Daniel Riley set out to tackle an issue that had been plaguing him: what if you built a drone with propeller blades a mile longer than regular models? His design features 41-inch blades that reach from tip to tip and spin at a steady 350 to 500 revolutions per minute, a far cry from the tiny, high-speed propellers seen on nearly every commercial drone on the market.

His quadcopter stands out from the crowd due to its gigantic 41-inch blades, and not only because of their size. They also spin at a nice, calm speed of 350 to 500 rpm, as opposed to the thousands of rpm seen on standard models. Riley paired these blades with a sophisticated variable pitch mechanism that allows each rotor to change the angle at which it bites into the air while keeping the motor speed constant. This combination enables the drone to generate lift and remain airborne with significantly less energy than you might expect, especially considering the blades’ high inertia.

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Riley designed a variable pitch system that allows the servos to change the angle of each blade while the motors continue to run at a consistent speed. This is a creative solution to the problem of high rotational inertia, which would normally make it difficult to swiftly increase and decrease motor speed in order to operate the drone successfully. He mounted high-torque servos at the base of each arm and ran a pushrod through them to the blade roots. As a result, the drone gains precise control over lift and attitude without constantly adjusting the engine speed.

The drone’s chassis was built of carbon fiber tubes attached to 3D printed polycarbonate parts, which gave just enough strength to keep things from breaking without adding too much weight. The propellers were made from PETG plastic reinforced with carbon fiber rods. Four pancake-style 5010 360KV motors power the blades via a belt reduction system, which reduces the speed and increases torque. Riley even removed the motor controllers’ heat sinks and sealed them in epoxy to save a few grams of weight. Every little piece added up to keep the overall power consumption low, allowing the huge rotors to support the airframe with minimal effort.

Ground tests produced some really impressive results. When the drone was hovering in situ, it produced a remarkable 18.1 grams of torque for every watt of electricity used, which is roughly half as much as a well-optimized conventional quadcopter. When the power was turned off, the drone was able to slowly circle its way to the ground. The only reason it didn’t come out of it without losing its balance was that it lacked a stabilisation system and crashed.

Engineers have long recognized that the key to making rotorcraft fly is getting the power loading just right. Spreading the weight over a larger rotor surface allows you to stay aloft with less energy, like Riley did here. He applied a principle that most commercial drone manufacturers are afraid to explore since it is more sophisticated, and it paid off handsomely. His approach demonstrates that scaling up to larger blades and adding some sophisticated pitch control can result in significant increases in flight time without simply throwing some heavier batteries on it.
[Source]

All it takes is two to three weddings to break even

Two to three weddings. That’s all it takes for entrepreneurs Edmund Teo from Octopus Reels and Jessica Tay from Leave Your Message to fully recoup their startup costs—and everything after is profit.

Their business? Renting out digital guestbooks that capture audio and video messages from wedding guests. As more couples seek personalised, interactive experiences, this niche service is quickly gaining popularity and turning into a profitable opportunity.

Set up is simple, only requires two to three people, and the equipment is reusable, making margins compelling with limited costs. 

Vulcan Post speaks with the two founders to uncover what it takes to run a digital guestbook business—and just how lucrative it can be.

What’s driving couples to ditch traditional guestbooks

In Singapore, couples are increasingly moving away from traditional guestbooks because digital formats offer something far more engaging and memorable.

While handwritten guestbooks are sentimental, they are often stored away and rarely revisited. More often than not, only a few pages are filled while the rest remain blank.

Audio and video recordings, on the other hand, capture the tone, laughter, and emotions behind each message, allowing couples to relive those moments for years to come.

We have had couples share how moved they were when revisiting their recordings.

Edmund Teo, founder of Octopus Reels

Jessica added that digital guestbooks make memories feel “more alive” by preserving expressions, voices, and interactions that a page of writing cannot convey.

