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Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. Studying can be as easy as sitting down and reading a chapter, but it shouldn't be. I do hate to break that to you, though I'm actually doing you a favor. Just absorbing huge blocks of content isn't necessarily helpful for remembering any of it. Before you do the work of studying, you have to get organized by sorting the content you need to absorb. Even organizing it, especially using the "chunking" method, will help you start to grasp and retain the materials, so by the time you're going through them, you'll be in a perfect position to lodge all that information in your memory. Chunking is a psychological trick that experts swear by. Here's how to master it for yourself. What is chunking?Here’s what the American Psychological Association says: Chunking is “the process by which the mind divides large pieces of information into smaller units (chunks) that are easier to retain in short-term memory. As a result of this recoding, one item in memory (e.g., a keyword or key idea) can stand for multiple other items (e.g., a short list of associated points).” Basically, your short-term memory has a specific capacity for how many units it can store and that capacity is pretty low, ranging from five to nine—but the units themselves can be as complex as you want. The APA says “the exact number of chunks remembered depends on the size of each chunk or the subunits contained within each chunk.” Each chunk is a collection of pieces of related information, like words, numbers, or phrases. The key here is they have to be related to each other, but not very related to the other chunks. Chunking is all about grouping related pieces of information so you can stay in that five-to-nine units frame. You probably already use chunking in your real life to remember things. Think of your phone number. You likely already sort it into your area code, those first three digits, and the final four digits. Remembering a string of 10 numbers is hard; remembering three “chunks” of smaller digits is less difficult. So how do you study in chunks?Look at the things you have to memorize and start grouping them loosely into categories based on how they’re related. This doesn’t have to be about content, either. If you have to memorize 20 words or concepts, you don’t have to group them by their meaning; you can group them by whether they sound similar, start with the same letter, or whatever you want. If you've ever used a mnemonic device to remember something like, say, the order of the planets, you've already made a "chunk" to study before. You can create your chunks with something as simple as a pencil and paper, listing the words or concepts together and skipping a few spaces between units. From here, you can make flashcard sets of each chunk or use the first letter of each phrase to create a mnemonic device. Try an acrostic, a phrase where the first letter of each word corresponds with the first letter of one of the things you need to remember. If you think better in terms of numbers, try grouping your words or concepts by how many letters are in them. The pencil-and-paper technique is helpful for entrenching words in your memory, since you retain things you write down a little better than those you type, but it's not that convenient or functional otherwise. I recommend using apps and digital programs to make this easier. For instance, use a mind-mapping app to sort out your chunks and make them easy to visualize. I always find that even seeing words grouped together and organized can help me remember them and the ways they relate to each other better. Xmind is my favorite app for this, but you can also use something like Canva, which I have absolutely done in a pinch. Next, you can even use an app to create your flashcards. Flashcards are one of the best and most time-tested methods for studying, but it's wildly unrealistic for you to carry a bunch of notecards around. These are my five favorite flashcard apps, which will enable you to keep all your study materials accessible on your phone wherever you are. I recommend making a new deck for every chunk you create so you can keep your groups separate in your mind. Once you've grasped all the content of your various chunks, try mixing some of the decks together and reviewing them in bigger batches. Known as interleaving, this technique will gradually help you make connections between different concepts, enhancing not only your recall of them, but your actual understanding. Just don't forget to start out by studying each set—or chunk—individually. Even though this doesn’t break down the amount of content, having them in groups with similar characteristics will help you remember it all together, and you’ll be surprised how much of the real material you retain. View the full article

Google Ads seems to be rolling out a change to the campaign set up screen and flow. Instead of being asked what ad format you want to run, you must select all for PMax or specific campaign types for display, search, discover and so on. View the full article

Google seems to be testing showing the local pack, Google Business Profile listings, at the top of the Google Shopping results in the Shopping tab. Normally, Google does not show local packs in the Shopping tab, I believe...View the full article

Back in May, we covered how Google was testing a new sponsored results label that placed a few ads beneath it, as opposed to labeling each and every ad as sponsored. Well, that version seems to be expanding and more and more people are seeing it and many are not liking it.View the full article

The show-stealing star on the ‘privileges of living in fiction’, why character acting is a misnomer — and how Tom Holland is keeping him relevantView the full article

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Our new print issue features “How YouTube Ate TV,” an oral history of the video-sharing site’s impact on entertainment, culture, and business as told by dozens of eyewitnesses past and present. As we stitched sound bites together into a story, it became clear that our interviews had provided an embarrassment of riches. Indeed, we had too many great stories and insights to cram into one magazine article. So we expanded the online version of the article into five oral histories. Two are live on our site now, covering the company’s earliest days and acquisition by Google. Three more will roll out next week, bringing the story up to 2025—and, in the case of AI’s sweeping impact on the platform, beyond. One of the joys of working on this project with my colleagues and fellow interviewers, María José Gutiérrez Chávez, Yasmin Gagne, Steven Melendez, and David Salazar, was having an excuse to think back to what the web was like 20 years ago. It’s not just that YouTube was brand new and rapidly becoming a necessity of everyday life. At the time, the whole proposition of being able to easily watch videos on the internet at all was a novelty. The technology that made it—and sites like YouTube—possible at all was Macromedia’s Flash. By the time YouTube came along, Flash was more than a decade old. Initially known as FutureWave SmartSketch, it morphed from a drawing app for pen-based computers into a browser plug-in that allowed websites to offer more motion and interactivity than the early web could muster on its own. Flash jazzed up the internet without requiring much in the way of bandwidth or computing cycles—a critical virtue back in the days of pokey dial-up connections. A whole universe of Flash-enabled animations and games sprung up. Flash was so manifestly useful that Netscape and Microsoft bundled it with their browsers. Eventually, the plug-in added support for video playback, dramatically simplifying a process that had formerly required clunky software such as RealPlayer. Instead of video being something you watched in a separate app with its own interface, it could be rendered right inside sites. That’s why YouTube was so easy to use. It also permitted the fledgling site to make its videos embeddable on any web page, spreading them all over the internet. If you were online back then, you may recall all this. But I’m afraid Flash’s reputation was tarnished by what happened well after it helped YouTube become, well, YouTube. A couple of months after YouTube was founded, Adobe agreed to acquire Macromedia. Once Flash came into its portfolio, the software giant aggressively stuffed the plug-in with new features. What had begun as a complement to the plain-vanilla web became a platform unto itself. As Flash got more powerful, it lost its original spritely nature. Increasingly, it was a bloated resource hog—something you reluctantly allowed onto your computer because a sizable percentage of the web wouldn’t work without it. In 2011, I wrote about how Flash had mucked up my MacBook Air, and how much better the laptop worked with the plug-in disabled. Did I mention that Flash also had some pretty significant security issues? By the time I banished Flash from my Mac, the PC-centric web that had given us Flash in the first place was receding into history. Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010 had put browsers onto new classes of gadgets with smaller displays and touchscreen interfaces. But Apple didn’t give Adobe the kind of technical access it needed to put Flash on an iPhone or iPad. On those devices, Flash content showed up as empty boxes. In 2010, Steve Jobs published an open letter, “Thoughts on Flash,” that argued that Adobe’s software was rife with problems and Apple’s platforms were better off without it. Adobe—and a fair percentage of technology enthusiasts—saw Apple’s exclusion of Flash as being about locking out competition, not enhancing the user experience. Now, Google’s Android mobile operating system could run Flash. And for a time, makers of Android devices considered that a major advantage. BlackBerry, the maker of the PlayBook tablet, even ran TV commercials The Presidenteting Flash support as a defining feature. The only problem was that mobile Flash was awful. It taxed the devices of the period beyond their breaking point. Even if it had been more efficient, much of the world’s Flash content simply didn’t work well on a tiny touchscreen. In 2011, Adobe gave up on mobile Flash. Then a suite of open web technologies known as HTML5 largely replicated Flash’s features as part of web browsing’s basic functionality, no plug-in required. Many big sites started abandoning Flash, period. Adobe decided to wind down the technology in 2017 and stopped supporting it altogether in 2020. Today’s internet is entirely Flash-free. I don’t miss Flash in the sense of thinking we were better off when it was central to our computing lives or fantasizing about it coming back. Even in the days when Flash was quite pleasant, a single company bearing so much responsibility for how websites worked was never ideal. That became painfully clear when Adobe lost track of the values that had made Flash popular in the first place. When it finally died, I was able to reallocate the brain cells I’d dedicated to wrestling with it to happier pursuits. Nevertheless, it was nice to remember the days when Flash’s impact on the web was largely positive. As a startup, YouTube got a lot of things right, such as seeing its users as a community, not just a morass of eyeballs. But none of that would have mattered if the internet had still been stuck in the RealPlayer era. As Billy Biggs, a software engineer who’s been at Google and YouTube since 2006, put it when I spoke with him for our YouTube history, “Flash video is what made this all possible.” It was the right technology at the right time. That’s as much a part of its legacy as its later regrettable evolution and descent into obsolescence. You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company This interactive AI-generated podcast app from ex-Googlers blew my mind Huxe makes podcasts almost uncannily personal—and even lets you talk to their AI hosts. Read More → Inside Amazon’s ‘Iliad Flow,’ the deceptive UX at the center of its federal trial We unpack the FTC’s claims that Amazon used design to trick customers into buying—and keeping—a Prime subscription. Read More → A Facebook dating app hopes to be the cure for ‘swipe fatigue’ The AI-powered bot can even suggest pickup lines. Read More → AI tools aren’t making much of a difference for companies Chat GPT, Copilot, and their competitors are boosting productivity without moving the needle on profit and loss. Read More → 5 time-saving Outlook features you’re probably overlooking Once you know these gems, you can’t go back to not using them. Read More → I gave ChatGPT $500 of real money to invest in stocks. Its picks surprised me I told ChatGPT with GPT-5’s ‘Thinking’ model selected that I would give it $500 to invest however it saw fit. Read More → View the full article

A month ago, Google announced new agentic (agent based) features for AI Mode. Well, some are now seeing this live in AI Mode, specifically making reservations at recommended restaurants. View the full article

Google is sunsetting the session-related metrics for Google AdSense. Google said this includes all metrics that rely on ad sessions, such as "Ad sessions", "Ad session RPM", etc.View the full article

