Airfares really suck these days, even for airlines that dissolved 33 years ago. Pan Am is going skyward again — well, kinda. The legendary airline will be revived next summer for a travel stunt, in which 50 passengers will take a Pan Am-branded plane for a 12-day, six-city excursion, paying upwards of — hold onto your seat – $60k each. At least there's an open bar?
In today's email:
Sounds like a plan: The push for quieter offices.
Digits: AI funding, emergency buckets, and more.
Around the web: Satellite photos, a 1994 throwback, and more.
👇 Listen: How to cash in on the $214B snack market.
The Big Idea
Your office is too loud — these businesses want to turn down the volume
A group of companies is looking to stifle your co-worker's noisy Zoom call.
2024-07-22T00:00:00Z
Sara Friedman
Last week, we wrote about how annoying co-workers have gotten. And you know what an irritating colleague likes to do more than anything?
Yap. And chew gum. And type too loudly. And tap their feet.
And since many companies that embraced hybrid work also downsized their offices to save money, fewer conference rooms and private areas mean those annoyances are harder than ever to escape, perForbes.
Noise levels were ranked among the top 10 most important office features and only 32% of employees said they're satisfied with average office noise levels, according to two recent surveys by research firm Leesman.
Luckily, a new crop of startups is working on stifling the noise:
Framery, which hit $164m in revenue in 2022, makes glass office pods that start at ~$8.7k for a single-person booth. A newly released line of pods not only insulates sound for users inside, but emits pink noise to dampen sound for those outside.
Moodsonic's sensors create "responsive soundscapes" by automatically adjusting ambient sounds based on real-time office noise levels. The nascent company's subscriptions grew 150% in its second year.
Zintra Acoustics offers acoustic solutions like wall panels, room dividers, and ceiling fixtures that absorb sound.
Even Ikea is adjusting its office furniture for sound control, like an electric standing desk with a quieter height-control mechanism and acoustic screens.
While sound dampening is great…
… it's even more effective to design offices with noise in mind.
Intuit Mailchimp's Atlanta office was designed with 60+ phone booths, acoustic paneling on the walls and ceilings, and five libraries where employees work silently.
Even Starbucks — makeshift office to many a remote worker — knows the importance of quiet time. The chain is adding sound-dampening materials to the ceilings of all new US locations and retrofitting ~1k existing ones.
Let's hope the soundproofing works; otherwise, it seems cubicles are making their comeback.
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Friday's CrowdStrike outage led to 5k+ canceled flights, affected 8.5m Windows devices, and could ultimately cost $1B+. Though CrowdStrike has not revealed any compensation plans, tech analyst Dan Ives predicts that CrowdStrike lawyers are "probably not going to enjoy" their summers.
SNIPPETS
The Disneyland employees union, which represents ~14k of the park's "cast members," voted Friday to authorize a strike. Organizers will meet this week to decide if and when the union will hold Disneyland's first work stoppage in 40 years.
ZipRecruiter's latest Job Seeker Confidence Index reached its lowest point in more than two years, with only 15% of job seekers saying their hunt is going well. Bleak, but seems about right.
Brian Gilbert is the seventh ex-eBay employee sentenced with cyberstalking a couple that wrote an ecommerce newsletter. He got time served, a year of supervised release, and a $20k fine.
Hasbronamed John Hight, formerly of Blizzard Entertainment, as president of Wizards of the Coast ("Dungeons & Dragons," "Magic: The Gathering") and digital gaming. While Hasbro revenue dropped 24% YoY in Q1, Wizards and digital gaming increased 7%.
Promising: A study found that doctors' offices using C the Signs, an AI tool used by ~1.4k practices in England to analyze patients' medical records, saw an ~8% rise in cancer detection rates.
Speaking of AI: So far, humans and AI complete the average task better when they aren't working together, per an MIT analysis of 74 experiments in which humans and AI perform tasks separately and collaboratively.
Women's sports merch is estimated to be a ~$4B market in the US, and it'd be larger if supply weren't such a problem: Nearly 80% of fans say they'd like to buy more but that the available options are limited.
Finally, a good food collab: Frozen french fry brand Ore-Ida and frozen desserts maker GoodPop teamed up for Fudge n' Vanilla French Fry Pops, a chocolate-covered vanilla ice-cream bar rolled in crispy potato bits.
Don't miss this...
Corporations have been outsourcing labor for decades. Now, average employees are getting in on the action. Explore the trend of "shadow stand-ins": when workers pay other people to do their work for them.
By the Numbers
Digits: Successful sequels, dinner in a bucket, and more
Apocalypse buckets, video games are still king, and more.
2024-07-22T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Rylah
200m+:YouTube views on a 90-second trailer for "Grand Theft Auto VI," due in 2025. For context on how much of a behemoth video games are among the entertainment industry: A popular trailer for Barbie, 2023's biggest blockbuster, racked up a mere 85m views. Here's another: In 2023 alone, Americans spent $57B+ on video games, or $6.43 for every buck spent at the movie theater.
634.78%: Estimated ROI on 10 Cloverfield Lane, the 2016 sequel to 2008's Cloverfield. Why are we talking about old movies? Well, VegasInsideranalyzed 70+ horror franchises to find the best-performing sequels, factoring in revenue and critical response, and 10 Cloverfield Lane tied for first with Evil Dead II. This report comes amid a year of sequels and prequels, including The First Omen, MaXXXine, and Alien: Romulus. Speaking of Alien: If only revenue was considered, the top spot would have gone to Prometheus (2012), the fifth Alien film, and its $403m gross.
$24B:Funding that went to AI startups in Q2, representing 30% of the $79B in total global startup funding, per Crunchbase. Of the quarter's six billion-dollar funding rounds, five pertained to AI companies, including Elon Musk's xAI, biotech company Xaira Therapeutics, and automated driving company Wayve. The sole non-AI company was Wiz, the cybersecurity company Google is looking to acquire for $23B.
150: Servings of freeze-dried food in one Readywise Emergency Food Supply bucket, available for ~$80 at Costco. Granted, that's only one month of rations, which may not last depending on what kind of apocalypse you're anticipating. "The Walking Dead" alone has shown us a zombie apocalypse can last for 11 seasons and multiple spinoffs. Those of you in it for the long haul may prefer a pallet of 36 buckets — that's 5.4k servings — available for $2.5k. Each bucket has a shelf life of 25 years.
Fit The Bill
There are thousands of companies valued at $1B+. How many clues do you need to identify today's billion-dollar brand?
Clue 1: Cheers to the director of this company's chemistry lab, who developed the pH scale in 1909.
Clue 2: Its founder named the company after his 5-year-old son, Carl, but if the company's chief product landed in that boy's hands, everyone involved would be in deep, deep trouble.
Clue 3: This company's reach extends far beyond its Copenhagen HQ — the 140 brands in its beer portfolio are widely popular across Asia and Western, Eastern, and Central Europe.
👇 Scroll to the bottom for the answer 👇
AROUND THE WEB
🐧 On this day: In 2005, the award-winning documentaryMarch of the Penguins debuted in US theaters, following a year in the life of emperor penguins.