Cold drinks now account for about half of the chain’s beverage sales; shares climb in after-hours trading. Stronger U.S. sales of iced coffee and other cold drinks bolstered sales in Starbucks’s latest quarter. Cold coffee is warming up Starbucks Corp. ’s U.S. sales.The world’s largest coffee chain said Wednesday that stronger U.S. sales of iced coffee and other cold drinks bolstered sales...

Apple went massive with its new global campaign to promote something so tiny—its new AirPods Pro. Outdoor campaign or outsize proportions promote the tiny product. Along with TBWA/Media Arts Lab, the company dropped larger-than-life images of lithe dancers in eye-popping poses—some reaching 40 feet tall and even breaking out of the expected framework of massive out-of-home displays. They wrap...

If Amazon is poised to gain share in the first half of the final week before Christmas, click-and-collect orders will tip the scales in the direction of big-box merchants during the second half of that week.According to Adobe, click-and-collect orders grew 50% during the 2018 holiday season, underscoring the synergistic effect of growing consumer demand and improved operational execution by ret...

Jeffrey Katzenberg’s mobile-only streaming service Quibi hasn’t even launched, but it’s already sold out of its $150 million first-year advertising inventory, the company announced this morning. The service, which officially debuts in April 2020, added new advertisers Discover, General Mills, T-Mobile and Taco Bell, which join Quibi’s existing lineup of ad partners Procter & Gamble, Pep...

Oats are trending—and beauty & grooming brands are cashing in.Per Cassandra’s recent Burnout Report, modern youth—and Millennials in particular—turn to beauty and grooming as a means to combat their physical burnout. This growing trend, coupled with youths’ growing interest in oat-based products, has paved the way for beauty and grooming brands to use oats as a natural, soothing ingred...

With two satisfying clicks, the Bas or the Bistable Automatic Shoe wears itself around you. No electronics, no Bluetooth apps, no fancy self-lacing technology, just innovative thinking.Yvonne Hung, a student at the Royal College of Art in London began her thesis project with the simple idea… what if textiles could move? Early on in the project, the designer had an accident and found her arm an...

5,000 Tesla Owners Told Us What Elon Musk Got Right and Wrong.The biggest survey of Tesla drivers ever conducted shows that the automaker has finally figured out how to deliver cars with fewer problems, cutting the rate of defects nearly in half.Tesla Inc. has sold more than 350,000 of its best-selling Model 3 sedans since 2017, and many of those cars have rolled out of the factory marred by de...

Alternative vaping products that include vitamins and essential oils fly under the regulatory radar; ‘it’s not hurting me’.[Ripple sells Juul-shaped vaporizers loaded with flavored, nicotine-free liquids and suggests its products can help with nicotine addiction.]Sherry Musso doesn’t like swallowing pills. To take her vitamins, she inhales them from a penlike device that vaporizes them.“I...

Alphabet is disrupting healthcare, auto, government contracts, and more with AI. We look at how it got here, where it’s headed, and what this means for incumbents.[click to enlarge]Google was relentless in its pursuit of artificial intelligence even before the current wave of AI commercialization took off.It may be hard to imagine a time when neural networks — AI algorithms initially inspired...