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When Marsya Ancker-Robert was younger, her father used to tell that her that he wanted to be buried naked, under a tree in the woods. The idea horrified Ancker-Robert, but when her father passed away earlier this June, the first call she made was to a Dutch company called Loop Biotech. Since 2020, Loop Biotech has been making biodegradable caskets out of mycelium, the root-like structure of mushrooms, and hemp. Unlike traditional wooden caskets, which are often treated with chemicals that leech into the soil, the company’s offerings are made of natural materials that enrich the soil as they biodegradea process that only takes 45 days after burial. So far, Loop Biotech has sold about 2,500 caskets in Europeprimarily in the Netherlands, but also in Germany and other parts of central Europe. But Ancker-Robert’s father, Mark Ancker, has just become the first person in the U.S. to be buried in Loop Biotech’s mycelium casket, called the Living Cocoon. “It was dignified, and beautiful,” says Ancker-Robert, who buried her father in a forest clearing on his property. “I have confidence that my dad will be fully part of the garden by winter.” [Photo: Loop Biotech] Growing caskets Loop Biotech was founded in 2020 by Bob Hendrikx, an architect and biodesigner known for his affinity for nature-based solutions, like a Living Bin that uses sea anemones to “eat” or compost our trash, or a Living Couch that uses algae water to cleanse the air around it. It is part of growing cohort of start-ups shaking up the $622 million green burial market with nature-based solutions. Resting Reef, from London, turns cremated ashes into underwater memorials that double as coral reefs. Coeio, from California, makes burial suits out of mushrooms and other organisms that accelerate decomposition. For Hendrikx, nature was always the starting point. When the designer first came up with the idea for a mycelium casket, he wasn’t looking for sustainable solutions to burial. He was looking for ways to harness mycelium’s natural ability to recycle dead organic matter into nutrient-rich soil. He knew that mycelium thrives best in soil, which led him to question the kinds of applications it could most benefit. “We call it organism-centered design,” he says, contrasting the approach with human-centered design. [Photo: Loop Biotech] Today, Loop caskets are made with mycelium, hemp, and nothing else. The two ingredients are mixed and poured into a mold, and a coffin grows out of that mold in just seven days. But nailing down the exact formula took several years. “Too long,” says Hendrikx with a laugh. Mycelium is a finicky organism that needs the right conditions to grow and is influenced by several environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, CO2, and oxygen. Even the moon, which influences air pressure on Earth, can have an effect, he says: “Collaborating with nature really allows you to see this interconnectivity of the ecosystem.” The company has a 1,500-square-meter growing facility in Delft, Netherlands with the capacity to grow 500 caskets at a time. In order to scale, Hendrikx wants to double the production capacity and potentially speed up the growth, too. This facility is what the company calls their blueprint. Once it is optimized, Hendrikx is hoping to replicate the model outside the Netherlands and grow the caskets locally, using local materials. The company has raised just over $3 million to date, and is planning a new funding round to finance the expansion. And for Hendrikx, the road to success transcends mycelium caskets. “Once we are profitable, we’ve shown the world that you can enrich nature while making money, so it’s a business case for a regenerative business model,” he says. [Photo: Loop Biotech] A first for the U.S. The burial in Maine marks a new chapter in the company’s journey, with mycelium caskets ($3,995) and urns ($395) now available to customers nationwide. But Hendrikx says he’s been getting requests for years. America is experiencing a green burial revolution. The total number of green burial cemeteries in the U.S. has quadrupled over the past 10 years, going from just over 100 in 2015 to more than 400 by March 2025. Over the past two decades, the nonprofit Green Burial Council has seen a 72% increase in demand from cemeteries for more sustainable end-of-life options. Loop Biotech’s expansion will likely depend on how willing people are to spend a few extra dollars on a biodegradable casket. An entry-level casket in the United States hovers around $800 for a simple metal burial casket, though average costs range from about $2,000 to $5,000. It will also depend on how fast the company establishes a robust infrastructure in the country. Already, Hendrikx has built a network of distribution partners and sustainable funeral homes that offer green burial alternatives. They also have a warehouse in Los Angeles where they can ship their products from. But if your local funeral home doesn’t offer mycelium caskets, and you’ve never heard about the company, you may never know it exists. [Photo: Loop Biotech] Ancker-Robert found out about Loop Biotech from a Tedx talk that Hendrikx gave in January, and she was really surprised she was the first person to order one. As it happens, Loop Biotech was gearing up to launch in the U.S. on World Environment Day when she called. Ancker-Robert allowed Hendrikx to film the ceremony, which turned into a small act of generosity for the planet. People made offerings of his favorite foods as well as flowers that Ancker-Robert will plant right above her father’s resting place so they can grow into a perennial flower garden. “The process is helping to turn the grieving process into one of creation and gives me something to daydream about instead of focusing on the loss,” she says. “I would much prefer to think of my father as part of the garden than as a dead body lying in the ground.” Ancker-Robert describes her father a free spirit who, in the ’80s, would jump into dumpsters to salvage food and drive around his community to distribute it. “There’s a famous picture of the traffic jam on the way to Woodstock. In it there is a young man in a striped shirt sitting on a VW bus looking at the traffic with binoculars,” she says. “That’s my dad.
