. The Adobe ecosystem integration makes the workflow even more powerful, directly linking your rotating vector assets to animation pipelines. As Subramaniam tells me, “with seamless handoff to tools like After Effects, teams can move from design to motion without breaking their flow.” This means a character spun around in Illustrator can be instantly dropped into a motion graphics sequence. It processes the heavy lifting entirely in Adobe’s cloud, pulling from the monthly generative credits bundled into paid Creative Cloud subscriptions at a cost of 20 credits per generation. But while this all sounds like a bulletproof technological leap, the initial reality was much rockier, and early adopters quickly hit a wall of workflow-breaking limitations and strict structural demands during the public beta. Is Adobe Turntable ready for prime time? As it usually happens, after the Adobe Max stunning demos ended, the tool showed limitations in real-world beta testing. It initially demanded absolute perfection from the human operator. To prevent the algorithm from violently ripping the geometry apart during a rotation, users had to meticulously bind their layers together using Illustrator’s grouping functions. It was the digital equivalent of lashing pieces of a ship together to survive a hurricane; if your anchor points were loose, the AI would scatter them into chaos. When it became available, Redditor LukeChoice warned early testers that they needed to be “adhering to established best practices to achieve optimal outcomes.” Even if the artwork survived the spin, getting the results out of the software was a chore. Early testers ran into severe export friction, requiring convoluted workarounds just to save individual frames as usable standalone files. Subramaniam claims that they worked out these problems, which is why the tool left the beta testing phase now. According to the Adobe Community Release Notes, you “no longer need to group objects” before applying the effect. Furthermore, the development team shattered the artificial boundaries that previously capped rotations between -120 and +120 degrees. Now, the math pushes the vectors through a full 360-degree orbit in crisp 15-degree steps, as noted by contributors on the Illustrator subreddit. The excruciating export roadblocks were fixed too. Users can now deploy a single command to instantly dump every generated angle directly onto the canvas, forming immediate character reference sheets. Adobe also injected native GIF exporting straight into Illustrator’s Contextual Taskbar. These kinds of utilities represent a massive evolutionary leap for commercial artists, functioning as a hyper-efficient co-pilot that vaporizes hours of tedious labor. It is adequately fast too, as it runs on Adobe’s servers. By the way, each Turntable run will cost 20 AI-processing credits. When you run out of credits in your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, that will cost you roughly $1.00 (via a $4.99 tier yielding 100 credits) down to just $0.10 (via a $9.99 tier providing 2,000 credits). Peanuts, considering the hours and days of work this tool may save you. Yet, for all these advantages, the underlying trajectory of this technology points toward a chilling final destination. In Spain we have a saying: “Bread for today, hunger for tomorrow.” I have no doubt that generative AI will inevitably render Turntable, and Adobe Illustrator itself, completely obsolete. And you can do your own math when it comes to consequences to the human illustrators. In the not-so-distant future, the act of visual creation will not require mapping mathematical vectors or coaxing an algorithm to rotate an astronaut. You will simply command a machine to manifest any concept, in any conceivable style, from any angle, with absolute precision and infinite resolution—bypassing the ability of the human hand or any human knowhow entirely. This existential reality is exactly why some creatives fundamentally reject this tool, no matter how much time it will save them today. That’s not the time that matters to them; it’s the little time they have left as creators after so much time spent becoming expert illustrators and designers. 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. Action cameras usually ask you to choose between size and capability—smaller ones are easier to wear but often compromise video quality or controls. The Insta360 Go Ultra tries to bridge that gap. It’s a tiny, wearable camera that can also behave like a more traditional action cam when you need it to. Right now, it’s down to $379.99 (originally $449.99) during Amazon’s Big Spring Sale (ending March 31), which is its lowest price yet, according to price trackers. It also helps that it earned an “excellent” rating from PCMag, which gives some context to what you’re getting here. Insta360 Go Ultra $379.99 at Amazon $449.99 Save $70.00 Get Deal Get Deal $379.99 at Amazon $449.99 Save $70.00 What makes this camera interesting in daily use is how flexible it feels. The main camera unit is small enough to clip to your shirt or wear on a magnetic pendant, so you can record hands-free without thinking about framing. When you want more control, you snap it into the Action Pod, which adds a 2.5-inch flip-up touchscreen and turns it into something closer to a GoPro-style setup. Video quality is a clear step up from older Go models—it shoots stabilized 4K at 60fps, and the larger 1/1.28-inch sensor helps in low light, so evening clips or indoor footage don’t fall apart as quickly. Stabilization, too, works well for walking or biking, and the wide field of view keeps things immersive. The Go Ultra also supports HDR, multiple shooting modes, and a tutorial-led app-based editing, so putting together a usable clip doesn’t take much effort, even if it takes a bit of getting used to. Video is limited to 8-bit color, so there’s not much room for heavy editing or color grading. You’ll also need a microSD card since there’s no built-in storage. Audio is decent for casual use, but wind and distance can affect clarity unless you connect an external mic or supported earbuds. Also, its battery life depends heavily on how you use it—the standalone camera lasts around 30 to 36 minutes at 4K60 before heating becomes an issue, while the Action Pod stretches that to about two hours, according to the PCMag review. Compared to something like the DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro, what you’re paying for here is the compact, wearable design rather than raw video flexibility. Our Best Editor-Vetted Amazon Big Spring Sale Deals Right Now Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $199.00 (List Price $249.00) Apple iPad 11" 128GB A16 WiFi Tablet (Blue, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Samsung Galaxy Tab A11+ 128GB Wi-Fi 11" Tablet (Gray) — $202.00 (List Price $249.99) Sony WH1000XM6- Best Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones — $398.00 (List Price $459.99) Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS, 42mm, S/M Black Sport Band) — $299.00 (List Price $399.00) Blink Video Doorbell Wireless (Newest Model) + Sync Module Core — $35.99 (List Price $69.99) Fire TV Stick 4K Max Streaming Player With Remote — $34.99 (List Price $59.99) Amazon Kindle Colorsoft 16GB 7" eReader (Black) — $169.99 (List Price $249.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

Some of Wall Street's biggest bond-fund managers say financial markets are underestimating the risk that the US war in Iran will cause a sharp slowdown in an already sputtering economy. View the full article

See how Google’s TurboQuant breakthrough could unlock real-time semantic search, faster indexing, and more powerful AI-driven rankings. The post TurboQuant Has The Potential To Fundamentally Change How Search (And AI) Works appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Fast Company is extending its application deadline for Best Workplaces for Innovators 2026 to Friday, April 3 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. This marks the eighth year Fast Company will be recognizing companies and organizations from around the world that most effectively empower employees at all levels to improve processes, create new products, or invent whole new ways of doing business. In addition to ranking the world’s Best Workplaces for Innovators, we will also recognize companies in 19 different categories. What differentiates Best Workplaces for Innovators from existing best-places-to-work lists is that it goes beyond benefits, competitive compensation, and collegiality (mere table stakes in today’s competitive talent marketplace) to identify which companies are actively creating and sustaining the kinds of innovative cultures that many top employees value even more than money. With Best Workplaces for Innovators, Fast Company aims to identify companies where employees can do the best work of their careers and improve the lives of hundreds, thousands, even millions of people around the world. For more than a decade, Fast Company has been recognizing outstanding achievement in business innovation with its annual awards programs. In addition to Best Workplaces for Innovators, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, Innovation by Design, World Changing Ideas, Brands That Matter, and the Next Big Thing in Tech lists have celebrated thousands of organizations transforming industries and shaping society through paradigm-shifting products, insights, or services. For more information on applying, see the FAQs. The final deadline is now April 3 at 11:59 p.m. PT. To sign up for Best Workplaces for Innovators notifications, register here. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Watching a show or a movie has quite literally never been easier. The streaming services you already subscribe to have more content than you could possible ever watch. If something you want to see is only on a specific platform, you can subscribe to it. If it's only available to buy or rent digitally, you can do that too. But with the rise of streaming, the concept of owning and curating a home video collection has fallen away. It seems fewer and fewer of us want a collection of discs in our homes. We'd prefer everything to fit neatly into our smart TVs. But streaming isn't perfect—far from it. Maybe you were counting on watching something on a service you already pay for, but discover it's now gone; maybe that movie isn't streaming anywhere at all, and there's no way to watch it online. Owning a physical copy of a show or movie really is the only way to guarantee that you'll be able to watch it whenever (or wherever) you want. Plus, building a collection of films perfectly suited to your tastes is just fun—entertainment feels less ephemeral when you can tie it to a physical object rather than an icon in a sea of them on the Netflix home screen. If you want to go back to how things used to be, here's how to go about starting your own home video collection in 2026: Buying movies and shows digitally isn't the same as owning them Modern streaming devices and TVs aren't exactly gatekeeping you from purchasing movies or TV shows. If you want to, you can still buy them through your Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku, Google TV, or through the various apps you use. Prime Video will happily sell you Titanic; Apple will let you buy a "box set" of every season of The Office; you can even buy The Dark Knight on YouTube, by way of Google Play Movies & TV. The thing is, buying digitally isn't really ownership. It might feel that way: You have to click a "Buy" button, pay a good chunk of change, and you get access to that content at any time from any compatible, connected device. But when you buy a digital show or movie through Apple, Amazon, or Google, what you're actually paying for isn't ownership rights, but a license. You're paying for the privilege of viewing that content for as long as the platform has the rights to it. If Prime Video loses the rights to Titanic, so do you, even if you paid $19 for it. That's not to say digital content doesn't have its place. These stores are particularly great for renting movies when the flick you want to watch isn't available on streaming. It might also make sense for you to "buy" shows and movies on these platforms, as the license can cost less than the price of a movie ticket, and you can definitely get your money's worth in viewings this way. I have a number of movies I bought on iTunes a decade ago that I still have access to, and I watch them regularly across all my Apple devices. But back when I bought them, I assumed I owned them. I was wrong, and that's why I haven't clicked "buy" on one of those platforms in years. True ownership requires buying physical mediaIf you want to truly own your TV shows and movies, and know for sure that you won't lose access to them, you need to invest in physical media. In 2026, that largely means on a disc. If you've fully transitioned to the streaming lifestyle, the idea of bringing DVDs and Blu-rays into your home might sound downright medieval—but without them, your collection is forever at the mercy of the platforms that license said content. Here's the real kicker, though: Even when buying your shows and movies physically, you're still just buying a license to watch that content—that's why you can't publicly screen a movie just because you own the DVD; you still have to pay for the rights to show it outside of your home. Technically, the companies that own the content can revoke that license at any time—it's just way more difficult to cut someone off when they have a physical disc. That gets a bit dicier with modern Blu-rays and Blu-ray players, which connect to the internet, and could theoretically block your access in the future. But as far as I know, there's no documented case of this happening, whereas marketplaces like Prime Video have lost licenses and revoked users' content. So generally, if you buy a movie or a TV show on a disc, you own it, for all intents and purposes. There are many video formats out there, especially if you're interesting in owning legacy media (from VHS, to Betamax, to LaserDisc). But for now, let's assume you want to start a collection of DVDs and Blu-rays. They're the easiest physical media to buy when it comes to shows and movies, and the most versatile when it comes to playback. Physical media often looks and sounds better than a digital copyThis isn't an opinion driven by nostalgia: While streaming quality can be excellent, modern discs will always be superior. Sure, your 4K Prime Video stream is going to crush a low-resolution DVD, but even a 1080p Blu-ray has it beat in certain categories. A 4K Blu-ray, meanwhile, is the absolute gold standard. The main reason comes down to bitrates—the amount of information displayed on your screen at once. In general, the higher the bitrate, the more visual detail a video will have at any given moment. This is different than resolution, which is simply total number of pixels a video contains. (4K has roughly 8.3 million pixels per frame—3,840 pixels by  2,160 pixels—while 1080p has just over two million pixels per frame—1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels). When you buy shows and movies digitally, you're only really sold on the resolution—whether the content is "HD" (1080p) or 4K—and not the bitrate. While that 4K stream has more available pixels to work with than a 1080p disc, if the disc's bitrate is higher, it can show more details in its two million pixels than the 4K stream can show in its 8.3 million. While discs can run off of the information they contain alone, streaming has to contend with all sorts of variables with your home internet connections—and, thus, it has to compromise on the bitrate. Take The Dark Knight, for example: I have the 1080p Blu-ray, which has a bitrate of 24 Mbps. I also have a license for the 4K Dolby Vision version from Apple TV. After hacking my Apple TV a bit, I was able to see the streaming data, which showed that while the maximum bitrate was 24.24 Mbps, my average hovered around 15 Mbps. That's still a good amount of data, but it's interesting to see that even at 4K resolution and in Dolby Vision HDR audio, my Apple TV stream moves less data than my 1080p Blu-ray. I have a good internet connection, but maybe if I were able to connect my Apple TV directly to the router via ethernet, I could get that 24.24 Mbps bitrate and match that of the Blu-ray. But what if I upgrade to the 4K Blu-ray, since that has a bitrate of 47.16 Mbps and supports HDR? While a 4K stream may be comparable (or even preferable) to a 1080p Blu-ray, the Blu-ray (4K or not) will always outclass it in the audio department. Streaming audio bitrates are more compressed than discs, even more than the video bitrates. While my Apple TV copy of The Dark Knight could theoretically reach the bitrate of my Blu-ray copy, its audio maxes out at 383.88 kbps. The Blu-ray, however, has support for 16-bit 48kHz Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio, which has a variable bitrate, but should theoretically reach 4,608 kbps (16 bits times 48 kHz times six audio channels)—as well as Dolby Digital 5.1 at 640 kbps. Simply put, you get a lot more audio data from the disc. The 4K Blu-ray ups that to DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 at 24-bit 48kHz, which applying the same math gets you 6,912 kbps. The big caveat here is that all of this is dependent on the TV and sound system you use to experience your movies or shows. If you use your TV's built-in, backwards-facing speakers, you might not notice the uptick in quality. But if you have at least a soundbar, if not a more elaborate home theater setup, discs are definitely going to sound better. The same goes for picture quality: If you have a high-quality TV panel, you'll notice sharper scenes, more film grain, and a lack of compression, especially in dark scenes. Where to buy Blu-rays and DVDs in 2026The good news is, even in 2026, it's not hard to find physical shows and movies to buy. You don't need to find specialty stores or shop secondhand: major retailers like Walmart and Target still sell physical media of all kinds, including Blu-rays and DVDs. You can walk into a Walmart right now and buy Zootopia 2 on Blu-ray, or head to Target and buy Vice on DVD. But for a more curated selection, you'll definitely want to keep tabs on Amazon, or even Best Buy. Barnes & Noble famously sells The Criterion Collection Blu-ray and DVDs, though you can always buy directly through Criterion. You might think that because "nobody" buys discs anymore, that these things would be dirt cheap. Au contraire: Physical media can get pricey, especially Blu-ray (and particularly 4K Blu-ray). My recommend is to follow a site that tracks deals on physical media, like Blu-ray.com. You can sort by type (4K Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD, etc.) or just browse all types of deals to see if any of your favorites get to a price you find acceptable. But if you're getting into this type of collecting, and especially if you're buying new movies and TV shows, be prepared to spend some cash (there's a reason folks in the r/Criterion Reddit group mark the Barnes & Noble semi-annual 50% off sale on their calendars). You'll need something to play your DVDs and Blu-raysIf you're all-in on streaming, you might not actually have anything to play a DVD or Blu-ray on. If so, you'll need to remedy that. Believe it or not, there are companies still making Blu-ray players, though the numbers are dwindling. Two companies, Pioneer and Reavon, abandoned the market in 2025, but there are still good options out there, with Sony and Panasonic leading the pack. CNET recommends the Sony UBP-X700M, which you can pick up for under $300 used on Amazon. On the flip side, if you have a game console, like a PlayStation