🤫  Hush up, microwave

👋  Good morning. If your boss keeps nagging you about that upcoming deadline, remind them that good things take time. Take, for example, the church in Germany hosting the world’s slowest concert. The same organ composition has been playing for nearly 25 years, and will keep playing until the year 2640. If you want your distant descendants to hear the final chord — if, you know, Earth is still around and all — inheritable tickets are already on sale. 

NEWS FLASH 

🐑  Baa, baa, track sheep: New Zealand startup WoolPass is building a “passport for wool” that digitally traces each bale of wool from farm to finished product. The platform uses photo-based identification and would help growers prove their wool’s origin, track movement, and provide more supply chain transparency.

🧑‍🏫  Where was this when we were crying over math homework? Edtech startup Wild Zebra is developing an AI-powered math and reading tutor that helps students find answers themselves. The startup, which raised $6m to expand and now serves tens of thousands of students, says it takes a Socratic approach that focuses on reasoning and customizes lesson plans around student interests, like sports, cooking, or music.

🤑  It’s my data and I’ll sell it if I want to: Verb launched a marketplace that lets consumers sell their personal data — including browsing, shopping, and social media activity — directly to AI companies. Users install a tracker on their phones and choose what information to share, who can buy it, and for what price, monetizing something users have previously given away for free.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• BRB, moving to Paris: France will enact a ban on unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week. If anyone ran on that platform in the US, the White House would be theirs. 
  

• Even your bubble tea is falling to private equity: Bain Capital is acquiring fast-growing global boba ​chain Gong Cha. The milk tea purveyor has nearly 2.2k stores around the world.
  

• You snooze, you lose: We’re six months out from Super Bowl LXI, but all of the ad inventory has already sold out. Disney, which owns the rights to the game, was asking ~$10m per 30-second ad. 
  

• Nailed it: You can now get New York's first robotic manicure inside a Yonkers Ulta, where startup 10Beauty uses computer vision and precision robotics to handle everything from polish removal and cuticle care to color application and drying for $30-$35.

SOAR IN SEARCH 

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THE BIG IDEA

The startup silencing your microwave's annoying beep

If you've ever scrambled to the microwave like a maniac to halt the piercing "beep, beep, beeeeep" — alerting the neighborhood to your late-night burrito indulgence — this will be music to your ears.

Starling, a two-person startup, developed a surprisingly simple solution to tame those annoying beeps without requiring new hardware, per Wired.

Buzz off

Why is the microwave beep such a near-universal annoyance?

It's all thanks to a small device known as a passive piezoelectric buzzer.

Popularized by Japanese manufacturers in the 1970s, the simple buzzers vibrate when electrically charged and, importantly, cost mere pennies.

They've been used in alarm clocks, smoke detectors, those beloved Nokia phones, and, of course, microwaves.

Versatile and cheap, piezo buzzers are also limited to adjustments of frequency and duration. Effective, but irritating and devoid of personality.

Until now

Starling, a new sonic-branding studio launched by sound designer Joel Corelitz and creative strategist Colin Coogan, aims to improve microwave sounds by leveraging the tech already inside. Collectively, their previous clients have included Sony, Netflix, and Ford, so they probably know what they're doing.

Simply adding a speaker and playback system would increase cost and complexity — a tough sell for an inexpensive appliance.

Instead, they built Microwave Sound Bench, software to program the buzzer's frequency and duration using an Arduino microcontroller. Most microwaves already contain microcontrollers, so a manufacturer would just need to add new code.

Instead of beeps, the buzzers could play a multitude of frequencies and sequences that sound infinitely better. Even button sounds could be adjusted.

While Corelitz and Coogan told Wired they would be happy to work with companies to upgrade their microwaves, they also aren't concerned about them "borrowing" the idea.

As designers and audio consultants, they have more to offer brands in terms of sonic branding.

• Sonic branding — strategically crafted sound that creates a company's unique audio identity and elicits emotional responses from customers — is considered the most underutilized component of marketing.
  
• Three-quarters of Gen Z consumers say music makes them feel more connected to a brand.
  
• Amp Sound Branding's Best Sound Brand study ranks companies' sonic branding strategies.

We'll just be happy enjoying our burritos to a more pleasant tune — and maybe one shorter than Samsung's "The Trout."

(Oh, and you can mute most microwaves. But where's the fun in that?)

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Peek behind the curtain: Steal these lessons from New York City’s elite. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Days that David Figueroa worked as a retail sales associate at a Connecticut-area Comcast store before resigning over a strange (maybe illegal?) workplace policy in which underperforming employees were tied down and violently pied in the face every month at their manager’s direction. The former employee, who is understandably not pleased, is now suing the company for damages.

Employees “should not be subject to assaults by co-workers for poor work performance,” the complaint reads. That seems right.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1782, George Washington created a new “Badge for Military Merit" decoration, known today as the Purple Heart.

🧲  That’s fun: Write a message with fridge magnets.

🧊  Game: Go, little ice cube.

➤  That’s fun: Funky effects for your cursor.

🦦  Aww: A sleepy otter. 

SHOWER THOUGHT

If you find difficult things easy, you are either very smart or very dumb.  SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Singdhi Sokpo and Danny Jensen.

Editing by: Sara "Mic drop" Friedman.

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