Author: wildgreenquest@gmail.com
Toshifumi Suzuki, the man who brought 7-Eleven to Japan and built a convenience store franchise empire, passed away on May 18 at 93 from heart failure. Under Suzuki’s leadership, 7-Eleven pioneered 24-hour operations, point-of-sale inventory systems, and in-store banking. By 2015, the empire had grown to more than 55,000 stores globally, earning him the industry nickname “God of Retail,” according to The New York Times. Suzuki credited a three-word motto forged during World War II for his four decades of relentless innovation: “Adapt to change.” This became his lifelong credo after his life was suddenly upended as a junior high…
We’ve written a lot about how AI is coming for your job. Now AI is coming for your music, flooding streaming platforms with “AI music slop.” But instead of curbing it, Spotify’s CEO Alex Norström is doubling down and embracing AI-generated music—claiming it offers artists protection from piracy, and music-lovers more freedom to listen to and create more of the kind of music they want. Last week, Spotify and Universal Music Group (UMG) announced landmark licensing agreements, paving the way for Spotify to launch a new tool for premium subscribers. The tool enables them to create AI-generated song covers and…
Apple Watch needs to watch its back. A scathing critique in Bloomberg by Mark Gurman warns how the company “risks falling behind in the next phase of the industry it helped create” as competitors like Whoop and Oura redefine wearables with screenless devices. Eleven years after launching the Apple Watch — a product that’s generated an estimated $100 billion in lifetime sales — Apple faces a leadership exodus and talent drain. Former Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams retired last year. Fitness+ leader Jay Blahnik is leaving amid litigation, health marketing chief Stan Ng also recently retired and Apple has lost…
Find the links between the words to win today’s game of Connections.gettyEach day’s game of NYT Connections goes live at midnight local time. Before today’s NYT Connections hints, here’s what you missed on Tuesday:ForbesNYT Connections Hints Today: Tuesday, May 26 Clues And Answers (#1,080)By Kris HoltIt’s Wednesday, and you know what that means: it’s time for another round of Connections!It took several weeks longer than I expected (with a delay that was probably due to a mistake on my part), but my federal tax return has finally been processed. For the first time ever, I’m getting a refund on my…
It pays to have friends in high places—and if your best friend happens to be the richest man in the world, that’s even better. Antonio Gracias is Elon Musk’s best friend. The two met through the Silicon Valley web at the turn of the century, when Tesla was teetering on bankruptcy. Gracias loaned Musk $1 million to keep the company alive. Since that time, he has sat on the boards of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, Neuralink and The Boring Company. Now he is poised to make as much as $140 billion from SpaceX’s IPO, according to Fortune. His firm, Valor Equity…
Apple’s Tim Cook isn’t the only well-known tech CEO stepping away from the chief executive role this year. Now, the founder and CEO of Dropbox (Nasdaq: DBX), Drew Houston, has announced he is making a similar move at the company he is synonymous with. Here’s what you need to know about Houston’s departure from the chief executive role and how investors are reacting to the news. What happened? Today, Houston announced he will be retiring from the chief executive role at the cloud storage provider. Houston has been with Dropbox in the role since he founded the company in 2007.…
The Maextro S800, an 18-foot Chinese luxury sedan packed with 40 speakers, a 40-inch screen, and self-parking technology, costs $173,000—half the price of a starter Mercedes-Maybach and a quarter of what a basic Rolls-Royce runs in the U.S. Chinese automakers know they lack the heritage of European luxury brands, so they’re compensating with overwhelming gadgetry. Built by more than 1,000 robots in Hefei and powered by Huawei technology, the Maextro opens doors with fist gestures detected by cameras and features reclining back seats with massage functions. “This is a maxed-out car for a very affordable price,” Thomas Luk, a strategy…
Anshul Tewari, founderYouth Ki Awaaz In a country of 1.4 billion people, more than half under the age of 30, the question of who speaks for young Indians is not a small one. Anshul Tewari has spent nearly two decades trying to answer it. As founder of Youth Ki Awaaz (“Voice of the Youth”), India’s largest civic participation platform, he has built a community of 200,000 monthly contributors and a WhatsApp-based polling engine that pulses tens of thousands of young people daily on everything from climate anxiety to mental health. The result is ground-level intelligence, at scale, that governments are…
Key Takeaways Wozniak shared the reason he was motivated to co-found Apple in a recent commencement speech. After Hewlett-Packard rejected his PC idea five times, Wozniak finally agreed to Steve Jobs’ plan to launch Apple independently. His message to Gen Z college graduates was that careers can follow unconventional, nonlinear paths. In 1976, Steve Wozniak teamed up with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne to launch Apple, setting in motion a tech giant that would go on to reshape modern technology. Yet despite Apple’s evolution into a $4.5 trillion powerhouse behind products like the iPhone and iPad, Wozniak says the idea…
The promise of frontier AI has always sounded like a utility: abundant intelligence, available on demand, as easy to access as electricity, water, or cloud computing. The metaphor is powerful, and for good reason. Utilities scale because they abstract complexity away. You don’t need an engineer from the power company sitting in your office every time you turn on the lights. And yet, the most sophisticated AI companies in the world are increasingly doing something very different: they are sending people. OpenAI recently announced the OpenAI Deployment Company, explicitly designed to embed Forward Deployed Engineers inside organizations working on complex…