Latest news with #February2025
Grazia USA
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Grazia USA
This Is The Exact Lip Liner Dakota Johnson Used In 'Materialists'
Dakota Johnson at SNL50: The Anniversary Special at 30 Rockefeller Plaza on February 16, 2025 in New York, New York. (Photo by John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images) In Materialists , A24's latest indie-romcom, directed by Celine Song, Dakota Johnson returns to screens alongside Internet heartthrobs Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans. Beyond the love triangle plot and commentaries on modern dating, it's been drawing attention for the actress' appearance. In the film, Johnson plays Lucy, a Manhattan matchmaker for the one per cent, who pairs pinstripe blazers with miniskirts, and breezy slip dresses with sneakers. But beyond the effortless polish of her wardrobe (which resembles Johnson's real-life style) is a makeup look that has the Internet rushing to recreate—and now we can, thanks to eagle-eyed fans. Casually applied in one of the film's early mirror moments was a lip liner that viewers instantly recognised as MAC Cosmetics (and confirmed by fan account @dakotajohnsonscloset). As revealed by the film's makeup artist, Emma Strachman, the secret weapon is indeed the brand's Lip Pencil, specifically in the shade Oak. Chris Evans and Dakota Johnson are seen on the movie set of 'Materialists' on June 03, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images) Having graced the lips of Pascal and Evans, the soft beige-brown hue is as versatile as it is chic, giving Johnson's lips a blurred, natural contour and depth without ever upstaging the rest of her look. Better yet, the neutral tone sets the perfect base for both her rosy daytime looks and dialled-up evening glam. Pedro Pascal (L) and Dakota Johnson are seen filming 'Materialists' in Tribeca on May 08, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Gotham/GC Images) Money may not buy love, according to the film's message, but an under-$50 lip liner that comes approved by Madame Webb herself? Not too shabby. Shop MAC Cosmetics' Lip Liner in Oak below. MAC Cosmetics Lip Pencil in 'Oak', $40 SHOP NOW topics: Dakota Johnson, Materialists, Celine Song, celebrity, celebrity news, Beauty, Beauty News, celebrity beauty, film, Film News, movies, MAC Cosmetics, Trending
Fast Company
5 days ago
- Business
- Fast Company
Where the design jobs are in 2025
BY Generative AI—and the velocity of its evolution—is forcing every breed of designer to contemplate a future without them. Will Midjourney and DALL-E eliminate the need for graphic designers? Will Claude and Gemini obviate the UX lead? What happens to motion artists in a world where Sora supposedly becomes the newest auteur? We're no sages. And we're certainly not clairvoyant. But we can comfortably say that, even if an AI-driven design industry apocalypse is coming, it hasn't arrived yet. Our second annual report on the state of the design industry draws from a dataset of 176,000 job listings we've gathered on Google Jobs (which consolidates listings from across the internet, including Indeed, LinkedIn, and regional job boards) from October 2023 to February 2025. They span several design disciplines: graphic, interior, game, urban, UX, product, and architectural. The clearest and perhaps most reassuring takeaway this year? Designers are still needed. Graphic and UX design job postings are flat from last year, game design postings are up, and urban design postings are way up. Only architects and product designers saw a dip, with postings for the latter down 24% from last year. So it's not time yet to abandon that art or architecture degree in order to become a prompt engineer.