She also noted that the rise of digital guestbooks connects to broader cultural currents. “In recent years, there has been a strong comeback of nostalgia, like the rise of digital cameras and Y2K aesthetics, where people are drawn to things that feel a bit more raw and authentic.”

Typically, digital guestbooks use a vintage telephone setup. Guests pick up the handset to hear a short, pre-recorded message from the couple, then record their own message after a tone. The retro telephone design, complete with rotary dials or classic handsets, adds a memorable touch.

Weddings, being highly emotional occasions, naturally attract formats that combine familiar, nostalgic elements.

At the same time, the industry itself also offers fertile ground for niche services like digital guestbooks. In 2024, the Singapore wedding market was valued at US$153.22 million (S$196.57 million), and is projected to reach US$292.38 million (S$375.11 million) by 2033, growing at an annual rate of 7.46%.

With approximately 24,700 marriages registered in Singapore in 2025, the addressable market for wedding vendors remains substantial.

A 30% profit margin

Both founders of Octopus Reels and Leave Your Message now run their businesses full-time, though Jessica initially started hers as a side hustle before leaving her full-time job as demand grew.

At first glance, the business seems simple and low-cost.

Similar digital video guestbook equipment sells for around S$533 on Amazon.sg, while each accordion-style column stand—typically used to hold and elevate the vintage telephone handsets—costs between S$72 and S$101. That totals to S$797 for a digital guestbook telephone setup with three cylindrical columns of varying heights.

With rates starting at S$295 for six hours for a basic digital guestbook setup by Octopus Reels and S$380 for two hours by Leave Your Message, both businesses can recoup their initial setup costs in just three bookings, making them highly lucrative ventures.

However, running the business goes beyond purchasing equipment. Set up, logistics, and manpower are all crucial to delivering a smooth and memorable guest experience. There are also additional technical support and post-production editing required to transform raw footage into polished keepsakes. 

Edmund shared that the average breakdown of costs for each setup, excluding equipment, is as follows:

Minus off all these costs, the overall profit margin for Octopus Reels is 20–30% for simpler setups, and tends to increase with larger or customised events, making the business still highly attractive.

Leave Your Message, however, declined to disclose exact figures, with Jessica explaining that these are “commercially sensitive for the business.” She did note, though, that there are “less obvious costs,” including seasonal fluctuations in bookings and downtime between events.

“While this can be a profitable business under the right conditions, there is also a fair amount of operational work behind the scenes that people may not immediately see,” she added.

Standing out in an increasingly crowded market

Demand is booming for these businesses’ offerings.

Octopus Reels currently runs 10 to 12 events every weekend, and in 2025, it supported 208 events across 98 venues, with demand peaking in Oct when the company managed up to eight events in a single day. Meanwhile, Leave Your Message has participated in over 400 events since 2023.

While weddings remain the core revenue driver, both companies have expanded into adjacent markets.

Octopus Reels has supported corporate events, birthday celebrations, and community initiatives, including a meaningful project with Sport Singapore for individuals with dementia.

Similarly, Leave Your Message has recorded appreciation messages at company award ceremonies and participated in large-scale activations like the National Day NTUC Youth initiative, where messages collected across institutions were showcased during the National Day Parade.

This diversification reduces reliance on wedding seasonality for sales on digital guestbooks—a critical business strategy in an industry where demand fluctuates throughout the year.

As competition intensifies with more businesses offering similar services, differentiation becomes especially important.

Hence, both companies have also diversified beyond their core guestbook services. Octopus Reels now offers interactive photo gallery installations, creating “mini exhibitions” of couples’ memories and low-lying fog effects for “walking on clouds” march-ins. They are also partnering with a local coffee cart vendor to bring Vietnamese coffee experiences into wedding spaces.

Jessica’s company, on the other hand, has expanded its digital guestbook concept with a virtual video option, where guests scan QR codes to record messages on their mobile phones. This extends the experience to overseas guests who cannot attend physically.

