Toss launched face-scan payments in September 2025 and now has close to 5 million users in South Korea. Will privacy-wary consumers elsewhere follow suit?

In South Korea, a growing number of shoppers are walking up to convenience-store counters, glancing at a small camera, and walking out with their purchase. They don't need to tap their phone, reach for a card or open an app. Toss, the Seoul-based fintech super-app used by nearly two-thirds of the country's 51 million people, launched its FacePay service nationwide in September 2025. As reported by the Financial Times, 4.8 million users have signed up since, close to 10% of the population, and face scanners now sit on counters in roughly 330,000 retail outlets, mostly cafés, restaurants and convenience stores.

The technology itself isn't new. Facial-recognition payments have existed for years; Shinhan Card piloted one in Korea back in 2020, and Amazon and Mastercard have run their own experiments. What's different about FacePay is how quickly consumers have taken to it. Toss credits its one-second authentication time, liveness detection that filters out photos and videos, and a 24-hour fraud guarantee that reimburses victims of unauthorized transactions. New users also get KRW 3,000 off their first payment and 3% cashback on all subsequent transactions. Modest incentives, but ones that pair a novel form of checkout with a tangible perk.

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The conditions in South Korea make this easier than it would be almost anywhere else. Cash made up less than 15% of payment value by 2021 and has kept shrinking, and Toss's super-app already reaches more than half the population, which means the trust threshold is comparatively low and the sign-up flow is short. Whether that model will land in other countries is another matter.

Jin Kwak, a cybersecurity professor at Ajou University, told the Financial Times that adoption is likely to move more slowly in the US and Europe, where consumers are more guarded about handing over biometric data. "Korean consumers tend to value convenience, while Western consumers can be more sensitive about privacy and personal information," he said. That caution isn't unfounded. People are used to unlocking their phones with their faces, but a payment-grade biometric is a different proposition: the template lives on a central server, not on the user's device, and unlike a leaked credit card number, a leaked face can't be reissued.

Team Repair launches a dummy smartphone that lets people rehearse real repair skills before risking their own device.

The biggest thing standing between someone and a DIY phone fix isn't a tiny screwdriver. It's nerves. When UK education startup Team Repair surveyed its audience about the barriers to fixing their own devices, the most common answer was fear of breaking them. The company's response, currently on presale, is the Repair Kit for Grown-Ups: Mobile Phone Edition — a dummy smartphone that lets adults rehearse a real repair before risking a device they actually need.

Founded by Design Engineering graduates from Imperial College London, Team Repair has spent years making STEM kits for 8- to 14-year-olds, focused on teardown and repair rather than building from scratch. Adults kept asking for a version of their own, and a TikTok video floating the idea last year went viral. The grown-up kit walks users through diagnosing faults, handling miniature precision screws, and working with stretch-release adhesive — the kind of fiddly business that makes real phone repair feel unattainable. Like the children's kits, the adult version is sold through a circular model: a three-month rental with a refundable deposit, plus an optional toolkit customers can keep for future jobs on actual devices. Pricing starts at GBP 44.99 without tools and GBP 59.98 with tools.

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Right-to-repair legislation has been steadily reshaping what manufacturers must offer. The European Commission's 2019 rules pushed for longer-lasting designs and accessible spare parts, and Nokia's G22 shipped with iFixit toolkits in the box. But the parts side of the equation has run ahead of the human one. Spare screens and pentalobe drivers don't help if the prospective repairer freezes at step one. Team Repair believes confidence is the missing ingredient, and that the route to it looks more like a flight simulator than an instruction manual: practice on something that doesn't matter until your hands know what they're doing.

UNICEF Spain redirects the unspent money sitting on festival cashless wristbands into donations, targeting funds that attendees had already written off.

At music festivals, attendees often load money onto cashless wristbands to pay for drinks, food and merch. They almost always overshoot. The leftover balance, sometimes a few euros, sometimes more, theoretically belongs to the attendee, who can claim it back through a refund process that opens days after an event ends. A meaningful share goes unredeemed. Cash Forward, a new initiative from UNICEF Spain and Ogilvy Spain, gives festivalgoers a third option: redirect that residual balance to support children living in vulnerable circumstances.

