Twenty-five years later, so many of us can still remember exactly where we were, what we saw, and how that day felt. Today, we remember the lives lost, the people who ran toward danger, and the families who have carried that loss ever since.
We haven’t forgotten.
Investors Smell Moneyin Better SleepThe Watch Is Swiss.
**The Motive May Be Handbag-Shaped.**Can a
Cheaper, Stranger PhoneSteal Apple’s Customers?The Robot Did My Homework.
**(It Also Took My GPA.)**FICO Might Lose the Monopoly Vibe
**And From Around the Web:**Rebranded States, Consolidated Carbs, and Organized Robots
The news shaping business, finance, and technology, for better or considerably worse.
Sleep tech startups are looking for a new sensory frontier: smell.
Israeli company Kimba just raised $6.5M for a bedside device that puffs AI-tuned scents throughout the night. Memory Air takes a similar route, using a neuroscientist-developed device that cycles 40 essential oils past your face while you sleep.
There’s money in better sleep. Nearly half of American adults say stress often disrupts their sleep, and the global sleep tech device market is expected to top $160B by 2035. Eight Sleep recently raised $50M at a $1.5B valuation, while Oura is reportedly eyeing an IPO at more than $16B.
That makes smell one of the few less-crowded corners left.
The obvious problem: sleep tech can be hard to prove, especially when the customer is unconscious for the product demo. Still, these companies have science behind the pitch. Memory Air cites UC Irvine research linking **overnight scent stimulation to a 226% improvement in memory. **Kimba says its AI adjusts scents over time based on how they affect your sleep.
It’s a strange idea in a very large market. Whether people want an algorithm choosing their bedtime aroma is another question. For now, it passes the smell test.
Huge markets still have room for new angles, even when the new angle is apparently convincing people their nostrils need software.
Hermès has spent more than two decades trying to prove it belongs in serious watchmaking. Its watch division has nearly tripled since 2019, and even after weaker sales in 2025, it still sold more than half a billion euros worth of watches.
The problem is that some buyers may not actually want the watches.
Among Birkin collectors, Hermès watches are sometimes called “Birkin bait.” The brand never says customers must buy other Hermès products before being offered one of its famously scarce handbags, but many shoppers believe spending heavily helps. A $30,000 watch can apparently be less of a timepiece and more of an expensive application fee.
There are signs this happens. Large numbers of nearly new Hermès watches show up on resale sites, where prices often take a hit. The **RealReal has sold three times as many pristine Hermès watches as Chanel watches **over the past five years, even though the brands sell roughly similar numbers each year.
Hermès, meanwhile, is making a serious effort to earn watch-world respect. It owns stakes in Swiss movement makers, bought dial and manufacturing companies, is expanding its Swiss watch facility, and has cut annual production by roughly 75% to make the watches more exclusive. Some models now sell for more than $50,000.
Chanel and Louis Vuitton are chasing the same credibility with collectors. Hermès may be doing the best job of it. But until buyers stop treating the watches like a cover charge for a Birkin, the stigma is going to be hard to shake.
Scarcity can make customers spend irrational amounts of money, but it can also make your other products look like stepping stones instead of products people actually want.
Silicon Valley is throwing money at AI, with venture funding hitting $256 billion in the first quarter of 2026, already topping all of 2025. One of the more interesting bets is a startup called Nothing, which is taking aim at the smartphone establishment.
Founded in 2020, Nothing started with earbuds before moving into phones and smartwatches. Its clean design and lower prices have helped it attract younger buyers looking for something besides Apple and Samsung. Its Nothing 4a Pro with 256GB starts at $599, compared with $799 for a comparable iPhone 17.
In a smartphone market where most devices increasingly look like cousins, Nothing has tried to be different. One feature puts notifications on the back of the phone using symbols and animations, so users can leave the screen face down and, theoretically, stop staring at it every nine seconds.
Investors are paying attention. Nothing has raised** $456M** and was valued at **$1.3B **after a $200M funding round last year. That’s rare territory: of more than 31,000 VC-backed consumer tech companies, just 0.4% have produced a $1B-plus exit.
Interest is growing too. Google searches for “Nothing Phone” and “Nothing headphones” are both up 500% versus the previous five years.
Now comes the harder part: adding AI without turning another simple device into something trying desperately to think for you.
Nothing is proving there may still be room in mature markets for a smaller brand that gives customers a clear reason to leave the giants.
Students who avoid AI chatbots for schoolwork are outperforming those who use them regularly, according to the OECD’s latest education report.
Students who said they never or almost never use AI to draft writing assignments scored 509 on a science test. Daily or near-daily users scored 481. After adjusting for socio-economic status, that 28-point gap works out to roughly a year and a half of schooling.
The same pattern showed up when students used AI for early research or to summarize assigned reading. The findings come from PISA, which tested more than 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries.
Apparently having software do the thinking for you is not ideal preparation for a test that requires thinking.
Schools are starting to react. New York City, the largest district in the U.S., banned AI tools for elementary and middle school students for the upcoming school year. UK regulators have warned about AI-assisted cheating, while MIT says colleges may need to rethink teaching and testing now that AI can complete many undergraduate tasks.
No shit, Sherlock.
Learning is supposed to involve some struggle. If the machine reads, writes, summarizes, and solves everything for you, eventually somebody is going to ask what exactly the student was doing.
AI can save time, but outsourcing the hard part of learning may also outsource the learning.
🔗 Read the OECD numbers before giving the robot custody of the homework.
One minute of money talk. Several expensive mistakes avoided.
with Matthew R. Meehan
Federal housing regulators are **pushing back on the cost of traditional credit scoring **and opening the door to more competition from alternatives like VantageScore.
Personal credit still plays a role in a lot of business financing. It can affect approvals, pricing, guarantees, and sometimes whether a deal gets done at all. And if you have a business partner, their financial history can become part of your financing problem too.
Luigi wrote about that exact issue this week in “ Before You Go 50/50, Check the Other 50.” Before you split a company down the middle, find out what the other person is bringing with them.
My take?
Borrowing money is complicated enough without one company owning the velvet rope. Read the full story here on the fight over FICO and what could change.
The internet’s least supervised corner. Useful? Debatable. Entertaining? Always.
**New Mexico, Now With Less Mexico:**President Trump shared maps relabeling New Mexico as “New America,” becauseThe federal government can’t actually rename a state, and New Mexico’s governor made it clear they’ll be keeping the original packaging.the 47th president has also taken on some freelance naming work.The Noodles Have Consolidated:Barilla is buying Goodles, the better-for-you mac-and-cheese brand selling about260,000 boxes a dayand claiming nearly90% of the category’s adoption growth.Apparently, Big Pasta finally decided it was easier to buy the cool kid than keep pretending chickpea protein wasn’t coming for the blue box.The Robots Have Unionized:About30 robots marched outside Poland’s Digital Affairs Ministrythis week, waving flags and “chanting” for stronger AI regulation and protections for human workers. The protest was staged by a group trying to raise awareness about automation, meaningrobots have now joined the fight against robotsbefore most of us finished updating Windows.
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