Hospitality Net
13-06-2025
- Business
- Hospitality Net
Rebuilding hotel tech stacks for the Agentic AI era Philip Barton
A new kind of traveller is emerging, one who may never visit your website, click an ad, or speak to a human. Instead, they rely on their personal AI agent to plan, compare, negotiate, and book every aspect of their trip. This shift marks a seismic change in how travel is discovered and transacted, demanding a fundamental rethink of hotel technology stacks. Are hoteliers ready for this new class of guests and their digital representatives? Consider how AI-driven website traffic is already having a dramatic impact: According to Ahrefs, 63% of websites receive AI traffic , with smaller sites experiencing the highest proportion. , with smaller sites experiencing the highest proportion. A survey by Adobe reveals that traffic from generative AI sources (chatbots or AI-powered search assistants) on U.S. travel websites rose 1,700% from Jul 2024 to Feb same survey shows that visitors arriving via generative AI tools show 8% higher engagement, view 12% more pages, and have a 23% lower bounce rate than non-AI traffic sources. reveals that traffic from generative AI sources (chatbots or AI-powered search assistants) on U.S. travel websites rose 1,700% from Jul 2024 to Feb same survey shows that visitors arriving via generative AI tools show 8% higher engagement, view 12% more pages, and have a 23% lower bounce rate than non-AI traffic sources. Cloudflare found that monthly traffic to generative AI services grew by 251%between February 2024 and March 2025. So, what does this all mean for the hospitality industry? Most hospitality tech stacks weren't built for AI; they were designed for humans, not machines. Legacy systems are slow, fragmented, and incapable of speaking the language of autonomous AI. To stay visible and bookable in an AI-agent-first ecosystem, hotels must rethink their infrastructure from the data layer up, embracing real-time interoperability, AI-native protocols, and machine-readable data formats. Is your data AI-ready? The rise of AI agents demands a fundamental shift in how hotels manage and present their data. Traditional website designs optimised for visual appeal and manual navigation are insufficient for engaging with AI-driven tools. Hotels must evaluate their systems against the following criteria: Structured data formats: Implement markup to make room availability, pricing, and amenities accessible to AI crawlers. Implement markup to make room availability, pricing, and amenities accessible to AI crawlers. Real-time accessibility: Ensure APIs deliver fast, accurate responses to queries from AI agents, with latency ideally under 100ms and definitely under 200ms. The 95th percentile for API response times should always be under 3 seconds. Ensure APIs deliver fast, accurate responses to queries from AI agents, with latency ideally under 100ms and definitely under 200ms. The 95th percentile for API response times should always be under 3 seconds. Interoperability: Adopt protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) to enable seamless interaction between hotel systems and external AI platforms. Adopt protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) to enable seamless interaction between hotel systems and external AI platforms. Dynamic content updates: Automate inventory and pricing updates to reflect real-time changes, ensuring AI agents always access the latest information. Hotels that fail to meet these standards risk becoming invisible to AI agents, which prioritise systems capable of delivering clean, actionable data. By preparing their data for this new user class, hoteliers can ensure they remain competitive in an increasingly automated travel ecosystem. Building the foundation: A focused, AI-ready architecture Modern hospitality stacks begin with unified data ecosystems that aggregate guest profiles, operational metrics, and market signals into cloud-based repositories. This eliminates silos between PMS, CRM, and revenue management systems, creating a single source of truth. Unifying data overlaid with semantic meaning is the prerequisite for AI innovation, enabling real-time analysis of guest preferences, occupancy trends, and competitive pricing. With clean data pipelines, hotels can deploy AI co-pilots that: Adjust room rates dynamically using market demand signals Predict guest preferences (room, meal selection, room settings, etc) Handle customer inquiries through conversational AI Optimise housekeeping routes and inventory orders. These systems learn continuously, improving efficiency and personalisation over time. Agentic integration: MCP and the rise of the A2A Economy The emergence of AI agents opens a new paradigm for hotels: active participation in the agentic economy. Hotels can no longer passively rely on traditional distribution channels. To thrive, they must embrace strategies that enable seamless interaction with AI agents, creating new avenues for booking, personalisation, and revenue generation. This starts with understanding and implementing key protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which paves the way for the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) economy. MCP is a new and evolving protocol that transforms hotels into active participants in the A2A economy. It standardises how AI agents interface with hotel systems, expanding the capabilities of individual agents by enabling them to connect and interact with other specialised agents, leading to richer and more versatile functionalities. This benefits hotels as it allows their systems to: Offer more comprehensive travel solutions : By connecting with external AI agents, hotels can offer bundled packages that include flights, transportation, and local experiences, all coordinated seamlessly. : By connecting with external AI agents, hotels can offer bundled packages that include flights, transportation, and local experiences, all coordinated seamlessly. Reach a wider audience : Integration with diverse AI travel platforms expands