At the Beijing Olympics, an entire robotic restaurant was built for the athletes. The cooking is done by an automated system.

Alas, the robostaurant does not work without a person - he's on the bar.

Amazon spends the most on advertising 💸

Amazon has become the largest advertiser in history. Last year, the company spent a record $16.7 billion. But the main dough they spend not on bloggers, but on more familiar and old channels: search engine ads, context and TV spots.

Moreover, Amazon makes a lot of money on advertising, too. According to the report, in 2021, it earned 31 billion dollars.

Apple prepares to revolutionize music: the company bought AI Music.

It is a startup that changes and adapts music for marketers, publishers, athletes, fitness enthusiasts, and any other profession/hobby. The technology can even adapt music to your heartbeat.

The algorithms could make any track faster, funnier, or slower. For example: there's a cool beat, but it's not right for a commercial or workout in some places. AI Music will make the it fit right in.

Hulu: Releases a tweet with a Futurama comeback with Bender in the announcement.

24 hours later: turns out Bender will be voiced by a different actor. It's not John DiMaggio; Hulu hasn't made a deal with him.

Fans are furious and have already launched #JohnDiMaggioIsBender, where they demand that Hulu bring the actor back, otherwise Futurama is not Futurama.

Cadbury's clever marketing experts have invented a lockable chocolate package - and they pompously present it as know-how. They say that this way you can eat the chocolate in portions instead of the whole one. The packaging will not let it fall apart in your pocket.

Cadbury talks about conscious consumption and caring for people on a diet. But it looks like a marketing ploy to sell people on a diet a chocolate bar¯\_(ツ)_/¯

American farmers have released a perfume that smells like French fries.

Frites by Idaho contains potato essential oils. The 50 ml bottle is on sale only in February, for a nominal $1.89 - like buying an average French fry.

If the perfume is popular, farmers will release another one with a baked potato scent.

Lol, the world map by cities with the weather forecast as emoji instead of degrees.

You can play around here: https://maps.darksky.net/@emoji,38.273,759.199,3

A great visualization of the 2022 Big Mac Index from the EEAGLI YouTube channel. As a reminder, the Big Mac Index is humorous and not entirely accurate. For example, it doesn't take into account duties, taxes, and shipping costs.

But the recipe for a burger is almost the same all over the world. And its cost includes staff, rent, and utilities. So this data is useful. Here's the most interesting data from The Economist report:

- The most expensive burger is in Norway and Switzerland. That is, the currencies of these countries are overvalued by about 10% and 20% respectively.
- Long-suffering Venezuela jumped up and down, but by January 2022 it ended up closer to the benchmark U.S. Big Mac than Denmark or Great Britain.

Any advertisement for a mobile game be like:

Dude turns memes into chic postcards. This is the work of Dutch illustrator and web designer Paul de Graaf for the #PopupBookofMemes art project. The Leo DiCaprio meme is gorgeous. And in the age of NFT and digital ownership, works like this are rarities.

If the artist never decides to monetize the postcards - surely someone else will try to make money from it. It's a lot more interesting than 99% of blank NFTs.

40 animators have created a short film, Pass the Ball, in which the main character is a red ball. The whole thing was invented by LittleBigPlanet 3 game designer Nathan Bowie.

Each animator drew a 3-second sequence and passed it on to the next one, who finishes drawing in his personal style, and so on down the chain. The result is a 2.5 minute video in 40 different styles.

It's pretty addictive 😍

McDonalds is registers 10 trademarks in the meta universe, from its logo and name to McCafe and the names of its products. McDonald's plans to evolve in the meta universe and create it's own outlets, after ordering from which, you get delivery to your home in real life. Dominos Pizza has already introduced this and it is in demand.

Nike X Louis Vuitton

200 pairs of sneakers Nike X Louis Vuitton for a record $25.3 million were sold on an auction.

The most expensive were sneakers in a single copy - $352,800 per pair, with a starting price of $2,000.

New Uber Eats ad: it's not just food delivery 🛵

In a new ad campaign, Uber decided to make it clear how much its delivery brand has outgrown its name "Eats" .

Elon Musk's startup Neurallink killed at least 15 monkeys out of 23 test subjects.

Animal rights groups and the Committee of Doctors have already filed a lawsuit against the company.

Animal rights activists have been leaked documents with gruesome details about how the test monkeys suffer from the implanted chips. Some of them began to engage in self-mutilation, experiencing constant pain, exhaustion and vomiting. Some began to have rotting skin after the chip was implanted. As a result, 15 monkeys died within a few years. Some died during the experiments, some had to be put to sleep.

All of this is at odds with Neurallink's rosy promos about monkeys playing video games with their minds. The startup remains silent, although Musk has promised to start experimenting with brain implants in humans as early as 2022.

It seems unlikely that anyone would want to repeat the fate of monkeys after that.

You're watching a $14 million commercial. 💵

No, you didn't misunderstand. It's a 60-second QR-code ad for cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

While other brands splurged millions of dollars on footage, special effects and stars - Coinbase spent $0. Despite this, they got the most traffic - their site even dropped due to an overflow of users. The company only paid for the placement.

Lol, the Shrek meme is not what you think it is. It turns out HP was the one advertising their camera back in the early 2000'. But only in 2018 someone on Twitter made Shrek with a camera a meme.

The video is lost, but Twitter detectives aren't despairing and keep looking. The Internet is amazing.

An interesting infographic shows how people don't take kindly leaving credit card details to use the trial version.

Once that was disabled, the number of registrations quadrupled.