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Home News Industries Technology Rosetta Stone eliminating 57 positions in Virginia
Rosetta Stone eliminating 57 positions in Virginia
Published March 12, 2013 by Jessica Sabbath
Language-learning technology company Rosetta Stone Inc. is eliminating almost 60 Virginia-based employees in its products division as it opens two additional U.S. Offices.
The move is part of the company's plans to reshape its product organization. The layoffs include 48 positions in the firm's Harrisonburg office, nine jobs in its Arlington headquarters and six in its Boulder, Colo. office.
The company announced Tuesday that it would open two offices in Austin, Texas, and San Francisco to tap the talent pool in these locations.
"We are in the process of transforming Rosetta Stone," Steve Swad, the company's President and CEO, said in a statement, "and a critical part of that is investing in our product organization. By opening offices in Austin and San Francisco — hotbeds for technology with deep talent pools — we are attracting some of the country's best developers and designers to help us strengthen our platforms and bring innovative new products to market."
Most of the layoffs are associated with Rosetta Stone's legacy products, according to spokesman Jonathan Mudd. "After 20 years technology has changed a lot and, a majority of positions were associated with legacy products and legacy technologies," he said.
The two new offices have a combined capacity of 100 positions.
Swad said that Rosetta Stone plans to launch several products in its kids' learning franchise in the late summer of 2013 and likely would follow with new intermediate and advanced offerings in English.
Rosetta Stone has about 1,500 employees worldwide.
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Dan Gilbert says a Detroit housing fix is vital. Here are 5 obstacles.
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has made rehabbing neighborhoods a priority, but not all areas are benefiting from the city's comeback.
March 15, 2018 Joel Kurth Urban Affairs
Dan Gilbert is the founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, a Detroit-based online mortgage company. He is also the owner of the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers.
Whipsawed by foreclosures and blight, Detroit homes have been a tough sell for mortgage lenders for years.
And although the market is rebounding, the city faces a host of unique challenges that require creative solutions, says Dan Gilbert, founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, a Detroit-based online mortgage company.
Related: Banks are lending again in Detroit...if you live in the right neighborhood
"Every sector – public, private and philanthropic – should engage to help address the housing needs in the city," Gilbert told Bridge Magazine in an email. "It is a moral imperative that we all work together … to ensure that every Detroiter has a fair opportunity to participate in a stable housing market in Detroit."
Last year, city mortgages jumped by a third to 994, records show. That's nearly double the amount in 2014 but a far cry from the 7,000 per year before the housing meltdown of 2007.
Here are five reasons why mortgages, traditionally viewed as a gateway to the middle class, are elusive in Detroit.
Detroit is the poorest big city in America. Only 1-in-5 city residents have credit scores high enough to get a mortgage, according to data from the Urban Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.
The average credit score of city residents, 585, is nearly 100 points below the national average and shy of the 620 threshold typically required by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises that finance more than 45 percent of U.S. mortgages.
Two-thirds of Detroiters also carry heavy debt, according to the Urban Institute, and have past-due accounts. That's a deterrent to lenders who scrutinize debt-to-income ratio of mortgage applicants.
Home values have plummeted since the Great Recession and, while they're recovering, the average price for conventional sales in Detroit was $47,000 in 2017, records show.
Trouble is, lenders are typically reluctant to initiate mortgages for less than $50,000. That's because loan origination and servicing costs are fixed no matter the size of the loan, so many banks don't bother with smaller loans.
There are exceptions. In Detroit, some companies (including Quicken, Huntington, Fifth-Third) now write mortgages for as low $30,000, according to sales data from RealtyTrac, a California-based real estate records firm.
The number of homes in disrepair in Detroit is declining but remains staggering. Some 22,000 are abandoned, another 25,000 are owned by the city's land bank, and nearly 50,000 properties have been foreclosed for back taxes since 2015.
The homes aren't just eyesores. They drag down the value of nearby homes, making them harder to finance for mortgages, Gilbert said.
Appraisal gap
Nearby blight and a dearth of mortgages mean even those with good credit and money for down payments have trouble buying homes in Detroit.
That's because of the "appraisal gap." Lenders appraise homes during the mortgage process by comparing recent sales of similar homes. A lack of sales – or high numbers of homes selling for cheap – can make homes appraise for less than their worth and halt the mortgage process, said Erica Ward Gerson, chairwoman of the Detroit Land Bank Authority.
Last year, the city announced a plan, the Detroit Home Mortgage program, that issues mortgages for up to $75,000 more than their appraised value to help fill the gap, Gerson said. Last year, the program initiated 95 mortgages.
Other factors?
An investigation last month by The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Associated Press found that black loan applicants in Detroit were 1.8 times more likely to be denied loans than their white counterparts.
The investigation labeled the practice "modern-day redlining," a reference to the pernicious practice of lenders (encouraged by the federal government) signifying areas of cities where mortgages were discouraged with red lines.
Bankers criticized the study's methodology and noted that many factors of lending decisions, such as credit scores and lenders' debt, aren't available to the public.
Thu, 03/15/2018 - 4:31pm
It would be interesting to know for the local metropolitan area the extent to which the local millage is "capitalized" into the value of homes. Detroit's homestead exemption millage totals 68.8675. It would seem that another factor holding down housing values in the city is the relatively high millage (i.e., high property taxes). Other cities have the same issue (e.g., Highland Park, Harper Woods, Inkster, River Rouge,...). For residents of the city who are middle class, there are other "additional" costs to living in the city, including high auto insurance, the high cost of property insurance, the costs for additional security measures, and possibly tuition if children are sent to a non-public school. The City should work to bring the millage down to a level comparable to other metropolitan area communities. If it did so, housing values would increase, and it would remove a roadblock to further housing development.
Wed, 02/19/2020 - 1:17am
I agree but you forgot to say that Detroit is predominantly people of color and that is why the rates of everything is so high redlining is alive and well within the city limits
until the whites come back in and get these houses for a little of nothing the property taxes water rates will not change in Detroit