or Xbox, you already have a Blu-ray player—with some caveats: The Xbox models, as well as the PS5, don't support Dolby Vision HDR, only HDR10. If you're looking for Dolby Vision, you'll need to buy a dedicated player. But if all you want is a machine to reliably play your budding movie collection, your PlayStation or Xbox will work just fine. (Just make sure you buy one with a disc drive.) PlayStation 5 $549.00 at Amazon Shop Now Shop Now $549.00 at Amazon You can rip your discs to enjoy the flexibility of digital ownershipIf you want the permanence of physical media and the convenience of digital ownership, you can actually take things full circle and create your own private streaming service. You can take any of the physical discs you buy, rip the video files, and upload them to a private server. You can then use a program like Plex or Jellyfin to access those files from anywhere. You can watch them from your own home, of course, but also stream them when traveling. Plus, it serves as a backup method: Should something happen to the disc (or should the movie studio actually somehow revoke your Blu-ray license) you always have a backup copy of your disc. You may need some extra hardware to get this done, however. If you're ripping DVDs, you'll need a DVD player connected to your computer, and a program like Handbrake. If you're ripping Blu-rays, you'll similarly need a Blu-ray player that can connect to your computer, and a program like MakeMKV. While ripping DVDs is pretty straightforward, ripping Blu-rays can get a bit tricky, especially if they're 4K, so you might want to follow a full guide for the best results. As for the legality of this method, well, most films are encoded onto discs with digital rights management software (DRM), and while making a backup copy is often considered fair use, bypassing DRM in the U.S. is also a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which means it's illegal. You know, technically. And while I won't encourage you to break the law, if you invite me over to stream a movie from your personal Plex server, I promise not to tell on you. View the full article

There’s no such thing as “too much information” in AI search. The more detail you provide, the less likely your business is to be replaced by third-party sources — or left out entirely. With the rise of AI search, we know users want answers, and they want them fast. Google Maps has Know before you go and Ask Maps about this place (not to be confused with Ask Maps, the new conversational “AI Mode” in Google Maps), both AI features that let users easily find information about a place without visiting their website or social media. Merchant Center added a new feature, Business Agent, that allows shoppers to chat with brands. Business Agent pulls from the business’s product information and website to answer users’ questions. The best way sites can prepare for the continued rollout of features like this is to ensure FAQ content based on customer research (not just standard SEO research) is top of mind. Why FAQs power answers in Google’s AI features Ask Maps about this place offers preloaded questions and lets users ask their own. If it can’t answer, it responds, “There’s not enough information about this place to answer your question, but you can try asking another question.” It’s a basic Q&A feature right now, but we can reasonably expect this to become more conversational in the future. With the Q&A feature being deprecated on GBPs, this is the replacement. If there isn’t information available for the AI to pull from, you’re leaving users in the dark. This doesn’t mean you should have Q&As on every page or grab every People Also Ask question from an SEO tool and use it as-is. It’s not very strategic, and those questions likely just reflect search volume. So what about the questions that don’t have national search volume? Or the questions that are highly specific to a region or location and their considerations? Think Victorian homes or specific city insurance laws. To craft an FAQ strategy that can provide helpful information to both AI features and people, you’ll need two things: Think outside the box of regular FAQs you’ll see across all businesses and SEO tools. Be consistent in how you answer these questions across platforms (website, social media, and third-party review sites like Yelp). Dig deeper: Local SEO sprints: A 90-day plan for service businesses in 2026 Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with Research the right questions Most businesses write FAQs based on whatever a tool tells them customers want to know (which is usually based on national, not local, data). The best way to get started is by re-evaluating your FAQ content. Where does it live? How many places are FAQs answered? Consider all the places your audience is and where they’re likely to ask questions or engage with your content. Look through: Dedicated FAQ pages. Service/Product pages. About Us pages. GBP Q&As. Ask the community on Yelp. Other third-party review sites. Social media content. Social media comments. Customer service call logs. Reviews. You should also open up Google Maps and check whether there’s an Ask Maps about this place feature on your own or your competitors’ GBPs. Take note of the questions Ask Maps about this place recommends, and write down any that remain unanswered. Dig deeper: If your local rankings are off, your map pin may be the reason Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Social media You can work with the client’s social media team to ask which questions they receive most frequently. Social media managers will have the most insight into the types of questions they’ve answered in comments or DMs. If you can work with them and get this information, do it. You can also just visit the client’s social media accounts and review their content. You’ll want to look for direct questions people are asking in the comments, and also think about the types of questions people might ask based on the content being posted. NakedMD is a medspa chain across the U.S. that regularly posts content on TikTok. They posted a before-and-after video for lip injections. One of the comments is someone asking if they also offer dissolving services, and if you visit their site and search for “dissolver,” nothing pops up. They also didn’t respond to the comment, but based on watching other people’s TikToks about their experiences at NakedMD, they can dissolve filler. Unfortunately, I only found out they dissolve filler from a negative TikTok review of their services. This is an opportunity to make sure they create content about this on the website and social media. It will allow NakedMD to control the narrative about dissolving filler vs. letting potential customers know they’ve only done it when clients were unhappy with the results. Another example of FAQ content from social media is posts that could leave users confused or make them want to know more. This TikTok asked staff to choose Xeomin or Dysport — that’s it. All the staff members chose Xeomin, but there wasn’t any follow-up on why. Content like this provides another opportunity to ensure these follow-up questions are answered. Start with the client’s social media accounts to find FAQ opportunities. Also, check out competitor social media accounts and general Reddit posts about your client’s products or services. Dig deeper: How to apply ‘They Ask, You Answer’ to SEO and AI visibility Customer service call transcripts and reviews Call transcripts and reviews are your direct line into how customers feel about a client: With transcripts, you’ll be able to read and hear the questions customers are asking. With reviews, you get to read exactly what the people who feel strongly about your clients’ services or products think. Both of these datasets offer insights into customers’ pain points and priorities. Use both the strengths and weaknesses identified from the transcripts and reviews to create FAQ content. Let’s say you’ve noticed reviewers mention the words “emergency,” “middle of the night,” and “Sunday” often. Customers are happy that a home service provider is available for their emergencies, no matter the day or time. Make sure the site’s content aligns with what users are saying. Maybe it’s including “24/7 emergency service, 7 days a week” as an H2 on the homepage, and using it as a selling point on service pages. If there was ever any question about your client’s service hours, having it mentioned on pages is an implicit way of answering that. While that’s a simple example, it’s still an easy way to think about how you can use this data to answer potential questions without having to write in literal FAQ format. Google is pulling from your on-site content to feed AI-driven answers. While the FAQ format may be best for some questions, it isn’t the only format that will work. Consistency across platforms While reviewing existing FAQs, ensure consistency across platforms. If a client is answering a question one way on the website and another way on Yelp, how can someone tell what the real answer is? Inconsistent answers confuse people and LLMs. As Jason Barnard recently wrote, AI platforms generate responses by sampling from a probability distribution that is influenced by the model’s knowledge, its confidence in that knowledge, and the information retrieved at the time of the query. When an AI system encounters the same information across multiple trusted sources, it becomes more confident in it. On the flip side, if it finds conflicting information or only discovers the answer in one location, its confidence diminishes. Make sure to include an FAQ review process in your workflow. Regularly audit and flag information related to hours, pricing ranges, availability, and service offerings for frequent review. These areas tend to change the most rapidly, and having outdated information can significantly harm customer trust. Dig deeper: The proximity paradox: Beating local SEO’s distance bias See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with Just one piece of the AI readiness puzzle While having an FAQ strategy in place isn’t anything new, the importance of it and the approach have shifted. With the rise of AI features like Ask Maps about this place, it has placed a stronger emphasis on structured, consistent, and explicit service or product and pricing information. Review FAQs wherever they may exist and audit for consistency across all digital touchpoints. This will help you prepare for the changes coming to Google Maps and Google Business Profile overall. 