According to reports, rapper Flo Rida was awarded $82 million in court on Wednesday in his lawsuit against Celsius Energy Drink.
Flo Rida sued the company over money and stock options that were never paid as part of his endorsement deal. Per Forbes, “over $27 million of the damages represent 250,000 shares in Celsius the rapper said he was owed by the company.” What’s more, the jury found that Celsius not only breached their 2014 contract with Flo Rida, but also took action to fraudulently conceal the breach.
“He’s entitled to 500,000 shares of stock via the contract, and entitled to 250,000 shares of stock if certain things happen—one of those yardsticks is that a certain number of units of products need to be sold, but unfortunately the contract doesn’t specify which type of unit—is it a box, is it a drink? And there’s no timeframe or deadline,” Flo Rida’s lawyer John Uustal told Insider.
Uber Eats has enlisted Kris and Kendall Jenner to help launch the brand’s new positioning as it transitions away from its long-running ‘Tonight I’ll be eating positioning”.
The delivery platform, which launched in Australia in 2016, has enlisted the Jenners, along with a handful of Aussie celebrities, to showcase the brand’s expanded delivery offering, which now includes food, groceries, alcohol and more.
The new brand platform ‘Get almost almost anything’ aims to highlight the expanded service while acknowledging that Uber Eats still can’t deliver some things.
The campaign, which Special Group created in collaboration with Hello Social and MediaCom, features the brand’s trademark mix of celebrities employing self-deprecating humour.
Andy Morley, director of marketing at Uber ANZ, said: “This year we will continue to deepen our get “anything” offering across Uber Eats – building on our already rich range of restaurants, greengrocers, supermarkets, fishmongers, butchers, florists, to add even more retail items. While takeaway food will remain a hallmark, as our selection deepens and evolves we believe it’s time for a new brand platform to capture that. Get almost, almost anything absolutely does that job for us.”
Julian Schreiber, CCO & Partner of Special, said, ‘Being confident enough to discuss what you can’t do is a great way to create entertaining cut through about what you can do, particularly when it’s a huge new diverse offering. It delivers the message but also makes fun of all the over promises that marketing is constantly guilty of.”
The campaign comes as Australia’s food and grocery delivery market undergoes significant changes as it matures. Last year, British-owned delivery giant, Deliveroo, pulled out of the Australian market after six years in operation, citing “challenging economic conditions”. Meanwhile, food delivery service VOLY also withdrew from the market in November, blaming economic uncertainty.
The high concentration of big players in the Australian market has created a competitive landscape. Figures from last year revealed Uber Eats remained the market leader with around 53% market share, ahead of rival Menulog at 20%. Deliveroo held about 12% share, which is believed to have been shared among rivals, including Door Dash and HungryPanda.
Research from Roy Morgan revealed over 7 million Australians use food delivery services, which equates to almost one-third (33.4%) of the population aged 14-plus; this has increased from 3.6 million in 2020. According to the same research, Uber Eats is used by 3.5 million Australians, up from 2.3 million in 2020, confirming its position as the clear market leader.
It’s a position this latest campaign aims to solidify as the brand showcases its ability to deliver more than takeaway meals.
In this clip, Smokey Robinson detailed his upbringing in Detroit where he lived in a packed house. Smokey spoke about being one of 11 kids in the house, most of whom were his nieces and nephews who, due to closeness in age, were more like his siblings. Smokey also discussed his father’s journey out of Selma, Alabama into Detroit after stabbing a white kid who bullied him for years and fleeing town at only 12 years old.
M&M’s is launching woke ‘all-female’ packs to celebrate female empowerment and attempt to shake things up in a continued shift toward progressive branding.
Mars, M&M’s parent company, debuted the feminist candy wrappers earlier this week, exclusively featuring the company’s three female mascots: green, brown and the newly-introduced purple.
The all-female package – upside down, to show how powerful women have ‘flipped the status quo’ – will be the first time the brown and green M&Ms have been featured together since a viral tweet from 2015 sparked rumors they were a lesbian couple.
The tweet contained a picture of the two characters holding hands on the beach, posted just two days after the Supreme Court effectively legalized gay marriage.
In fact, a search for the two characters in the notorious fan fiction site Archive Of Our Own produces 11 different results. The green M&M supposedly posted the tweet herself, writing: ‘It’s rare Ms. Brown and I get to spend time together without some colorful characters barging in.’
Mars has shifted the M&M’s brand in recent years multiple times in attempts to appear more progressive, with new CEO Poul Weihrauch looking to continue the trend.
