Author: Geek Planet

In corporate boardrooms and on the sidelines of industry conferences, marketers are considering how best to respond to President Donald Trump’s tariffs. It’s become the key question facing them this year.Marketers’ collective wisdom, gleaned from past recessions, pandemics and near misses, will tell them that advertisers that stick with their message — and continue to invest in their brand — are able to reap the benefits when the crunch eases. Market volatility rarely lasts long, after all. Some advertisers, from B2B brands like PwC to automakers such as Hyundai, are holding the line and pushing ahead with marketing activity. Others,…

Soon after Google gave us our first glimpse of the Pixel 10a, it attracted plenty of heat. Looks identical to its predecessor. A no-upgrade chip situation. A similar status for the camera. And display. And battery. That’s a lot to take in.   It’s almost as if Google pulled an Apple. And somehow, did worse.  But there’s more to this phone than meets the eye. I have only had the chance to push it as my daily driver for a week, which is not enough for a full review. But that spell still gave me enough encouragement to keep driving it…

Google isn’t known for saying sorry so the fact that it’s offering something close to a mea culpa at an industry conference in Miami says a lot about the chaos its Chrome cookie plan has unleashed. Last week, the company announced that it would continue to permit third-party cookies in its web browser Chrome, upending nearly six years of planning for many. Despite its careful messaging, the move effectively marks the putative death of the accompanying Privacy Sandbox experimentations, and this week, Google set out on what many expected to be a (much-called-for) apology tour at the Possible conference. “Mostly…

Over the past couple of years, I have tried my fair share of smart glasses. And in that span, the industry matured dramatically. What started as Bluetooth-enabled glasses, which merely served as glorified speakers, has now reached a stage where they are equipped with screens.  Screens are the differentiating factor. On the one hand, we have brands such as Xreal and Viture that fit two display units that offer a massive canvas for work and play. Then we have labels like Even Realities and Meta, which are offering glasses with an indivisible display. RayNeo has done both, and its latest…

The transition from viral influencer to a full-time career as a creator has always been tough — but with greater economic pressure, some are realizing the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.After working 11 years as a creator and amassing 68.2K subscribers on YouTube, mom of twins, creator-turned talent manager Joanna Fowler joined Shine Talent Group in December as its head of talent. “A lot of it is unpaid for a very long time,” Fowler told Digiday, of her work as a creator. “Even when it is your full-time job, you need to be able to bookend sponsored content with a lot…

Android phones now let you personalize how you appear on a call with the Calling Card feature in the Google Phone app. Instead of a basic contact photo, you can create a full screen visual card that appears during calls. You can add a photo, adjust how it looks on the screen, and customize the name style that appears when you call someone or when they call you. The feature is part of a recent update to the Phone app and works on devices running version 182 and above. Once a calling card is created, the image and text style…

There’s a quiet vibe shift rippling through marketing circles as the industry comes to terms with the epistemic hangover of its long entanglement with Google. None of this is new, of course — marketers have spent years toggling between frustration and resignation over how tightly Google grips their ad dollars. But now, with the company freshly found guilty of illegally monopolizing not just how people find information online but how that information gets monetized, those long-simmering feelings are boiling over. Throw in Google’s ongoing third-party tap dance in the world’s most popular browser, and the unease is becoming harder to ignore. …

Microsoft is testing Windows 11 26H1 with the Insider Preview Build 28000, which brings many of the useful features we’ve seen in the Dev, Beta, and stable versions of previous builds. Even though the version contains some additions, it’s not one of the usual Windows feature updates (via PCWorld). For instance, there’s a more consistent dark mode for the File Explorer. All the dialogues in the interface, including those for copy, move, replace, errors, and progress bar, now completely match the theme. Minor feature tweaks, major groundwork for Windows on Arm The Explorer start area gets new hover options, including…

Google‘s March Pixel Drop is rolling out now, and it’s giving one of the Pixel‘s best quiet features its own home. The Now Playing tool, which automatically figures out songs playing around you, is now a standalone app. That means your history of discovered tracks finally has a place to live. You can actually revisit that song you heard at the coffee shop last week. The update turns a background trick into something useful. Now Playing has long been a Pixel thing, silently catching music without needing to Shazam it. The new app adds a history tab that logs everything…

AI agents are no longer just experimental tools — they’re rapidly becoming indispensable intermediaries in how people search, shop, and interact online. As platforms like Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity race to roll out agentic AI, the advertising industry is bracing for a shift that could redefine consumer journeys and reshape digital marketing strategies.Despite all the hype, many marketer’s generative AI investments are still modest or even nonexistent. One Gartner survey of more than 400 marketing leaders found that 27% of CMOs reported their teams had little or no adoption of generative AI. However, it’s still early — both in terms…