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E-Commerce
For 13 years, Subway Surfers download rate has been consistent: about one million new installs every single day. Half of those downloads come from users upgrading to new devices. The other half comes from children aging into phone usage, and users in less developed countries reaching a level of affluence that allows them to purchase their first smartphones. This steady influx of players has made Subway Surfers the most downloaded mobile game of all time, with 4.5 billion lifetime downloads. Recently, however, Subway Surfers traffic has arrived in more dramatic waves. In 2020, the app saw a surge of new users after TikTokers discovered a way to hack the game. In 2022, a 10th anniversary social media campaigncombined with a TikTok-viral no coin challengeonce again sent downloads soaring. Mathias Gredal Nrvig, CEO of Subway Surfers parent company SYBO, understands the vital role social media plays in the games continued growth. Many of its early competitors have vanished: Draw Something and Zombie Farm are no longer on the app store, and Temple Run (which once inspired Subway Surfers) has stagnated. Through TikTok, though, Subway Surfers has kept its edge. The fact that TikTok loves us means were also being rewarded by Apple and Google, because their algorithms see what trends on other platforms, Nrvig says. Its a flywheel of activation. Subway Surfers social media dominance TikTok is crowded with so-called brain rot content. These posts typically layer two unrelated videos: one showing a TV show or narrated Reddit post, the other featuring a video game. Also called sludge content, the videos lull the doomscrolling brain into a passive state, watching and listening as the parallel feeds play. Its like Cocomelon for teenagers. @bekiedit23 #creatorsearchinsights #reddit_tiktok #aitastories #redditstoriestts #redditredings #reddittiktok #fyp #Aita #viral #edit #subwaysurfers #xyz #subway #subwaysurfersstorytime original sound – beki – beki Nrvig takes a much sunnier view of these videos, saying they give you a moment of zen. They also frequently feature Subway Surfers, repeatedly bringing TikTok users back to SYBOs IP. Theres no clear evidence that these brain rot videos drive viewers to the App Store, but they certainly do keep Subway Surfers in the conversation. [TikTokers] know were not going to go after them for posting our content, Nrvig says. We have a very different approach from other companies, where they do a lot more policing of social media. Subway Surfers in-house social media channels are led by Celia Zimmermann, SYBOs head of player experience. While the company produces plenty of its own content across platforms, the team also spends considerable time supporting the flow of organically created content. Zimmermann describes the games openness as brave, noting that many community managers at other gaming companies dont have the same speed for green-lighting. We have IP that were able to be quite flexible with, she says. This social momentum is especially important for Subway Surfers young audience. Many tween players gather on platforms like TikTok. SYBO does not track younger players directly, but Nrvig estimates anecdotally that about half of the games players are under 18. That figure does not account for the many kids playing on adult devices, which could push the percentage even higher. Of course, not all social media trends are positive. In New York City, a TikTok challenge recently encouraged some young people to try hopping between subway cars. At least six people died in 2024 attempting the stunt. Nrvig calls the trend unfortunate and says SYBO would never repost or amplify dangerous content, though the company ultimately decided not to issue a public statement. Train surfing has been a thing that people are doing in New York, thankfully very seldom, but we havent seen with our downloads that people think of it as something they can do in real life, Nrvig says. Its clearly a game, and a silly game at that, and therefore we dont have any direct connection to it. Can TikTok keep a 13-year-old game on top? Nrvig sees Subway Surfers as part of a standout group of Scandinavian mobile games. Theres Angry Birds, launched in 2009, and Candy Crush, which debuted in 2012. Both remain strong performers, though Subway Surfers download rate now outpaces them by a sizable margin, according to analysts. It also stands out as the only game in the group embracing such a deeply TikTok-driven strategythough it remains hard to say whether virality and revenue always go hand in hand. While SYBO declined to share exact revenue figures, Nrvig notes that 80 to 85% of the companys revenue comes from advertising, with the rest gnerated through in-app purchases. Monthly active users remain relatively steadyaside from viral spikesat 100 to 150 million. With such a stable user base, revenue shifts at SYBO tend to follow fluctuations in the ad market. Analysts are split on Subway Surfers future. Samuel Aune, a gaming insights analyst at Sensor Tower, supports Nrvigs view of long-term stability. He describes the games 10-year download curve as really consistent, especially when compared to its peers. Not a lot of games have lived 10-plus years, he tells Fast Company. Ariel Michaeli, CEO of Appfigures, takes a more skeptical stance. Mobile game downloads have declined across the board on both the App Store and Google Play. But Subway Surfers has dropped a little bit more than everyone else, he says, citing the companys internal tracking. It used to be number one for a very long time. Over the last few months, it started slowly going down [the ranking] . . . Subway Surfers has been around for so long that theres fatigue. And what if TikTok disappeared? That seems unlikely in the U.S. for now, with President Donald Trump having extended the TikTok ban deadline for a third time. But in India, where TikTok is banned, Subway Surfers had to pivot. Facebook is their go-to, and so is YouTube, so thats the place where we go to engage with them, Zimmermann says. For now, Subway Surfers holds its lead. Nrvig argues that among todays top-ranked mobile games, it is the only one growing organically. Its steady stream of downloads continues, driven by strong, recognizable IP and smart social media strategynot by less transparent forces. Were still the most downloaded viral game, Nrvig says. Everyone else has paid for their traffic to get on that list.
