Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Creators are ringing in a banner year for influencer marketing, and they might consider sending a thank-you note to Unilever CEO Fernando Fernández.In March, Fernández unveiled a new “influencer-first” strategy. He said the consumer-goods company would work with 20 times the number of influencers it had previously worked with. The owner of well-known brands such as Dove, Hellmann’s, and Vaseline also said that it would spend half of its ad budget on social media, up from 30%.The result has been a galvanizing event for the influencer marketing space, according to marketing consultants and executives, talent agents, and influencer marketing insiders.”Unilever…
The University of Oklahoma has fired an instructor who was accused by a student of religious discrimination over a failing grade on a psychology paper in which she cited the Bible and argued that promoting a “belief in multiple genders” was “demonic.” The university said in a statement posted Monday on X that its investigation found the graduate teaching assistant had been “arbitrary” in giving 20-year-old junior Samantha Fulnecky zero points on the assignment. The university declined to comment beyond its statement, which said the instructor had been removed from teaching. Through her attorney, the instructor, Mel Curth, denied Tuesday…
A Texas boy’s second dose of the MMRV vaccine cost over $1,400. A Pennsylvania woman’s long-acting birth control cost more than $14,000.Treatment for a Florida Medicaid enrollee’s heart attack cost nearly $78,000 – about as much as surgery for an uninsured Montana woman’s broken arm.Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. In 2025, these patients were among the hundreds who asked Bill of the Month to investigate their medical bills.As millions of Americans grapple with the rising cost of health insurance next year, the Bill of the Month series will…
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it will begin garnishing the wages of student loan borrowers who are in default early next year. The department said it will send notices to approximately 1,000 borrowers the week of January 7, with more notices to come at an increasing scale each month.Millions of borrowers are considered in default, meaning they are 270 days past due on their payments. The department must give borrowers 30 days notice before their wages can be garnished. The department said it will begin collection activities, “only after student and parent borrowers have been…
Amazon has stopped more than 1,800 suspected North Korean agents from applying for jobs over the last 20 months, a top executive at the firm has said.In a post on LinkedIn, Stephen Schmidt, Amazon’s chief security officer, said North Korean nationals had in recent years been attempting to land remote tech roles with companies across the globe.”Their objective is typically straightforward: get hired, get paid, and funnel wages back to fund the regime’s weapons programs,” Schmidt wrote.Amazon has used a combination of AI-powered screening and human verification to detect and block such applications, Schmidt continued.The company’s AI model searches for…
Dec 23 (Reuters) – The weight-loss drug market is surging, with biotech firms racing to win share in a sector dominated by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly.Analysts forecast the industry will generate about $150 billion in annual sales in the next decade.Novo Nordisk won a key first-mover advantage after U.S. regulators approved a pill version of its blockbuster obesity injection Wegovy, the first GLP-1 pill cleared for obesity.The following is a list of weight-loss drugs in development by Novo, Lilly and other companies chasing the next blockbuster treatment:NOVO NORDISKThe Food and Drug Administration approved the oral version of Novo Nordisk’s…
Moving at superspeed isn’t limited to SpaceX’s rockets.Elon Musk’s satellite and rocket company has secured one million new customers for its Starlink internet in under seven weeks and is now active in 155 markets, the company wrote in a post on X on Monday evening.”Starlink is connecting more than 9M active customers with high-speed internet across 155 countries, territories, and many other markets,” the company said.In a similar post from November 5, SpaceX said Starlink had 8 million customers, meaning that its customer base has expanded at a rate of more than 20,000 per day since that date.SpaceX, which uses…
A long-awaited change in drug policy could bring scientists one step closer to understanding the harms and benefits of marijuana, the most commonly used federally illegal substance.On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that moved to reclassify cannabis from a Schedule I to a Schedule III substance, following through on a regulatory shift first pushed during the Biden administration.“Decades of federal drug control policy have neglected marijuana’s medical uses,” the order says. “That oversight has limited the ability of scientists and manufacturers to complete the necessary research on safety and efficacy to inform doctors and patients.”While the reclassification…
It’s been more than eight years since Amazon bought Whole Foods, but the two companies still haven’t aligned their setup for the Microsoft software their employees use.That disconnect was flagged in an 8-week Deloitte review of Whole Foods’ use of Microsoft 365 apps earlier this year, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider.Deloitte found that Whole Foods relies on “fragmented” Microsoft toolsets, has loose security and data-retention practices, and employs a complex user-management setup — all of which contribute to inefficiencies and lower productivity when working with Amazon employees.The consulting firm recommended a 24-month integration plan that would…
Dating apps’ original pitch was to match you with anyone.”Swipe. Match. Chat. Date.” That was Tinder’s promise when it launched more than a decade ago, forecasting the endless cycle so many of its users now bemoan.Now they want to match you with the one.The giants in the dating space — Match Group’s Hinge and Tinder, Grindr, and Bumble — are investing tens of millions into artificial intelligence, hoping to beat each other and the new AI-driven upstarts in the ultimate dating game.While, technically speaking, AI and machine learning have been used by dating app algorithms for years, these generative AI…