The behavioral mechanics are worth a closer look. Money sitting on a wristband at the end of a weekend doesn't feel like money in a bank account. It was already mentally allocated to the festival, already spent in the attendee's head, so the psychological cost of giving it away approaches zero. Cash Forward leans into that gap between accounting and feeling, turning a moment of mild administrative friction (claim it back, wait two weeks, fill in forms) into an easier alternative (one tap, done). UNICEF Spain plans to run the program throughout 2026 with the goal of establishing it as a permanent donation channel.

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Cashless systems were sold to festival organizers as efficiency tools. They've turned out to be something else as well: a layer of abstraction between people and their money that changes how attendees spend. Wristbands get overloaded because topping up feels weightless, and refunds get skipped because reclaiming feels like effort. UNICEF Spain is rerouting those abstract funds rather than fighting the abstraction. The campaign sits in a growing category of fundraising mechanics that target money the donor has already psychologically written off — round-ups on card transactions, leftover foreign currency, gift card residuals. None of these are heroic acts of generosity, and that's the point. A donation that takes no effort, made with money that didn't quite feel real, can be as meaningful as the deliberate kind.

A new free tool for teens navigating consent, Vibe Check is private, human-designed and built to prompt reflection.

When teenagers find themselves uncertain whether something that happened was okay — or are worried they may have caused harm — their most likely first move is opening Reddit or asking ChatGPT. SafeBAE, a US nonprofit focused on peer sexual violence prevention, thinks that's a problem. Last month, the organization launched Vibe Check, a free, anonymous, self-guided reflection tool at CheckYourVibe.org. No account required. No data stored. Nothing saved when a browser closes.

The tool walks users through questions about a situation: what happened, how they're feeling, what signals they may have missed. It then connects them with evidence-based resources on consent, communication, and accountability. The tone is deliberately non-punitive — built on the premise that shame spiraling rarely produces behavior change, and that a young person who feels judged will simply close the tab. SafeBAE has also published a companion guide for parents on how to introduce the tool.

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Young people are already turning to AI and anonymous forums to ask questions they're too embarrassed to raise with anyone they know. The problem is that those platforms often optimize for engagement, not reflection. SafeBAE's bet is that a purpose-built, human-designed tool can do something ChatGPT fundamentally can't: sit with ambiguity and guide someone toward accountability rather than away from discomfort. The core idea isn't solely about consent — it's about designing for contemplation in environments that are optimized for instant answers.

With a pop-up grocery store selling absurdly priced fruit, The Ordinary makes the case that beauty's luxury markups don't hold up under scrutiny.

What would you pay for an "all-natural magical energy-boosting bar"? At The Markup Marché, The Ordinary's new pop-up concept launching this month across six cities — Toronto, London, Paris, São Paulo, Mexico City and Melbourne — the answer is USD 98.50. The product in question is a banana. Next to it sits an "exotic thirst-defying hydration vessel" (a coconut) at USD 195.50. Putting beauty-industry pricing logic into a grocery store is a simple trick, but it works: the absurdity lands fast.

The pop-ups look like actual grocery stores, complete with shopping baskets, fridges, a produce section and checkout counters. Visitors can write their own florid ingredient descriptions for everyday items like lemons, and a food scale illustrates how much of a product's price goes toward packaging and marketing rather than the formula itself. According to Deciem, The Ordinary's parent company, some luxury beauty products carry markups as high as 700%. Outside Toronto, nothing is for sale — the experience is purely educational.

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The Markup Marché arrives as consumer mistrust of premiumization is already fairly high. Dupe culture has normalized the idea that efficacy and price are often decoupled; The Ordinary is taking that instinct and sharpening the argument. The deeper pattern isn't specific to beauty. Across categories, more consumers are separating what a product actually does from the story and packaging built around it. And asking whether that story is worth the price difference. Brands that built their margins on aspiration are finding that a more outcome-minded buyer is harder to charge for vibes alone.