For a decade, marketing strategy was engineered to master Google’s “messy middle.” Today, the customer’s exploration and evaluation journey has migrated from the open web (PPC, Reddit, YouTube, websites) into closed AI environments (ChatGPT, AI Mode, Perplexity), making direct observation impossible. Your marketing analytics stack faces funnel blindness. You must reconstruct customer journeys from fragmented data offered by LLM visibility tools. Funnel reconstruction relies on two primary data streams The rush to measure LLM performance has vendors promising dashboards to help you “Analyze your AI visibility right now.” This work requires reconciling two fundamentally different data streams: Synthetic data (the prompts you choose to track as a brand). Observational data (clickstream data). Every LLM visibility tracking platform delivers products built from some extraction, recombination, or brokerage of this data. Funnel reconstruction relies on two primary data streams The questions, commands, and scenarios you want to track are, by their nature, synthetic. Lab data is inherently synthetic. Lab data does not come from the real world; it is the direct output you get when you inject chosen prompts into an LLM. Tools like Semrush’s Artificial Intelligence Optimization (also known as AIO) and Profound curate a list of prompts for brands to help map the theoretical limits of your brand’s presence in generative AI answers. Companies use lab data to benchmark performance, spot errors or bias, and compare outputs across different queries or models. It shows how various models respond to exactly what the brand wants to test. This approach only reflects how the system performs in test conditions, not what happens in real-world use. The data you get is pulled from a world that doesn’t exist, without any persistent user context (memories ChatGPT keeps of its users’ habits, for example). These engineered scenarios are idealized, repetitive, and distant from the messy middle and real demand. Lab metrics show the “best case” output you get from prompts you carefully design. They tell you what is possible, not what is real. They cannot predict or reflect real-world outcomes, conversions, or market shifts. The only actionable results come from observed field data: what actually happens when anonymous users encounter your brand in uncontrolled environments. Synthetic persona injection and system saturation Some vendors use two bold strategies – system-level saturation and user-level simulation – to compensate for the lack of real customer data. “Sometimes, personas are assigned to these prompts. Sometimes, it boils down to brute-forcing a thousand prompt variants to see how LLMs respond,” said Jamie Indigo, Technical SEO authority. One strategy, employed by vendors like Brandlight, is system-level saturation. This brute-force approach maps a brand’s entire citation ecosystem by analyzing millions of AI responses. System-level saturation is designed to maximize exposure by revealing the structural footprint of the system itself, rather than modeling user behavior. This approach is designed to maximize influence and exposure in AI environments by targeting the most impactful sources, rather than a tool for modeling or predicting authentic user behavior. The alternative strategy is user-level simulation, used by tools like Quilt. This involves injecting thousands of synthetic personas into the testing environment. Persona injection means creating simulated users for your prompts (distinct types, priorities, edge-case scenarios) and feeding their tailored prompts to an LLM in testing environments. Experts like Indigo acknowledge the value of this approach, which helps expose clarity gaps and reveal edge behaviors. Others, like Chris Green, a veteran Fortune 500 SEO strategist, underscore its arbitrary nature, pointing out that it remains disconnected from real-world behavior patterns. These synthetic personas may offer structural insight and help brands stress-test, but do not predict audience outcome or campaign ROI. These methods are useful for product teams that need fast, cheap feedback on their logic, language, and interactions. They cannot reproduce the randomness and unpredictability of actual users. Real user behavior, as captured in clickstream data, rarely matches lab personas or occurs in any meaningful sequence. Case in point: humans are now starting to rely on agentic AI to make online purchases. Clickstream data: Validating what’s real If lab data maps the possibilities, field data validates reality. That data is clickstream data, the record of how users interact with digital platforms: Pages they view. Results they click. Paths they follow. Companies like Similarweb or Datos (a Semrush company) offer data capturing genuine user actions, collected through browser extensions, consented panels, app telemetry, and provider networks. Visibility tools like Semrush’s AIO and Profound are built on this principle, leveraging clickstream data, sequential metrics showing which AI results are seen, engaged with or ignored. This is the only ground truth available, exposing your brand’s real-world impact and pinpointing the precise moments of friction or success. The integrity of the underlying clickstream data of any LLM visibility tool is central to validating what’s real. Most analytics platforms buy data from brokers, so the quality of your insights is dictated by the quality of their source. You should focus on scale and quality when it comes to clickstream data. Ask the following questions of any platform/tool you are considering: What is the scale? Aim for tens of millions of anonymized users across relevant device/region. Is the data cleaned, deduplicated, and validated? What about bot exclusion and compliance? No dashboard or reporting tool can be trusted if it is not built on strong clickstream signals. Weak clickstream panels, small samples, limited geographies, hide minority behaviors and emergent trends. Most AI analytics do not own their clickstream panels (except Semrush’s AIO); they buy from brokers who extract from global browser/app data. Vendors segment only as far as their panels stretch. Datos sets the current standard for reliable, real-time, actionable clickstream data. As the largest global panel operator, it provides the backbone for visibility platforms, including Semrush AIO, and Profound. Tens of millions of anonymized users are tracked across 185 countries and every relevant device class. This data ensures you are anchoring market decisions in a way that synthetic personas or millions of curated brand prompts cannot. Where strategy is forged Lab data, including all the prompts you curate and track, is only half the story. Without the validation of field data (clickstream data), your lab data remains an idealized marketing funnel. Field data, without the context of the lab’s map, is just a rearview mirror, providing the “what” but never the “why.” Manage the delta between the two, reconcile, and calibrate the map of what’s possible in an ideal scenario against evidence of what actually works and brings revenue. This is the feedback loop you should seek from LLM visibility tools. The actionable intelligence, the actual strategy, is forged in the gap between them. You should consider the “messy middle” a dynamic intelligence feedback loop, not a static funnel analysis. Modern online marketing means mapping what is possible with what is profitable. View the full article

The remote work movement is a growing global phenomenon. 79 percent of knowledge workers worldwide said they work from home, and 80-90% of the U.S. workforce would like to work remotely at least part time. And while no two remote work situations are identical, there are some common themes when it comes to the tools and accessories for success. Of course, the most crucial element is wifi. But after that, there’s still plenty to consider: the desk setup, the commuter bag, the headphones, the travel accessories and more. And then, there are the more classic questions… Mac or PC? iPhone or Android? On Buffer’s global team of 80 folks, many team members have spent a great deal of thought, time and research answering these questions as they work and travel. To help out any new or future remote workers, we gathered some teammate suggestions about the best gear and gadgets for remote workers. If you’re looking for a gift for the digital nomad or remote worker in your life, these might be some great ideas! Backpacks: The best daily go-bags for working remotely To carry your laptop and essentials, a day bag is one of a remote worker’s toughest choices. Here are some brands and bags recommended by our team. Bags under $200Black canvas Kaukko bag: ($40) “Not too bulky, stylish bag. Got it as a gift from my wife.” – MichaelHershel backpack: ($45) “Very simple, I’ve had it since college!” – EmilyIncase City Collection Brief 15” Heather Black: ($70) “Solid, quality fabric, low volume, and cute.” – PhilippeDeuter Giga Daypack: ($70) “I bought this for university and I love that it has many compartments — one for my laptop and paper documents, one for clothes/lunch box and one for small items like headphones and wallet.” – AlfredEastpack Floid: (€70) “The bag is not so big, has many pockets, a main compartment with laptop sleeve and the most important thing: a pocket in the back. It’s really easy to access and super secure, so very convenient to keep your passport safe while traveling.” – MaximeECBC grey laptop backpack: ($100) “I adore my rugged Northface backpack, but wanted something that looked slim and professional so I didn’t feel like I was going off to camp! My qualifiers were: weight (under 2 lbs empty), color, price, fabric (water resistant), laptop area and many organizing pockets, water-bottle pockets (must-have, even better if it zips away when not in use), padding/comfort of straps, and return policy.” – CarolynFjällräven laptop backpack: ($110) “The Fjällräven has survived snow and rain!” – StephaniePatagonia Black Hole 32L Pack: ($149) “Patagonia makes solid products with the intent that they’ll last a really long time. I like this bag in particular for its versatility and the protection it provides for my laptop.” – RoyA BlueLounge backpack: ($149) “Not only is it the perfect size for my day-to-day trips through the city, it also expands perfectly to be all the luggage I need for Buffer retreats! Also, is eco-friendly!” – Mike SBags $200 and upcôte & ciel : ($200-$800) “I absolutely adore this Paris-based company’s (their name is “coast & sky” in French) approach to designing products! They seek inspiration from the natural world as well as the cityscape and urban space of Paris.” – JulietMinaal Daily + Minaal 2.0: ($250-$300) RodolpheGoRuck GR1: ($295) “The best backpack I’ve owned – looks amazing, lifetime warranty, made in America and the company was founded by a former veteran!” – SuperMission Works the Rambler – ($295) “The price may sound expensive at first, but I plan on owning and using it for several years to come, which makes this well worth the cost broken down over that period of time. I’ve also made an effort to prioritize function over form—although at a very high level of quality, luckily often both are included.” – Leo (Here’s more on Leo’s experiment in living out of one bag!)The Everyday Backpack: ($260) “Getting this for laptop and camera in December.” – AndyMichael Kors Jet Set Travel Saffiano Leather Top-Zip Tote: ($298) “Stylish and practical.” – HannahMulberry Slim Heathcliffe: ($1,150) “I’ve gone through many backpacks, bags, etc. and find this to be the perfect bag for all my daily items (Macbook, iPad, Chargers, Camera, etc.) in a functional (briefcase + shoulder strap) design. It’s also a classic, quality-focused bag that will last a lifetime.“ – Daniel Luggage: The best bigger bags for travel Whether you check a bag or carry on, a travel bag is often a key investment for digital nomads. Luggage and carry-ons under $150“I use an old Nike carry-on bag along with a HikPro backpack ($20). Love being super mobile when I’m traveling and so I pack light. It allows me to get out my computer on command and I save time at the airport.” – Brian“Depending on the trip, it might be a big Berghaus backpack ($70-$75) and my daypack for a short trip. I like to carry backpacks when the trip requires a lot of walking with my stuff and huge luggage when I’m on a tour or when I can drive around.” – Alfred“My wife and I both have a Samsonite Lift2 Spinner ($139–$199). We generally check any large bags when we fly. And we’ll carry on a backpack with things we want to have handy while we’re traveling” – Spencer“I do not check my bag, I love having everything with me on the plane and the feeling of traveling lightweight! BlueLounge backpack ($149) or, if I need some extra space, I use an Eastpak (€60 and up) that’s a bit larger.” – Mike SLuggage and carry-ons $200+“My husband recently convinced me to travel for a month with only a backpack – and I was super unsure about it! It ended up being the absolute BEST. We each bought Osprey Ozone 46 bags, ($160) and everything we needed could fit in them! It was also a breeze to get through airports, since these bags fit as carry-ons :) Now, I imagine this will be my bag of choice for longer trips!” – Arielle“If <2 weeks, carry-on suitcase/bag combination from Timbuk2 Aviator Convertible ($189). If travel is longer, I have a checked suitcase from Roncato and my light backpack” – Marcus“Love my Tortuga ($249)! Incredible when traveling and super easy to take through Security. Amazingly fits in overhead bins.” – AdamRimowa Topas – Multiwheel® 32’’ ($980) – I used to travel with the amazing Minaal bag before making the switch to the Fjallraven Duffel No. 6 Medium ($225), both of which were PERFECT carry-on bags. I recently made the switch to the Topas for durability and wheels. I often found myself exhausted traveling due to backpack load, or having to keep setting my bag down. Now it’s more stress-free while also allowing me to carry-on still. The Topas is an incredible piece of luggage, fits a ton and comes with a 5-year warranty.” – Daniel F Also a huge must-have: travel power adaptors! Desk setup: Laptop stands and ergonomic accessories We’ve shared a bit before how important your work setup is to your health. Here are suggestions from that piece and some other ways that our team has found to work in a healthy way! Laptop stands and adjustable standing desksRoost stand – ($74.95) This collapsable and portable stand helps lift the laptop screen to a more ergonomically-friendly height. The $22 IKEA desk hack is the brainchild of Colin Nederkoom, CEO of Customer.io. With side tables, shelves, and brackets purchased at IKEA, Nederkoom put together a custom desk for his monitor and keyboard/mouse. Products like the Varidesk ($395 and up) and Kangaroo Pro ($425) help convert a standard desk into a standing desk, and they have the adjustable power to set the screen and keyboard at the ideal height. Standing desks“A stand-up desk is always great. I like to find high tables at coffee shops and switch off between standing and sitting” – Darcy For the best standalone adjustable desks, we cede the floor to the Wirecutter, which tested a number of desk options. They found that the Jarvis Bamboo ($500) is the best standing desk on the market. They also liked Uplift’s Standing Desk ($693). Headphones we love Whether you’re into music, podcasts, or a soundtrack to maximize productivity and creativity, headphones are crucial for the remote worker. Buffer’s favorite: Apple Earpods ($29) Other favorites include: Sony earbuds ($25 and up)Marshall II ($119)Beats by Dre ($130 and up)AudioTechnica ATH-M50x ($169)Klipsch Reference earphones ($199)H6 Bang and Olufson ($299) Laptops: The most vital tool for the remote worker Have laptop, will travel. And the clear favorite amongst the Buffer team is Mac. Buffer’s favorite: Macbook 13 inch Specifically, the 13-inch MacBook ($1,499 USD and up). This combines the power and portability many digital nomads and remote workers need — and this is what we recommend for our team members and reimburse for as they graduate from bootcamp. The “other” category laptops included: – 15-inch MacBook Pro ($2,399 and up) – 13-inch MacBook Air ($999 and up) – 15-inch Lenovo ($829 and up) E-readers, tablets, and more! Buffer gifts our new team members and significant others a Kindle Paperwhite ($119 and up) when they are brought onto the team full-time — reading is a huge focus for the team! Other favorite e-reader options: iPad mini ($269 and up)iPad Pro ($599 and up)Apple Watch ($269 and up)Kindle Voyage ($199 and up) Step trackers It’s fair to say our team is all over the map on this one! Here are the main gadgets we use to track our steps: Jawbone ($20 and up)FitBit ($60 and up)Garmin ($99 and up)Pebble ($130 and up)Withings Activité Steel ($150)Apple Watch ($269 and up) Smartphones Buffer’s Favorite: iPhone The team leans toward iPhone about 3:1 over Android. Note: Our “other” response here was currently an Android user who planned to switch to the iPhone 7. Other essentials from our team The Better Back ($59) is a favorite among many team members. “Game changer: packing squares. These make me so happy because all my things are in their own little bag, instead of having a backpack/suitcase full of random stuff everywhere!” – Emily “Plain old paper books :) For any occasion.” – Humber “I use my Apple Pencil ($99) a ton to take notes throughout the day on my iPad :)” – Jordan “Project Fi by Google has to be the most essential addition for my daily work, life and travel since the discovery of PB-Jam sandwich! With its data coverage in over 135+ countries, I can now travel to new countries without any worries since I know Project Fi will have me covered in case a wifi connection doesn’t work well to do my job. I’m very grateful for it! :)” – Octavio (a full-time digital nomad) “Absolute essential is my trusty sketch book. I find ideas flow so much easier (and it’s so much more enjoyable) when using paper and pencil. Not just for ideas, but for to-dos and arranging thoughts for the day or a given task.” – James “My playlists in Spotify are everything to me. I feel like I can’t produce great work unless I’ve picked the right music to match my mood. Today is a Birds of Tokyo kind of day.” – Paul “Always have my Mophie ($30 and up) phone charger on hand. And some variety of wires to ensure I can charge everything! Backup Mi-fi dongle in case Wifi disappears or my iPhone tethering fails on me.” – Colin “Can’t leave home without Burt’s Bees. For travel, my miles card gives me early boarding which I love. Also, global entry/TSA pre-check ($85 to apply) is a game changer for me.” – Dan Over to you! What’s missing from our list? What’s your top choice for our remote work categories? Add you voice to our list! We’d love to hear from you in the comments! View the full article