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Farmers around the world are feeling the squeeze of the Iran war. Gas prices have shot up and fertilizer supplies are waning due to Tehran’s near shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli bombing. The fertilizer shortage is putting the livelihood of farmers in developing countries — already troubled by rising temperatures and erratic weather systems — further at risk, and could lead to people everywhere paying more for food. The poorest farmers in the Northern Hemisphere rely on fertilizer imports from the Gulf, and the shortage comes just as planting season begins, said Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the World Food Program. “In the worst case, this means lower yields and crop failures next season. In the best case, higher input costs will be included in food prices next year.” Baldev Singh, a 55-year-old rice farmer in Punjab, India, says smallholders — the bulk of the country’s farmers — may not survive if the government cannot subsidize fertilizers when demand peaks in June. “Right now, we are waiting and hoping,” he said. The war halts supplies of key nutrients Iran is seriously limiting shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage that usually handles about a fifth of the world’s oil shipments and nearly a third of global fertilizer trade. On Friday Iranian ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva Ali Bahreini said Tehran has accepted a request from the U.N to let humanitarian aid and agricultural shipments move through the critical waterway, even as it endured strikes on its nuclear facilities. The aid plan would be the first breakthrough at the shipping chokepoint after a month of war. While markets and governments have largely focused on blocked supplies of oil and natural gas, the restriction of fertilizer threatens farming and food security around the world. Nitrogen and phosphate — two major fertilizer nutrients — are under immediate threat from the blockade. Supplies of nitrogen including urea, the most widely traded fertilizer that helps plants grow and boosts yields, are the hardest hit because of shipping delays and the soaring price of liquefied natural gas — an essential ingredient. The conflict has restricted about 30% of global urea trade, said Chris Lawson of CRU Group, a London-based commodities consultancy. Some countries are already facing critical shortages, according to Raj Patel, a food systems economist at the University of Texas. For example, Ethiopia gets over 90% of its nitrogen fertilizer from the Gulf through Djibouti, a supply route that was strained even before the war began in February. “The planting season is now,” Patel said. “The fertilizer isn’t there.” Phosphate supplies, which support root development, are also under pressure. Saudi Arabia exports about a fifth of the world’s phosphate fertilizer, and the region exports more than 40% of the world’s sulfur, a key ingredient and byproduct of oil and gas refining, Lawson said. Even after the war ends, producers in the Gulf would need clear security guarantees before resuming shipments through the strait, and insurance costs would almost certainly rise, said Owen Gooch, an analyst with London-based Argus Consulting Services. In India, the government has prioritized urea supplies for domestic use and provides fertilizer manufacturers with about 70% of their natural gas needs. Some plants are still running below capacity, leading to lower output. “The food system is fragile, and it depends on stable fertilizer supply chains to ensure farmers can produce the food the world relies on,” said Hanna Opsahl-Ben Ammar of Yara International, one of the world’s largest fertilizer companies. Shortages hit at a critical time Fertilizers are generally applied just before or at planting, so crops miss key early growth stages and yields can fall when deliveries are delayed, even if supplies improve later. The impact is already being felt in the United States and Europe, where the main planting season is underway, and it is expected to hit the first planting season in much of Asia in the coming months. “Our crops out in the field need nitrogen now — the sooner the better — so they can get off to a good start, helping them establish themselves and build up reserves for the harvest later this summer,” said Dirk Peters, an agricultural engineer who runs a farm outside Berlin. Fertilizer prices are below the peaks seen after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but grain prices were higher then, helping farmers absorb the costs, said Joseph Glauber of the International Food Policy Research Institute. Grain prices are lower now meaning margins are tighter and farmers may have to switch to less fertilizer-intensive crops — such as soybeans in the U.S. — or apply less fertilizer, reducing yields. Lower yields can lead to higher consumer prices. Other nations likely won’t make up the shortfall. China, the world’s largest producer of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers, is prioritizing domestic supply, and urea shipments probably won’t resume until May, Lawson said. Plants in Russia, another major producer, are already running near full capacity, he said. Developing nations are vulnerable The disruptions are already being felt across Africa, where many farmers rely on fertilizer imported from the Middle East and Russia. Early heavy rains in East Africa have left farmers with about a week of dry weather to prepare fields and apply fertilizer, said Stephen Muchiri, a Kenya maize farmer and CEO of the Eastern African Farmers Federation, which represents 25 million smallholders. Fertilizer shortages and price hikes hit farmers hard, forcing them to use less and leading to reduced yields. Even short delays can reduce maize yields by about 4% in a season, Patel said, citing research from Zambia. Governments can intervene by applying subsidies, promoting domestic production and controlling exports. India already subsidizes fertilizer to ease the financial strain on farmers, but those subsidies leave less money for long-term farming investments. It has budgeted $12.7 billion this year for urea subsidies alone, according to the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Efforts to produce domestic urea have increased India’s dependence on imported gas, and excessive urea use has harmed local soil, said Purva Jain of IEEFA, who supports the use of organic fertilizers. Less reliance on imported fertilizers could protect farmers and consumers from energy price swings and climate shocks, said Oliver Oliveros, executive coordinator of the Agroecology Coalition. “This could be a turning point,” he said. This story was first published on March 27, 2026. It was updated on March 30, 2026, to correct Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the fertilizer industry. Saudi Arabia exports about a fifth of the world’s phosphate fertilizer. It does not produce about a fifth of the world’s phosphate fertilizer. Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten and Kerstin Sopke contributed. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. —Aniruddha Ghosal and Allan Olingo, Associated Press View the full article

Your favorite spot for slow-cooked riblets might be cooked. A number of Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill + Bar restaurants have closed their doors in the wake of mounting financial distress and declining foot traffic, according to a recent bankruptcy filing. The 10 shuttered stores, located in Florida and Georgia, are all owned by an Atlanta-based Applebee’s franchisee that last week became the latest regional restaurateur to seek Chapter 11 protection. The list of impacted locations includes long-standing Applebee’s restaurants near top tourist destinations such as SeaWorld, Walt Disney World, and the Daytona International Speedway. Most of the locations were closed at some point before the franchisee’s initial bankruptcy petition on March 24, although online reviews suggest that some of the restaurants were still operating as recently as last week. Applebee’s had roughly 1,520 franchised locations as of December 2025. Which franchisee went bankrupt? According to court records, the bankrupt franchisee operates as a holding company called NRPF Group Two, along with multiple subsidiaries. Together, they own more than 50 Applebee’s locations in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Unfortunately, not all of its restaurants are going to survive the bankruptcy process. NRPF (short for Neighborhood Restaurant Partners Florida) is now seeking to reject the leases at the 10 properties in Florida and Georgia where the locations have shuttered, court documents reveal. Applebee’s restaurants had operated at the locations for more than a decade in some cases, with one lease dating all the way back to 1995. It’s unclear how many jobs have been impacted by the closures, or if more restaurants are expected to shutter. At the time of its bankruptcy filing, NRPF said it employed around 2,000 workers, including employees and independent contractors. The restaurant group has hired GGG Partners, a turnaround firm, to oversee its restructuring process. Fast Company reached out to GGG Partners for comment. News of the bankruptcy comes as increasing numbers of struggling chain restaurant franchisees appear to be turning to the courts to manage unsustainable debt loads. Earlier this year, a Miami-based owner of roughly 130 Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen locations closed at least 17 establishments after filing for bankruptcy. Franchisees for Subway, Domino’s Pizza, and Firehouse Subs have also filed for bankruptcy in recent weeks. Why is the Applebee’s franchisee bankrupt? Business was apparently bright for the regional restaurant owner in the first few years after it acquired 65 Applebee’s locations in 2012. As described in court documents, NRPF enjoyed growth and profitability well into 2015, but then business started to fall off at the end of that year. The story from there is a familiar one for many legacy restaurant chains, particularly in the casual dining space. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent inflationary pressures had a detrimental impact on the company’s bottom line. Operating costs increased, customers felt the pinch from higher prices, and foot traffic dropped. As of last year, the company was operating in the red, despite having closed several locations in 2025 in an attempt to stem losses. In February, NRPF reached a tentative deal with the parent company of Applebee’s, Dine Brands Global, through which Applebee’s would acquire 53 of NRPF’s locations. But escalating financial struggles forced NRPF to file for bankruptcy before the deal could be finalized. The transaction is still expected to be completed by mid-May, with Dine Brands now acting as a “stalking horse” bidder for NRPF’s stores in the bankruptcy process. It was not immediately clear if a deal with Dine Brands could change the fate of the 10 shuttered stores. Fast Company reached out to Dine Brands for comment. Scooping up franchise-owned restaurants is not unprecedented for Dine Brands. In a 2025 financial report with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it said it acquired 47 restaurants from franchisees in 2024 and another 12 last year. Which Applebee’s locations are closing? According to a March 24 court docket, nine Florida locations and one Georgia location were either closed as of the bankruptcy petition date, or were expected to be closed after the date. The locations were described by NRPF as “unprofitable,” with the properties being “burdensome” and providing little to no value for the company. The 10 locations are as follows: 150 Williamson Boulevard, Ormond Beach, Florida 14990 E. Orange Lake Blvd., Kissimmee, Florida 2503 S. Kirkman Road, Orlando, Florida 6290 W. Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway, Celebration, Florida 11036 International Drive, Orlando, Florida (SeaWorld) 3315 U.S. Highway 17-19, Casselberry, Florida 678 West 23rd Street, Panama City, Florida 637 Westover Boulevard, Albany, Georgia 10071 Hutchison Boulevard, Panama City Beach, Florida 1700 W. Intl. Speedway Blvd., Unit 600, Daytona Beach, Florida Is Applebee’s in trouble? The overall Applebee’s brand has struggled in recent years, although there there have been recent glimmers of hope. Dine Brands, which also owns IHOP, reported a 0.4% decline in Applebee’s same-store for the fourth quarter of 2025, but sales were up 1.3% for the year. In its February earnings report, Dine Brands projected that Applebee’s in 2026 would see U.S. sales growth of 0% to 2%. That’s nothing to brag about, but it’s a significant improvement over two years ago, when Applebee’s sales declined 4.2%. Still, investors don’t seem to be as impressed. Shares of Dine Brands Global Inc (NYSE: DIN) are down more than 24% year to date, compared to a dip of around 7% for the S&P 500. The stock saw significant declines during the post-COVID era and has not fully recovered since. This story is developing… 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. Most window air conditioners follow a simple formula: cool the room, maybe add a fan setting, and leave it at that. The LG LW8023HRSM window air conditioner, currently on sale for $399.99 on StackSocial, takes a slightly more flexible approach. It still installs like a typical window unit, but it adds heating and smart controls, making daily use easier. For someone cooling a bedroom, small apartment living room, or home office, the main appeal here is convenience. You can control the unit with a remote, the onboard buttons, or the LG ThinQ app on your phone. If you already use Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, you can also adjust the temperature with a voice command instead of getting up to press buttons. The cooling capacity is 7,600 BTU, which LG recommends for rooms up to 330 square feet. In practical terms, that size works well for most bedrooms, studio apartments, or compact office spaces. It should bring the temperature down fairly quickly after a hot afternoon, especially if the room stays closed. This unit also includes 3,850 BTU of heating, which can be helpful during cooler months when you want a little warmth without turning on central heat. You can also switch between cool, heat, fan, and dehumidify modes, depending on what the room needs that day. Two cooling speeds and two fan speeds give you some control over how aggressively the unit runs. Airflow is adjustable in four directions, so you can angle the air away from your bed or couch. LG lists the noise level at about 50–52 dB, so it produces a steady background hum, but not enough to drown out conversation or a TV. Rounding things out, there’s a 24-hour programmable timer that lets you schedule the AC to turn on before you get home or shut off overnight. You’ll also find an auto-restart function that restores your previous settings after a power outage, so you don't have to reset everything. The main limitation is coverage—at this size, it's built for smaller rooms, not large open living spaces. But if you want a window unit that cools reliably and gives you a few more ways to control it, this one fits the role without stepping into premium pricing. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $199.00 (List Price $249.00) Apple iPad 11" 128GB A16 WiFi Tablet (Blue, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Samsung Galaxy Tab A11+ 128GB Wi-Fi 11" Tablet (Gray) — $202.00 (List Price $249.99) Sony WH1000XM6- Best Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones — $398.00 (List Price $459.99) Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS, 42mm, S/M Black Sport Band) — $299.00 (List Price $399.00) Blink Video Doorbell Wireless (Newest Model) + Sync Module Core — $35.99 (List Price $69.99) Fire TV Stick 4K Max Streaming Player With Remote — $34.99 (List Price $59.99) Amazon Kindle Colorsoft 16GB 7" eReader (Black) — $169.99 (List Price $249.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team 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. Amazon’s Big Spring Sale is still going strong, and smart home upgrades are getting some real price cuts. One among them is the Philips Wi-Fi Smart Lock with Handle, which is down to $149.99 (originally $229.99)—its lowest price so far, according to price trackers. That drop makes it a more approachable way to switch from a traditional lock to something smarter without committing to a full security system. It’s a complete set with handles included, so you’re not mixing and matching parts or dealing with awkward installs that don’t look right on your door. Philips Wi-Fi Smart Lock Keyless entry keypad door lock with handle $149.99 at Amazon $229.99 Save $80.00 Get Deal Get Deal $149.99 at Amazon $229.99 Save $80.00 This lock focuses on flexibility in how you get in and out. You can unlock it with your fingerprint, a PIN, the Philips app, a physical key, or even voice commands through Alexa or Google Assistant. Fingerprint unlock is fast—around 0.3 seconds, according to the manufacturer. The app adds another layer of control. You can lock or unlock your door remotely, check access history, and create temporary or one-time PINs for guests, deliveries, or house help. That comes in handy if you don’t want to hand out permanent access. The auto-lock feature also helps cover those moments when you forget to lock the door, with a timer you can set between 30 and 180 seconds. That said, there are a few things to keep in mind—the wifi features depend on the included gateway, so you’ll need to set that up for remote access and voice control. Installation is straightforward for most standard doors, but you may need to drill if your door isn’t a perfect fit. And this is still a smart lock, so battery management and occasional maintenance are part of the experience. Our Best Editor-Vetted Amazon Big Spring Sale Deals Right Now Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $199.00 (List Price $249.00) Apple iPad 11" 128GB A16 WiFi Tablet (Blue, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Samsung Galaxy Tab A11+ 128GB Wi-Fi 11" Tablet (Gray) — $202.00 (List Price $249.99) Sony WH1000XM6- Best Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones — $398.00 (List Price $459.99) Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS, 42mm, S/M Black Sport Band) — $299.00 (List Price $399.00) Blink Video Doorbell Wireless (Newest Model) + Sync Module Core — $35.99 (List Price $69.99) Fire TV Stick 4K Max Streaming Player With Remote — $34.99 (List Price $59.99) Amazon Kindle Colorsoft 16GB 7" eReader (Black) — $169.99 (List Price $249.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