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E-Commerce
I heard its supposed to rain this weekend. How about those Cubs? Did you hear Ed, the escaped zebra from Tennessee? If you groan at the thought of small talk, youre not alone. More than 70% of Americans said theyd prefer to just sit in silence over talking about the weather, sports, or current events, according to a survey by the online education site Preply. While small talk is often viewed as the unnecessary fluff that comes before something real is discussed, that attitude doesnt do its importance justice, says Deb Feder, author of Tell Me More: Building Trusted Client Relationships through Everyday Interactions. I think small talk is where the real is found, she says. Its where the depth of a relationship can really be cemented. Its taking conversations and allowing them to evolve by getting curious and by taking time to get to know others. Small talk often takes place at cocktail parties or in a line at the store, but when its done at work, it has the power to accelerate your career, says Feder. Our careers involve relationships, she says. Whether it is with a colleague down the hall, a boss or a client, you’re constantly interacting with people. Those small moments of conversation before or after a meeting is where banter happens. Its all part of your career. Rather than quickly segueing away from small talk, Feder says you can use it to create and strengthen relationships. When we have relationships with people that we trust, we can get bigger results, she says. We can be invited to the table and to opportunities a whole lot faster. How to Improve Your Small Talk Talking about the forecast, baseball, or the latest escaped animal only gets you so far. To be good at small talk, Feder says you need to decide what you like to talk about. Owning what you’re interested in and leading from there is a good start, because it allows you to relax and realize that there is stuff you know that you could share, she says. I ask people, If you could talk about one thing all day long that’s not work, what would it be? Maybe youre a fan of a certain television show, movie, or book. You might be passionate about your dogs or a hobby. Or maybe you loved where you grew up. Feder says small talk can be anything. Lean in there and just practice, she says. It can be relaxing to talk about what you enjoy. It opens the doors to get curious about other people and their interests. Talking about what youre interested in shouldn’t become a monologue about yourself. Instead, it gives you a jumping point. For example, if you love to travel, you could start a conversation by asking, If we were going to plan this meeting anywhere else in the world, where would you suggest we go? It opens up conversation and allows you to learn a lot about a person, says Feder. Sometimes people tell you about their hometown. Sometimes people tell you about some random mountain village far away. I like to think of conversation openers, rather than just a question that you want answered. How Small Talk Boosts your Career Small talk has the potential to improve your career in a few important ways, says Feder. The first is by deepening relationships within your team. The more you know the people around you, the more efficient and effective you can be. For example, you may learn that a coworker isnt a morning person. In this case, you might ask for their help after theyve had their second cup of coffee. Or you might discover that your boss needs to get out the door right at 5 p.m. on Wednesdays to coach her daughters soccer team. You would know to not wait until late in the day to ask important questions. Understanding the rhythm and the way that other people think around us can be a huge accelerator, says Feder. Small talk also opens the door for improved client relationships because you can find topics that lead to future avenues for connection. When you learn that somebody loves fishing or travel, you can remember to ask how their latest trip went when you see them next or send them a link to a relevant article, says Feder. It shows that you are interested in them, not just for the work, but as a human being. People appreciate that care. Finally, one of the best things you can do to accelerate your career is to introduce somebody else to an opportunity or person who can be helpful to them. Its less about you being able to do something for somebody, and more about spotting opportunities and sharing them with others, says Feder. The more you know about somebody from small talk or banter about work, the more you can understand which connections to make. Small talk allows you to get curious about someone else. It allows you to add layers to clients, team members or executive relationships in a way that’s meaningful and natural. If you avoid small talk altogether, you lose the chance to build rapport and develop connections, says Feder. Trust is built in tiny little moments, she says. You don’t walk into a room and say, Hi, trust me. We want to learn about the human being and how they show up as their whole self. Small talk can be fun if you decide it’s a great way to start a connection.