Former Lib Dem leader brought up in Glasgow tenement was key figure in party’s success in 2000sView the full article

We optimized for fan-out queries to see if it improves our AI visibility. Read this article to see what happened. View the full article

What’s the biggest company in the world? Apple? Amazon? Microsoft? No. It’s Nvidia, which in early August became the world’s first $4 trillion company, overtaking both Apple and Microsoft. Last week’s results were eagerly awaited by the world’s markets and actually helped push the S&P 500 and Dow Jones to all-time highs. By the end of August, Nvidia accounted for more than 8% of the S&P 500, the largest weighting for a single stock in the index’s history. Yet, Nvidia isn’t a household name. It doesn’t make the devices in your pocket or the apps you use every day. Nvidia makes chips. Excellent chips, yes, but not unique in the way we tend to assume a $4 trillion product must be. Its success is not just a product story; it’s also a brand story. B2B is often treated as B2C’s poor relation. When budgets are tight, brand is first to be stripped back, reduced to a logo refresh or a new color palette. Nvidia’s rise proves that’s a mistake. Its transformation from graphics chipmaker to the engine of the AI revolution shows how brand strategy can create enormous value. Here are six lessons B2B brands can take from Nvidia’s playbook. 1. More than a logo Nvidia’s brand identity hasn’t changed much since the 1990s. The typography has been updated, but the odd, retro eye-and-square graphic remains. Many organizations would have dropped it long ago, worried it looked dated or alienating. Nvidia’s decision to keep it reflects confidence in what the brand stands for and in the loyalty of its audience, especially the developers and gamers who value its heritage. Many B2B brands struggle here. A new CMO arrives and the instinct is to “refresh the logo.” These changes are often driven more by internal pressure than by real market insight. In doing so, companies risk eroding recognition and alienating the very customers that anchor their brand. Companies need to ask: What do our core users value from us? What signals show continuity and confidence? Consistency builds familiarity, and that in turn builds trust. 2. Own a story, not just a product Nvidia’s two main rivals, AMD and Intel, have longer histories and strong product reputations. Yet Intel is seen as legacy computing and AMD as fast and affordable, while Nvidia is synonymous with the future. This isn’t because Nvidia “started” AI, but because it positioned itself as the essential platform for enabling it, shifting from being a graphics processing unit manufacturer to the company powering the AI revolution, and framing its value in terms of possibility rather than price or speed. That positioning has contributed to a market cap 15 times AMD’s and 47 times Intel’s, despite smaller revenues. Many B2B firms struggle to look this far ahead. Brand vision often gets tied to short sales cycles and annual budgets. The challenge is to set an ambition that stretches beyond the next quarter. Microsoft did this successfully with its “cloud-first” pivot. Intel seemingly failed to capitalize on the AI growth wave, falling behind AMD and Nvidia. Although it is reportedly working hard on a comeback, will it be enough to make up for lost time? The lesson: don’t just describe what you make, own the bigger shift your products make possible. 3. Be more peacock Brands are regularly the victims of trends. The more established and reputationally safe they are the harder it is for them to stay connected to new audiences while remaining true to themselves. However, Nvidia has remained remarkably true to its central vision. It uses its core brand assets—the logo, the green—everywhere. This consistency reinforces recognition, particularly among its most loyal audience: a technically minded, brand-aware community that values the company’s history. Where some brands tone down their heritage as they grow, Nvidia has leaned into it. Salesforce and Slack have both succeeded by sticking with distinctive, even playful, visual identities in a category prone to beige “professionalism.” In contrast, many brands caught up in the 2018 “blanding” epidemic traded characterful logos and flourishes for neutral sans-serifs, diluting their identities in the process. Often B2B brands should have the courage to lean into the brand assets that make them distinctive and unique, rather than feeling they need to follow the latest trend. 4. Make the brand an experience Nvidia’s GTC (GPU Technology Conference) has been described as the “Super Bowl of AI”, stadium-scale events wrapped in the brand, bringing together developers, researchers, and business leaders. These conferences position Nvidia not just as a supplier of hardware but as the platform powering what’s next. Most B2B brands don’t think about experience in this way. “Customer experience” is often a trade show booth or a sales meeting. Yet experience is where brand comes to life: through service design, digital platforms, physical spaces, and above all, people. Not every business needs stadium events, but every B2B brand can look at the moments where clients interact with them and ask: does this experience reflect who we are? Does it build confidence? Deloitte is a good example here. Its investment in connected digital and service experiences has made it the highest-valued commercial services brand by Brand Finance. 5. Partner for relevance Nvidia’s partnerships—from Tesla to Disney Research to Google DeepMind—have put it at the center of conversations about robotics, art, graphics, and AI. Each collaboration reinforces the company’s relevance far beyond chips. B2B companies often fall into one of two traps: chasing partnerships haphazardly without alignment, or avoiding them altogether for fear of losing control. But the right partnerships extend credibility, and relevance. The lesson is to find partnerships that complement your brand’s value and purpose. Co-branded thought leadership, for example, can build credibility for both parties. Deloitte and Apple’s collaboration to accelerate enterprise mobility is a good example. The misstep comes when brands partner without clear alignment. 6. Build a human figurehead Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, has become a brand asset in his own right. Known for his leather jackets and unscripted keynote style, he’s built a following—even a nickname for his fans—which is unusual in the world of B2B hardware. His visibility has amplified Nvidia’s vision while keeping the brand rooted in the community that uses its products. Most B2B leaders aren’t visible in this way. Either they avoid the spotlight, or they show up only in highly scripted investor calls. Yet charismatic leaders can create strong brand momentum. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce uses his personal platform to advance the company’s narrative. Deloitte CEO Joseph Ucuzoglu has also become a recognizable voice on leadership and the future of work. For B2B brands, the takeaway isn’t to manufacture celebrity. It’s to encourage leaders to show up authentically, in ways that reflect the brand’s values and ambitions. Brand is the differentiator From the outside, many B2B products can look more alike than they really are: another chip, another service, another platform. That’s when brand becomes the differentiator. Nvidia’s rise to the top wasn’t just about cutting-edge engineering. It was about confidence: sticking with distinctive assets, claiming ownership of the future, showing up consistently, building meaningful experiences, partnering with intent, and amplifying it all through visible leadership. The lesson for B2B brands is simple. Don’t treat brand as decoration. Allow your brand to be vision-led. Nvidia shows that even in categories that seem invisible or interchangeable, brand confidence can drive both growth and value. 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For years, Mercedes-Benz has relied on touchscreens as the command center of its vehicles. Is it too hot? Tap the screen to set the AC temperature. Want to listen to the news? Tap. Defrost the rear window? Tap, tap, tap. While the automaker has retained some physical controls in its cars, its modern user experience is effectively built around the screen. But that’s about to change. Magnus Östberg, chief software officer for Mercedes-Benz, recently announced that the company would be centering future car design around physical controls instead of screens. “The data shows us physical buttons are better,” Östberg told Autocar at the Munich motor show. He says Mercedes will begin integrating more physical controls into its digitally focused cabins starting in 2026. Mercedes’ announcement is part of a bigger industry trend… with carmakers like Hyundai leading the charge to bring back knobs and buttons to its cars. Earlier this year, fellow German automaker Volkswagen, also announced plans to fix its touchscreen problem, saying that it was “taking a step back to move forward.” After more than a decade of car screens growing bigger and brighter, the auto industry finally seems to be acknowledging what drivers (and science!) has known all along: physical buttons are safer and more pleasant to use. Why automakers went crazy for screens You can partly blame Buick for this mess. The General Motors’ brand introduced the first 3-by-4-inch car touchscreen with the 1986 Buick Riviera. It turned out that drivers found the design distracting and cumbersome, so Buick eventually cancelled it. Still, it serves as an early glimpse of how automakers would eventually come to think about integrating technology into the driver experience. Throughout the ’90s and early 2000s, automakers like BMW and Lexus began to integrate small, low-res screens into their cars to handle functions like navigation. But the touchscreen revolution didn’t happen in earnest until 2012 when Elon Musk installed cheap vertical 17-inch displays in his Model S. The sleek, tech-forward design intrigued other automakers, who realized they could cut costs by reducing the number of expensive physical controls in their cars. And sure enough, lots of car companies followed suit. Throughout the 2010s, touchscreens became the default mode of interaction for carmakers across the price spectrum. But screens were not without their problems. Tesla’s reliance on electronic controls has lead to some high profile issues. The screens themselves started failing, leading to a 158,000-vehicle recall for the company. Drivers, meanwhile, didn’t seem to like touchscreens all that much, and science didn’t either. Evidence began mounting that touchscreens, despite their perceived convenience, were actually not all that helpful. In 2022, Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare conducted a comprehensive study of 11 modern touchscreen-equipped cars. It found that physical controls dramatically outperform digital interfaces for driver tasks. Its testing revealed that a 17-year-old Volvo V70 with only physical controls allowed drivers to complete essential tasks in just 10 seconds, while modern cars with touchscreens took anywhere from 23.5 seconds to a disastrous 44.9 seconds to accomplish the same functions. But going back to physical controls is not just about convenience—it’s about safety. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says any distraction that requires drivers to look away from the road even for a second is a potential accident. Touchscreens, by nature, require drivers to take their eyes off the road to navigate through multiple menu layers in order to perform simple tasks that once required an easy-to-find single physical button press or dial twist. As design expert Amber Case says, “Because buttons are not fixed to specific locations, screens inhibit muscle memory and findability. Touchscreens compete for attention with the driving process, adding to the dangers of distracted driving.” Back to basics All this has lead automakers to reconsider their devotion to the screen. In early 2025, Volkswagen announced a significant policy shift, with the company committing to restore physical controls for essential functions across all future models. Design chief Andreas Mindt acknowledged publicly that the company’s touchscreen-heavy strategy had failed users. He said that cars are not phones, so they require a different interface. Hyundai also reversed direction in late 2024, when they reintroduced physical controls with its Ioniq 5. It came after a 2023 epiphany, when its internal testing revealed driver frustration with capacitive controls during critical moments. The Korean automaker’s research showed that touch-only interfaces create anxiety when drivers need immediate access to vehicle functions. “I think it’s great,” designer Chris Kernaghan told Fast Company at the time. “I’m not dismissing touchscreens in cars entirely, [but] there are certain critical controls that are better suited to good old-fashioned buttons and knobs. As a designer, I’m all about tactile feedback whenever possible. It just feels natural to push a button and get an immediate response. You don’t get that same sense of control with touchscreens.” Manufacturers like Toyota, Honda, and Nissan maintained hybrid approaches throughout the touchscreen boom, preserving tactile controls alongside digital displays rather than eliminating buttons entirely. Chinese brands also offer hybrid a touchscreen-physical button UX, although some, like the Xiaomi SU7, provide it with an optional full physical control system that attaches magnetically to the dashboard, under the main display. Trend spotting If I were a cynic (and I am), I would say that Mercedes took these steps mostly because there seems to be a reversal to this useless fad. Plus, regulatory pressure is mounting: Europe’s safety testing organization will penalize vehicles starting in 2026 if they lack physical controls for essential safety systems including climate, signals, emergency features, and driver-assistance functions. But Östberg explained that the company’s real-world usage data—revealed by its own cars’ electronics—pointed out that something needed to change. A Mercedes spokesperson told Fast Company that consumer feedback played a role in the shift: “We’ve listened closely to customer feedback and analyzed real-world usage data from our software-defined vehicles. Physical controls offer superior usability and comfort for many drivers.” The spokesperson added, “The rollers and these physical buttons are very important for certain age groups and certain populations.” This may be true, but it’s a strange way to frame a decision that is ultimately about making cars safer for everyone. A solution in progress The solution Mercedes has chosen starts with a redesigned steering wheel featuring “a host of rockers, rollers, and buttons” that will become standard across all Mercedes models going forward. This wheel will be fitted to all car models already on sale, with implementation beginning early next year. Mercedes tells me that the manufacturer is reintroducing tactile elements like a rocker for the limiter and Distronic (its cruise control system) and a roller for volume control. These will all be on the steering wheel. The picture of the wheel shows a lot of buttons crammed in its horizontal axis, like an oversize PlayStation gamepad—a bit complicated, but definitely better than using the display. Is this the solution to the problem? I always found these types of button-heavy wheel designs problematic. In theory, not having to take your hands away from the steering wheel is good. In practice, I find myself looking down to make sure I’m clicking the right button. Or missing the target if I don’t look. When asked about usability testing for the new GLC wheel controls, Mercedes told me the new steering wheel had undergone “extensive testing” as part of its development process, though no specific details about the results were provided. It’s interesting timing for the announcement. Mercedes has just fitted its new GLC SUV model with what is allegedly the biggest screen ever put in a production car: a 39.1-inch display called an MBUX Hyperscreen. It spans the entire dashboard width. As Mercedes-Benz design chief Gorden Wagener acknowledged to Autocar, the company has “reached a point where you cannot make the screen much bigger.” Perhaps the industry’s screen-enlargement race has finally reached its logically absurd conclusion. Mercedes plans to add more physical controls elsewhere in future cabins, though Östberg indicated this will likely be limited to SUVs because “in larger cars we have more freedom to package” and buyers of those vehicles “care more about buttons.” When asked about expanding changes beyond the steering wheel, the Mercedes spokesperson told me the company doesn’t disclose details of future portfolios but continually evaluates “customer needs and preferences.” Maybe this is indicative that the company is still trying to balance cost considerations with user experience, rather than committing fully to what its own data shows works best. Perhaps it’s FOMO, as the Chinese industry seems to be fully committed to displays everywhere and companies like BYD are poised to dominate the global car industry. In fact, Östberg hinted that different wheel designs might be used depending on location, explaining that “while Europeans like buttons, Asian drivers prefer more touchscreen and voice controls.” This market-specific strategy suggests Mercedes is prioritizing regional preferences over the safety and usability benefits its own data has uncovered. Can AI fix it? At the same time, Mercedes says it is investing heavily in voice command technology, with Östberg noting that voice command usage in the CLA has “tripled” among Mercedes drivers, calling the increase “phenomenal.” This AI integration could represent the future solution to the buttons-versus-screens dilemma. If voice recognition becomes really good rather than the current Larry David level of accuracy, drivers might eventually interact with their cars through natural conversation. This mirrors the prediction of usability expert Jakob Nielsen, who believes that user interfaces will eventually disappear entirely as AI anticipates user needs. In such a future, the current debate about buttons and screens might be irrelevant. Back in the real world, however, things need to change. More manufacturers should embrace the return to physical controls, even if it will cost them more to make those cars because of the complex electronics that rolling wheels and buttons require. Mercedes deserves credit for acknowledging the touchscreen problem like its VW colleagues have done and attempting to address a real problem with data-driven solutions. But there is still a way to go before we can say automakers are truly prioritizing drivers’ best interests. What will the cars of the future look like? Right now, the industry seems to be hedging its bets. View the full article

