Connect with us

Technology

SECRET WALLS ACADEMY LAUNCHES “POSCA UNI-VERSITY”, POWERED BY POSCA, TO INSPIRE TOMORROW’S ARTISTS AMID SHRINKING EDUCATION BUDGETS AND SPACE

Published

on

SECRET WALLS ACADEMY
JUNE 5TH – 17TH, 2023

WEBSITE
https://uniballco.com/uni-versity

LOS ANGELES, May 24, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Introducing “POSCA uni-versity”, the ultimate back-to-school partnership between Secret Walls and uni. As the new school year approaches, Secret Walls and uni are teaming up to help students unleash their creativity and express themselves like never before. With uni’s vibrant and versatile line of POSCA paint markers and Secret Walls’ unparalleled live paint battles, the partnership aims to educate, inspire, and support students to express themselves in bold new ways.

 

Introducing “POSCA uni-versity”, the ultimate back-to-school partnership between Secret Walls and uni.

In this curriculum, students will learn from special guest speakers, Serena Au (Occupational Art Therapist and Arts Justice Educator), Terry Guy (SW Founder), and all-star artists like Dreyfus, AngelOnce + GoopMassta, Upendo, and Wotto, leading each class, with more special guests to be announced. The program will provide crash courses in free-style drawing, DIY design, and character building, all while instilling artistic confidence, fostering open collaboration and enhancing storytelling abilities.

“I firmly believe that every single person has the potential for creativity within them. There’s a common misconception that creativity is an innate talent – you either have it, or you don’t. But I think that’s a false dichotomy.” says Secret Walls founder Terry Guy. “Creativity is a skill that can be developed and honed with the right mindset and environment. It’s not about genetics; it’s about self-belief and the opportunity to experiment without fear of criticism.”

“It’s all about creating an environment where people feel confident, playful, and encouraged to take risks. So, whether you’re a business owner, a teacher, or a parent, remember that everyone has the potential for creativity. Nurture and uplift those around you, and watch them unleash their full creative potential.”, he adds.

Each day’s programming will be structured around a theme that includes mural planning and character building. On the final day (June 17th), select students will combine everything they learned with a Secret Walls team battle that includes host Nick Major, DJ Olea, and renowned guest judges.

“As a unique back-to-school experience, the POSCA uni-versity program is a great opportunity to help young art students start their creative story. uni’s mission is to ‘Enrich lives by inspiring creativity and connection’, and this partnership aligns perfectly with that vision by helping students connect to their mentors, their peers, and to the brand by exploring and applying their full creative potential.” highlights uni’s President, Mike Parker.

Sessions will take place IRL at Secret Walls HQ (2272 Venice Blvd, 90006) in Los Angeles on June 5th through 8th, from 12pm to 5:00pm Pacific Time.

This is a FREE TICKET experience and you can grab your place at the “POSCA uni-versity” by accessing the links below:
Workshop 1 | Workshop 2 | Workshop 3 | Workshop 4 

More information can be found here.

About Secret Walls & Secret Walls Academy

Founded in London in 2006, Secret Walls is the world’s premier live arts entertainment brand, where artists take a stage to show off their talent and compete to win. We exist to entertain fans, support local, develop artists and showcase the best creativity on the planet. We operate across the realms of physical and digital art – IRL + URL – and we are always expanding our universe in exciting new ways. The Secret Walls Academy was launched to reinvent and refresh the summer school camp world and bring the magic of Secret Walls to the masses, inspiring students and parents to think bigger and harness the power of imagination and creativity, and is devoted training the next generation of street artists and muralists even as the government cuts funding for the arts and education. Support your local artist!

About uni

For more than 135 years, uniball has been the leader in the design, development, and delivery of writing and art product solutions. Headquartered just outside of Chicago, uni continues to deliver best-in-class products that are a catalyst for creativity and connection. uni’s robust and innovative portfolio includes products under the uniball, POSCA, Emott, and Pin brands. For more information about uni and our family of brands, visit uniballco.com.

Media Inquiries

uni
Beatriz Lorentebeatriz.lorente@mediamonks.com

Secret Walls
Terry Guystudio@thesecretwalls.com 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/secret-walls-academy-launches-posca-uni-versity-powered-by-posca-to-inspire-tomorrows-artists-amid-shrinking-education-budgets-and-space-301833948.html

SOURCE uni

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Technology

Ally Waste Acquires Swift Integrated Services, Expanding Service Capabilities and Market Reach

Published

on

By

GILBERT, Ariz., Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Ally Waste, a nationwide provider of comprehensive waste solutions for multifamily communities, announced today that it has acquired Swift Integrated Services, a Utah-based provider of dumpster management, doorstep trash pickup, and waste brokerage services.