They debuted ‘Purple’ – the first ever female peanut M&M spokescandy, who has been designed to represent acceptance and inclusivity and is ‘quirky, confident and authentic’.
More than 10 million fans voted to add the color to the confectionary’s current rainbow in May, beating aqua and pink.
Purple’s arrival was announced with ‘I’m Just Gonna Be Me,’ a new promotional song and music video, which launched on Tuesday.
Jane Hwang, global VP at Mars Wrigley said: ‘There is so much about our new spokescandy that people can relate to and appreciate, including her willingness to embrace her true self – our new character reminds us to celebrate what makes us unique.’
Purple joins the legendary cast of M&M’s characters, who were given a refresh with updated looks and more nuanced personalities back in January.
The iconic M&M characters – ubiquitous in commercials for the chocolate candies for decades – are getting a makeover that the company claimed will fit them in a ‘more dynamic, progressive world.’
The changes, which took effect immediately, gives the characters a more modern look to emphasize characters’ ‘personalities.’
The biggest changes appear to be to the two female M&M’s, the green and brown ones.
Mars, the maker of the candies, has been criticized in the past for making the green M&M too sexy, and either pushing a rivalry or a possible flirtation with the brown M&M.
The solution appears to be the green M&M losing her stiletto boots in favor of sneakers and the brown M&M wearing slightly lower heels than before to what Mars spokespersons called a ‘professional height.’
Mars wants the green M&M to be ‘better represented to reflect confidence and empowerment, as a strong female, and known for much more than her boots.’
As far as the relationship between the green and brown M&M’s, it will be based on the two ‘together throwing shine and not shade,’ as a reaction to how the two have been at odds at times in promotional material.
Each M&M has been given a Q&A to explain their new characters on the candy’s website, in which the brown M&M claims to be ‘not bossy, just the boss.’
Mars is also doubling down on the anxious orange M&M, whom the company believes is ‘one of the most relatable characters with Gen-Z, the most anxious generation.’
The orange M&M previously wore his shoes untied, but now will have them tied in an effort to represent his cautious nature, according to Mars.
The red M&M – voiced by cartoon icon Billy West in commercials and often vacillating between leader and bully toward the other M&M’s – will be adjusted to be more kind to his fellow characters.
The yellow M&M, classically dim-witted, appears to remain so. He once was quoted saying that the first thing he would do if today was his last day ever is ‘wake up.’
Mars hopes these changes will show the importance of ‘self-expression and power of community.’
This year, it feels like artificial intelligence-generated art has been everywhere.
In the summer, many of us entered goofy prompts into DALL-E Mini (now called Craiyon), yielding a series of nine comedically janky AI-generated images. But more recently, there’s been a boom of AI-powered apps that can create cool avatars. MyHeritage AI Time Machine generates images of users in historical styles and settings, and AI TikTok filters have become popular for creating anime versions of people. This past week, “magic avatars” from Lensa AI flooded social media platforms like Twitter with illustrative and painterly renderings of people’s headshots, as if truly made by magic.
These avatars, created using Stable Diffusion — which allows the AI to “learn” someone’s features based off of submitted images — also opened an ethical can of worms about AI’s application. People discovered that the “magic avatars” tended to sexualize women and appeared to have fake artist signatures on the bottom corner, prompting questions about the images that had been used to train the AI and where they came from. Here’s what you need to know.
WHAT IS LENSA AI? It’s an app created by Prisma Labs that recently topped the iOS app store’s free chart. Though it was created in 2018, the app became popular after introducing a “magic avatar” feature earlier this month. Users can submit 10 to 20 selfies, pay a fee ($3.99 for 50 images, $5.99 for 100, and $7.99 for 200), and then receive a bundle of AI-generated images in a range of styles like “kawaii” or “fantasy.”
The app’s “magic avatars” are somewhat uncanny in style, refracting likenesses as if through a funhouse mirror. In a packet of 100, at least a few of the results will likely capture the user’s photo well enough in the style of a painting or an anime character. These images have flooded Twitter and TikTok. (Polygon asked Prisma Labs for an estimate of how many avatars were produced, and the company declined to answer.) Celebrities like Megan Fox, Sam Asghari, and Chance the Rapper have even shared their Lensa-created likenesses.
HOW DOES LENSA CREATE THESE MAGIC AVATARS? Lensa uses Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI deep learning model, which draws from a database of art scraped from the internet. This database is called LAION-5B, and it includes 5.85 billion image-text pairs, filtered by a neural network called CLIP (which is also open-source). Stable Diffusion was released to the public on Aug. 22, and Lensa is far from the only app using its text-to-image capabilities. Canva, for example, recently launched a feature using the open-source AI.