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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David Bowie - Blackstar (5/5)
On The Next Day, David Bowie self-consciously looked back through his legacy. The repurposed "Heroes" cover art and the songs about youth (both of unnamed protagonists as in "I'd Rather Be High" and Bowie's own as in "Where Are We Now?") signaled Bowie's intent on sifting through memories and taking stock of a life fully lived. On Blackstar, his follow up album, Bowie seems more interested in breaking from the past and once again making a massive leap into the unknown.
Always the consummate collaborator, Bowie this time not only brought in his long time producer Tony Visconti but also enlisted the work of the Donny McCaslin Quartet, a group that melds jazz and electronica. Because he has devoured so many genres over the decades, jazz isn't necessarily new to Bowie. "Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)" from Aladdin Sane and "Bring Me the Disco King" from Reality immediately spring to mind. While Blackstar demonstrates Bowie's most sustained engagement with jazz, it should come as no surprise that Bowie tackles the genre from his own askance perspective and fully fleshes it out with his ever shifting personality.
In addition to jazz, 90s trip-hop and ambient electronica are equally important to Blackstar's sound. The eponymous album opener is a nearly ten minute opus populated with mythic, future-fantasy lyrics that sound as if they were assembled from William S. Burrough's famous "cut up" technique that Bowie has been known to use. Set to a stuttering drum beat, Bowie sings of the "villa of Ormen" in the cadence of a Gregorian chant. The archaic lyrics showcase Bowie's interest in medieval European culture and narratives, but here they brush up against electronic arrangements resulting in something that both sounds like it always was and will never be. If past and present are two similarly charged magnets, then "Blackstar" stands at its very center. A little over the halfway mark, "Blackstar" takes a turn towards the theatrical, from a Broadwayesque crescendo into a slinking 1930s cabaret number. As if that weren't enough, Middle Eastern sounding woodwinds and strings eventually creep into the proceedings. Within ten minutes, "Blackstar" seems to be reaching towards everything at once, but still maintains a cohesive identity all its own, much like Bowie himself.
As expansive and experimental as "Blackstar" sounds, it's still more inviting than the more streamlined "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore" and "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)." Both songs employ polyrhythm and syncopation to unsettle the listener. While the Donny McCaslin Quartet attack their instruments, Bowie layers his patented croon over the carefully controlled chaos. Donny McCaslin and company deserve a good deal of credit for their aggressive playing, giving the songs real bite, but both tracks were originally demoed by Bowie himself prior to anyone else's involvement, and they showcase his real ability to really investigate disparate genres and then make them his own.
Letting his quintessential Britishness poke through, Bowie borrows the title of "'Tis a Pity" from a seventeenth-century English play about an incestruous tryst between brother and sister, certainly an allusion and subject matter you aren't going to find from any other rocker. Likewise, the lyrics of "Girl Loves Me" are partly in the style of Nadsat, the fictional dialect developed by British author Anthony Burgess in his dystopian novel, A Clockwork Orange. As if these disparate influences weren't enough, "Sue" and "Lazarus" in particular play up the album's noir feel, which is also echoed in the album title and artwork. At only forty minutes in length, Blackstar contains multitudes. The album name is actually supposed to be styled as ★, and so much of the work sounds like an artist trying to slip the constraints of language and rigid rationality.