Texas Instruments' new TI-84 Evo skips Wi-Fi by design, repositioning friction as a premium feature in classrooms full of distractions.

The TI-84 has sat on math classroom desks for over three decades, a piece of plastic so familiar it's become shorthand for high school algebra itself. Recently, Texas Instruments released its latest update — the TI-84 Evo — with a faster processor, USB-C charging, more graphing real estate and a redesigned icon-based menu. What it doesn't have is Wi-Fi. In a market where free graphing apps like Desmos and GeoGebra have effectively won on price and accessibility (and the distraction of building games), TI isn't trying to outcompete them on features. It's selling something the apps can't offer: a tool that does one thing and provides no escape route to anywhere else.

The pitch leans hard into the current moment. Schools everywhere are restricting phones in classrooms, parents are suing social platforms over addictive design, and teachers are watching students reach for calculator apps that sit one swipe away from TikTok. TI cites EdWeek research that 81% of teachers and administrators say students focus better on math when using a handheld calculator, and 94% say students perform better on exams when they've practiced on the same device. The company also flags new features like a "points of interest trace" that, in its words, give students "more ways to engage deeply with concepts without skipping straight to the answers" — a phrase that reads as a quiet dig at AI homework helpers.

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Single-purpose hardware is finding a second wind. Dumbphones, e-readers, Tin Can, paper planners: friction is increasingly being sold as a feature rather than a flaw. TI is making the same bet for education. As generative AI collapses the gap between question and answer to almost nothing, a tool that refuses to shortcut the work becomes more valuable, not less. It's a counterintuitive pitch for a USD 160 calculator. Buy this because it can't do as much. Whether parents and school districts will actually pay a premium for that restraint while free apps remain a tap away is unclear. Still, the underlying logic — that legitimate learning, like legitimate work, may need tools that protect users from themselves — has implications well beyond the math classroom.

Oura now tracks how birth control affects sleep and recovery, and offers a new tool to measure menopause's impact on daily life.

For most of women's hormonal lives — through contraception, perimenopause, menopause — the standard of care has amounted to vague reassurance and generic symptom trackers. Oura is targeting that gap with two new features for its smart rings: Hormonal Birth Control support, which adapts its existing Cycle Insights for women using pills, patches, IUDs, implants and other hormonal methods; and Menopause Insights, which introduces a proprietary clinical questionnaire called the Menopause Impact Scale. Both roll out globally on May 6th.

The Hormonal Birth Control feature lets members log their specific contraceptive method from more than 20 combinations and see how it affects their temperature patterns, sleep and recovery over time. In the US, Oura is pairing this with a direct integration with Twentyeight Health, a women's healthcare platform, so members can book same-day clinician appointments, sync their biometric data to inform contraceptive counseling, and get prescriptions and refills delivered at home. 

Menopause Insights centers on the Menopause Impact Scale — a research-driven questionnaire built by Oura's clinical team to replace a decades-old tool developed on a small clinic-based sample. After completing the assessment, members get a personalized dashboard that tracks perimenopause symptoms across sleep, mood, cognition and daily functioning, with the option to share results with their clinician.

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What women have long been told to manage — mood swings, disrupted sleep, shifting cycles — turns out to be trackable, measurable and increasingly actionable. Oura is betting that continuous biometric data, combined with the right clinical framing, can do what a brief check-in or a general AI query can't: show someone what's actually changing in their body over time, as healthcare continues to move from episodic care to continuous context.

Plenitude is converting LED billboards to dark mode across Italy, Spain and France, cutting power draw by up to 74% and inviting other advertisers to follow.

LED billboards run hot. The brighter the pixel, the more current it draws — which means the white backgrounds, vivid skies, and sun-drenched product shots that dominate digital out-of-home advertising are also the most energy-intensive to display. Plenitude, the retail energy arm of Italian oil and gas group Eni, has decided to address that. As of mid-April, the company is converting all its LED creative across stores in Italy and DOOH placements in Italy, Spain and France to a dark-mode aesthetic: black and deep-toned backgrounds, with brand elements rendered in lower-luminance palettes.

