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A new brand wants to change how people interact with honey by addressing two persistent frustrations: the sticky jar and the gloopy drip. Honey Department's honey comes in a squeezable, infinitely recyclable aluminum tube, replacing the traditional glass jar or plastic container with packaging borrowed from the toothpaste aisle. The honey itself has been transformed through a "controlled micro-crystallization process" that creates a smooth, spreadable texture thick enough to hold its shape on toast without running or dripping, yet creamy enough to squeeze from the tube.Founded by Noah Phillips, son of a beekeeper, the product starts with 100% raw wildflower and mesquite honey sourced from a co-op in Central Mexico. The liquid honey undergoes processing at a family-owned Texas apiary, where it's transformed into what the industry calls creamed honey. By controlling crystallization to form microscopic, uniform crystals, the texture stays stable and won't turn grainy or harden. Tubes are priced at USD 15 for 6 oz (170 g).TREND BITEHoney Department illustrates how traditional food categories can be overhauled through format innovation rather than flavor novelty. The insight here isn't about honey itself it's about everyday points of micro-friction. Jars require utensils, while plastic squeeze containers don't work with thick, creamy honey. And both can get messy. Tubes eliminate those snags. Making the tubes aluminum instead of plastic taps into another consumer expectation: packaging that feels both premium and environmentally considered.For brands in mature categories, the opportunity lies in reimagining the physical experience of using a product rather than just reformulating what's inside. Format shifts can unlock new consumption occasions (desk lunches, after-workout snacks, anywhere and usage contexts that ingredient tweaks never could.
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Marketing and Advertising
King of Meat's reign is ending. The game will end service on April 9, less than a year after its October 2025 debut. The Amazon Games-published title will be playable until that date, but will then be taken entirely offline. "Despite the creativity and innovation Glowmade brought to King of Meat, the game has unfortunately not found the audience we hoped for," the announcement read. Developer Glowmade had high hopes for King of Meat, its debut game, but it fell starkly short of expectations. The developer wanted a concurrent player count of at least 100,000, but peaked at 320, according to Insider Gaming. The game had a multi-million dollar marketing budget that included a video on MrBeast's YouTube channel and custom-wrapped London buses. The company even made a pilot for an animated TV show. Here at Engadget, we were so-so on a preview version of the game. December brought voluntary redundancies to Glowmade after previous assurances to staff. Anyone who has purchased King of Meat will be able to get a refund through their purchase platform and, in most cases, these refunds should process automatically by April 9. While it seems that King of Meat struggled to reach its audience, Amazon has a history of pulling games that are popular. Last fall, Amazon Games announced it would wind down support for New World: Aeternum, which first debuted in 2021. The news came as the division faced layoffs, but just that week the game had reached almost 50,000 concurrent players on Steam. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/amazon-games-is-winding-down-king-of-meat-113049172.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
The US Department of Defense has reportedly reached a deal to use Elon Musk's Grok in its classified systems, according to Axios. That follows news that the Pentagon is currently in a dispute with another AI company, Anthropic, over limits on its technology for things like mass surveillance. Last year, the White ordered Grok, along with ChatGPT, Gemini and Anthropic's Claude to be approved for government use. Up until now, though, only Anthropic's model has been allowed for the military's most sensitive tasks in intelligence, weapons development and battlefield operations. Claude was reportedly used in the Venezuelan raid in which the US military exfiltrated the country's president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife. However, the Pentagon demanded that Anthropic make Claude available for "all lawful purposes" including mass surveillance and the development of fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic reportedly refused to offer its tech for those things, even with a "safety stack" built into that model. xAI, by contrast, agreed to a standard that would allow the DoD to employ its AI for any purpose it deems "lawful." However, the xAI model is not considered by officials to be as cutting-edge or reliable as Anthropic's Claude, and they admit that replacing Claude with Grok would be a challenge. The Pentagon is reportedly also negotiating deals with OpenAI and Gemini, both of which it considers to be on par with Anthropic. xAI had announced a version of Grok for US government agencies in July 2025. Shortly before that, though, the chatbot started spouting fascist propaganda and antisemitic rhetoric while dubbing itself "MechaHitler." All of that followed a public spat between Musk and Trump over the president's spending bill, after which GSA approval of Grok seemed to stall. Earlier this week, Anthropic accused three Chinese AI labs of abusing Claude's AI with "distillation attacks" to improve their own models. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-us-military-will-reportedly-use-elon-musks-grok-ai-in-its-classified-systems-110049021.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
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