(Brands & Consumers)
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II made a surprise public appearance at the opening of a long-awaited train line in London on Tuesday. The monarch, walking with a stick, wore a bright yellow outfit and hat at Paddington station, in west London, to open the Elizabeth line, which is named in her honor. She was given a…
The US has warned that IT workers from North Korea are trying to get remote working jobs by hiding their true identities for the purpose of stealing money for Pyongyang. Many of them pretend to be from other parts of Asia, according to three US government agencies. They are allegedly helping to fund North Korea’s…
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Elon Musk are engaged in a debate over an issue Musk has made central to his proposed purchase of the platform — spam. In a series of tweets on Monday, Agrawal laid out Twitter’s approach to spam accounts and its challenges dealing with them. Twitter (TWTR) suspends “over half a…
Two prominent lobbying groups representing the tech industry’s biggest companies are asking the US Supreme Court to step in and block a Texas law that lets the state’s residents sue large social media platforms for alleged censorship, two days after a federal appeals court allowed the law to take effect. The Computer & Communications Industry…
China’s retail and factory activity fell sharply in April as wide COVID-19 lockdowns confined workers and consumers to their homes and severely disrupted supply chains, casting a long shadow over the outlook for the world’s second-largest economy. Full or partial lockdowns were imposed in major centres across the country in March and April, including the…
Skyrocketing natural gas prices have raised manufacturing and transportation costs across many U.S. industries, and the situation should persist as the United States exports more gas to Europe to make up for Russian supplies lost to sanctions. U.S. natural gas futures have doubled this year, far more than the increases in retail gasoline and diesel…
India, the world’s second largest producer of wheat, has banned all exports with immediate effect after a heatwave affected the crop. A notice in the government gazette by the directorate of foreign trade, dated Friday, said a rise in global prices for wheat was threatening the food security of India and neighbouring and vulnerable countries….
SMBC Aviation Capital, one of the world’s biggest aircraft lessors, is nearing a deal to acquire smaller rival Goshawk for about $7 billion, including debt, people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The deal between the two privately held, Dublin, Ireland-based lessors could be announced as soon as next week, the sources said, speaking…
Ford Motor Co sold 7 million shares of electric carmaker Rivian Automotive Inc for about $188.2 million, or $26.88 apiece, the U.S. automaker said in a filing on Friday. Ford now holds 86.9 million shares in the California-headquartered company. Rivian is struggling in a competitive market, including competition from Ford’s F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck,…
Perrigo Company PLC (PRGO.N), which makes store-brand baby formulas for retailers, including Walmart Inc (WMT.N) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), expects shortages and heightened demand to last for the “balance of the year,” Chief Executive Murray Kessler told Reuters in an interview. The Biden administration this week has come under increasing pressure to address a baby…
Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) has put on hold plans to sell electric cars in India, abandoned a search for showroom space and reassigned some of its domestic team after failing to secure lower import taxes, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The decision caps more than a year of deadlocked talks with government representatives…
Wall Street rallied on Friday, ending a week of wild market gyrations marked by signs of peaking inflation and worries that the Federal Reserve might tighten policy too aggressively. Rebounding megacap tech and tech-adjacent growth stocks led the market higher. These shares thrived when interest rates were low and Fed policy accommodative during the pandemic,…
Apple’s iPod creator has warned the so-called metaverse risks creating more trolls and damaging human interaction. The virtual reality-based metaverse removes the ability “to look into the other person’s face,” Tony Fadell said. “If you put technology between that human connection that’s when the toxicity happens,” he said. The metaverse is a virtual reality realm…
Elon Musk has said his $44bn (£35bn) deal to buy Twitter is on hold after he queried the number of fake or spam accounts on the social media platform. He said he was waiting for information “supporting [the] calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users”. Mr Musk added later that…
Heinz is creating a brand new ketchup bottle made from paper and plans on being the first ever sauce brand to have completely renewable packaging. In partnership with Pulpex, who also created a paper bottle for whisky brand Johnnie Walker, the condiment company want to make all their packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025….
