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Ukraines war with Russiasparked by Russias invasion in the spring of 2022is now entering its fourth year. So too is Sine.Engineering, a company born amid the conflict. CEO Andriy Chulyk founded the company in April 2022, pivoting from running a standing-desk business in the Lviv region to supporting his countrys defense efforts through various drone technologies and components. The 150-person-company has scaled rapidly over the past three years; its parts are now used in drones made by more than 50 manufacturers worldwide. Everyone thought something might change, that [war] would stop, Chulyk says. But we see clearly now that the situation is only getting harder. We need to be more effective on the front line. The scale of drone deployment is staggering: Drones are responsible for about 70% of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties, according to Ukrainian officials. In 2024 alone, Ukraine produced more than 2 million small drones for its war effort, with plans to manufacture 4.5 million this year. But such scale comes with a challengethere simply arent enough operators to control them all. That shortfall is precisely why the company is focusing on autonomous systems, developing drones capable of operating semi-independently. The deployment of swarms of autonomous or group-controlled drones comes as a far cry from the early days of the conflict, when larger individual drones, such as the Turkey-produced Bayraktar UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), were put onto the battlefield. Theyre big targets, Chulyk says of the Bayraktars. The shift now is toward smaller, disposable systems. You fly a drone, it completes its mission, and if you lose it, its fine. But ensuring drones reach their targets is no simple task. Environments are very contested, and its hard to operate, says Andriy Zvirko, Sine.Engineerings chief strategy officer. In response to the growing drone threat, Russia has ramped up GPS jammingdisrupting the traditional navigation systems UAVs rely on. In response, Sine.Engineering has developed a solution that enables drones to navigate accurately without GPS. More pressingly, Ukraine must contend with a shortage of qualified drone operatorsand here, again, Sine.Engineerings innovations could prove a crucial boon to the countrys wartime efforts. The company is developing technology that will enable one operator, sitting hundreds of miles from the front line, to control dozens of drones simultaneously through a real-time electronic map. Eventually, the hope is that those drones can number in the hundreds. Its like StarCraft, says Zvirko, referencing the iconic strategy game. He will see everything, what is happening on the battlefield, and he can operate dozens of drones by himself. That shift would be a significant scale up in capabilities for the Ukrainian armed forces. Sine.Engineerings technology is already capable of controlling 10 to 15 drones simultaneously, with systems currently being deployed to the front line in recent weeks. That rapid pace of development is something Ukraine has achieved out of necessitywartime demands quick iteration and adoption. But Chulyk warns that allied nations must speed up the implementation of new technologies like Sine.Engineerings as the threat from Russia to the global West continues to grow. Western countries need to move faster, he warns. They need to wake upnot just to help Ukraine, but to help themselves.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump’s tariffs are unpopular and expected to raise costs for Americans, but he’s trying his best to message them in a positive light. When his proposed new tariffs on foreign goods go into effect on Wednesday, he’s calling it liberation day. We have liberation day, Trump said last week. Many countries have taken advantage of us, the likes of which nobody even thought was possible for many, many decades. Trump has long been one for hyperbole, and when it comes to trade, he’s not holding back, calling the word tariff the most beautiful word in the dictionary. But the choice of liberation day to describe tariffs is a true misnomer. In Europe, Liberation Day is observed by countries in celebration of the liberation from Nazi Germany. For Trump, he simply uses the phrase to describe a day on which he enacts his agenda. Already, Trump called his 2025 Inauguration in January liberation day during his speech, and he’s repeating the phrase to apply to tariffs hitting Wednesday. How to make a political phrase stick For words and phrases to take hold, both inside and outside of politics, they must meet the FUDGE test, according to the mnemonic device devised by linguist and Predicting New Words author Allan Metcalf. He wrote that new words need to meet a threshold for frequency, unobtrusiveness, diversity, generating new forms and meanings, and endurance in order to take hold. In other words, they need to be simple to pick up, used a lot, and able to be used flexibly across different groups and in different ways. Trump is a master of bumper sticker-style slogans and political rhetoric, repeating straightforward, memorable phrases to explain his political agenda that becomes widely used, like America first and drain the swamp. Perhaps the best example is his already tired campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, which he cribbed from President Ronald Reagan. That became so ubiquitous in Trump’s rhetoric that it spawned an acronym and inspired spin-offs, like Make America Healthy Again. Whether liberation day can similarly take hold remains to be seen. For Daniel Rogers, a Princeton University history professor who’s studied political rhetoric, the phrase is a distraction tactic. Changing the subject has always been one of Trump’s favorite tactics, Rogers tells Fast Company. Don’t engage with those who want to know on whom the cost of tariffs is going to fall, or what steep new tariffs will mean for the cost of living. Get people to believe that tariffs will free the nation from the oppressive trade policies of the commercial enemies that surround it. Get them to think that there’s a ‘war’ going on, and that tariff is another, beautiful word for victory. Whether voters outside Trump’s base ever find his trade-war rhetoric convincing seems unlikely. A majority of U.S. adults (55%) believe the Trump administration is focusing too much on tariffs and 64% think it’s not doing enough to lower prices, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday. It’s not as if Americans squeezed by years of post-pandemic inflation will greet as “liberators” the higher costs that tariffs will add to cars, housing, food, and other regularly purchased goods.
Category:
E-Commerce
Max just got a new logo. Again. Two years after rebranding from HBO Max to just Max with new a bright blue-and-white logo, the Warner Bros Discovery-owned streaming service is making an update to its logo. This time, it’s swapping blue for a metallic black and white logo. According to Max, the color change is part of a larger refresh. Max says the standalone logo will be in the black-and-white color scheme, but an updated color palette, chosen to allow for flexibility of the logo in app and in marketing materials, will be unveiled in the coming months. [Images: HBO Max] Why Max updated its logo Max includes content from HBO and other Warner Bros Discovery brands, like Adult Swim, Animal Planet, Cartoon Network, CNN Films Discovery, and TNT, but the new logo appears to put HBOwhich is responsible for top shows for the streamer like The White Lotus, The Sopranos, and Successionback at the center. The new logo reflects the black-and-white color palette of HBO’s branding and retains the circle inside the counter of the A in Max, a callback to the circle inside the O in the HBO logo. [Images: HBO Max] Throughout the streaming wars, individual brands have updated their visual identities to stand out in a sea of blue logos. Disney+ updated its logo last year from blue to teal, and when Max first rolled out its blue logo, its former global chief marketing officer Patrizio Spagnoletto said the specific shade was chosen because it stood apart from Paramount blue and Prime blue. Together with the logo mark, the color communicated something about how the streamer wanted to be perceived, he said. With our blue and the way that the logo is designed, what we were going for is a combination of premium but accessible, Spagnoletto said in 2023. In black and white, the new Max logo seems to be amping up the premium aspect of its brand and downplaying the accessible. A Nielsen survey of the top 10 most-streamed shows in the U.S. may suggest why, with HBO shows like True Detective and The White Lotus among the few Max shows with enough viewers to make it onto the list dominated by Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu shows. It’s a strategy that just might work.
Category:
E-Commerce
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