The energy case is straightforward, and particularly urgent as the escalating conflict between the US and Iran continues to destabilize global oil markets and drive energy costs to record highs. Independent research from Certimac found that reducing average pixel luminance from 70% to 35% cuts power draw by approximately 74%. To scale the impact, Plenitude and agency LePub have released a platform that automatically converts brand assets to dark mode while preserving legibility, inviting other advertisers to use it.

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Sustainability messaging is moving out of the campaign and into the substrate. For years, brands signaled their climate credentials through dedicated initiatives — pledge ads, hero spots, capsule collections wrapped in shades of green. Plenitude's move points to a quieter alternative: the design itself carries the signal, every time the creative runs. There's no copy line about energy efficiency on a dark-mode billboard. The format is the message, and it reinforces itself thousands of times a day across screens that would otherwise be making the opposite argument by sheer brightness. That kind of ambient signaling lands differently with consumers than a campaign. It's also harder to dismiss as performative, because the savings accrue whether or not anyone notices the framing. Sustainability stops being something the brand says and becomes something the brand quietly does, in the background, at scale.

A 25-hectare Limoux estate makes French Bloom the first Maison in the world dedicated entirely to alcohol-free sparkling wine.

French Bloom has acquired a 25-hectare estate in Limoux, the southern French region considered the historic birthplace of sparkling wine. The move makes the Maison the first in the world dedicated entirely to producing non-alcoholic sparkling wines from its own vineyard and winery, with the site set to be fully operational in September 2026. Until now, French Bloom — founded in 2019 and majority-backed by Moët Hennessy since 2024 — had built its reputation on dealcoholized cuvées sourced from external partners. Owning the land changes that.

Once the estate is operational, French Bloom will be working with organic grapes purpose-grown for the process, rather than reverse-engineering a non-alcoholic product from alcoholic wines. It's an approach that affirms alcohol-free sparkling wine as a category in its own right, not a watered-down cousin of Champagne. The positioning play mirrors broader market signals: NielsenIQ reports that more than half of American adults aim to cut back on alcohol in 2025, and IWSR projects the global non-alcoholic drinks market will exceed USD 30 billion by 2030. Earlier this year, French Bloom became the first non-alcoholic wine to be served on Air France flights.

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The non-alcoholic beverage category has spent the last few years proving demand exists. The next phase is about expanding craft and quality. French Bloom's bet on owned terroir is a tell: as the premium segment matures, the brands pulling ahead are those treating alcohol-free not as a substitute or a wellness hack, but as a serious product worthy of the same provenance language — estate, vineyard, vintage — that built the wine industry's prestige tier. Expect more category leaders across spirits, beer and wine to do the same.

When caregivers clock 80 extra km a week, who pays? Citroën's answer: deduct up to 1,000 km annually from lease penalties for qualifying drivers.

In France, an estimated 11 million people — professional carers and family members — spend part of their week driving to support someone else. Visits, medical appointments, emergency runs: caregivers clock up to 80 extra kilometers a week behind the wheel for someone other than themselves. With most new cars in France acquired through leasing contracts, those kilometers come with a price tag attached at the end of the term.

Citroën, working with agency BETC, has decided to stop counting some of them. Through a new offer called Les Kilomètres Solidaires, the carmaker will deduct up to 1,000 kilometers per year from the excess-mileage penalties billed at the end of lease contracts signed between April and December 2026. To qualify, customers identify themselves as caregivers when signing and provide documentation: one of the official attestations provided in France (APA, PCH or MDPH). The offer is capped at roughly 500 contracts and runs up to 48 months. "Innovating at Citroën also means working to improve the daily lives of all our users and their loved ones," said CEO Xavier Chardon.

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Sympathetic pricing, where discounts are engineered to relieve a specific lifestyle strain rather than move volume, has been quietly spreading. Citroën isn't shaving euros off a sticker price. It's acknowledging that the standard leasing contract penalizes a population whose extra mileage isn't a choice. Les Kilomètres Solidaires treats unpaid care as something the commercial system should accommodate, not something the caregiver should absorb. (Though true solidarity might scratch the limited-time availability and cap on contracts.) For brands whose products are priced on usage, from insurance to energy to subscription services, the question is where the standard pricing model penalizes people for circumstances they didn't choose, and what it would look like to design that penalty out.