Danish developer and US private capital group discuss deal for Hornsea 3 wind farm View the full article

EV sales just hit a new record in the U.S.: This month, they’re on track to make up 12.2% of new car sales, according to J.D. Power and Associates. Meanwhile, gas car sales dropped compared to the same month last year. Buyers are racing to get new electric vehicles before the $7,500 federal tax credit goes away on September 30. When the The President administration pushed to eliminate the credit in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, it inadvertently helped nudge some consumers to switch to EVs earlier that they otherwise might have. “There’s nothing like a deadline to get people paying attention,” says Josh Boone, executive director of Veloz, a nonprofit focused on electrifying transportation. The organization has seen a surge of traffic on its digital platform that helps consumers choose an EV. The end of the credit also helped temporarily push EV prices down. In August, the average transaction cost for an EV was $44,908—a little less than the average gas vehicle, at $45,521. That’s because manufacturers added generous incentives to help sell cars before the deadline. The tax credit has been in place since 2008, under the Bush administration. Now that it’s disappearing, EV sales are likely to plummet next quarter. Automakers are slowing production and canceling some models. But electric cars aren’t dead in the U.S., and sales are still likely to grow next year. How much does the tax credit matter? Even though the end of the incentive has spurred sales, the tax credit generally hasn’t been the deciding factor for most buyers, says Loren McDonald, who runs an EV data and analysis firm called Chargeonomics. “I’ve always believed that its importance has been overplayed,” he says. “For most people, it was more of a discount than it was an actual incentive to get people over the hump.” Most people using the tax credit have had higher incomes, and probably could have afforded the vehicles on their own. That’s still the case now. “For a lot of people, if they’re considering the difference of a $50 or $100 a month payment, it’s like ‘I can deal with that,’ he says. “What it means is that people with lower income brackets still aren’t interested.” In a recent survey with Morning Consult, analysts at Cox Automotive found that 65% of respondents who were in the market for a new EV said they would still consider an EV without the tax credit. “I thought that was a good data point to show that it’s important, but not for everyone,” says Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox. The number of affordable EVs keeps growing As EV production scales up and battery costs fall, that helps push cost down. The number of more affordable models is growing. The next-generation Chevy Bolt will enter production later this year. The new Nissan Leaf will start at just under $30,000, with a 300-mile range. Slate Auto, a startup backed by Jeff Bezos, will release an electric truck in the mid-$20,000s next year. (With the tax credit in place, it would have been less than $20k.) Toyota is releasing a new electric C-HR next year. Volvo has said that its new crossover, the EX60, is aiming to get as close as possible to price parity with gas cars. In China, it’s worth noting, EVs are already cheaper than gas cars without subsidies. Plug-in vehicles now make up more than half of new sales in China, with battery electric vehicles alone representing one-third of the market. Technology continues to improve. CATL, the largest EV battery manufacturer, plans to soon release new sodium-ion packs that cost $40 per kilowatt-hour, 20% less than its current lithium iorn phosphate batteries (which are already cheaper than standard lithium-ion batteries). Automakers are increasingly adopting platforms that support multiple EV models, boosting economies of scale. All of this will help, although automakers are also facing headwinds from tariffs. If you consider the total cost of ownership, many EVs are already less expensive than equivalent gas vehicles. They need less maintenance, and charging is cheaper than buying gas. Still, that’s harder to communicate than the sticker price. “The auto industry needs to start educating buyers to be more like fleet buyers, which is they get out their Excel spreadsheet and they calculate the total cost of ownership of the truck over the lifetime,” says McDonald. “They need to do this with electric vehicles. The problem is, if you’re also selling gas vehicles, you’re basically selling against your own cars. And that’s always been one of the problems with the legacy automakers: if they go too far in selling how great EVs are, they’re basically saying, sorry, [gas cars] aren’t that good.” The number of used EVs is also continuing to grow—1.1 million EVs were leased over the last few years and will soon be available for resale. The upfront cost of a used EV is already typically comparable (or cheaper) than an equivalent gas car. Those sales have also been surging. Some state and utility incentives are also still available. All of this means that even without the tax credit, the cost of EVs may not necessarily be a large barrier. Charging infrastructure is also improving, and the average range of an EV is already big enough that range anxiety isn’t the challenge that it used to be. Automakers will need to get better at marketing As the tax credit goes away, automakers may have to rethink marketing. McDonald argues that car brands have overrelied on incentives and rebates from the government and utilities. “They’ve focused on all these incentives—not that it’s a really great car, and it doesn’t require maintenance, and it’s fast, and convenient,” he says. “My hope is that they’re going to do a better job marketing and targeting.” One automaker he recently spoke with said that the brand is now beginning to target likely buyers, such as suburban families with a large garage and income. “They’re finally waking up and realized that doing Super Bowl ads is a waste of time,” he says. “What you really need to do is target the people who are considering a Tesla, and get them to buy yours.” Automakers may continue to offer strong incentives next quarter to help offset the loss of the tax credit. “I think they’ll step in and offer more now,” says Tyson Jominy, senior vice president of data & analytics at J.D. Power. (GM declined to comment on its plans for this story, and Rivian said that it is still working through its incentive plans.) Sales are likely to drop, and then rebound in 2026 EV sales will probably fall steeply in the fourth quarter, and likely the first quarter of 2026. That’s both because some sales that would have happened then happened early, and because other sales will be lost because the tax credit is no longer available. But they’re expected to pick up again later in 2026. The same pattern has happened in other countries that phased out EV tax credits. In Germany, for example, the share of EV sales temporarily spiked to 22% just before the German subsidy went away at the end of 2023. At the beginning of 2024, they dropped by more than half. But sales then started to rebound, and by this summer, had grown to 16.8% of the market. In Canada, a federal EV incentive was paused at the beginning of 2025. Sales spiked beforehand, dropped, and are now starting to grow again. JD Power expects that EV sales for this year will be around 9% of the total car market, similar to last year, and will grow in 2026 as new models arrive. Long term, analysts still expect steep growth over the rest of the decade, despite changes in policy. “As we go throughout [2026], and certainly as we head toward the end of decade, we are still bullish on EVs overall,” says Jominy. “We do expect there to be a lot of new launches and expect the technology to continue to improve and evolve.” View the full article