the hotel's reach beyond traditional channels, tapping into new customer segments. : Integration with diverse AI travel platforms expands the hotel's reach beyond traditional channels, tapping into new customer segments. Improve efficiency and reduce costs: Automating interactions with AI agents minimises the need for human intervention in routine tasks, freeing up staff to focus on higher-value activities. MCP is a rapidly evolving landscape that can potentially eliminate fragile API integrations, allowing properties to connect with numerous services through a single MCP gateway. Imagine a guest's travel agent AI seamlessly booking rooms, spa services, and dinner reservations by interfacing directly with your hotel's agent. Optimising the agent experience 8Traditionally, websites have focused on the user experience (UX). However, the rise of AI demands a focus on the agent experience (AX) that must consider a different set of technical priorities: AI-accessible inventory: Expose rooms, amenities, and add-ons through GraphQL APIs and enable multi-property package bookings in a single transaction. Expose rooms, amenities, and add-ons through GraphQL APIs and enable multi-property package bookings in a single transaction. Machine-readable content: Replace visual call to actions (CTAs) with annotations, reconsider SEO in the context of how LLMs view your brand visibility, and implement tags for preferential crawling. Replace visual call to actions (CTAs) with annotations, reconsider SEO in the context of how LLMs view your brand visibility, and implement tags for preferential crawling. Agent Experience (AX) design: Develop parallel website versions optimized for API interactions. Semantic consistency and support for multiple data sources, including social and query graphs, are all key. Develop parallel website versions optimized for API interactions. Semantic consistency and support for multiple data sources, including social and query graphs, are all key. Dynamic commission structures: Create lower AI-specific affiliate tiers and offer bulk booking discounts for high-intent agent queries. Transitioning from legacy systems to seize the AI opportunity The transition to an agent-mediated hospitality landscape is not a distant possibility but an accelerating reality. Hotels that delay implementing MCP capabilities and an agent-friendly infrastructure risk significant market share erosion within 12-18 months as AI travel planning becomes mainstream. Forward-thinking properties are already capturing early-adopter advantages through strategic partnerships with emerging AI travel platforms. The challenge now is how quickly hoteliers can transform their digital infrastructure to become preferred partners in the A2A economy, where AI agents will increasingly mediate guest relationships. The journey to an AI-first architecture means hotels must adopt a modern technology stack by: Phasing out on-premise systems with cloud-native platforms offering open API access. Adopting composable data and platform architecture using microservices for easy MCP integration. Considering website SEO and agentic presentation pathways. Retraining staff on AI-assisted workflows, reducing manual data entry. Revamped stacks for the Agentic AI era will drive operational efficiency and real-time channel optimisation by automatically redistributing inventory across the most profitable channels and guest profiles. First-mover hoteliers will help shape the new distribution paradigm and have greater control over their digital destiny in the age of AI.
Forbes
12-06-2025
- Forbes
Alexa+ Users Top 1 Million - Here's What People Are Saying
Tablets showcase Alexa+ software features during an unveiling event in New York, US, on Wednesday, ... More Feb. 26, 2025. Amazon has rebooted Alexa with artificial intelligence, marking the biggest overhaul of the voice-activated assistant since its introduction over a decade ago. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg At the start of 2025, following months of speculation, Amazon finally unveiled its next-gen digital assistant, Alexa+. Revealed during a launch event in New York in February, the AI-supercharged version of Alexa was, we were informed, about to "start rolling out in the US in the next few weeks during an early access period." It was slow going though; as recently as last month there were reports suggesting there was "scant evidence it is in regular customers' hands." However, The Verge is now reporting that over a million users now have access to the generative artificial-intelligence-powered voice assistant. That's the word according to Amazon spokesperson Eric Sveum, who stated that the roll out was now happening at "an increasing pace" and that Amazon will "make it even more broadly available over the summer." And there's plenty of evidence over on Reddit that it is indeed the case, with numerous posters confirming their Echo devices have been updated with Alexa+. On the whole, people seem pretty pleased; with both the UI and responsiveness getting praise from early access users… But it's not all positive press, with other users commenting on some teething issues, especially when it comes to controlling smart home devices: It's hardly surprising that there's been a mixed response and, of course, while a million is a decent test sample, the amount of Alexa users is in the hundreds of millions. In April, it was also revealed by The Washington Post that several headline features weren't ready for the Alexa+ initial rollout, including ordering food from Grubhub, and visual recognition for assigning reminders to specific family members. So it's clear that, while the million users number is a good soundbite, Alexa+ is still very much an experimental work in progress. If you do want to get in on the Alexa+ action, you'll need an Echo Show 8, Show 10, Show 15 or 21, as these are the first devices it is rolling out to. As and when you do get access, Alexa+ will cost $19.99 a month; unless you're a Prime member, in which case you'll get access included in that subscription.