The album's last two tracks, "Dollar Days" and "I Can't Give Everything Away," are a little friendlier than those that precede them. Both are midtempo pop songs driven by indelible melodies. After the dark collage of music that constitutes most of the album, the final two tracks offer a little sliver of light and some emotional release. This tension has always been within Bowie's music. From the beginning, the light has always kept darkness at bay, if just barely. And here Bowie is in his late sixties and reinventing himself once again. In "Dollar Days," he sings, "I'm dying to / Push their backs against the grain / And fool them all again and again," a mantra for both this album and Bowie's life. I picked up Blackstar on the day it came out, and after listening to the album repeatedly, I thought to myself, "I can't wait to see what Bowie is going to do next."
But, of course, we'll never know. As everyone knows by now, David Bowie died of cancer two days after the album was released. In retrospect, it's clear that the album was written while Bowie was contemplating his own fragile mortality, and death and dying are found throughout the album, something I vaguely recognized when listening, but I mostly chose to ignore because the idea just seemed unfathomable at the time. Producer Tony Visconti called Blackstar Bowie's final parting gift, an idea present in the lyrics and title of the final song, "I Can't Give Everything Away." The album speaks to Bowie's generosity of spirit--that, in the end, he poured out nearly everything he had for his art and his fans. And who but Bowie could craft a final work of art that brilliantly looks towards the future, exploring new sounds and ideas all the way to the end.
I first became interested in Bowie when I was about eighteen and I bought Ziggy Stardust. Before then, I had heard his radio hits, but I had never really delved fully into his work. Listening to the album at the time felt like a world opening up to me. It was catchy, theatrical, campy, and mercurial in the way only Bowie could manage. Back then, gas was cheap, and I drove around in my shitty, bluish-green Ford Escort nearly non-stop, and for some time Ziggy Stardust became my soundtrack to the woods of rural Ohio.
From then on, I was hooked. The first paper I wrote in college that I was somewhat proud of was written for my freshman composition class, and it focused on the questions of gender and sexuality in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It was only through Bowie that I came to more fully comprehend--rather than merely "know"--the fluid nature of gender and sexuality.
Before listening to Bowie, my understanding of these concepts were rather rigid and staid. I was brought up in an evangelical household, and while I had abandoned much of the regressive politics of that culture by the time I was a senior in high school, I had yet to fully come to terms with homophobic thought and language. I was still quasi-religious at the time, but I couldn't quite wrap my head around why homosexuality was supposed to be a sin. I reasoned that if it was a sin, then it must have been on the level of lying or some other kind of act that wouldn't imperil your soul. But I also used the occasional unthinking homophobic slur. While I was moving in the right direction, I still had too much of a regressive attitude towards gender and sexuality. Bowie's music allowed me to become more open and accepting.
In other words, Bowie's music did what great art is supposed to: it transformed the way I saw the world. I realized that many of the harmful and bigoted ideas I had about others were incommensurate with the person I wanted to be, and they needed to be discarded. I can honestly say that listening to David Bowie gave me empathy and understanding. His music has since weaved itself into my life. Whenever I'm on a long plane ride, I always listen to the entire Berlin trilogy, and I even incorporated music from the "Heroes" album into my wedding ceremony.
Bowie's musical contribution is vast. In his discography there are universes within universes that I suspect I'll be exploring from here until my dying day. His output in the 70s is unparalleled, but he continued to surprise. There's a lot more to Bowie than the way he played with gender and sexuality. Questions of identity were central. The truism about Bowie was that he was a chameleon, but every new personae still felt like it was somehow still him. He always is and never was David Jones, David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, and Aladdin Sane. He's like a postmodern Bodhisattva.