Will digital guestbooks stay?

Edmund considers video guestbooks an “early-stage trend,” with the potential to become a standard feature at weddings.

But as with any trend, it can flare up quickly—and fade just as fast. Despite this, Jessica is confident it will endure, at least in terms of its core intent.

“The format may continue to evolve, but the intention behind it, capturing meaningful messages from loved ones, will always be relevant.”

A new feature that lets you create an AI avatar with your likeness is now live on YouTube. First in a blog post earlier this year, avatars are designed to be used in Shorts (provided you still them to show up), allowing you to insert yourself into video content in a way that YouTube deems to be safe and secure.

YouTube’s approach to combatting the AI sloppification of the internet and the proliferation of appears to be adding more and more AI features to its platform, framing this latest addition as a tool that gives creators more control of their digital identities. Any video generated using an avatar will feature YouTube’s AI disclosure and include visible watermarks and labels like SynthID and C2PA.

YouTube has published a pretty in-depth on how to create and use an avatar in either the YouTube or YouTube Create app, but here’s a brief summary of how to do it using the former. Once you’ve opened AI Playground, you’ll be taking a “live selfie” that also records your voice. You can then preview your photorealistic virtual self and either proceed with it or redo the process if you’re unhappy with anything. Creating an avatar in the YouTube Create app is broadly similar, but you have to navigate to the My Avatar homepage first.

YouTube recommends that you hold your phone at eye level and keep yourself centered as much as possible. Lighting is also important, as is ensuring your whole face is visible, you’re in a quiet area, and there’s nobody else in the background. You also have to be the account owner to create an avatar, and over the age of 18.

Once you have an avatar you like, you simply type in a prompt and wait for the AI to generate a video, which according to  can be up to eight seconds long. Alternatively, YouTube will also let you add an avatar to existing “eligible” Shorts by tapping “Remix” and then “Reimagine” with your avatar selected.

Avatars can be deleted or retaken whenever you like, as can any video with your avatar in it. You can also limit who’s able to remix your videos, but deleting a video with your avatar in it won’t also delete the original video, or that avatar from your account. YouTube will automatically delete any avatar that hasn’t been used to create new video content for three years.

The new avatar feature will roll out gradually, and is the latest in a long line of AI-centric tools and updates YouTube has added to the platform in the last year, including for low-res videos, for creators and an for search results.

In short: Three YouTube content creators, specifically the company behind H3H3 Productions, a solo golf presenter, and a golf channel, have filed a proposed class action lawsuit in Seattle alleging that Amazon bypassed YouTube’s technical protections using virtual machines and rotating IP addresses to scrape their videos without consent, feeding the footage into training datasets for Nova Reel, its generative video AI model available through Amazon Bedrock. The suit invokes the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and is the latest in a series of similar cases the same group has filed against Nvidia, Meta, ByteDance, Snap, OpenAI, and Apple.

Ted Entertainment Inc., the company behind H3H3 Productions and H3 Podcast Highlights, the YouTube channels run by Ethan and Hila Klein, filed the complaint in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington alongside Matt Fisher, who runs the MrShortGame Golf channel, and Golfholics Inc. The three plaintiffs collectively account for more than 2.6 million YouTube subscribers, approximately four billion combined views, and more than 5,800 original videos. The suit names Amazon as the defendant and targets Nova Reel specifically as the product built, in part, on their content.

The complaint and its legal theory

The lawsuit rests on Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the anti-circumvention provision that prohibits bypassing technological protection measures put in place by copyright holders to restrict access to their works. The plaintiffs argue that YouTube’s systems for protecting its video files constitute such technological protection measures and that Amazon circumvented them deliberately and at scale to extract training data. If the theory holds in court, it would establish that the act of downloading YouTube videos for AI training purposes constitutes a DMCA violation regardless of whether the content is publicly viewable, because circumventing the technical mechanisms that enforce terms of service crosses the statutory line.

