All posts tagged: Strategy

Guardian sees advertising inventory revenue up 21% with new strategy

Guardian sees advertising inventory revenue up 21% with new strategy

Published by Sam Flores

Duane Thompson, head of digital optimisation at The Guardian (left) and Imogen Fox, global chief advertising officer at The Guardian (right). Pictures: Submitted The Guardian increased revenue from programmatic advertising by 21% in a year following the introduction of its project to simplify how its advertising is bought and sold. The publisher’s Curation at Scale initiative went live in September 2025 and focuses on improving its audience signals, simplifying programmatic buying routes and making pricing more consistent across international operations. It has also cut unsold inventory by around 54% year on year in the three months to March 2026. [Read more: Guardian grows revenue to record £282m boosted by US operation] Imogen Fox, global chief advertising officer at The Guardian, told Press Gazette: “We have a high-quality context, a high-value environment, and if you don’t get your setup right, then your inventory can become devalued… It’s very important that we maximise what we can get to invest back in our journalism.” The Guardian partnered with Google Ad Manager during its 2025-26 financial year to improve …

Here’s how to find the learning strategy that makes AI work for you

Here’s how to find the learning strategy that makes AI work for you

Published by skeptic

Generative AI can explain a difficult concept, solve a problem, correct a sentence or produce an answer in seconds. That creates enormous opportunities for learning. People have more access than ever before to information about different learning strategies. But the strategies that feel easy or familiar are not necessarily those that produce the most durable learning. You are in charge when you use an AI so it’s a good idea to come up with a learning strategy that works. Understanding this matters because successfully completing a task is not the same as learning from it. AI might help a person produce the right answer today without increasing their ability to independently produce a correct answer tomorrow. Language learning provides a useful example. An app such as Duolingo can provide structure, repetition and motivation. A learner can deepen that experience by trying to produce the answer from memory before looking at or selecting the options provided by the app, repeating unfamiliar sentences aloud or revisiting difficult vocabulary. Deliberately retrieving information can improve longer term retention compared …

Apple Reboots Its Smart-Home Strategy With New Hardware and a ‘Home Collection’

Apple Reboots Its Smart-Home Strategy With New Hardware and a ‘Home Collection’

Published by skeptic

Siri AI powers the core experience, which Apple revamped this year in iOS 27. Now, Siri can answer broad questions like Gemini or ChatGPT, and it can provide personalized answers; the same personal context Siri has cataloged on your iPhone is accessible to the HomeView. Ask it to open the recipe your friend Alex messaged about, or add a dentist appointment to the family calendar, and it can handle it. Apple’s HomeView supports up to six iCloud profiles, and each person can set up a custom view only visible to them once the device’s camera detects their face. Yes, there’s a camera on the HomeView. The computer vision trick where the HomeView displays a custom view for a specific individual when they approach it only works if the person’s iPhone is on the same Wi-Fi network and was recently unlocked. You need an iPhone with Apple Intelligence support (iPhone 15 Pro or newer) to get the most out of the device; you can’t set it up with an iPad. We have a separate story with …

DoorDash’s drone strategy started on the ground

DoorDash’s drone strategy started on the ground

Published by skeptic

When DoorDash set out to build a drone delivery business, it started with the tricky logistics that happen on the ground before it looked up. The autonomous drone came last, according to the company, which unveiled its new six-propeller aircraft at its annual Dash Forward 2026 event on Wednesday. Before DoorDash worked on the aircraft, the company focused on ground infrastructure, including loading systems, how food would be handed off from a restaurant’s kitchen, and packaging. DoorDash Labs, the R&D team that built its autonomous sidewalk delivery bot Dot, created the drone delivery service now called DoorDash Air. The same team also developed the underlying software, called the Autonomous Delivery Platform (ADP), to handle the coordination challenges in deliveries handled by humans, sidewalk delivery bots, and now drones. The ADP software uses smart routing, incorporating factors like weather, flight range, and ground traffic to narrow down which orders actually make sense to send by air. Image Credits:DoorDash The company’s systems-first strategy for its DoorDash Air business aligns with its strengths. DoorDash isn’t a hardware company, …

Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta uses ‘desirable difficulties’ to prepare his players – is this a good coaching strategy?

Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta uses ‘desirable difficulties’ to prepare his players – is this a good coaching strategy?