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E-Commerce
The Senate budget billalso called the reconciliation bill, or Trumps One Beautiful Bill Act is making headlines for its drastic cuts to Medicaid, its rollback of clean energy tax credits, and the fact that it would raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. Its also threatening to take away millions of acres of public land. Nearly 150 groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity, and local organizations like Alaska Wilderness League and New Mexico Wild, have urged Senate members to reconsider this unprecedented sell-off of public lands. The Senate budget bill would be a fire sale of Americas public lands and waters, Bobby McEnaney, director of land conservation at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. The bill would force the sale of between 2 million and 3 million acres of public lands from the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, acres that span 11 Western states. (The state of Connecticut is about 3.1 million acres, for comparison). [Screenshot: The Wilderness Society] The bill also makes even more public land eligible for salemore than 250 million acres, including hiking trails, ski resorts, wilderness study areas, national monuments, and critical wildlife migration corridors. New areas would also be opened for oil leasing and offshore drilling under the bill, including in the Gulf of Alaska. If passed, the bill would likely be largest single sale of national public lands in modern history, according to the Wilderness Society. Its a move Senate Republicans are making, multiple groups note, in order to pay for billionaire tax breaks. The bill trades ordinary Americans access to outdoor recreation for a short-term payoff that disproportionately benefits the privileged and well-connected, the Wilderness Society says. Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah and chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, has also said the bill would create opportunities for housing. But nature organizations say it would do no such thingand that it would bring more harm to the public. There is no provision to prevent lands sold under Lees bill from being developed into high-end vacation homes, Airbnbs, or luxury housing projects, the letter signed by dozens of organizations reads. Selling these lands, they add, threatens public access, undermines responsible land management, puts environmental values, cultural resources, and endangered species at risk along with clean drinking water for 60 million Americans and betrays the publics trust. That 250 million acres of public lands are at risk can be hard to visualize. The Wilderness Society made an interactive map, showing both the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands the bill makes eligible for sale. The map illustrates how those 250 million acres span 119 congressional districts, reaching all the way from Alaska down through the Western United States, and over past the Rocky Mountains. This bill would lead to a wave of irreversible extraction that will rob future generations of public access to lands and waters that belong to all of usjust to bankroll tax cuts for the superrich, McEnaney said in his statement. As currently proposed, Americans will soon lose permanent access to the public lands close to home, their favorite trails, their parks, and their favorite recreation areas. Once these lands are sold, and the no trespassing signs go up, there will be no going back.