“Every acquisition we make starts with the same question: Will it help us serve customers better? Swift expands our reach and brings capabilities that allow us to support more of our customers’ waste needs. We’re excited to welcome the Swift team to Ally and build on what they’ve created,” said James Crawley, CEO of Ally Waste.

The acquisition expands Ally Waste’s presence in Utah, Florida, and Idaho markets while strengthening the company’s waste stream optimization capabilities. It also brings waste brokerage capabilities to Ally, giving current customers another way to address their waste needs as the offering is integrated.

“Joining Ally gives us the opportunity to build on what we’ve created while bringing our customers the support and resources of a nationwide team,” said Indigo Schumann-Curtis, President of Swift Integrated Services. “Our customers can expect business as usual, with many of the same people continuing to support them. I’m excited about what our teams can accomplish together.”

Swift Integrated Services customers can expect continuity in both service and support throughout the transition. The Swift team will continue with Ally, bringing established customer relationships and deep market knowledge to the combined organization.

About Ally Waste

Ally Waste is a nationwide provider of comprehensive waste solutions for multifamily communities, including valet trash and recycling, bulk removal, and waste stream optimization services. Its technology gives owners and operators clear visibility into what they’re paying for waste across a portfolio, paired with on-the-ground teams who put those insights into action.

The company’s culture is grounded in its values of Integrity, Grit, and Humility. These principles drive Ally Waste’s commitment to supporting multifamily teams and delivering consistent, high-quality service that improves everyday life for residents and on-site staff. Learn more at www.allywaste.com.

Media Contact:
Doridé Uvaldo
duvaldo@allywaste.com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ally-waste-acquires-swift-integrated-services-expanding-service-capabilities-and-market-reach-302868621.html

SOURCE Ally Waste

Continue Reading

Technology

Gupshup Launches Self-Serve Voice AI Platform, Extending Conversational Engagement into Phone Calls

Published

on

By

Businesses can now build, test, and deploy AI voice agents across support, sales, and operations – alongside WhatsApp, RCS, and SMS – from a single platform

MUMBAI, India and SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Gupshup launched its Voice AI Platform, a self-serve console for building and running AI voice agents that handle calls end to end. The launch extends Gupshup’s engagement platform from messaging into voice, bringing support, sales, and operations onto the same infrastructure businesses use for WhatsApp, RCS, and SMS.

Gupshup’s Voice AI Platform resolves support calls, qualifies and converts leads, and automates operational calls such as scheduling, verification, and payment reminders, so human teams can focus on conversations that require a person.

The platform covers agent lifecycle in a no-code, prompt-based interface. Businesses configure an agent’s voice, language, knowledge base, system prompt, and workflows, then connect it to tools their teams use. Before going live, teams define guardrails, run simulations, and validate behaviour with tests – comparing models. Once deployed, analytics track success rates, satisfaction, and language usage, with transcripts, conversation history, and debug logs for review.

Gupshup’s platform is the first to bring unique capabilities. First, voice is a channel extension of a platform serving businesses across WhatsApp, RCS, and SMS – enabling voice-and-messaging experiences within a customer journey. Second, it supports telephony: PSTN and WhatsApp voice channels, on-premise and cloud deployment, and the option to bring PSTN infrastructure. Third, it is model-flexible – businesses choose speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and LLM providers rather than accepting a stack.

The platform builds on Gupshup’s experience powering customer engagement for 50,000+ businesses across 100+ countries and 25+ industries, processing 10 billion interactions monthly, including 500 million voice calls per month.

The Voice AI Platform has been beta tested and delivered outcomes across deployments. Users receive 100 minutes of credits to test, and pricing starts at USD 0.035 (INR 3.50) per minute.

“For customer engagement in emerging markets, Voice AI drives universal access – reaching every user regardless of language or literacy. In developed markets, it drives efficiency and automation. In both, it delivers cost savings, revenue growth, and satisfaction. With the launch of its Voice AI Platform alongside its messaging, Gupshup offers the only unified self-serve platform for customer engagement across voice and messaging,” said Beerud Sheth, Co-founder and CEO, Gupshup.

The Voice AI Platform is available to businesses at voiceai.gupshup.io.

For more information, visit www.gupshup.ai.