It’s not really possible to cleanly pin down the setting of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Written by Michael Chabon and published in 2000, the story takes place in Brooklyn, in Prague, on the battlefields of World War II, on the top of the Empire State Building, and in the imaginary universe of a superhero comic book. The breadth of locations—physical and metaphysical—make for a rollicking read. But when New York’s Met Opera decided to stage an opera version of the book, that globe-crossing, reality-bending narrative presented some very tangible challenges. “It’s a big sweeping novel, so it requires an enormous canvas and a lot of locations,” says Bartlett Sher, director of the opera version of the book, which has just opened the Met’s 2025–2026 season. “We started workshopping it a couple of years ago, and I realized I can’t do this in the normal way.” To make those leaps in the real time span of a live opera performance, Sher and his team had to take a novel and highly complex approach to its production design. The Met tapped 59, a multidisciplinary stage and experience design studio, to design the sets, lighting, and, crucially, video elements that reveal a narrative that takes place on multiple continents and within the pages of comic books. The story follows two Jewish cousins at the outset of World War II who create a comic book hero whose stories are intended to urge Americans to join the fight against the Nazis. Their comic becomes a hit, but their lives are thrown into chaos as the war unfolds, taking the audience from New York to Prague to the minds of comic book creators. Part of the experiential design agency Journey, 59 developed a production design approach that embraced the story’s location hopping. “The worlds start to be really musically distinct and really visually distinct, and then everything starts to collide together throughout the course of the piece,” says Jenny Melville, principal design director at 59. “It was quite clear early on that particularly the comic book world was going to have a major visual component to the whole design.” Melville has worked on operas and stage plays around the world, and 59 has developed video elements for productions like the Broadway version of the Netflix series Stranger Things and the Met Opera’s 2024 staging of Aida. Melville says that as more and more performances integrate video elements, production designers have to strike a careful balance. “Video design in opera is very much supportive material, an augmentation to the scenic design,” Melville says. “But it’s really critical to never overshadow the live performance on stage.” For The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay opera, video took on an outsized role, especially for scenes involving the creation of the comic book and stories from within its pages. “There are these moments where, really unusually for an opera, the singers stop singing and the video moments take over,” Melville says. That’s partially a function of the narrative, which revolves around the creation of a superhero comic. The impracticality of having the audience watch actors imagining superheroes and drawing comics on stage led to the integration of vivid animated sequences projected on the set. The opera’s modernist score, by composer Mason Bates, also creates moments for the video elements to come into the foreground. The music juggles between the somberness of Europe in World War II, the jazziness of New York City in the 1930s, and a comic book world represented by electronic music. “Because there are these electronic music sections, it’s a really clear divide when we’re a supporting act, which is actually like 90% of the time,” Melville says. The abundance of video elements in the opera presents its own set of technical challenges, especially when it comes to making sure the video synchs up with the musicians in the band pit and the singers on stage. “The timing changes every night, because of course the conductor and the orchestra and all the singers have to just do what feels right in the moment,” says Melville. “We’ve had to break all of our cue structures down into very, very specific time sequences.” “We worked very cleverly and carefully to make it work,” says Sher. “And that was fun, but it wasn’t easy.” The hard work on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay opera may pay dividends later on. Sher and 59 are already working together on another production, a musical version of the film La La Land, that is going to rely on a similar level of video integration. “Everything we’ve absorbed on this experience is only going to help redouble our efforts when it comes to that experience,” he says. View the full article

Becoming a chartered financial analyst (CFA)—a certification that requires thousands of hours of professional experience, as well as taking a very rigorous exam; Investopedia calls it “one of the most respected designations in finance”—is no easy feat. That is, until now. Two years ago, AI models could only pass the first two sections of the prestigious, three-part exam. The essay section, however, had it stumped. And yet, in a new study from New York University’s Stern School of Business and GoodFin, an AI-powered wealth management platform, advanced AI like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude Opus passed the exam with flying colors. What would’ve taken a human 1,000 hours of studying over multiple years took AI a matter of minutes. Just two years ago, analysts were saying that it would never be able to pass the exam. It’s a sign of how advanced the technology has become, and once again fuels discussion about how AI could replace even the most challenging jobs. But Anna Joo Fee, founder and CEO of GoodFin, which contributed to the research but did not fund it, told CNBC, “There are things like context and intent that are hard for the machine to assess right now. That’s where a human shines, in understanding your body language and cues.” That didn’t stop social media from having all sorts of reactions. One LinkedIn user called the news both an “impressive milestone” and “a little eye opening.” They wrote in a comment: “It doesn’t replace the human side of financial advising, but it does raise big questions about how the role of advisors and analysts will evolve in the near future.” “AI passing the CFA in minutes while humans cry over flashcards for years? At this point, the calculator deserves a corner office,” another joked. On the r/CFA subreddit, however, many were actually unimpressed. “Isn’t that like taking an open book exam? Unless your AI has memory problems,” one wrote. “Study: ‘water is wet’.” While it may not be surprising to some, the study does make plain the rapid pace of change in AI’s capabilities in just a few short years. “Right now, most of the conversation about work is about chasing the latest signal of what AI can do at work. It’s a messy, noisy, often contradictory conversation because AI is change that keeps changing,” chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, Aneesh Raman, wrote in a post. He encouraged: “This new era is about the mind not the machine. Focus on the mind—yours, your teams, your organizations, your societies—and so many opportunities will unfold in the coming years. It’s not the robots that are coming. The humans are coming!” A finance professional at PwC agreed. “AI won’t replace finance professionals—but finance professionals using AI will replace those who don’t,” she wrote. Her advice is to be selective about the tools you adopt, prioritize use cases, and prepare to “work alongside AI.” For now, though, this most recent headline is yet more fearmongering about the arrival of an omniscient entity plucking jobs from under our feet and kicking entire industries to the curb. “It’s just another test a machine can pass faster, cheaper, and without breaking a sweat. Let’s be real. This is bigger than finance,” another LinkedIn user wrote. “This is a warning shot for every ‘thinking’ job we thought was future-proof.” View the full article

Research across hundreds of thousands of queries shows AI Overviews shrinking click-through rates, destabilizing publishing models, and accelerating zero-click search growth. The post The Impact Of AI Overviews & How Publishers Need To Adapt appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Artificial intelligence is infiltrating every corner of professional sports, from scouting and injury prevention to scheduling. Now, it looks like golf has its most sophisticated AI adoption yet, and it’s happening in the bag of Bryson DeChambeau, the sport’s most notorious tinkerer. “We’re building an AI golf coach,” DeChambeau says. “Essentially, it will be a golf coach that, based on data, will be able to tell you exactly what you’re doing, how to practice, and how to improve your game. We can take a golf swing, compile the information, upload it, and within a minute, it will give me what’s different from my gold standard set of swings.” The setup is deceptively simple: a smartphone on a tripod gathering data via video, paired with Google’s Gemini AI to interpret said data. Combined, they create a swing coach so intuitive that DeChambeau uses it even moments before teeing off in a tournament. “The mental game is something I’ve always struggled with,” he says. “But whenever I become a little more confident and comfortable with my feel, my mental game goes extremely positive. And this assistant has helped me become a lot more confident with my golf swing.” AI + AI = Coach DeChambeau’s coaching system starts with SportsBox, an AI-powered 3D biomechanical analysis app that analyzes over 30 key points on the body, club, and ball per golf swing. It measures everything from rotational range of motion to kinematic sequencing—the precise order in which different body parts accelerate and decelerate through the swing. This data is then processed by Gemini AI to turn those measurements into actionable coaching insights. Think of SportsBox as the measuring tool, Gemini as the AI coach agent, and Google Cloud as the platform hosting it all. The system starts by building and maintaining a database of DeChambeau’s optimal swings from recent years to create his “gold standard” set. So, when he hits a poor shot, the AI immediately measures that shot against his gold standard set and ranks the factors most likely contributing to the miss. “We can take a golf swing, then upload it, and within a minute, it will give me what’s different from my gold standard set of swings,” he says. “It will give me a rundown list of the top [deviations] that are correlating to whatever’s causing me to miss.” According to Granville Valentine, managing director of AI go-to-market at Google Cloud, it’s Gemini’s multimodal capabilities that bring the SportsBox data to life, creating the interactive coaching agent. “Gemini is very differentiated on multimodality—the ability to ingest the combination of video, audio, text, and voice, and even livestreaming some of those capabilities into the model,” he says. “The combination of really deep video understanding plus core reasoning comes out in differentiated coaching guidance.” The devil’s in the details The granular nature of DeChambeau’s AI coaching reveals just how sophisticated modern sports analytics has become. The system uses Z-scores—statistical measurements showing how many standard deviations a movement is from the mean of a data set—to identify exactly where problems occur. Previously, DeChambeau would capture swing data but wait hours or days for analysis. With this technology, he gets feedback within a minute, allowing for real-time adjustments before a round. “We were going through [the data] by hand in an Excel spreadsheet,” he says. “It was a manual process, very difficult. So you’re talking about months and months of trying to study the golf swing, now done in minutes.” The data is also surprisingly precise. “Let’s say it’s a radial deviation at P6,” DeChambeau says. “That’s too much, meaning I’ve got too much wrist hinge, which makes the club come more outside in. So it’s very specific.” For us non-DeChambeaus who got lost at “radial deviation” and checked out at “P6,” that’s where Gemini comes to the rescue. The AI’s ability to adapt its communication style allows users to train it to explain complex biomechanical concepts in terms appropriate for any skill level. Like other large language models, you can ask it questions, such as what specific terms mean, and as your understanding grows, it will adapt to give you more granular, technical data, meeting each golfer where he or she is at. Old dog, new tricks When he began using this technology earlier this year, DeChambeau found one of his fundamental beliefs about his swing challenged. For years, he says, he thought he needed to stay more centered over the ball—more on top of it—when hitting his driver. The AI consistently told him otherwise, saying he was too on top of the ball. “It told me to keep swaying my chest just a bit back on the backstroke to get my center mass more behind the golf ball so I can allow the club to release through the impact more,” he says. “So that just blew my mind at how precise this assistant is. It was kind of a kick-in-the-butt moment of, wait, you gotta start trusting this thing.” Eventually, he realized the AI’s objectivity as its strength. “It’s unbiased,” he says. “It doesn’t tell you what it thinks you should do. It’s literally based on what you do when you’re doing your best, and keeps you in check with that.” Democratizing elite-level instruction The rapid evolution of AI coaching technology suggests we’re witnessing the early stages of a broader transformation in sports training. Valentine points to each new release of Gemini, which shows consistent step-function improvements in spatial awareness and reasoning capabilities. “With each subsequent release, breakthroughs are happening,” he says, comparing Gemini’s current moment to the early days of Waymo self-driving cars, which needed time to become trustworthy enough for widespread adoption. “That level of trust—that level of breakthrough in the model itself—is now kicking over to a place where humans have the confidence to rely on this as a coach relative to a human coach.” Still, Valentine says, the ultimate goal is not to replace human coaches, but to democratize access to elite-level instruction. “I don’t think the objective is to get rid of coaches,” he says. “I think it’s to deliver access to those folks who don’t have access to coaches. There are lots of folks in the world who would probably be very well served to have access to coaching, it just hasn’t been available to them.” At the PGA Tour level, DeChambeau believes there are further use cases for the tool, and that widespread adoption is inevitable once other players experience the results he’s seen. “When these [other golfers] see what the capabilities are, they’ll immediately latch onto it,” he says. “Because it’s not about some theoretical idea. It’s about what works best for them as an individual. I can’t wait for a day when it’s a full-on coach, club fitter, you name it. We’re just at the beginning.” View the full article