Category:
E-Commerce
Imagine you owned a bookstore. Most of your revenue depends on customers coming in and buying books, so you set up different aspects of the business around that activity. You might put low-cost “impulse buy” items near the checkout or start selling coffee as a convenience. You might even partner with publishers to put displays of popular bestsellers in high-visibility locations in the story to drive sales. Now imagine one day a robot comes in to buy books on behalf of someone. It ignores the displays, the coffee kiosk, and the tchotchkes near the till. It just grabs the book the person ordered, pays for it, and walks out. The next day 4 robots come in, then 12 the day after that. Soon, robots are outnumbering humans in your store, which are dwindling by the day. You soon see very few sales from nonbook items, publishers stop bothering with those displays, and the coffee goes cold. Revenue plummets. In response, you might start charging robots a fee to enter your store, and if they don’t pay it, you deny them entry. But then one day a robot that looks just like a human comes into the point that you can’t tell the difference. What do you do then? {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} This analogy is basically what the publishing world is going through right now, with bot traffic to media websites skyrocketing over the past three months. That’s according to new data from TollBit, which recently published its State of the Bots report for the first quarter of 2025. Even more concerning, however, is that the most popular AI search engines are choosing to ignore long-respected standards for blocking bots, in some cases arguing that when a search “agent” acts on behalf of an individual user, the bot should be treated as human. The robot revolution TollBit’s report paints a fast-changing picture of what’s happening with AI search. Over the past several months, AI companies have either introduced search abilities or greatly increased their search activity. Bot scraping focused on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which is distinct from training data, increased 49% over the previous quarters. Anthropic’s Claude notably introduced search, and in the same period ChatGPT (the world’s most popular chatbot by far) had a spike in users, plus deep research tools from all the major providers began to take hold. At the same time, publishers increased their defenses. The report reveals that media websites in January were using various methods to block AI bots four times as much as they were doing in a year before. The first line of defense is to adjust their website’s robots.txt file, which tells which specific bots are welcome and which ones are forbidden from accessing the content. The thing is, adhering to robots.txt is ultimately an honor system and not really enforceable. And the report indicates more AI companies are treating it as such: Among sites in TollBit’s network, bot scrapes that ignore robots.txt increased from 3.3% to 12.9% in just one quarter. Part of that increase is due to a relatively new stance the AI companies have taken, and it’s subtle but important. Broadly speaking, there are three different kinds of bots that scrape or crawl content: Training bots: These are bots that crawl the internet to scrape content to provide training data for AI models. Search indexing bots: Bots that go out and crawl the web to ensure the model has fast access to important information outside its training set (which is usually out of date). This is a form of RAG. User agent bots: Also a form of RAG, these are crawlers that go out to the web in real time to find information directly in response to a user query, regardless of whether the content it finds has been previously indexed. Because No. 3 is an agent acting on behalf of a human, AI companies argue that it’s an extension of that user behavior and have essentially given themselves permission to ignore robots.txt settings for that use case. This isn’t guessworkGoogle, Meta, and Perplexity have made it explicit in their developer notes. This is how you get human-looking robots in the bookstore. When humans go to websites, they see ads. Humans can be intrigued or enticed by other content, such as a link to a podcast about the same topic as an article they’re reading. Humans can decide whether or not to pay for a subscription. Humans sometimes choose to make a transaction based on the information in front of them. Bots don’t really do any of that (not yet, anyway). Large parts of the internet economy depend on human attention to websites, but as the report shows, that behavior drops off massively when someone uses AI to search the webAI search engines provide very little in the way of referral traffic compared to traditional search. This of course is what’s behind many of the lawsuits now in play between media companies and AI companies. How that is resolved in the legal realm is still TBD, but in the meantime, some media sites are choosing to block botsor at least are attempting tofrom accessing their content at all. For user agent bots, however, that ability has been taken away. The AI companies have always seen data harvesting in the way that’s most favorable to their insatiable demand for it, famously claiming that data only needs to be “publicly available” to qualify as training data. Even when they claim to respect robots.txt for their search engines, it’s an open secret that they sometimes use third-party scrapers to bypass it. Unmasking the bots So apart from suing and hoping for the best, how can publishers regain some, well, agency in the emerging world of agent traffic? If you believe AI substitution threatens your growth, there are additional defenses to consider. Hard paywalls are easier to defend, both technically and legally, and there are several companies (including TollBit, but there are others, such as ScalePost) that specialize in redirecting bot traffic to paywalled endpoints specifically for bots. If the robot dosn’t pay, it’s denied the content, at least in theory. Collective action is another possibility. I doubt publishers would launch a class action around this specific relabeling of user agents, but it does provide more ammunition in broader copyright lawsuits. Besides going to court, industry associations could come out against the move. The News/Media Alliance in particular has been very vocal about AI companies’ alleged transgressions of copyright. The idea of treating agentic activity as the equivalent of human activity has consequences that go beyond the media. Any content or tool that’s been traditionally available for free will need to reevaluate that access now that robots are destined to be a growing part of the mix. If there was any doubt that simply updating robots.txt instructions was adequate, the TollBit report blew it out of the water. The stance that “AI is just doing what humans do” is often used as a defense for when AI systems ingest large amounts of information and then produce new content based on it. Now the makers of those systems are quietly extending that idea, allowing their agents to effectively impersonate humans while shopping the web for data. Until it’s clear how to build profitable stores for robots, there should be a way to force their masks off. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
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