Jour : 12 janvier 2026
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It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
Translations: Chinese I was reading Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 and found this nice illustration: accompanied by explanation: Fast forward to 2025. Apple releases macOS Tahoe. Main attraction? Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating icons (their words, not mine!) to every menu item: Sequoia → Tahoe It’s bad. But why exactly is…
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Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse
Jon Henshaw: I’m here with the creator of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko, and I’m excited to finally meet you. Eugen Rochko …and I’m excited to talk to you in person. Well, not in person, but you know what I mean. JH: It’s more in person than it’s ever been. Yeah. As opposed to the random Mastodon…
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Walmart Opens Up Ads in Gen AI Shopping Agent Sparky
Walmart wants in on the AI advertising boom.The retailer announced that it is actively testing ads within Sparky, its AI shopping agent, after an initial test last fall.Sparky is an AI shopping assistant within Walmart’s mobile app. Shoppers can ask Sparky questions and prompts to find products, and Sparky analyzes products and reviews to recommend…
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When Nobody’s Watching: Why 99%+ Reliability Is the Only ROI That Matters
By Stephen Burke, Founder & CEO, RobosizeME In hotel operations, automation doesn’t fail loudly. It fails quietly. That could be a reason why 72%1 of hotel chains do not yet leverage workflow automation (automating repetitive and rule-based tasks). Not because they lack ambition, budgets, or ideas, but because they lack trust in operational reliability. When…
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237. CES 2026 – “The Future Is Here” and “Innovators Show Up” #CES2026
CES is a trade show and not a broad consumer event. It just so happens that it attracts so many in the industry that it has often been covered as a broad interest news event. My sense is the coverage was somewhat muted this year (judging by the extremes of X and CNN) but I…
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Moving Past ROAS as Marketing KPI
For years, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) has been treated as the gold standard for evaluating hotel marketing performance. But as traveler behavior evolves and the planning journey becomes longer and more complex, it’s clear that ROAS no longer tells the full story. A more strategic, full-funnel approach is needed. One that aligns marketing, revenue…
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Bed Time Stories by Testbed Vegas: The CES 2026 Edition
Good afternoon, everyone! Testbed Vegas is on the ground for the biggest week of the year. It’s CES week in Las Vegas, and the city is buzzing with the electric energy of over 140,000 innovators, creators, and disruptors. This week, we are stripping away the general news to focus entirely on CES 2026. The theme…
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I Ran an AI Misinformation Experiment. Every Marketer Should See the Results
I invented a fake luxury paperweight company, spread three made-up stories about it online, and watched AI tools confidently repeat the lies.Almost every AI I tested used the fake info—some eagerly, some reluctantly. The lesson is: in AI search, the most detailed story wins, even if it’s false.AI will talk about your brand no matter what, and…
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Big news yesterday from Google, changing how we book everything from hotel rooms to tours to flights: – Google and a group of major retailers launched a new tool (Universal Commerce Protocol). The… | Benjamin Rhatigan
Big news yesterday from Google, changing how we book everything from hotel rooms to tours to flights: – Google and a group of major retailers launched a new tool (Universal Commerce Protocol). The takeaway is shopping will no longer depend on clicking through a website. You will tell an AI assistant what you want, it…
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The Complete OTAs of the World List
The global OTA landscape is often discussed, as the Booking / Expedia duopoly, yet it is surprisingly rarely visualized in a global way that makes it truly actionable for hoteliers. Everyone knows the big names. Few people understand their real weight, their regional power, and how dramatically uneven the market actually is. We are also…