News24
01-06-2025
- General
- News24
Meet the woman behind Ask A Mom, a safe, supportive space for mothers who need a community
She was merely sharing her real, raw journey about single motherhood on TikTok. From one video to the next, many mothers resonated with her story, and the next thing, the community of mothers called for a Whatsapp group chat which she started in February 2025. Before she knew it, the community turned into an initiative and selfless movement aimed to help out mothers in their struggles. Nobuhle Radebe, affectionately known as BheePosh tells Drum how activism found her and philanthropy followed naturally. 'I didn't set out with a clear plan to step into motherhood, activism, or philanthropy in the way that I have, but life has a way of calling you into purpose through experience. Motherhood came first, and with it, a complete shift in perspective. Activism found me when I started sharing my real, raw journey on TikTok. I wasn't trying to be anything other than honest. But the more I shared, the more I realised how many women felt the same: overwhelmed, isolated, and in need of community. One comment suggested I start a WhatsApp group, and philanthropy followed naturally. 'Once you start connecting with people's real needs, when you see someone crying because they received baby formula, or you witness moms donating breast pumps and nappies to one another, you can't turn away. Helping others became an extension of my motherhood journey and a reflection of the kind of world I want my children to grow up in,' she adds. Read more | From Khayelitsha to international runways, Mzukisi Mbane on turning passion into award-winning success Now, she's a proud founder of Ask A Mom, a community-based support initiative born to create a safe, non-judgmental space for mothers. Nobuhle has created a platform where women can ask questions, share their experiences, seek advice from each other and qualified professionals, and receive both emotional and practical support. 'Whether you're navigating the early days of motherhood or balancing the demands of parenting, Ask A Mom exists to ensure that no mother feels alone at any point of their motherhood journey. We are proud to have a qualified social worker and midwife as part of our community, offering credible, compassionate guidance when it's needed most. At its core, Ask A Mom is about empowering mothers through connection, compassion, and community, regardless of their background or circumstances,' the mother of two says. Though she's no longer single, her heart has grown fond of the mothers that felt seen and heard by her. Currently, the Whatsapp group chat has over 170 moms who actively participate and support one another every day. 'For safety and to protect the integrity of the space especially since we discuss sensitive topics and offer personal support each new member is required to complete a vetting questionnaire to confirm that they are indeed a mom or a mom to be. This step ensures that the space remains trusted, secure, and genuine.' From all the stories and journeys, she's had a front-row seat to through her initiative, she says the one that stands out the most for her is one of a first-time mom who had virtually no support besides her partner. 'The moms in the group came together and created a heartfelt video filled with realistic, honest tips to support her through the early stages of motherhood. It was such a genuine act of community. 'There was also a young mom who didn't have the essentials to prepare for her baby's arrival. Without hesitation, other moms stepped in and put together a package of essentials, from nappies and baby clothes to toiletries and more. What's even more inspiring is that group members often go out of their way to deliver these items personally, breast pumps, baby clothes, nappies you name it. It's that kind of real-world action and sisterhood that keeps me going. It's proof that when women come together, incredible things happen,' she beams with pride. Under Ask A Mom, the 30-year-old houses a few programmes that include the following; - Commerce and Career Wednesdays (Ongoing) This bi-weekly digital series is dedicated to helping mothers reclaim or elevate their careers. Whether returning to work after maternity leave or exploring new professional paths, Commerce and Career Wednesdays provides practical tools like CV building, LinkedIn optimisation, interview tips, and entrepreneurial guidance. We've featured expert guests and real success stories. - Virtual Birth Class (April 2025) In response to the overwhelming need for accessible and reliable birth education, we hosted a free virtual birth class facilitated by healthcare professionals. The session covered crucial topics like labour preparation, creating birth plans, postpartum recovery, and mental well-being. - Winter Drive (Current) ' Our Winter Drive is one of our most heartfelt initiatives. As temperatures drop, we are collecting and intend to distribute warm clothing, blankets, baby supplies, and food to moms and families in need. Some moms not only donate but also volunteer to collect and deliver items to others in their area. It's a real-life reflection of the Ask A Mom spirit: no mother left behind. This drive reminds us that even the smallest act of kindness like a warm jacket or a pack of nappies can bring dignity and comfort to another family.' 'Each of these programmes is born from real needs expressed by our community. Whether it's emotional support, professional development, birth education, or physical resources, Ask A Mom strives to show up for mothers in tangible, life-changing ways.' Read more | Lawrence Maleka gets real about fame and hosting Friends of Amstel With the winter drive, the goal is to keep at least 100 families warm with winter packages, with basic items such as clothes, non-perishable food, and blankets. All the items collected will be donated to the Frida Hartley Women's Shelter in Yeoville, Johannesburg during Mandela month (July). While motherhood has taught her endurance, emotional depth, and vulnerability with all the sleepless nights and financial stress, helping other mothers has given her life purpose and meaning beyond words. If anything, it's been a constant reminder that healing can happen through community. 'In the next 5–10 years, I see Ask A Mom growing into a national network of physical and digital support hubs. I envision resource centres in every major city where mothers can get help, attend workshops, and simply connect. We hope to be a recognised voice in maternal wellbeing and advocacy, driving policy and social change,' she confidently tells Drum. Nobuhle is also the founder of Fempire Afrika, a digital solutions marketing agency that helps brands grow through strategic content and online visibility, a full-time content creator, and she also runs Luna Boheme ZA, a gold non-tarnish jewellery line that celebrates elegance, individuality, and everyday luxury.
