In its latest retreat from India's crowded online retail market, Walmart-backed fintech giant PhonePe has wound down its Pincode e-commerce app and will shift the business toward B2B services for offline merchants. On Thursday, PhonePe founder and group CEO Sameer Nigam said operating a consumer-facing quick-commerce app had become a distraction from the company's core focus on small retailers. The company instead wants to concentrate on helping stores 'achieve operational efficiency, improved margins and visibility,' he said, citing this as its primary objective. PhonePe launched Pincode in April 2023 as a major push into e-commerce, building it on the Indian government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). The hyperlocal app offered groceries, medicines, food, electronics, and home decor from neighborhood shops. It rolled out first in Bengaluru and later expanded to other cities. Within a little over a year of launch, Pincode pulled out of most categories except food. Earlier this year, the app shifted to a quick-commerce model, offering 10-minute deliveries through local kirana shops and retailers in cities such as Bengaluru, New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Pune. The company also expanded the service to 10-minute medicine deliveries in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Pune in April....

AWS announced a wave of new AI agent tools at re:Invent 2025, but can Amazon actually catch up to the AI leaders' While the cloud giant is betting big on enterprise AI with its third-gen chip and database discounts that got developers cheering, it's still fighting to prove it can compete beyond infrastructure. This week on Equity, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the ROI on AI agents, plus the collision course between Hollywood and generative AI, and why everyone wants their own version of Spotify Wrapped. Theresa Loconsolo is an audio producer at TechCrunch focusing on Equity, the network's flagship podcast. Before joining TechCrunch in 2022, she was one of 2 producers at a four-station conglomerate where she wrote, recorded, voiced and edited content, and engineered live performances and interviews from guests like lovelytheband. Theresa is based in New Jersey and holds a bachelors degree in Communication from Monmouth University. Show your CFO the marketing proof they want!Join a free webinar hosted by Pantheon on Tuesday December 9 at 10am PT to learn where spend delivers & how to build a 2026 strategy grounded in real results....

When people use hand gestures that visually represent what they're saying, listeners see them as more clear, competent and persuasive. That's the key finding from my new research published in the Journal of Marketing Research, where I analyzed thousands of TED Talks and ran controlled experiments to examine how gestures shape communication. I grew up in Italy, where gesturing is practically a second language. Now that I live in the United States, I've become acutely aware of how cultures differ in how, and how much, people move their hands when they talk. Still, across contexts and cultures, one thing is constant: People do talk with their hands. To study gestures at scale, my team and I analyzed 200,000 video segments from more than 2,000 TED Talks using AI tools that can detect and classify hand gestures frame by frame. We paired this with controlled experiments in which our study participants evaluated entrepreneurs pitching a product. The same pattern of results appeared in both settings. In the AI-analyzed TED Talk data, illustrative gestures predicted higher audience evaluations, reflected in more than 33 million online 'likes' of the videos. And in our experiments, 1,600 participants rated speakers who used illustrative gestures as more clear, competent and persuasive....

Lo and behold, one of my most-listened-to songs was an obscure 2004 track titled 'Rusty Chevrolet' by the Irish band Shanneyganock. I heard it first thanks to my son, whose friend had been singing it on the swings at school. My son found it utterly hilarious, and it's been playing in our house nonstop ever since. Like parents all over the world, I rue how my son's musical tastes have hijacked my listening history. But I'm also tickled to learn that our household is probably one of the few even listening to it. Spotify Wrapped is an annual campaign by the popular streaming music platform. Since 2015, the streaming service has been repackaging user data ' specifically, the listening history of Spotify's users over the past year ' into attractive, personalized slideshows featuring, among other data points, your top five songs, your total listening time and even your 'listening personality.' (Are you a 'Replayer,' a 'Maverick' or a 'Vampire'') As a consumer behavior researcher, I've thought about why these lists get so much attention each year. I suspect that the success of Spotify Wrapped may have a lot to do with how the flashy, shareable graphics are connected to a couple of fundamental ' and somewhat contradictory ' human needs....