Lab Weekly — 08/22/2025 Smart Home reality check; Canadian POV on Outlook trends, Plus, the latest news about new Pixel phones, new Meta smart glasses, and more must-know news and stats
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The Smart Home Ecosystem is Decaying — Can AI Save it?
A reality check on the smart home market in 2025, and hope for its future revival
Outlook 2025: The Canadian POV
How Canadians are finding shelter from the storm
In case you missed it… Streaming Enters Its “Profitability Era” — What Comes Next?
Hollywood is finally figuring out how to make the streaming model work, and the numbers speak for themselves. Looking ahead, new bundling strategies and consolidations signal a new playbook for entertainment brands.
Hollywood’s Complicated Relationship with AI Content
Publicly, the entertainment industry treats generative AI like it’s radioactive. Privately, however, studios are reportedly slipping into the DMs of AI startups, quietly experimenting behind closed doors, and very much testing the waters of what generative tools can do.
The AI-Powered Future of Travel
For travel and hospitality brands, there are three other interesting ways that the growing consumer adoption of AI chatbots — and perhaps soon, AI agents — will start to impact their ways of booking and planning trips, as well as how they enjoy their trips.
Google Doubles Down On “AI Phones” With Its Pixel 10 Series [TechCrunch]
Google unveiled the Pixel 10 lineup at its ‘Made by Google‘ event on Wednesday, hosted by Jimmy Fallon and featuring celebrities like Stephen Curry and the Jonas Brothers. Powered by a new Tensor G5 chip, the new Google flagship smartphones are packed with a slew of AI features, including advanced photo editing, “Magic Cue’” contextual suggestions, live translations, a ‘Visual Guidance’ upgrade allows Gemini Live to give real-time visual cues on a user’s phone screen, and more.
While this launch doesn’t spell trouble for Apple — it would take more than some nifty Ai integrations to get iPhone users to swiitch camp — but it does signal a shifting landscape where smart, context-aware AI is becoming central to premium smartphone differentiation. Apple has been hammered in the press lately for being late to ship promised Siri upgrades and advanced AI features, but others will have to demonstrate AI integrations causing sustantial changes to the mobile user experience overall before that truly becomes a problem for Apple.
Related: Google announces new AI-powered personal health and fitness coach for Fitbit [TechCrunch]; Apple is expected to release its iPhone 17 lineup at rumored September 9 event [CNET]
Meta Set To To Introduce Its $800 “Hypernova” Smart Glasses In September [Bloomberg]
Tech analyst Mark Gurman slipped this upcoming release in his Bloomberg column this week that Meta is planning to introduce its $800 “Hypernova” smart glasses in September. This is reportedly a significantly cheaper price point than industry insiders expected, and some say Meta is planning to sell them for closer to cost to grab more market share in the burgeoning space.
The interesting thing to note here is that this new premium smart glasses “Hypernova” is still not the kind of true AR glasses that Meta previously showcased with Project Orion, which remains years away from being market-ready. Instead, Hypernova reportedly relies on an small display built into one of the lenses to overlay limited text or visual information in users’ field of vision. So, essentially, an expensive notification screen that one could wear on their face. Time will tell, soon enough, whether this is the right market expansion strategy for Meta to pursue.
Related: A review of Tiramisu, Meta’s VR research prototype that combines beyond-retinal resolution, high brightness and high contrast [UploadVR]; Alibaba set to release Quark AI Glasses in China by late 2025 [E-Week]
Amazon Now Sells Used Hertz Rental Cars [The Verge]
Amazon has expanded its Autos business to include used rental cars from Hertz, starting in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Seattle, with plans to roll out nationwide. The partnership marks Hertz as Amazon’s first rental fleet collaborator, adding vehicles from brands like Ford, Toyota, Chevrolet, and Nissan to the platform. This builds on Amazon’s initial foray into autos last year, when it began selling new and certified pre-owned Hyundai models through dealer networks.
This move signals a shifting role for both companies in the mobility ecosystem. For Hertz, it provides a new distribution channel to offload vehicles at scale, broadening its reach beyond auctions and direct sales while potentially boosting recovery from its recent struggles. For Amazon, it positions Autos as a marketplace that can handle both new and fleet-retired vehicles, embedding the company deeper into the car ownership lifecycle. More broadly, it shows how rental companies are evolving from short-term mobility providers into asset managers with retail extensions, especially considering Avis’ recent partnership with Waymo to expand into the robotaxi space as a fleet manager.
Related: Amazon is expanding same-day grocery delivery to over 2000 cities [Gizmodo]; Waymo expands to Dallas with Avis partnership [TechCrunch]
Situational Awareness: How Reddit is influencing brand visibility on AI search [AdAge]
Reddit has revealed it is the number one most cited domain for AI across all models, according to data collected by analytics platform Profound, beating publishers including YouTube, Forbes, and Wikipedia. While ChatGPT’s top source was named as Wikipedia by Profound, both Google AI Overviews and Perplexity were AI models that relied most on Reddit as a source.
Google launches “Flight Deals,” a new AI-powered search tool within Google Flights [The Points Guy]
The launch of this new feature is clearly responding to the swift backlash generated by the news that Delta is set to introduce Ai pricing for their flights. Instead of using AI for micro-targeted price-gouging, Google leverages its AI to improve the flight-shopping experience by surfacing personalized recommendations and highlighting limited-time offers. Whether that’d help travelers achieve the goal of simplifying the process of filtering through all the available flight options remains to be seen, but this is yet another way that AI is infiltrating the travel industry.
Microsoft and NFL announce multiyear partnership to use AI to enhance game day analysis [CNBC]
Microsoft and the NFL announced a multiyear extension of their partnership to bring real-time game data and analysis to the sidelines using Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI. Football club staff will soon be able to use copilots for player scouting and salary cap management. Jury is still out on when copilots will be promoted to assistant coach positions.
- Americans fear AI for a variety of reasons, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found. The survey of 4,446 US adults on AI found that 71% are concerned AI will put “too many people out of work permanently”, 61% worry about electricity consumption, and 77% worry that the technology could be used to stir up political chaos.
- Despite the recent AI upgrade, most people still use smart assistants for weather, timers, and music — the same stuff we were doing a decade ago. A recent YouGov survey found that 59% of US adults use AI assistants to check the weather, 51% to play music, 47% to get answers from the web, and 40% for timers, mirroring usage in 2018.
- GEO — generative engine optimization — could be critical for marketers as shoppers turn to large language models for product recommendations. The traffic AI sources are driving to retailer websites has risen 1,200% between July 2024 and February 2025, per Adobe Analytics, and grew 3,300% year over year during Amazon’s Prime Day event last week, RetailBrew reports.
If you find our insights valuable and would like to have a deeper conversation on technology and media innovations, or need to sound smarter in a client meeting or a pitch, please feel free to reach out to Ryan Miller, our Director of Partnerships, at ryan.miller@ipglab.com.
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VELD Music Festival – whose 2025 lineup featured headliners like Dom Dolla, John Summit, Alesso and more – once again took over Toronto this summer, reaffirming itself as one of Canada’s premiere events. But with major festivals often comes an influx of ticket scams on social media – something concertgoers are all too familiar with… 