Following the The President administration’s cuts to foreign aid, two-thirds of Mercy Corps’ U.S.-funded programs have been rescinded. CEO Tjada D’Oyen McKenna shares how she’s leading her team amid immense pressure—scrambling to find new ways to help those in need, even as she resorts to layoffs to keep the business afloat. McKenna reveals what she’s hearing from her team of aid workers on the ground in Gaza, and why she isn’t running away from burnout but embracing it. Like many business leaders experiencing political or economic volatility right now, McKenna is faced with a complex conundrum: fight, flight, or freeze. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. U.S. government funding accounted for half of your funding, right? Exactly. About two thirds of your programs were rescinded. I mean, it’s like an existential crisis, a true existential crisis for the organization. So what did you do? I mean, you faced a slew of urgent decisions. They were urgent decisions, and I have to say it was very clumsy, right? Usually when you work with the government, there are definitions for every single thing, so very specific definition for stop or very specific definition for freeze. And in this case, the guidance wasn’t there. When they said we had to stop doing everything, our first concern was safety for people. If I have people in a remote area of a country or in charge of delivering food to a school feeding program next day, that community didn’t understand that we weren’t showing up the next day, and they certainly didn’t understand it was because the U.S. government told us not to, but we had to go to work. Once it was clear what was going to be cut or what wasn’t going to be cut, we had to go about shutting down those programs across 40 different countries, lots of different labor laws to that. We consolidated some of our regions, we closed some country offices. We just got to work to say, “If the funding wasn’t there for that program, we’ll shut it down in the most responsible way possible and we’ll keep moving and then address what we have to do with the U.S. government to see what we can preserve, make sure our other funders are okay, and still be prepared in case if another hurricane or earthquake had hit during that period, we still had to be prepared to respond.” I mean, the irony is your organization is all about responding to crisis when it emerges and now the crisis becomes you. And in some ways in some of these communities you’re sort of creating the crisis because they’ve become used to having you there. Yes, yes, yes. And I worried a lot about staff safety, particularly in remote places where we were a source of survival for people where we provided access to food, and that continued to plague me. We’d hear reports from colleagues of government officials trying to stop their country director to make sure everyone got paid before they left. And my staff in Sudan, almost all of them are displaced from their homes themselves. So they’re working for us in temporary shelters, still going through the same problems that everyone else is going through. And so this was a weird situation where our organization was the one that had to be the emergency patient, but we also knew . . . You almost felt guilty for feeling bad because people have it so much worse than you do. There were a lot of weird mental gymnastics that were happening for all of us. We’re now months in, past that initial shock. How much do you look at 2025 today as an inflection point, sort of a new normal for USAID orgs like Mercy Corps? Are you kind of holding your breath in a way in hopes that, “A next administration maybe will reinstate things?” No, we know nothing’s going back to the way it was, but we don’t know exactly what that looks like going forward. The other thing that was surreal is there was this demonization of aid or demonization of aid agencies. A lot of misinformation about the work we were doing and how we were doing it. And then there’s the third and fourth effect. So in a lot of places, we rely on UN airplanes to get in and out of certain areas, and so a lot of UN organizations we’re also facing the same U.S. cuts that we were. So we are still digging out of the aftermath. We know the world is fundamentally changed, and right now we are trying to embrace that and move into the future while also knowing the future’s still quite uncertain. I have to ask you about Gaza. There are all the reports about famine in Gaza where you’ve had teams on the ground. Your Mideast director was on this show in October of 2023 soon after Hamas’s October 7th attack as the initial Israeli military action was underway. Are your teams still active on the ground there now? What are they seeing and what might our listeners be missing in the news reports that they’re getting? We have about 35 staff that are still on the ground living and working in Gaza. We’ve had about 1,300 trucks stuck at a border that have not been able to get in. We’ve had some food in those trucks expire in that time period. And even without those trucks, our teams on the ground we’re working with water desalination plants and supplying clean water to people. It’s so dire right now. Our own team members are hungry. They are worried about where their next meal is coming from. We have a staff member that is able to go in and out, and she talks about the weight loss that she’s seen in her colleagues. About a million people are under evacuation orders in Gaza City. A lot of them, this is the fourth, fifth time they’ve moved. And what’s different lately, which really concerns us, is that sense of hope is really eroded. I think people feel like they’ve been just left. This is as tough as it’s ever been, and our own staff are fighting for their own survival. We talk about the lack of food, but 95% of households there just don’t have enough water. And so someone said, “A choice you’re making every day is, do I wash my hands? Do I drink a glass of water? Do I bathe the kids? The little water I have, what do I do with it?” And we just can’t imagine. It’s just been horrific and to feel so powerless, especially when we know there are trucks waiting across the border that could get in. There are people like us that are really eager to do the work, like my staff who are looking for food themselves, who want to get out and do things, and we just know it’s political will that’s stopping that. I spoke to another humanitarian aid leader recently off the record, who shared that starting years ago, they chose not to provide services in Gaza because they were worried and believed that Hamas would inevitably infiltrate their efforts. And obviously this is what the Israeli government or military at least is kind of saying, did you have worries about that? Does that matter when you’re trying to just feed people? Gaza has always been one of the most difficult places in the world to work. I mean, we all are under U.S. anti-terrorism laws. Our staff are vetted. We check the names, we check the lists because the risk of having a staff member be a part of Hamas is too great to bear. We have not seen mass aid diversion from Hamas. That just has not been our experience, and most of our colleagues have not experienced that either. So that has been talked about as a threat. You do see looting, you do see hungry people, crowds of hungry people swarming to every truck and you see children and people throwing themselves in front of trucks. The way to address people stealing aid or making food valuable is to flood the zone with food, and then it’s not as valuable. I think more importantly, there have been anonymous Israeli defense forces in COGAT, which is the border authority officials saying that they’ve seen no mass aid diversion. U.S. government reports, internal former USAID audit reports said they have no evidence of mass diversion of aid. So we work in difficult environments and we all take vetting very seriously, but we know how to do this. We know how to work in these environments. View the full article

It’s Sunday night. Before kids, this was the time to nurse a mimosa hangover and zone out to The Sopranos. Now? It’s a very different playbook. Sunday evenings feel less like a gentle exhale from the weekend and more like staging a Broadway play with a cast that hasn’t rehearsed and refuses to put on pants. You are simultaneously the chef, chauffeur, hairdresser, homework coach, and emotional support animal. For parents, the Sunday Scaries don’t whisper “your inbox is waiting.” They shout: Did you wash the soccer uniform? Are there enough snacks for afterschool? Is the social studies project due tomorrow or Wednesday? Ugh! Did I RSVP for that birthday party? The stress creeps up way before the Monday morning alarm. Workweek Ericka already has 15 Google Meets scheduled, but Mom Ericka must also make sure small humans leave the house with a full water bottle, completed homework, and hair appears combed. And unlike our carefree twenties, we can’t just order Pad Thai at 10 p.m. and call it dinner for two days. The case for Sunday systems Here’s the encouraging news: you don’t have to live in perpetual scramble mode. Research consistently shows that people who plan and structure their weeks report lower stress and greater well-being. Weekly planning reduces rumination. In a field experiment, people who sketched out their week in advance reported fewer 2 a.m. spirals about forgotten tasks and felt more engaged during the day. Routines stabilize mental health. Psychologists link chaotic home routines to worse parental well-being, especially during school transitions. Planning boosts control. Other studies show that planning is correlated with a greater sense of progress and competence—the feeling that you’re steering the ship instead of clinging to the side in rough seas. Of course, let’s be clear: folding laundry does not spark joy. It’s possible that people who are naturally calmer are also more inclined to plan. But the evidence leans in a direction every parent instinctively knows: structure is sanity. How to survive (without spiraling) The trick isn’t to banish the Sunday Scaries—you won’t, unless you invent a time machine or outsource your children. The goal is to outmaneuver them with rituals that make Monday feel less like an ambush. Hold a Family Staff Meeting Yes, it sounds corporate but it works. Ten minutes where everyone lays out the week: who needs poster board, who has soccer practice, who’s on snack duty. Cookies as bribes are encouraged. Do Laundry Like It’s Gospel Uniforms, tights, hoodies, and beloved blankies must be washed and folded by 7 p.m. Otherwise, you’ll discover the only clean option is a Halloween cape on Wednesday morning. Play Fridge Tetris Stock the fridge like a level of Tetris: cheese sticks where you can grab them, sandwich fixings prepped, carrots visible so you can feel virtuous (even if no one eats them). With a system in place, you can turn Sunday night from a slow-motion panic spiral into something approaching serenity. Because Monday morning will still bring tears over the wrong-colored water bottle, but if the bags are packed, the laundry is folded, and the fridge is stocked, you will survive with a little more calm, and maybe even brushed hair. View the full article