Published by skeptic

The former England rugby union coach, Sir Clive Woodward, once shared an anecdote about an unexpectedly delayed diving contest, after an interloper in fancy dress had jumped in the pool. Woodward described how some competitors became overly anxious, ill-focused and disturbed, while others stayed calm, continued their preparation, and treated these altered circumstances as part of the challenge. Not surprisingly, the latter divers performed much better when the competition resumed. In a similar vein, Arsenal men’s football manager Mikel Arteta spoke recently about deliberately creating unexpected disruptions for his players as part of their preparation. The Spaniard, whose contract has just been extended by the Premier League champions, explained that he does this to promote greater adaptability among his players, when they have to perform at the highest level under fluctuating real-world circumstances. Arteta’s tactics include unexpectedly delaying the players’ meals, changing their travel plans, making dressing rooms hotter and reducing the number of massage beds. Another reported example was secretly hiring professional pickpockets at a team dinner, to emphasise the importance of maintaining awareness …

Atlanta zoo to get pandas as Xi revives strategy at U.S. summit

Atlanta zoo to get pandas as Xi revives strategy at U.S. summit

Published by Sam Flores

Chinese leader Xi Jinping promised two giant pandas to Zoo Atlanta, reviving Beijing’s decades-old charm offensive on the opening day of his first state visit to the U.S. in more than a decade. Two giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, from a research base in Chengdu will arrive at the Georgia zoo “in the coming days,” Xi said. They would be Zoo Atlanta’s first pandas since its previous four returned to China in November 2024, when it became the last U.S. zoo to lose its bears. The Chinese president made the announcement at the start of his state visit in Washington, where he and President Donald Trump are meeting through Friday on an agenda spanning artificial intelligence, tariffs, critical minerals, Taiwan and the Iran war. “The giant panda has been an envoy of friendship between the Chinese and Americans,” he said at a White House ceremony. China has used pandas as a diplomatic barometer since Mao Zedong sent a pair to Washington’s National Zoo following Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit, a gift so anticipated that …

U.S. alliance strains complicate China strategy

U.S. alliance strains complicate China strategy

Published by Sam Flores

President Donald Trump has spent years trying to squeeze China — imposing tariffs, cutting off access to advanced technology and pressing U.S. allies to reduce their dependence on Beijing. When he begins meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday, he’ll juxtapose the long-standing bluster with the pomp and circumstance the leaders lavish on each other. And the two-day tête-à-tête will take place as Trump confronts a China that has proved harder to isolate and allies increasingly reluctant to line up behind the U.S. to do it. Part of that is Beijing’s doing. China has deepened trade ties around the world while building leverage of its own, most notably through rare earths. Its global trade surplus is on pace to top $1 trillion for a second straight year, reaching a record $1.2 trillion for 2025 even as its exports to the U.S. dropped. But the shift also reflects Trump’s approach. Since returning to office, fights over tariffs, defense spending and personal spats have strained relationships with traditional allies even as Trump has pursued a more …

An Engineering Strategy for Testing Self-Improvement Plans

An Engineering Strategy for Testing Self-Improvement Plans

Published by Jenni Sidey

Backtesting is a technique used to test a new system based on whether it would have done what you needed it to do in a past situation, where you already have existing data of exactly what happened and the specific stress the system would’ve needed to withstand. Let’s first explore a business example and then see how the principles translate to personal situations. Business case: You run a website, and your server got overloaded during a promotion. You upgrade and then simulate the exact conditions that occurred before to see if the new setup could handle the prior conditions. The main negative of backtesting is that it can cause you to “overfit” your plans to past scenarios but fail to anticipate new ones. For instance, you plan for how your website could withstand a sudden influx of real users but not an army of bots. Or, in a personal context, you design a system for how to not let your exercise routine be overly disrupted when your child is sick, but the plan doesn’t account …

UK government’s new ‘class unit’ promises to tackle inequalities – but it’s a risky strategy

UK government’s new ‘class unit’ promises to tackle inequalities – but it’s a risky strategy

Published by Sam Flores

Inequality has been debated in British politics for decades, often with a reluctance to address class issues. Bridget Phillipson, the minister for women and equalities, thinks this needs to change. Announcing the government’s new class unit, she argued that Britain has been “squeamish about class for too long”. Class has, of course, never disappeared from the policy agenda. But in recent decades it has largely been addressed through the language of social mobility: how do we help talented people from disadvantaged backgrounds climb the ladder? Much of this work has been channelled through the Social Mobility Commission, an independent statutory advisory body that monitors social mobility and reports to parliament. The commission has produced some excellent research. However, a key weakness has been that while it can research, monitor and advise, it cannot compel government to act. Bridget Phillipson wants to see a new approach to class issues. repic/Shutterstock The government now plans to abolish it and bring this work into the Office for Equality and Opportunity. The new class unit will focus on low-income …