When Mercado Libre, Latin America's largest e-commerce platform, installed a series of AI-powered billboards across Buenos Aires, it turned a static medium into something reactive.

Working with creative agency GUT Buenos Aires and several tech partners, the company's 'Custom Billboards' use computer vision to read their surroundings in real time, picking up on traffic patterns, visual cues from passers-by like sportswear or business attire, even someone walking a dog. The system matches what it detects to a product from Mercado Libre's catalog and displays it alongside a scannable QR code. All processing happens on the billboard itself, and when conditions don't meet a confidence threshold, the billboard falls back on broader signals, such as weather or time of day.

The goal is contextual relevance. As GUT Buenos Aires CCO Joaquín Campins told Little Black Book: "Instead of showing the same message all day, the system decides which version of the creative makes the most sense right now." Someone cycling without a helmet might see an ad for one; someone caught in the rain, an umbrella. The QR code is integral to the creative, linking directly to the featured product. For now, the rollout is deliberately limited to a handful of transit hubs and busy intersections, giving GUT and Mercado Libre room to test and refine. But the infrastructure has been built with expansion in mind.

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In a medium where audiences routinely tune out static messages, Mercado Libre's billboards offer a proof of concept worth watching: OOH that reacts to what's actually happening around it. Just as notable is what the system doesn't do. By steering clear of facial recognition, profiling and data storage, the campaign avoids the surveillance associations that have undermined previous attempts at 'smart' outdoor advertising. That restraint may matter as much as the technology. As contextual AI improves, the competitive edge in responsive OOH will likely belong to brands that make the experience feel useful rather than intrusive.

The Infinite Now at Kraftwerk Berlin runs for 30 nonstop hours, offering beds and hammocks because sleep is treated as participation, not an interruption.

Most music festivals treat sleep as a concession, something that happens in a tent between sets. The Infinite Now, a collaboration between Berlin Atonal and Unsound taking place at Kraftwerk Berlin from May 16 to 18, flips that logic. Across 30 uninterrupted hours of ambient music, video art, and installations, beds, hammocks and rest areas are woven into the venue itself. Attendees are invited to drift in and out of consciousness as the program moves through phases of twilight, night, dawn, day and twilight again. Sleep is folded into the experience itself.

The programming rewards that kind of durational presence. Kali Malone performs a four-hour session of largely unreleased installation works timed to the quietest hours of the night. Adam Wiltzie presents a three-hour re-recording of Stars of the Lid's catalog intended for an audience waking up on day two. Spanish filmmaker Lois Patiño guides a reclining audience through a collective dream sequence. Throughout, the brutalist architecture of the former power plant opens and closes around visitors as the hours pass, time made spatial and nonlinear. "This is not a festival you attend," the organizers state. "It is a building you inhabit."

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The Infinite Now makes rest visible and communal in a way most live events actively avoid. Sleeping alongside strangers in a public space introduces a degree of vulnerability that's almost entirely absent from conventional festival formats, where the emphasis tends to be on stimulation and spectacle. The shared experience of drifting off, waking and being quietly present together becomes its own form of participation, a collective rhythm that no one choreographs but everyone contributes to. For brands designing large-scale experiences, sometimes the most memorable shared moments aren't the high-energy ones. They're the ones that ask people to slow down, drop their defenses, and simply be in the same room.

Pawmometer uses real-time weather data to estimate ground temps and flag unsafe surfaces for dogs.

Gregory Paige isn't a developer. He's a product marketer at Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin. But when the weather started heating up, he built Pawmometer — a free web tool that estimates surface temperatures based on someone's location and tells them whether it's safe for their dog to walk on asphalt, concrete, sand, artificial turf and other common ground types.

The tool is simple. Punch in a city or let it detect your location, and Pawmometer pulls real-time weather data to calculate how hot different surfaces are likely to get. It flags each one as safe, caution or avoid, and includes a reminder about the seven-second rule: if the back of your hand can't handle the surface for seven seconds, neither can your dog's paws. Paige built the whole thing using vibe coding — the increasingly popular practice of building software by describing what you want to an AI tool and letting it generate the code. No computer science degree required.