 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gupshup-launches-self-serve-voice-ai-platform-extending-conversational-engagement-into-phone-calls-302869131.html

SOURCE Gupshup Technology India Pvt Ltd

Continue Reading

Technology

Deepdub Launches Phantom Z 3.4 Conversational: Multilingual Text-to-Speech Built to Survive Real Customers, Not Just Demos

Published

on

By

Enterprise-grade real-time text-to-speech delivers 150ms time to first audio at full 48 kHz, with text normalization that gets account numbers, invoice totals and appointment dates right

TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Deepdub, a foundational voice AI company pioneering expressive voice technologies, announced today the launch of Phantom Z 3.4 Conversational, a new multilingual text-to-speech model with high-fidelity 48 kHz audio, improved text normalization and extended Hebrew support. The model is available to all Deepdub clients now.

For enterprises running voice agents, a call holds together when four things go right at once. The voice sounds like a person. The response arrives fast enough to feel like a conversation. The agent knows when to speak and when to listen. And every account number, date and amount comes out the way a customer would say it. When one of them slips, the call escalates to a human, and that is where containment and cost are decided. Phantom Z 3.4 Conversational is built for all four.

“Every voice model sounds impressive for two minutes in a demo. Very few survive two weeks with real customers,” said Ofir Krakowski, CEO and co-founder of Deepdub. “Deployments don’t stall on the 95% a model gets right, they stall on the misread account number, the mangled surname, the one wrong digit on a live call. We built this model for that last few percent, because in production, the last few percent is the whole product.”

In English, the work is in text normalization, the step that turns written text into spoken words. A delivery date written 2024-12-31 is read as December thirty first, twenty twenty-four rather than as a run of digits. An invoice total written $1,240 is read as one thousand two hundred forty dollars. An appointment at 14:30 is read as two thirty. A reference written Chapter VII is read as chapter seven rather than as letters. These are the categories where Deepdub’s testing puts the model ahead of the other systems it was measured against. An enterprise running more than one language gets one set of behavior to test and one contract to hold rather than two.

Phantom Z 3.4 delivers an end-to-end p95 time-to-first-audio of 150 milliseconds in real-time mode at full-range 48 kHz audio, with cross-language voice transfer from under three seconds of reference audio. Deepdub builds and trains its own speech models from random rather than licensing them, which allows the company to bring a new language into production in two weeks. Deepdub covers more than fifty locales and dialects verified by local voice and language experts, inside a platform supporting more than 50 locales and dialects.

“We run Deepdub in production for live, real-time phone calls, where latency and naturalness aren’t nice-to-haves but the key factor in whether a caller stays on the line. 3.4 is the closest we’ve heard a synthetic voice come to a real person, and our callers show it: they stay longer, talk more, and engage with our agents like we’ve never seen before,” said Adir Haziza, CTO at Voiceman.

The hardest case is Hebrew, which is written without vowels, so the same letters can spell different words. The three letters of שלט are a sign read one way and a remote control read another. A model that reads one word at a time has to guess which the sentence means, and in Hebrew a wrong guess is not an accent, it is a different word that stays invisible until a customer hears it. Phantom Z 3.4 resolves this at the source. Pronunciation is decided from the whole sentence rather than word by word, and every instance of שלט in Deepdub’s Hebrew test set was read correctly. Where a brand name or a plan tier has to be said a particular way, marking it in the text is enough. Deepdub ranks first for Hebrew text-to-speech on the public TTS Arena leaderboard hosted by ivrit.ai on Hugging Face.

In Hebrew, national ID numbers, appointment dates and transaction amounts are expanded before speech, so a balance written as 1,240 ₪ is spoken in full rather than read out as digits. In blind listening tests, Phantom Z 3.4 was preferred over Deepdub’s previous Hebrew model in 71 percent of decisive comparisons.

“We needed something that would hold up consistently across a large volume of work, so we tested it thoroughly before deciding. What stood out was that the details came out right and the Hebrew was the most natural we’d heard,” said Dor Levy, Head of Jeen Talk at Jeen AI.

About Deepdub
Deepdub is the foundational voice AI model company pioneering expressive voice technologies for global enterprises across TV, film, advertising, gaming, e-learning, and AI-agent applications. The company’s international team of technology, dubbing, and linguistic experts deliver an end-to-end voice solution that preserves the emotional and cultural integrity of original content in more than 50 locales and dialects. With an advisory board that includes media leaders such as Kevin Reilly, former Chief Content Officer at HBO Max, and Emiliano Calemzuk, former President of Fox Television Studios, Deepdub is eliminating language barriers to enable the global diffusion of media on major streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Visit https://deepdub.ai or follow us on LinkedIn for more information.

Deepdub Media Contact
Zivit Katz
Deepdub
zivit.katz@deepdub.ai

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/deepdub-launches-phantom-z-3-4-conversational-multilingual-text-to-speech-built-to-survive-real-customers-not-just-demos-302869134.html

SOURCE Deepdub

Continue Reading

Trending