The next few days could be a historic one for manned spaceflight. After a previous delay, it’s possible that NASA’s Artemis II manned lunar mission may finally blast off this week. But no matter what, Krispy Kreme’s limited-edition doughnut commemorating the mission is a go. Here’s what you need to know. What is Artemis II? The Artemis II mission is a historic one for NASA. It is the second major phase of the five-stage Artemis Program, whose ultimate goal is to establish a permanent base on the Earth’s moon, with future missions envisioned for Mars. Artemis I launched in 2022 and sent the unmanned Orion spacecraft into lunar orbit around the moon. That mission was a prelude to Artemis II, which may launch this week. Artemis II will be different than Artemis I, in that it will be a manned mission to the moon. However, its four astronauts will not be setting foot on the moon. Instead, they will remain in the orbiter as it circles the lunar body. Yet while the four astronauts will not actually land on the moon, the crew of the Artemis II will make history. The Artemis II mission will be the first crewed mission to the moon—and the first to go beyond the range of low Earth orbit—in the 21st century. That last manned mission to the moon happened all the way back in 1972. As CNN notes, the Artemis II mission also features the first woman to travel into deep space, Christina Koch; the first person of color to do so, Victor Glover; and the first non-U.S. citizen to do so, Canadian Jeremy Hansen. The goal of the Artemis II mission is to act as the first test flight ahead of the Artemis IV mission in 2028, which will actually land astronauts on the moon. Has the Artemis II mission been delayed? The Artemis II mission was originally scheduled for launch in February, but a helium flow issue prevented that launch. As a result, the launch date was pushed back to April 2026. Currently, NASA is aiming to launch Artemis II this week, but whether that launch goes ahead will depend on safety checks and weather conditions at Cape Canaveral, Florida. As of the time of this writing, NASA’s Artemis II website lists its current launch date as “No Earlier Than April 1, 2026.” Yes, there’s an Artemis II Krispy Kreme doughnut Whether or not the Artemis II launch actually goes ahead this week, fans of NASA, the mission, or just spaceflight in general, can celebrate the mission by picking up the limited-edition Artemis II Doughnut at participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide. Krispy Kreme says the doughnut is “inspired by NASA’s iconic imagery” and is comprised of an Original Glazed doughnut with blue vanilla-flavored icing, black and white sprinkles, a buttercream dollop, and “a red chevron nod to the NASA logo.” But if you want to take a bite into the Artemis II Doughnut, you’ll need to act fast. It will only be available from tomorrow, Tuesday, March 31, to Thursday, April 2. It is unknown if Kirspy Kreme will reissue the Artemis II Doughnut if the launch is delayed beyond Thursday. Fast Company has reached out to Kripsy Kreme for comment. View the full article

Communicate what your data can and cannot prove to avoid costly decisions driven by incomplete insights. The post Reporting Uncertainty Without Losing Credibility appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

AI search often fails to identify which Spanish-speaking market it’s serving. Instead, it blends regional terminology, legal frameworks, and commercial context into a single response, creating answers that don’t map to any real market. The result is answers that mix multiple countries into something no user can actually use. This is the “Global Spanish” problem. How AI turns ‘correct’ Spanish into useless answers Ask a chatbot in Spanish how to file your taxes — cómo puedo declarar impuestos — and watch what happens. The response is grammatically perfect, well structured, and seemingly helpful. Then, in a single bullet point, it casually lists “RFC, NIF, SSN, según país” — Mexico’s tax ID, Spain’s tax ID, and America’s Social Security Number — as if they were interchangeable items on a shopping list. Chatbot response to “cómo puedo declarar impuestos” showing RFC/NIF/SSN mixed in a single answer To be fair, it’s improving — early models would confidently give you Mexico’s SAT filing process when you were sitting in Madrid, no disclaimer attached. Now they hedge. But hedging by dumping three countries’ tax systems into a single bullet point isn’t localization. It’s surrender dressed up as thoroughness. The model still can’t determine which Spanish-speaking market it’s talking to, so it defaults to a vague, one-size-fits-none answer that serves no user well. It’s the AI equivalent of a waiter asking a table of 20 people, “What will you all be having?” and writing down “Food.” If your AI answers a Mexican user with Spain’s tax logic, you don’t have a translation problem. You have a geo- and jurisdiction-inference problem. And in AI-mediated search, that inference is now the foundation on which everything else sits. Traditional search had these same issues. Google has spent years building systems to handle regional intent, geotargeting, and language variants — and still doesn’t get it right every time. The difference is that generative AI removes the safety net. Instead of 10 blue links where users can self-correct, you get one synthesized answer. And that answer either lands in the right country or it doesn’t. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with Spanish isn’t one market, it’s 20+ — and ‘neutral’ is not neutral Most Americans hear “Spanish” and imagine a language toggle. Hispanic markets don’t work like that. Spain and Latin America don’t just differ in slang. They’re distinct in what decides whether a page converts, whether a brand is trusted, and whether an answer is even legally usable. For example, there are clear differences in the following: Regulators (Hacienda vs. SAT). Legal terms (NIF vs. RFC). Currencies (EUR vs. MXN). Formatting (period vs. comma decimals). Tone and social distance (tú/vosotros vs. usted/ustedes — get it wrong and you’re instantly an outsider). Commercial norms (payment rails, installment culture, shipping expectations). Search intent (the same query can map to different products or categories, depending on the country). Every international SEO knows these differences matter — they affect everything from indexing to conversion. In generative search, they become decisive. The model doesn’t show 10 blue links and let the user decide. It collapses the SERP into a single synthesized answer and chooses what counts as authoritative. If your context signals are ambiguous, the model improvises. That’s where “Global Spanish” is born. Linguists have a name for this: “Digital Linguistic Bias” (Sesgo Lingüístico Digital), documented by Muñoz-Basols, Palomares Marín, and Moreno Fernández in Lengua y Sociedad. Their research shows how the uneven distribution of Spanish varieties in training corpora produces chatbot responses that ignore specific dialectal varieties and sociocultural contexts. The bias is structural — baked into the training data itself. Spain represents a minority of the world’s Spanish speakers, yet it’s often overrepresented in the digital corpora and institutional sources that shape what models “see” as default Spanish. Meanwhile, many Latin American markets remain comparatively underrepresented in AI investment and data infrastructure. Latin America received only 1.12% of global AI investment despite contributing 6.6% of global GDP. The result is predictable: The model’s most confident Spanish tends to sound geographically specific — even when the user didn’t ask for that geography. LLM models are trained on whatever web data is most available, and that data skews heavily toward certain geographies. In practice, this means a well-written product page from a Mexican SaaS company competes for model attention against decades of accumulated Peninsular Spanish web content and often loses. Marketers created “neutral Spanish” as an efficiency shortcut, and LLMs treat it as a standard — one that breaks down at scale. How LLMs break Spanish: 3 failure modes that matter for SEO The cultural blind spots cluster into three predictable failure modes, each with direct consequences for search performance, trust, and conversion. 1. Dialect defaulting: The most visible failure When an LLM generates Spanish, it gravitates toward a default variant — usually Mexican for vocabulary, sometimes Peninsular for grammar. It doesn’t announce the choice. It just picks one and presents it as “Spanish.” Will Saborio demonstrated this concretely in 2023. Testing GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 with regionally variable vocabulary — “straw” can be pajilla, popote, pitillo, or bombilla depending on the country — ChatGPT consistently defaulted to the most globally popular translation, typically Mexican Spanish. Even after explicit context-setting prompts (asking for Colombian recipes first), the model couldn’t be reliably localized. A study evaluating nine LLMs across seven Spanish varieties confirmed the pattern at scale: Peninsular Spanish was the variant best identified by all models, while other varieties were frequently misclassified or collapsed into a generic register. GPT-4o was the only model capable of recognizing Spanish variability with reasonable consistency. But dialect defaulting goes far beyond pronoun mismatch. It’s vocabulary (coche/carro/auto), product categorization (zapatillas/tenis), idiomatic expressions, formality register, and the cultural assumptions embedded in every sentence. A product page that sounds like it was written for Spain signals to a Mexican user that the content wasn’t made for their market. In AI discovery, those signals compound. The model learns to associate your content with “outsider” markers and may select other sources for the answer. (A nuance worth noting: This isn’t always binary. A Mexican luxury brand might deliberately use tú in certain contexts. The point isn’t rigid rules — it’s that the model should make intentional choices, not default ones.) “The dialect defaulting problem” — diagram showing how one word maps to five different terms across Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile, with LLMs defaulting to one variant Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. 