An independent analysis of 12 million images from the data set — a small percentage, even though it sounds massive — traced images’ origins to platforms like Blogspot, Flickr, DeviantArt, Wikimedia, and Pinterest, the last of which is the source of roughly half of the collection.
More concerningly, this “large-scale dataset is uncurated,” says the disclaimer section of the LAION-5B FAQ blog page. Or, in regular words, this AI has been trained on a firehose of pure, unadulterated internet images. Stability AI only removed “illegal content” from Stable Diffusion’s training data, including child sexual abuse material, The Verge reported. In November, Stability AI made some changes that made it harder to make NSFW images. This week, Prisma Labs told Polygon it too “launched a new safety layer” that’s “aimed at tackling unwanted NSFW content.”
Stable Diffusion’s license says users can’t use it for violating the law, “exploiting, harming or attempting to exploit or harm minors,” or for generating false information or disparaging and harassing others (among other restrictions). But the technology itself can still generate images in violation of those terms. As The Verge put it, “once someone has downloaded Stable Diffusion to their computer, there are no technical constraints to what they can use the software for.”
WHY DID AI ART GENERATORS BECOME SO POPULAR THIS YEAR? Though this technology has been in development for years, a few AI art generators entered public beta or became publicly available this year, like Midjourney, DALL-E (technically DALL-E 2, but people just call it DALL-E), and Stable Diffusion.
These forms of generative AI allow users to type in a string of terms to create impressive images. Some of these are delightful and whimsical, like putting a Shiba Inu in a beret. But you can probably also imagine how easily this technology could be used to create deepfakes or pornography.
Investigation Launched On Kuwait Airways After Female Attendant Applicants Reportedly Ordered To Strip Down To Their Underwear During Recruitment Event
Women hoping to become flight attendants with Kuwait Airways said they were ordered to strip down to their underwear so that recruiters could inspect their bodies, a Spanish newspaper reported.
Mariana, 23, told El Diario she was asked to strip to her bra, skirt, and pantyhose while a female recruiter wrote comments in a notebook. “I felt like an animal in the zoo,” she said.
The incident took place at a hotel in Madrid, Spain, in November during a recruitment event that Meccti, which describes itself as the world’s largest cabin-crew recruitment agency, organized.
Three sources told El Diario that the interview process was uncomfortable from the start.
During an initial inspection, the sources said recruiters turned away women with glasses, braces, visible scars, or moles — as well as any they thought were overweight.
Recruiters asked some if they’d be willing to lose weight, and asked others whether they’d be willing to “eat more.”
Recruiters rejected one candidate after saying they “didn’t like her skin or her smile,” according to Mariana.
Mariana told El Diario that just three of the 60 or so people attending the event were male, but that recruiters turned them away after saying that the airline only hired Kuwaiti men.
Recruiters later asked shortlisted candidates to enter a room individually, where a female recruiter then asked them to undress.
Bianca, a 23-year-old flight attendant from Romania, told El Diario: “The first girl that went in came out crying.”
She told the other candidates that she’d been ordered to strip down to her underwear. “The others came out saying the same thing. It was hard for me to believe. I was freaking out — but they weren’t exaggerating,” Bianca told El Diario.
When Bianca entered the room, the female recruiter asked her to pull up her dress. Bianca said: “I pulled it up a little bit, to just below my knee, so she pulled it up to my panties. My dress had a zipper down the back and she asked me to pull it down to my waist, so I was standing there in just my bra.”
The recruiter told Bianca that she was checking for “scars, birthmarks, and tattoos.”
María, a 19-year-old student, said: “First I took off my blouse and left my pants on — and then vice versa.”
María told El Diario that the recruiter “looked at me from top to bottom” and “bent down to look at me from the ankles.”
Meccti’s ad for the recruitment event stated that candidates needed to be at least 5-foot-2 inches tall — with their “weight and height in proportion” — and have “excellent overall presentation.”
Spain’s Department of Labor has opened an investigation into Meccti’s hiring processes. Joaquín Pérez Rey, Spain’s Secretary of State for Employment, described the recruiters’ alleged conduct as “intolerable behavior that violates the dignity and fundamental rights of these women.”
“It’s almost like [Chinese company Bytedance] recognize[s] that technology’s influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,” says Tristan Harris.
People are complaining about the 5K Studio Display, but in reality how does it compare to the 6K Pro Display XDR?
In this video, Vadim Yuryev from Max Tech covers Apple’s new Mac Studio Display and cover all of its features and how it compares to Apples 6K Prodisplay XDR in terms of features and display quality and performance!
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