The Battle Cats 'hacked' itself to sell Cat Food on Black Friday
PONOS faked a hacker group stealing 100M Cat Food cans; players voted on the story with purchases, lifting revenue 131%.
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2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDIto En removed oxygen from canned green tea and created the unsweetened tea market
Green tea oxidizes within minutes, so nobody could bottle it — Ito En's deoxygenation filling created the world's first canned green tea.
Read the caseA German hospital automated physician scheduling with MIP, slicing hours of planning
Kempten Hospital rebuilt physician scheduling as a mixed-integer program on a relational data model, cutting planning effort and making fairness computable.
Read the caseCasa di San Giorgio turned Genoa's war debt into tradeable shares
Genoa's Casa di San Giorgio turned unpayable war debt into tradeable shares backed by tax revenue, letting creditors sell instead of wait for repayment.
Read the caseleo-stone's hack-petya beat Petya ransomware by finding the key instead of paying
When Petya locked his father-in-law's PC, leo-stone rebuilt the malware's 16-bit Salsa10 key check and recovered the key in seconds with a genetic solver
Read the caseSTC answered the women-driving backlash with a king who called himself 'Nora's brother'
As Saudi Arabia let women drive, STC reminded men that founder King Abdulaziz proudly named himself after his sister Nora — tradition as the case for change.
Read the caseKoush's node fork added async/await on V8 coroutines to end callback spaghetti
Node's callback pyramids drove koush to fork the runtime, adding coroutine-based async/await so async code reads and debugs like synchronous code
Read the caseKotak 811's phone accounts doubled its customer base in 18 months
Kotak's 811 made account opening free, paperless and five minutes long — acquisition cost fell 80–90% and customers doubled to 16 million.
Read the casee.l.f. Beauty used one absurd stat to push corporate board diversity
e.l.f. counted 566 men named Dick on U.S. boards — more than several minority groups — and made the stat a Wall Street OOH campaign.
Read the caseBionade brewed lemonade like beer and rode word of mouth to 200 million bottles a year
A master brewer at a dying Bavarian family brewery fermented sugar into gluconic acid instead of alcohol, creating the world's first brewed organic lemonade.
Read the casePCR copied a stretch of DNA by just heating and cooling it
In 1983 Mullis's polymerase chain reaction turned one DNA segment into a billion copies in hours.
Read the caseAustralia turned abandoned pallets into a shared rental pool
Australia pooled 60,000 abandoned US Army pallets into a shared rental fleet, letting companies borrow and return instead of owning, which became CHEP.
Read the casePrey caught a stolen-MacBook thief by turning the device into its own evidence source
Free open-source tracker Prey turned a MacBook stolen in the London riots into a silent witness, handing police the thief's name, address and webcam face
Read the caseDove deepfaked mothers reciting the toxic beauty advice their daughters hear
To make parents see the toxic beauty tips algorithms feed teen girls, Dove used deepfakes to put those words in trusted mothers' mouths.
Read the caseBD Odon Device: a mechanic's cork-popping trick became an assisted-birth tool
A car mechanic watched a party trick free a cork from a bottle and turned the air-cuff principle into the first new assisted-birth instrument since the 1950s.
Read the caseNPCI gave India's payment rails away free — and wallets had to compete on top
Instead of another closed wallet, India's bank-owned NPCI launched UPI in 2016 as free, interoperable public rails any bank account could use instantly.
Read the caseIHOP renamed itself IHOb to announce burgers, sales quadrupled
A fake rebrand to 'International House of Burgers' generated 36B impressions and 4x burger sales; 2019 Effie Gold.
Read the caseFujifilm X-Trans fought moire by scrambling the color grid
Fujifilm used a 6-by-6 color filter pattern so its X-Pro1 could drop the resolution-blurring optical low-pass filter.
Read the caseArgentina's Superliga scheduled its season with cluster patterns instead of place names
Argentina's top soccer league used integer programming with geographic cluster patterns, beating its old schedule on fairness, travel and broadcast constraints.
Read the caseInca relay runners beat endurance by handing off every 6 km
The Inca Empire moved messages up to 240 km a day by stationing fresh chaski runners every 6-9 km, each sprinting a short leg before handing off.
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