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A few years ago, an idea like Pawmometer wouldn't have gotten further than a lingering thought in someone's mind, or a rough outline in their notes app. Today, tools like Cursor, Replit and Bolt let anyone with a clear idea ship a working product in hours. That should matter to brands and product teams: when the barrier to prototyping falls away, the bottleneck shifts from technical capacity to creative thinking. The competitive advantage isn't knowing how to code — it's knowing what's worth building.

Tecate's Welcome Back, Paisano offers deported Mexicans 24 months of training and jobs within Heineken's retail network.

In 2025, the United States deported over 160,000 Mexican migrants. Many returned to a country where job prospects were thin and their support networks had dissolved. Tecate, the Heineken-owned beer brand, is now responding with "Welcome Back, Paisano," a platform built around a simple premise: returnees aren't a crisis to manage but a workforce to invest in. In partnership with nonprofit FUNDES and convenience store chain Tiendas SIX (also part of Heineken), the program offers repatriated Mexicans 24 months of job training, mentorship and employment within the SIX retail network. The first phase commits to hiring over 100 people, with plans to expand as new Tiendas SIX locations open.

This isn't a donation or a one-off hiring event. FUNDES brings four decades of workforce integration experience across Latin America; Tiendas SIX provides the actual jobs. Participants get technical training and ongoing support, with pathways into either employment or entrepreneurship. The initiative also fits a pattern for Tecate, which has run campaigns on gender-based violence prevention, responsible drinking and public beach access, each tied to Mexican identity and social responsibility. "Welcome Back, Paisano" carries more operational weight than any of those. Balancing out the earnestness, an accompanying ad entertainingly illustrates how gringos back in the US are struggling to get anything done without the skills and talent of their Mexican workers and coworkers.

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Repatriation is accelerating across the Americas, forcing brands and employers to decide whether displacement is someone else's problem or an opportunity with real commercial and social upside. Tecate's approach is worth watching less for the sentiment — plenty of brands express solidarity — and more for the mechanics: embedding returnees into an existing supply chain rather than spinning up a standalone CSR project. It treats workforce integration as a business advantage, not charity. Other brands operating in markets shaped by migration: how could you restructure your operations to turn a social challenge into an economic edge?

Most technology designed for older adults starts with a regular tablet and strips features away. Dutch startup Pedle took the opposite approach. Instead of simplifying a complex device, the company built a minimalist computer from scratch for people who find phones, tablets and laptops unworkable, whether due to age, cognitive impairment or mental health challenges.

The device handles video calling, messaging, news, radio, quizzes and photo sharing through a fixed interface that never changes. No system updates, no pop-ups. Family members and care staff manage everything remotely through a companion app, from adjusting the volume to adding items to a daily calendar. A closed contact system means strangers can't reach the user.

Pedle is currently available only through care organizations in the Netherlands, where it's used in elderly care, disability services, mental health facilities and sheltered housing. The platform connects with existing care infrastructure (calendars, client systems, meal services, even home automation) via a back-office portal and REST API. A home version is in the works.

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While internet usage numbers for adults over 65 have shown a steady increase over the past decades, that growth doesn't capture a sublter problem than pure access: many older adults who are technically "online" struggle with the devices that connect them. For those experiencing cognitive decline, even simplified interfaces can become unusable. 

Pedle shares the case of a woman in her early eighties with progressive dementia whose husband suddenly fell ill. Unable to process what was happening or call for help, she walked to her Pedle and pressed her daughter's photo. The video call connected automatically, and her daughter contacted emergency services. For the elderly woman, there were no menus to navigate, nothing to unlock, no searching — just one recognizable image and a single tap. 

The industry's usual answer to digital exclusion among older adults has been senior-friendly tablets with bigger icons and simpler menus. But when cognition itself is the barrier, the interface needs to work at the level of instinct, not instruction. It's a design principle that bridges the gap between "technically accessible" and "actually usable."