I was one of the millions of people who lost someone to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the nonstop news about the “new normal,” my grief felt invisible. I took shallow solace in my phone and turned to social media to numb me from the reality that I now lived in: a world without my dad. One day, while mindlessly scrolling, I came across the r/Squishmallow subreddit, where a girl had posted her collection of more than 100 round plush toys. They were called Squishmallows—round stuffed animals invented in 2017 that have become one of the most popular toy lines in the world, with more than 100 million sold each year. I was hypnotized. I expected that my dive into the Squishmallow phenomenon would be the usual two-hour rabbit hole, but spending time in that community was the first joy I’d felt in months. After scrolling through endless photos of Squishmallow hauls, I worked up the courage to post. I asked if there was a cardinal Squishmallow, since that bird was my dad’s symbol for his own father. I was bombarded with compassion; even though cardinal Squishmallows were rare at the time, someone sent me theirs for free. That single act of generosity started my collection. Stumbling into the Squishmallow world But alongside kindness and joy, I encountered a darker side of the community: resellers. Finding the most coveted Squishmallows could turn into a fierce competition. This wasn’t just my personal frustration. As a doctoral candidate in marketing, I wanted to understand how communities like this function when outsiders exploit their passion for profit. That became the focus of my dissertation—the first study to examine resellers’ psychological and emotional impact on brand communities. That research—which my colleagues and I published in one of the field’s top journals—echoed what I had lived through as a collector: Resellers are one of the most consistent sources of pain for members of brand communities. For example, when I heard that my local Hot Topic would be selling two Reshmas, the coveted strawberry cow Squishmallow, I, like any rational adult, found myself outside of a mall at 6:30 in the morning. When the doors finally opened at 11 a.m., I sprinted to the storefront—only to find that I had been beaten by some people who had dressed as mall employees to sneak in early. I left devastated and cowless. Later that day, I saw the same people gloating in local Squishmallow Facebook groups, trying to resell the cow for more than 10 times the retail price. I was heartbroken and angry; I swore I’d never collect again. And I wasn’t the only one to feel that way: Across social media, you’ll find countless collectors venting about resellers. What is a brand community? I didn’t know it then, but I had joined my first brand community: a group of consumers who form strong, meaningful connections through their shared admiration of a product. Brand communities range from giant online hubs with more than 100,000 members to tiny local groups that host trading parties in empty lots. You might be in a brand community without realizing it. These communities can be created by a company—like Harley-Davidson, Lego, and Hot Wheels—or emerge organically from fans, like the Facebook group “Walt Disney World Tips and Tricks.” And they aren’t just about buying and selling. They’re creative ecosystems, full of posts showing collections, inventive displays, and even goodbye messages when someone “rehomes” an item to another loving collector. Community members help each other solve problems, share leads on hard-to-find items, and sometimes even mail strangers a plush toy because they know it will make them smile. But while collectors use these communities to exchange information, so do resellers. The reseller paradox: A shared enemy can unite a community Resellers are outsiders who buy the most sought-after items and flip them online for a profit. They scout inventory tips, track hot products, and plan their shelf-clearing strategies accordingly. And they infuriate collectors like me. Nothing sours the thrill of the hunt faster than seeing a shelf cleared by someone who only wants to use your sacred collectibles for profit. After feeling emotional pain myself, I wanted to understand why resellers bothered me so much, and what they meant for the communities that had become my lifeline. That frustration became the spark for my research. What I found surprised me. As a collector, nothing frustrates me more than to say: According to my research, resellers paradoxically strengthen brand communities. Yes, you read that right. Resellers help communities, but not because they try to help members acquire their desired items. In fact, my findings indicate that resellers inflict heartbreak on community members—which was in line with what I saw and experienced. Resellers help brand communities because they create a common enemy that the community can rally against. When resellers grab all the stock from a store shelf, collectors turn to each other. They vent. They strategize. They share tips on where to find certain items, offer to pick up extras for strangers, and organize trades to help each other avoid inflated resale prices. Ironically, the people causing the most frustration also increase community engagement. Brand communities are real communities These communities reminded me that you are never truly alone in your darkest moments. Joining a niche community, whether for sneakers, trading cards, cars or even Squishmallows, can enrich your life far beyond the products themselves. It wasn’t the Squishmallows that helped me heal from loss; it was the connection that lived in threads, comments, and group chats. I even came to appreciate the “villains” of the community—resellers—for their role in bringing people together. Although I still think I deserve that strawberry cow more than they did. Danielle Hass is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Marketing at West Virginia University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

Almost as soon as the first iPad was announced, a range of competitors sprung up in an attempt to become the “iPad killer.” Devices like the Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry PlayBook, and HP TouchPad all put another spin on the formula but couldn’t come close to the iPad’s blend of performance and App Store dominance. Android tablets are still around today, of course, but most manufacturers don’t push them too hard. They’re all fine at doing tablet things like watching videos, and they’re all worse than the iPad when it comes to the app ecosystem. In recent years I’ve used some great hardware from Xiaomi in particular that I still wouldn’t outright recommend over an iPad. Xiaomi’s latest, though, is straight-up better than its Apple equivalent. The Xiaomi Pad Mini feels like an exercise in picking low-hanging fruit: in this case, the iPad mini. Apple’s smallest tablet is often neglected and rarely updated, leaving several open goals for competitors. In this case, Xiaomi has turned in a better design with better performance, and critically in a form factor where Apple’s software advantages are less relevant. Added ports This tablet isn’t going to stun anyone with its originality—it pretty much looks like an iPad mini. It does have one neat trick, though, by placing USB-C ports along both the bottom edge and one of the sides you can easily charge it in a dock or while using it for video. (Apple apparently considered the same idea for the original iPad before deciding against it.) The Xiaomi Pad Mini runs on a MediaTek Dimensity 9400 processor, the chipmaker’s current top-end mobile system on a chip (SoC) and one that’s at least in the same ballpark as the two-year-old A17 Pro in the iPad mini, if not faster. Performance is excellent, and Xiaomi also offers up to 12GB of RAM while the iPad mini is stuck on 8GB. Superior screen The screen is where Xiaomi really pulls away from Apple. This is an 8.8-inch 3008-by-1880-pixel LCD with a 16:10 aspect ratio; the difference in size to the 8.3-inch iPad mini is mostly that the Xiaomi has thinner bezels and is slightly wider in landscape. Critically, it refreshes at up to 165Hz while the iPad mini is still stuck on 60Hz, which is very jarring for anyone who’s gotten used to the much smoother frame rates on the iPhone and almost every Android phone in recent years. That was the main reason I sold my own iPad mini a while back. HyperOS, which is Xiaomi’s custom version of Android, looks and works similarly to iOS, but Apple actually moved in the direction of its system of multitasking and resizing windows with this year’s iPadOS 26. While Android apps still can’t compete with the iPad in terms of quantity or quality, how much productivity are you planning to get out of an 8-inch tablet in the first place? Like a really big phone The Xiaomi Pad Mini handles simple multitasking with ease, and its aspect ratio is well-suited for most Android apps. Since you can hold it in one hand and the screen is relatively tall, apps like Instagram work fine in portrait orientation—it’s basically like using a really big phone. The aspect ratio is also better suited to most video content than the 3:2 iPad mini, meaning you’ll get a bigger picture with smaller black borders. Overall, this is a great tablet for watching videos, reading ebooks, scrolling social media, and browsing the web. You know, tablet things. It handles all of these tasks at least as well as the iPad mini unless you have a need for a very specific iPad app. A caveat There is one slightly bizarre caveat, which is the lack of any true biometric authentication. You can use your face to unlock the tablet through the selfie camera, which works better than it used to and didn’t get fooled when I tried to use a picture of my face, but that’s still not as secure as a fingerprint reader and doesn’t work in the dark. That could be a deal-breaker for many. Touch ID isn’t exactly a great experience on the iPad mini, but surely a fingerprint scanner would have been a low-cost, worthwhile inclusion here for convenience and peace of mind. Still, I can put up with sometimes needing to enter a PIN in exchange for all the ways that this is simply a better product. I would rather use this than the iPad it’s competing with, which is the first time I’ve ever been able to say that about an Android tablet. And that’s before I even mention the pricing, which starts at $429 for a model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The iPad mini, on the other hand, costs $499 for 8GB of RAM and half the amount of storage; the 256GB model is $599. It’s not like Apple isn’t capable of making the iPad mini better value for the money—it just doesn’t particularly care to. This is what can happen when companies keep outdated devices on shelves at high prices. Mini tablets clearly aren’t the most critical product category in the world, but for the first time in a long while, Apple doesn’t make the best one. View the full article