2. Format contamination: The silent conversion killer This one is invisible and arguably more dangerous. It’s not about words, it’s about numbers. A documented issue in the Unicode ICU4X ecosystem illustrates the problem: Mexican Spanish (es-MX) uses a period as decimal separator (1,234.56), but if a system lacks specific es-MX locale data and falls back to generic “es,” it applies European formatting (1.234,56). The number 1.250 could mean one thousand two hundred fifty or one-point-two-five-zero, depending on which locale the system defaults to. If you’ve ever shipped a pricing page with the wrong currency symbol, you know the damage. (I have. It was a Black Friday landing page showing €49,99 to Mexican users who expected $49.99. Support tickets spiked before anyone in the office noticed.) Now multiply that by AI summaries and assistants. The wrong market default propagates into product answers, generative search snippets, customer support scripts, and “recommended pricing” explanations. 3. Legal and regulatory hallucination: Where it gets dangerous This is where “Global Spanish” becomes genuinely harmful. If you’re producing content in regulated verticals (i.e., finance, health, legal, insurance), it’s the kind of error that erodes the E-E-A-T signals that Google relies on. Spain operates under the EU’s GDPR and its national LOPDGDD. Argentina has its Habeas Data law. Colombia has its own framework. Chile is updating its personal data legislation. Mexico has its own federal privacy law, and as of March 2025, functions previously handled by the INAI have been transferred to the Secretaría Anticorrupción y Buen Gobierno. An LLM that treats “Spanish-speaking” as a single legal context might answer a privacy question from Madrid by citing Mexican regulators, or advise a Colombian business on using Spanish consumer protection law. The output reads confidently — but legally fictional. In YMYL verticals, this creates legal risk and may result in your content being excluded from AI-generated answers. Geo-identification failures: When AI gets the country wrong, it gets the Spanish wrong International SEO used to be a routing problem: Make sure Google shows the right URL. In AI-mediated discovery, the failure shifts upstream. If the system misidentifies geography, it retrieves the wrong market context. “Spanish” then becomes a coin toss between Spain’s defaults and Latin America’s realities. Motoko Hunt describes it as “geo-drift” — when a global page replaces a region-specific page in AI-generated answers. AI systems treat language as a proxy for geography, so a Spanish query could represent Mexico, Colombia, or Spain, and without explicit signals, the model lumps them together. Hunt introduced the concept of “geo-legibility” — making your content’s geographic boundaries interpretable during traditional indexing and AI synthesis. Her critical finding, echoed by practitioners across the industry: hreflang — already one of the most complex and fragile signals in traditional SEO, where it was always advisory rather than deterministic — appears even less influential in AI synthesis. LLMs don’t actively interpret hreflang during response generation. They ground responses based on semantic relevance and authority signals. Language match without market match One example from her analysis makes the Spanish problem concrete. International SEO consultant Blas Giffuni typed “proveedores de químicos industriales” (industrial chemical suppliers) into a generative search engine. Rather than surfacing Mexican suppliers, it presented a translated list from the U.S. — companies that either didn’t operate in Mexico or didn’t meet local safety and business requirements. The AI performed the linguistic task (translating) while completely failing the informational task (finding relevant local suppliers). That’s geo-drift in action: language match without market match. The scale of the problem Even within a single country, 78% of U.S. markets receive the same AI-generated recommendation list, regardless of local economic context, per Daniel Martin‘s analysis of 773 queries across 50 markets. If this cookie-cutter pattern exists within English across U.S. cities, imagine the scale across 20+ Spanish-speaking countries with distinct legal systems, currencies, and cultural norms. Semantic collapse: When localized versions disappear Gianluca Fiorelli calls the endgame “semantic collapse” — the point where localized content versions become indistinguishable to AI retrieval systems, and the strongest version (usually English or U.S.-centric) absorbs the rest. His framework maps three ways this plays out: The AI retrieves from the wrong market. It translates U.S. content into Spanish rather than using native sources. It serves legal advice from one jurisdiction in another. All three are happening in Hispanic markets right now. The concept resonates beyond SEO. NeurIPS presentation “Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond)” documents a broader pattern of output homogeneity: open-ended LLM responses are collapsing into the same narrow set of answers across major models — different labs, different training pipelines, same outputs. If output diversity is shrinking globally, the prospects for preserving regional diversity in Spanish-language answers are sobering. Why this matters now These problems existed before AI Overviews. But the expansion of AI-generated search to Spanish-speaking markets is amplifying them at scale. Google’s AI Overviews have expanded to Spain, Mexico, and multiple Latin American countries. The same Spanish-language AI summary can be served across geographies. If it was generated from “generic Spanish” content, it may carry dialect assumptions, formatting conventions, and regulatory references that may be incorrect for the user receiving it. The crawl gap Log file analysis by Pieter Serraris revealed a compounding factor: OpenAI’s indexing bots visit English-language pages significantly more frequently than non-English variants on multilingual sites. Even when a site has properly localized Spanish content, the AI training pipeline may be systematically undersampling it, reinforcing the English-centric bias at the data ingestion level. The tokenization tax The Spanish word desarrollador requires four tokens while the English word “developer” needs just one, according to analysis by Sngular. A typical technical paragraph in Spanish consumes roughly 59% more tokens than the same content in English — higher API costs, reduced context windows, and degraded output quality. A systemic cost on non-English content compounds across every interaction, creating an economic bias. The self-reinforcing loop The combined effect is predictable and vicious — the most-resourced market version (typically U.S. English) accumulates the strongest authority signals, gets retrieved more often, and progressively absorbs the localized versions. Spanish pages receive fewer retrieval opportunities, weaker engagement signals, and eventually become invisible to the AI. See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with The SEO shift: From ranking pages to shaping entity perception We’ve entered a visibility model where being retrievable isn’t the same as being selected. In generative search, what matters is whether the system sees you as authoritative for that context. The margin for error has collapsed. You’re competing to be included in a single synthesized answer. A single Spanish site often underperforms because it doesn’t clearly signal a specific market. Generic Spanish signals low confidence, and models avoid it. The next step is making that context explicit — so it’s clear where your content belongs. View the full article

Making the move to management is not for every employee, yet many think it’s the only option for climbing the ladder. There’s an art to coaching individual contributors who either want to take that step, or offering a promotion to someone you think is ready. It’s important to approach this not just as an opportunity, but a teachable moment. We asked our Fast Company Impact Council members how they coach team members to make this move and got much wise counsel in return. Their ideas might improve how you approach this with your employees. 1. TRUST YOUR PEOPLE I tell them I am trusting them, and in turn, they need to trust their people. Trust is giving someone an assignment and getting out of their way. Let them go do it and understand it might not be how you would do it, and that is okay. It sounds so easy but it can be so hard to let go and trust that teammate to get it done on time, on budget, and with quality. I also share that a little empathy and a few simple words can work magic: “How can I help you?” — Steven McKay, DLR Group 2. MOVE FROM HERO TO COACH The biggest trap I see talented individual contributors fall into when they become managers is continuing to do the work instead of multiplying it. The shift from individual contributor to manager is fundamentally an identity shift from hero to coach. You stop being the one who solves the problem and start being the one who creates the conditions for others to solve it. — Hala Hanna, MIT Solve 3. FROM DOING TO DELEGATING That transition is pivotal. The skills that make someone a strong individual contributor are different from those required to lead. I coach people to shift from doing to delegating, from execution to leverage, and to keep your arms wide, sweeping everyone forward with you. It starts with organization and clearly defining outcomes. Then it becomes about motivating others, listening closely, and giving direct, transparent feedback that drives growth. That’s our ethos: inspirational, direct, driven, empowering, and agile. — Meredith Rosenberg, NU Advisory Partners 4. SHIFT IN APPROACH A manager must step into a founder/owner mindset. They shift from an individual approach to one in which they look to their team as a tool towards achieving organizational