SPIEGEL-Gruppe

Sabine Jünger joins Front Row as Europe Head

Sabine Jünger, currently Vice President at Otto Advertising, will become Managing Director Europe of e‑commerce agency group Front Row, effective 1 January 2027. Jünger has served at Otto since 2021 and previously was Head of Agency at Amazon (2015–2020). At Front Row she will join a four‑person European management team alongside Daniel Andrlik (e‑commerce), Chief Product Officer Benjamin Weyrich and Niall Donohoe (B2B marketing). The company—formed in 2022 from the merger of Hamburg’s Finc3 and US marketplace accelerator Fortress Brand—employs more than 600 people worldwide and counts clients such as Unilever, Bosch, Tesa, Sennheiser and Wella. Founders Jan Bechler, Tim Nedden and Björn Sjut will step back from the management team in spring 2027 but remain founding partners and shareholders. Reported by Horizont on 20 August 2026.

macOS RC leak shows AirPods with built-in camera

A 13-second demo clip discovered inside the macOS 26.7 (Tahoe) beta/release-candidate — first flagged by MacRumors — appears to show AirPods with built-in cameras working with an iPhone-based AI feature called Visual Intelligence. The video’s Siri voiceover describes Visual Intelligence analyzing what the user sees, saving items for later and answering questions about objects, and the macOS assets suggest users would be notified if hair or another object obstructs the camera. Bloomberg previously reported Apple was in late-stage testing of camera-equipped AirPods that resemble AirPods Pro 3 but with longer stems and an LED indicator. It remains unclear whether the in‑ear cameras would capture still photos, Apple has not confirmed the product, and reporter Mark Gurman has indicated some AI headphone projects may be delayed into 2027 while this variant could appear sooner.

European publishers face heavier AI bot scraping

TollBit's H1 2026 analysis of 3,906 publishers (456 European) using a >987 billion-visit dataset found a sharp rise in AI-powered scraping: more than 22 billion bot accesses, about 1.9 billion events that bypassed or ignored robots.txt, and scraping up ~20% from January to June. European sites endure roughly four times the median AI scrapes of North American peers and far fewer human referrals from AI apps; TollBit measured about 179 automated page fetches per human referral and the scrape-to-referral ratio climbed from 150:1 in Q1 to 227:1 in Q2. Only 0.05% of external referrals to the European cohort came from AI apps (Google supplied ~84%), and AI-driven referrals generate far fewer clicks. Tests of commercial scrapers retrieved content on nearly all tested sites. Cloudflare has started blocking training crawlers on new domains and plans finer bot classifications and paid access from September 2026.