The complaint draws attention to what the plaintiffs describe as the permanent nature of the harm: “Once AI ingests content, that content is stored in its neural network and not capable of deletion or retraction.” The plaintiffs are seeking both damages and injunctive relief, the latter potentially forcing Amazon to stop distributing a model trained in part on their content or to retrain it without the disputed material.

How the scraping allegedly worked

The complaint centres on two academic datasets: HD-VILA-100M, produced by Microsoft Research Asia in 2021, and HD-VG-130M, produced by researchers from Peking University and Microsoft. Both were published for academic purposes and consist of URL identifiers pointing to YouTube videos rather than the video files themselves. That distinction is legally significant: to use either dataset for AI model training, a company must download the actual video files from YouTube, and the plaintiffs allege Amazon did exactly that.

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According to the complaint, Amazon did not simply download the videos. It deployed automated programmes combined with virtual machines that rotated IP addresses continuously to evade YouTube’s detection and blocking systems. The combination of these technical measures, namely automated mass downloading, virtual machine infrastructure, and IP rotation, is characterised in the complaint as a deliberate circumvention of the technological protection measures YouTube maintains over its video library. The same evasion pattern was alleged in this group of plaintiffs’ earlier suit against Nvidia, which the complaint in that case said had downloaded 38.5 million video URLs using comparable infrastructure.

Nova Reel and Amazon’s video AI ambitions

Nova Reel is Amazon’s text-to-video generative AI model, launched in December 2024 and made available through Amazon Bedrock. The model accepts text prompts and images as inputs and generates video clips ranging from six seconds to two minutes in length, with a watermarking feature that Amazon positions as a content authenticity measure. It sits within the broader Nova model family, which Amazon has been expanding across text, image, and video modalities as competition in enterprise AI accelerates.

The competitive pressure on Amazon to build capable video AI is substantial. Nova Reel represents the company’s attempt to compete with Sora, Google Veo, and other text-to-video systems for enterprise workloads. Amazon’s wider AI infrastructure investment, including its partnership with Uber to deploy custom Trainium chips for large-scale model training via AWS, reflects the breadth of the company’s ambitions across the AI stack, from cloud compute to generative media. The capital available to frontier AI developers has intensified the competitive pressure to acquire training data at speed and at scale, with SoftBank’s $40 billion bridge loan to OpenAI illustrating the resources flowing into the race for generative AI supremacy.

A pattern of lawsuits, and a legal theory in development

The three plaintiffs arrived at this complaint with prior litigation experience. The year 2025 was one in which AI training data practices moved from an industry footnote to the subject of co-ordinated legal action. In December 2025, Ted Entertainment, Fisher, and Golfholics filed a proposed class action against Nvidia in California federal court, alleging that Nvidia scraped their YouTube content using the same HD-VILA-100M and HD-VG-130M datasets and the same IP-rotation and virtual machine infrastructure to train its Cosmos video model. In January 2026 the group extended the strategy, filing suits against Meta, ByteDance, and Snap. In the first week of April, parallel complaints against OpenAI and Apple were filed in the Northern District of California. The Amazon suit, filed in Seattle, is the most recent entry in the sequence.

The suits arrive as the broader wave of copyright litigation against AI developers continues to grow. The number of US copyright cases filed against AI companies has now surpassed 100, a figure that includes a March 2026 complaint from Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster against OpenAI, alleging that nearly 100,000 of Britannica’s articles were used as training inputs without consent. That case, like the YouTuber suits, relies on the argument that AI developers have systematically extracted content from publishers and creators whose work underpins the capabilities that those developers are now commercialising.