Construction task management is the backbone of keeping crews productive and projects on schedule. Each day on a job site involves dozens of moving parts; from coordinating subcontractors to ordering materials and tracking deadlines. Without a clear system, tasks can slip through the cracks, leading to costly rework and delays. A well-organized approach keeps every team member focused on the right priorities and ensures work gets done efficiently. Modern construction task management goes beyond pen-and-paper checklists and static spreadsheets. Digital tools now let teams collaborate in real time, track task progress and quickly respond to changes in scope or schedule. By using the right mix of tools, strategies and templates, managers can keep projects running smoothly and avoid common roadblocks that slow down work on site. What Is Construction Task Management? Construction task management is the process of planning, assigning and tracking all the individual activities that make up a construction project. It covers everything from scheduling crews and ordering materials to monitoring inspections and ensuring safety requirements are met. By breaking down large projects into smaller, manageable tasks, construction teams can stay focused, avoid bottlenecks and complete work in the right sequence. Effective construction task management also keeps communication flowing between field crews, subcontractors and project managers. It creates a centralized source of truth where everyone knows what needs to be done and by when. This transparency helps reduce errors, prevents duplication of work and ensures projects stay within budget and on schedule. While spreadsheets and manual systems can work on small projects, they often fail when projects scale. Project management software is better suited for construction task management because it automates scheduling, streamlines communication and provides real-time updates on progress. This allows teams to quickly identify delays, adjust resources and keep stakeholders informed, something manual tools can’t do as efficiently. ProjectManager is an ideal solution for construction task management because it combines multiple powerful features into one platform. Its Gantt charts let you plan work visually with task dependencies and milestones, while task lists make it easy for crews to see their assignments. Kanban boards allow managers to track progress at a glance, and real-time dashboards provide instant visibility into project health, keeping everything organized from planning to completion. Get started with ProjectManager today for free. /wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Gantt-CTA-2025.jpg Why Is Construction Task Management Important? Construction task management is critical because every project involves hundreds of moving parts that must be executed in a specific order. If one task is delayed, it can disrupt the entire schedule and create costly setbacks. By organizing work into clear tasks, project teams can prioritize what matters most, allocate resources efficiently and prevent last-minute rushes that compromise quality and safety. Good construction task management also improves collaboration between field crews, subcontractors and managers. When everyone knows what needs to be done and when, there’s less confusion and fewer mistakes. This alignment helps keep the project on time, within budget and compliant with regulations while reducing stress for everyone involved. 11 Best Construction Task Management Tools Choosing the right tools for construction task management can make or break a project. A well-organized system helps teams plan work, assign responsibilities and track progress while reducing delays and cost overruns. The best tools make complex projects easier to manage, improve collaboration between teams and provide visibility into every step of the build. Below are 11 of the most effective tools for managing construction tasks. Each one addresses a unique aspect of project planning and execution, from scheduling and resource allocation to issue tracking and reporting. By combining the right mix of these tools, project managers can create a workflow that keeps projects running smoothly and teams aligned. 1. Gantt Chart A Gantt chart is one of the most powerful tools for construction task management because it visually maps every task along a timeline. Each bar represents a task’s start and end date, which makes it easy to see how tasks overlap and where dependencies exist. This is especially helpful for construction projects where foundation work, framing, electrical and finishing all must happen in sequence. A Gantt chart also allows teams to quickly adjust when delays occur by dragging and shifting tasks to reflect new dates. For project managers, this tool provides a bird’s-eye view of the entire schedule, ensuring that deadlines are realistic and resources are allocated efficiently. /wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Gantt-chart-in-project-management-construction-project-1600x873.png Get your free Gantt Chart Template Use this free Gantt Chart Template to manage your projects better. Get the Template 2. Kanban Board A kanban board is a flexible way to visualize construction tasks in real time. Using columns like “To Do,” “In Progress” and “Done,” teams can track the status of work at a glance. This method works well for field crews that need a quick, visual reference for what needs attention next. Kanban boards are also highly collaborative—workers can move tasks as they complete them, giving managers instant updates on progress. This transparency reduces status meetings and allows bottlenecks to be spotted early. For construction task management, kanban boards work best for short-term scheduling, daily coordination and tracking subcontractor activities. /wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Construction-kanban-150-lightmode-600x321.jpgLearn more 3. Task List Task lists are the foundation of construction task management. A simple list organizes every activity that needs to be done and assigns it to the right team member. Task lists can be organized by phase, trade or priority, making them useful for both high-level planning and daily work coordination. When digital tools are used, task lists can include due dates, attachments and comments, which makes collaboration much easier. A task list keeps everyone aligned and ensures that no small but critical activity—like inspections or permit approvals—falls through the cracks. /wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Task-Card-List-Light-Mode-Bid-Proposal-600x295.pngLearn more 4. Work Breakdown Structure A work breakdown structure (WBS) helps project managers deconstruct a construction project into smaller, manageable pieces. By organizing work hierarchically, from deliverables down to individual tasks, a WBS provides clarity and prevents scope creep. This is critical in construction task management because it ensures that nothing is overlooked when planning labor, materials or timelines. A detailed WBS also makes it easier to estimate costs accurately and track progress against the plan. When combined with scheduling tools, it becomes a roadmap that keeps the entire project on track. /wp-content/uploads/2021/04/WES-Screenshot-600x222.jpgLearn more 5. Punch List A punch list is a closeout tool used to ensure all tasks are completed to standard before a project is turned over to the client. It typically includes small but essential items like touch-up painting, cleaning or final inspections. Punch lists play a key role in construction task management because they provide a final quality control check. Digital punch lists allow teams to attach photos, mark items as resolved and collaborate with subcontractors to close issues quickly. A well-managed punch list speeds up project closeout and reduces disputes with clients over unfinished work. /wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Sheet-light-mode-punch-list-construction-custom-columns-costs-hours--600x328.pngLearn more 6. Timesheets Timesheets track the hours worked by employees and subcontractors, which is crucial for both payroll and cost control. Accurate time tracking helps project managers stay within budget and forecast future labor needs. Digital timesheets are especially helpful because they can be submitted from the field, reducing paperwork and administrative overhead. In construction task management, timesheets can also be linked to tasks, allowing managers to see how much time was spent on each activity and adjust resource planning accordingly. This data can reveal inefficiencies and help improve future project estimates. /wp-content/uploads/2024/05/timesheet-lightmode-good-version-lots-of-tasks-600x326.pngLearn more Related: 9 Free Timesheet Templates for Excel, Google Sheets & Word 7. RACI Chart A RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) defines roles and responsibilities for every task in a project. In construction task management, this tool ensures that everyone knows their part in the process, preventing confusion and duplicated effort. For example, a site engineer may be responsible for checking measurements, while the project manager is accountable for sign-off. By making responsibilities clear upfront, RACI charts improve accountability and reduce communication gaps. They are particularly valuable on large projects with many stakeholders and subcontractors involved. /wp-content/uploads/2020/05/RACI-Matrix-Screenshot-600x237.jpgLearn more 8. RAID Log A RAID log is a structured way to document Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies. In construction task management, this tool helps project managers anticipate challenges and develop contingency plans. For example, if a risk is identified that a supplier might be delayed, mitigation steps can be logged and assigned to a responsible party. Keeping a RAID log updated allows teams to react quickly when problems arise and prevents issues from escalating into costly delays. It also serves as a record for post-project reviews and lessons learned. /wp-content/uploads/2025/05/risk-management-hero-600x435.pngLearn more 9. Schedule of Values A schedule of values (SOV) is a financial tool that breaks down the total project cost into line items tied to specific tasks or phases. This is essential for progress billing and for ensuring that payments align with work completed. In construction task management, an SOV provides financial transparency and helps avoid disputes with clients or subcontractors. It also allows project managers to compare costs against the budget as work progresses, making it easier to spot overruns early and take corrective action before they impact profitability. 10. Lookahead Schedule A lookahead schedule is a short-term planning tool, often covering two to six weeks of work. It provides a more detailed view than the master schedule and focuses on immediate tasks that need to be coordinated. Lookahead schedules are critical for construction task management because they help align crews, subcontractors and material deliveries. They allow managers to anticipate potential conflicts, such as two trades needing access to the same area, and resolve them before they cause delays. This keeps daily operations smooth and prevents last-minute scrambling on site. 11. Impact-Effort Matrix An impact-effort matrix is a decision-making tool that helps prioritize construction tasks based on the effort required and the impact on the project. Tasks are plotted in four quadrants—quick wins, major projects, fill-ins and time-wasters—allowing teams to focus on what delivers the most value. In construction task management, this approach prevents wasted resources on low-impact work and ensures that critical activities receive the most attention. Using this tool helps project managers make data-driven decisions and keep the team focused on high-priority items. /wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Impact-effort-matrix-example-2-600x308.pngLearn more 5 Key Construction Task Management Tips Managing tasks on a construction site requires more than just scheduling work—it’s about staying flexible, aligning teams and keeping the project moving forward despite inevitable challenges. Good construction task management helps teams avoid rework, reduce downtime and deliver projects on time and within budget. The following tips cover some of the most effective ways to improve task management on any job site. From prioritizing work and encouraging collaboration to using the right software, these strategies will help keep crews focused and projects running efficiently. Constantly Evaluate the Priority of Tasks Construction projects are dynamic, with new issues and changes arising daily. Constantly reevaluating task priority ensures teams are always working on the most critical activities. Use a clear system—such as color coding or categorization—to flag urgent work and reassign resources when necessary. This proactive approach prevents bottlenecks and avoids wasting time on low-impact tasks while high-priority ones sit idle. In effective construction task management, revisiting priorities during daily briefings keeps everyone aligned and allows managers to adapt quickly when delays, weather disruptions or material shortages occur. /wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2025-construction-ebook-banner-ad.jpg Promote Communication With Daily Stand-Up Meetings Daily stand-up meetings, sometimes called toolbox talks, are an excellent way to promote communication among crews, subcontractors and managers. These short, focused meetings align the team on daily goals, identify potential hazards and resolve issues before work begins. Good communication is at the heart of construction task management—without it, teams risk misalignment, duplicated effort and costly mistakes. Stand-ups also give everyone a chance to raise concerns or report progress, making them a vital tool for keeping projects moving forward smoothly and safely. Use Construction Task Management Software While spreadsheets and paper checklists can work for small projects, they often become inefficient as the job grows more complex. Construction task management software centralizes all project information—tasks, schedules, documents and communications—in one platform. This eliminates version control issues, allows for real-time updates and improves collaboration between field and office teams. Many tools also offer mobile apps so workers can update task statuses directly from the job site. Using software ensures that managers always have an up-to-date view of progress and can adjust plans quickly when challenges arise. Ensure Employee Safety at the Job Site Safety must remain a top priority in construction task management. Accidents can delay projects, increase costs and put workers at risk. Incorporate safety checks into daily workflows, conduct regular inspections and ensure that personal protective equipment (PPE) is available and used correctly. Documenting hazards and incidents also helps track trends and implement corrective measures before accidents occur. By integrating safety into task planning, managers create a culture where workers are protected and projects stay on schedule, avoiding expensive downtime or regulatory penalties. Control Changes to the Project Scope Scope creep is one of the most common causes of budget overruns and schedule delays in construction. To maintain control, establish a formal change management process for all new requests or modifications. This process should document the change, assess its impact on cost and schedule and require approval before work begins. In construction task management, controlling scope ensures that resources are focused on delivering the agreed-upon project and that stakeholders remain informed about any trade-offs. Strong change control keeps projects predictable and helps avoid disputes at closeout. Free Construction Task Management Templates Templates can simplify construction task management by giving teams ready-to-use structures for planning, scheduling and tracking work. They help organize tasks, improve communication and ensure accountability across every phase of the project. Below are three free construction task management templates you can start using right away. Gantt Chart Template Download this free Gantt chart template to help you map out construction tasks on a timeline, making it easier to see dependencies, track progress and adjust schedules when needed. It’s perfect for visualizing the entire project from start to finish, helping you anticipate bottlenecks and keep the team aligned on deadlines. Kanban Board Template Use this Kanban board template to visualize construction tasks by status—such as “to do,” “in progress” and “complete.” This template helps you manage workflow, limit bottlenecks and make task assignments clear to everyone on the job site. It’s an excellent choice for teams looking for a simple, visual way to track daily work. To-Do List Template This to-do list template is ideal for breaking down construction tasks into manageable daily or weekly checklists. Assign tasks, set due dates and track completions in one place. It’s a straightforward solution for small teams or short projects that need clear visibility into what must be done next. ProjectManager Is an Advanced Construction Task Management Software While templates like Gantt charts, kanban boards and to-do lists are helpful starting points, they can quickly become limiting as projects grow in complexity. ProjectManager goes beyond static templates by offering dynamic tools designed specifically for construction task management. Our software combines multiple project views—including Gantt charts with built-in work breakdown structure (WBS), kanban boards, task lists and calendars—so teams can plan, track and adjust work in real time. Plus, advanced features secure timesheets and a RAID log for risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies, give project managers a complete view of what could impact the project and how to stay ahead of problems. Robust Resource Planning and Cost Tracking Tools One of the biggest challenges in construction task management is allocating labor, equipment and budget efficiently. ProjectManager solves this with workload charts, resource calendars and cost tracking features that provide instant visibility into who is available, what resources are overbooked and where spending is trending. Managers can balance workloads, avoid bottlenecks and make data-driven decisions to keep projects within budget and on schedule—all without juggling multiple spreadsheets. /wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Team-Light-2554x1372-1.png Real-time Construction Project Management Dashboards and Reports Static templates can’t provide real-time performance updates. ProjectManager delivers live dashboards that automatically update to show key metrics like task progress, costs and resource utilization. Customizable reports make it easy to share status updates with stakeholders, ensuring transparency and alignment at every stage of the project. This level of insight helps teams respond to changes faster and maintain control over even the most complex construction projects. /wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Team-summary-better-data-light-mode-home-screen-dashboard.png Related Construction Task Management Content While we covered a lot about construction task management, there’s always more to learn. For those readers who care to continue their education, below are some links that will take them to articles on construction methods and techniques, illustrate different types of construction projects and much more. 18 Construction Methods and Techniques 10 Types of Construction Projects with Examples 32 Construction Documents (Templates Included) 8 Free Construction Forms for Excel and Word How to Manage a Construction Project Step by Step The Construction Resource Management Process Explained ProjectManager is online project and portfolio management software that connects teams whether they’re in the office or on the job site. They can share files, comment at the task level and stay up to date with email and in-app notifications. Get started with ProjectManager today for free. The post Construction Task Management: Tools, Tips & Templates appeared first on ProjectManager. View the full article