goals. Importantly, they stay close to the work that happens as an individual contributor, because the nuances of that work inform their leadership. — Michael Tannenbaum, Figure 5. LEAD QUIETLY SO OTHERS CAN SHINE I tell people the move from individual contributor to manager is a complete mindset shift. You stop being the hero and start building them, multiplying impact through others. The focus moves to people and outcomes and how we get there quickly, intelligently, without fear. It starts with delegation, clear intent, honest feedback, and disciplined listening. Most of all, treat everyone like real human beings. Great managers clear obstacles, create air cover, and lead quietly so others can shine. Leadership is trading the dopamine of doing for the leverage of coaching. If you don’t feel the weight of it, you’re probably not doing it right. — Peter Smart, Fantasy 6. NO LONGER BE THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE ROOM I believe the transition from individual contributor to manager is about shifting from being the expert to empowering experts. As a manager, your job is no longer to be the smartest person in the room, but to build strong teams and clear their path. I encourage leaders to develop a deep understanding of the work so they can support with credibility while giving trust and freedom to their teams. Great managers connect dots, people, and possibilities to help others perform at their best. — Ben Jeffries, Influencer 7. PROACTIVELY HOLD BACK It’s the hardest jump in leadership. As an independent contributor, you’re rewarded for doing. As a manager, you have to proactively hold back, which is uncomfortable for high performers. I give three rules: Stop rescuing. Define outcomes, not steps. Measure success by how well the team performs without you. At some point, leadership isn’t about being the most capable person. It’s about creating an environment where capability multiplies. — Emily Kortlang, Yerba Madre 8. DEVELOP DIFFERENT SKILL SETS High-performing individual contributors excel in their specific area of focus: the quality, consistency, and impact of their work. That doesn’t mean they can automatically shift to manager with additional responsibilities. It’s important for them to develop different skill sets—especially if this is their first time managing people. Coaching and directing work can help people learn how to effectively delegate, when to empower their teams to make the decision, and how they give meaningful feedback at various points throughout a year, not just at an annual review. — Nathan Friedman, Understood.org 9. VALUE OTHERS’ CONTRIBUTIONS MORE THAN YOURS Once you truly value the contributions of others more than your own, then (and only then) are you ready for leadership. — William H. Dodge, P-U-B-L-I-C 10. LEADERS ABSORB THEIR TEAMS’ FEARS The key behavioral shift here is that leaders absorb their teams’ fears. Periods of uncertainty are a given, so I tell my managers: Don’t pretend to have all the answers, just be the steady hand that hears your teams’ concerns, and reflects the real opportunity back to them. — Khozema Shipchandler, Twilio 11. DO THEY ACTUALLY WANT TO MANAGE? Management isn’t automatically a promotion. It’s a different job. Being a great individual contributor is about mastering your craft. Being a manager is about helping others master theirs. When someone says they want to move up, we talk about what they actually want. Do they like building things, or do they get energy from coaching others? Your wins come through your team. Some people love that. Some don’t. If they’re serious, we focus on a few fundamentals: defining success, communicating constantly, and resisting the urge to fix everything yourself. Good managers create clarity. They don’t rescue. — Logan Mulvey, GoDigital Music 12. EXTREME OWNERSHIP We recommend embracing three essential core principles, starting with radical candor. We’ve brought in renowned leadership coach and author Kim Scott to talk about the importance of providing honest and respectful conversations with team members, even in challenging times. It’s very effective. Leaning into extreme ownership is key to building a cohesive, accountable team. Finally, taking a clean escalation approach to problem-solving will help demonstrate critical thinking and build credibility. — Leerom Segal, Klick Health 13. UNDERSTAND THEIR GOALS When I coach team members on this transition, I want to understand why they want to be a manager. For many it’s because of pay, perceived status, or the view that they need to progress “up.” These are not good indicators of success, as the skills required for success as a manager differ significantly from those of a top performing individual contributor. The best solution for these talented individuals is to provide them a path to seniority that allows them to focus on their strengths and interests. This is especially true for highly technical roles where talented individuals can be a huge multiplier in a business. — Tony Grimminck, Scribd, Inc. 14. PROACTIVE TRAINING We developed the Tactacam Leadership accelerator program to create a “ready-now” talent pool. Upon successful graduation, participants are not merely given a certificate; they are formally designated within the company’s talent pool as “ready now” for promotion to the next leadership level. It creates a clear, tangible, and highly motivating career pathway for participants, answering the “what’s next?” question from day one. It also ensures that the investment in developing these leaders is realized through internal placements, strengthening the leadership bench and reducing recruitment costs. — Jeff Peel, Tactacam 15. THINK: LEADERS I don’t think in terms of managers. I think in terms of leaders. You don’t need direct reports to start leading. Leadership begins with ownership of outcomes. If someone consistently drives clarity, accountability, and results, they’re already leading whether they manage people or not. Eventually, when someone proves they can lead outcomes, they’re given the opportunity to lead people. But the mindset comes first. Titles come later. — Elery Pfeffer, Nift 16. IT’S NOT ABOUT CAREER ADVANCEMENT First I make sure they understand management is about caring for their employees, not about career advancement. So many people tell me they don’t want to manage people but they feel like they should to progress. In our company we create career progression paths as individual contributors to ensure people move to management roles for the right reasons. — Shely Aronov, InnerPlant 17. SHOW INITIATIVE By example. We live and act our values and expect all team members to do so too. Those who show initiative can move to the role of managing others—others prefer not to. — Larraine Segil, Exceptional Women Alliance 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. Apple’s latest tablet is still one of the most powerful pieces of hardware you can carry in a backpack, and right now, the refurbished 13-inch M4 iPad Pro is on sale for $899.99 on StackSocial. That price gets you the 256GB Wi-Fi model in Space Black with a Grade-A rating, meaning it should look and work like new with little to no visible wear. If you need more storage or cellular, prices scale up: 256GB with Wi-Fi + 5G is $999.99, 512GB Wi-Fi is $1,044.99, and configurations go up to 2TB with Wi-Fi + 5G at $1,674.99. All models include a USB-C charger and a 30-day third-party parts-and-labor warranty, and they ship only within the contiguous U.S. The 13-inch OLED display is sharp at 2,752 by 2,064 pixels, and it gets extremely bright for HDR video. Colors look rich without being oversaturated, and scrolling feels smooth thanks to the adaptive refresh rate. The M4 chip inside is the same class of processor Apple puts in its laptops, so this tablet can handle heavy tasks like editing high-resolution photos, cutting 4K or even 8K video, or juggling multiple apps without slowing down. It's also thin at 0.20 inches and weighs about 1.28 pounds, so it's easier to carry than most laptops. Battery life is rated up to 10 hours for web browsing or video playback, though demanding work will likely get you closer to seven hours, notes this PCMag review. Beyond performance, it covers the basics well. There are 12MP cameras on both sides for video calls and quick photos, speakers that sound fuller than most tablets, clear microphones, Face ID for unlocking, and a Thunderbolt/USB 4 port for connecting a monitor or fast external drive. It runs iPadOS 17 and will support future updates, including iOS 18 and beyond. Accessories like the Apple Pencil Pro and Magic Keyboard work with it, but they are sold separately and add a noticeable amount to the total cost. Even at a discount, this is a high-end tablet, suitable if you want more than what a standard iPad offers for streaming, email, and casual browsing. It makes sense if you want top-tier power in a thin, touch-first device. Our Best Editor-Vetted Apple Deals Right Now Apple AirPods Pro 2 Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds — $199.00 (List Price $249.00) Apple iPad 11" A16 128GB Wi-Fi Tablet (Silver, 2025) — $321.00 (List Price $349.00) Apple Watch Series 10 GPS 46mm with Jet Black Aluminium Case with Black Sport Band — $392.09 (List Price $429.00) Apple MacBook Air M4 Chip 256GB SSD 16GB RAM 13.6" Laptop (Midnight) — $899.00 (List Price $999.00) Apple AirTag Tracker (4-Pack) — $90.49 (List Price $99.00) Apple 1M USB-C Woven Charging Cable (3-Pack) — $21.99 (List Price $57.00) Apple 1M 15W MagSafe Wireless Charger (1st Gen) — $14.99 (List Price $39.00) Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $199.00 (List Price $249.00) Apple Watch Ultra 3 (GPS, Cellular, 49mm, Black Ocean Band) — $779.00 (List Price $779.00) Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS, 42mm, S/M Black Sport Band) — $299.00 (List Price $399.00) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article