The academic dataset mechanism sits at the centre of what the plaintiffs’ legal theory is attempting to challenge. By alleging that downloading video files pointed to by an academic URL index constitutes a DMCA violation, the suits target the gap between the published URL list — which carries a veneer of academic legitimacy — and the actual extraction activity required to use it. Questions about how frontier AI models source and handle their training data have come into sharper focus in 2026, as scrutiny of the industry’s data supply chain has intensified. If courts accept the plaintiffs’ reading of Section 1201, the practical consequence would be that AI developers using academic video URL datasets as a path to training footage face the same exposure as developers who downloaded that footage directly. Amazon, like the other defendants in this series of suits, has not commented publicly on the filing.

After eight years under the guidance of company founder Vytautas Kaziukonis, Surfshark has entered its next era with a new CEO – Dovydas Godelis.

In his own words, “Vytautas was more of a visionary at the strategic level”. Godelis, though, is looking to “stay very close to the employees”, retaining the singular vision that’s bound them together, and him to the company, for years.

The just released in-game footage of Forza Horizon 6’s initial drive sequence isn’t messing around. You’re immediately thrust into high-speed pursuits alongside a bullet train on a roadway adorned with cherry blossoms and the distant shape of Mount Fuji. A Polaris RZR Pro 4 truck blasts itself over gigantic off-road jumps, while jets and helicopters fly overhead over the icy mountain passes. The sequence then progresses to precise drifts in a Porsche 911 GT2 as you carve up the twisty touge paths, culminating in an all-out sprint with the cover vehicle, the 2025 Toyota GR GT Prototype.

Following that prologue, you can use the preview builds to create extended sessions that include structured races with plenty of freedom to roam around wherever you choose. The early qualifications are rather simple, with only three events to get you started utilizing cars provided by the game: a modified Nissan Silvia K’s for road racing, a 1994 Toyota Celica GT-Four for rallying, and a 1970 GMC Jimmy jacked up for off-road expeditions. As you level up, wristbands you collect indicate your progress through the automobile classes, essentially guiding you from complete novice to full admission to the festival without overloading you with a million options at away. Meanwhile, there are grassroots circuits all over the world that allow you to simply drive up in any car for a time attack or some local battles.

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Tokyo is a standout on the map, with its tight alleyways, multi-level freeways, and nighttime illumination of sites such as Shibuya Crossing and Tokyo Tower. Then there’s the northern mountain ranges, where gentle snowfall on the green slopes and blossom-covered roads opens up to these breathtaking views of the entire country from far above. Of course, the rural villages, woodland shrines, and dockside container yards all combine to fill in the gaps, resulting in a connected landscape that rewards you as much for leisurely driving as it does for competitive driving. Over 550 cars are released, including Japanese models at the forefront, as well as all of the insane Forza Edition versions that just improve the performance of all regular cars.

You never know what you’ll find when you start exploring, as roadside parking spaces can include all sorts of amazing aftermarket vehicles, already outfitted with body kits or tuned parts and ready to go. Then there’s the personal estate in the mountains, which you can use as a base and decorate with buildings and garages inspired by community designs. When it comes to the seasons, they just cycle through like they do in the other entries, which means that the activities and road conditions are all refreshed, but the festival atmosphere remains vibrant thanks to all of the organized barriers, marshals, and volunteer crews.

Touge clashes provide some intense rivalry on the beautifully small mountain roads, and Horizon CoLab allows players to form groups and create and share their own bespoke events in real time. Car meetings are typically held at gas stations or multi-story parking lots, which are ideal for co-op runs or simply hanging out with friends. Accessibility is prioritized, with high-contrast modes, proximity radar, and other features to ensure that everyone can participate and have fun. On PC, you receive the complete treatment, including ray-traced global illumination and reflections; on consoles, quality and performance are balanced for consistent as-you-go frame rates.

The game will be available for Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC on May 19th through the Microsoft Store and Steam, with the premium edition arriving a few days earlier. PS5 support arrives later this year. According to previews, this game has toned down some of the more out-there elements from the previous game, allowing the magic of the roads and cars to shine through, resulting in an opening drive that grabs you and an open world that makes you want to keep coming back for more.