Ever since he founded Twitter, Jack Dorsey remained as the company’s CEO for many years until the board ousted him. He was battling against members of that board over a wide variety of reasons that ultimately ostracized him from the high seat at the table. Although he’s remained as an important share holder from the…
It’s a sad day for cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin. Bitcoin fell below $26,000 for the first time in 16 months, part of a larger sell-off in cryptocurrencies that wiped out more than $200 billion from the market in a single day. According to Coin Metrics, the price of bitcoin fell to $25,401.29 on Thursday. This is…
The battle line appears to be drawn as FIFA takes on EA Sports video game in soccer’s new rivalry. For three decades, the Switzerland-based soccer body, FIFA has enjoyed a flourishing, mutually beneficial relationship with EA Sports. The annual edition of the video game, alongside related products, has raked in billions of dollars and has…
In light of receiving more than 100 fines dished out to people working in Downing Street for Partygate breaches of Covid laws, Scotland Yard revealed today. In the first update in a month, detectives working on the Operation Hillman probe into boozy gatherings in the corridors of power have doubled the number of fixed-penalty notices…
More Americans are feeling financially strained as the prices of basic necessities keep climbing. At the moment, inflation is showing no signs of slowing down, making it harder for workers to make ends meet. The Consumer Price Index increased 8.3% from a year ago, higher than the 8.1% estimate, according to the U.S. Bureau of…
The inflation rate in Germany hit 7.4% year-on-year in April, up from 7.3% in March, official data showed on Wednesday. “The inflation rate thus reached an all-time high for the second month in a row since German reunification,” Georg Thiel, president of the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), said in a written statement, Anadolu News agency…
The US consumer price index (CPI), a broad-based measure of prices for goods and services, was released on Wednesday, showing that prices rose 8.3% in April. Officials hope soaring inflation might be slowing down, even as households continue to feel the pain, The Washington Post reports. Still, inflation has been the single biggest threat to…
Cryptocurrency market cap has crashed further as Bitcoin and several other top crypto prices hit new lows. The global crypto market cap is now just $1.38 trillion, a 6.44% decrease in the last 24 hours. The Bitcoin price has again fallen below $31,000 level. At the time of this report, Bitcoin price was $30,621, which…
We know for a fact that Apple’s iPhone 14 line-up will be launched around October 31, 2022. While details of the phone’s specifications and new features have been circulating on the Internet, we will have to wait longer for Apple to come out with the official details. However, news cycles are replete with leaks on…
Hiring in the US remained strong in April despite concerns that fast rising prices and other economic disruption could lead to slowdown. Employers added 428,000 jobs, while the unemployment rate held steady at 3.6%, the Labor Department said. The gains were bigger than expected, marking the 16th month of expansion. The growth is likely to…
These might not be the best times for popular business magnate Elon Musk as his $44 billion buyout of Twitter Inc. has been challenged in a lawsuit by a Florida pension fund that argues the deal can’t close before 2025 because Musk was an “interested shareholder” in the social networking platform. The suit was filed…
Ecobank has launched its Ellevate Leadership Training Programme in partnership with the Global Business School Network (GBSN). The Ellevate Leadership Training Programme forms part of ‘Ellevate Equip’, the brand name for all capability and training support initiatives for Ellevate by Ecobank, the bank’s gender financing programme. This Leadership Training programme is being delivered to an…
On the heels of its announcement in December 2021, Amazon has shut down its popular website research and SEO analysis tool. Alexa was well known within the digital marketing hub for its Alexa Rank score. It should be recalled that in December, Amazon had announced that it would shut down the Alexa rank service in…
The board of Twitter has agreed to a $44bn (£34.5bn) takeover offer from the billionaire Elon Musk. Mr Musk, who made the shock bid less than two weeks ago, said Twitter had “tremendous potential” that he would unlock. He also called for a series of changes from relaxing its content restrictions to eradicating fake accounts….
Organizational culture is the surface on which an organization’s structure lives, grows, and all corporate decisions are based. Without culture in an organization, it is like a house having no foundation. The operations and decision-making would be significantly affected by an organization if a culture does not exist. Organizational culture is the soul that binds…
Gamification is more manipulative, as advertising is persuasive. What makes it more sensitive most of the time is the hidden motive that the consumers are unaware of. That makes it questionable and unethical in a sense. Because of the falsity in content, Gamification of a product or service makes it less authentic and transparent, thereby…
Coca-Cola’s global brand marketing success comes as no gimmick for a brand that has been in existence for over a century. Coke brand is an industry leader and has utilized numerous marketing strategies to sustain its market share within the beverage industry. One of such thriving strategies Coca-Cola has employed to maintain its leadership status…
An organization that genuinely supports a course allows consumers to create a strong affinity and loyalty for their brand. As a consumer, it becomes more imperative for brands to be analyzed not for the profits they stand to make but more of a beacon of hope to their community.When corporations walk the talk, they not…
Non-fungible Tokens, or NFTs, are becoming more popular as investors and collectors try to cash in on the newest blockchain craze — and some of the amounts being paid for them are ridiculous. Throughout 2022, NFTs will continue to increase in popularity, with millions of dollars in art collections being sold as digital jpegs, and…