In fact, I had a hard time reconciling the Earthling era David Bowie that populated the airwaves when I was growing up with the 60s folkie he started off as. Over time, Bowie's unceasing transformations started to become one of his constants, a concept he played with by purposefully reemploying the iconic "Heroes" cover for The Next Day. His contributions also spanned far more than his music. He was an incredible stylist and a great actor. Who other than David Bowie could have pulled of the outrageous fashion of Jareth the Goblin King in The Labyrinth? But he could also go for subtlety as in The Prestige and The Man Who Fell to Earth or play with his iconography like he did in an episode of Extras.
In some ways, there's a Bowie for everyone. But I think that for fans, all Bowies are necessary. After buying Blackstar, I found myself scouring the internet for stories about Bowie, and I spent hours perusing Consequence of Sound's ordering of every Bowie album from worst to best where they staunchly defend his much maligned work in the eighties. I disagree with plenty of their reviews (soon I'm certain that Reality is going to get a reassessment), but the fact that the critical attitude of Bowie's oeuvre can shift so dramatically demonstrates that when it comes to Bowie nothing's unnecessary. However uneven, each album has always been a new facet of a restless artist. He's left us a body of work that will take a lifetime to explore, and for that I will always be grateful.
Much has been made recently about the "Lazarus" music video, which takes as its subject a bedridden David Bowie and includes the lyrics, "Look up here, I'm in Heaven / I've got scars that can't be seen." Death is present throughout Blackstar, but like an idiot I mostly ignored these obvious hints. A world without David Bowie seemed inconceivable, especially since he was still making vital and important music. There was more work to be done. It's amazing to me that even as he passed away, Bowie had the utmost control over his image. It's equally amazing that he had such generosity to give us one final parting gift. Few other than Bowie could transform their death into a work of art.
I'm sure the death and resurrection story of Lazarus appealed to Bowie's playful instincts. And he's not wrong. He will rise again, if not in flesh, then in culture. Like Wintermute in Neuromancer, Bowie has achieved something like non-corporeal sentience. His iconography will live on, and other artists will take Bowie the saint and remake him for their own purposes. Artists have been creating their own David Bowies for some time now, from Hedwig and the Angry Inch to Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine to The Venture Brothers to a Neil Gaiman short story. Bowie is an artist, a revolutionary, and an idea unbound by time, space, life, and death.
Despite (or because) of this, it still seems unthinkable that David Bowie has died. Even as he aged, he seemed ethereal as if he had already slipped this plane of existence long ago. Rest in peace, David Bowie, and thank you.
Labels: Blackstar, David Bowie, film noir, jazz, music, obituary, review


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package org.ovirt.engine.ui.common.widget.table.cell;

import org.ovirt.engine.ui.common.CommonApplicationResources;
import org.ovirt.engine.ui.common.gin.AssetProvider;
import org.ovirt.engine.ui.uicommonweb.models.storage.LunModel;
import com.google.gwt.core.client.GWT;
import com.google.gwt.safehtml.client.SafeHtmlTemplates;
import com.google.gwt.safehtml.shared.SafeHtml;
import com.google.gwt.safehtml.shared.SafeHtmlBuilder;

/**
 * LunSelectionCell. Supports tooltips.
 *
 */
public class LunSelectionCell extends AbstractCell<LunModel> {

    interface CellTemplate extends SafeHtmlTemplates {

        @Template("{1}")
        SafeHtml span(String id, SafeHtml html);

        @Template("<input id=\"{0}\" tabindex='-1' type=\"{1}\" checked />")
        SafeHtml inputChecked(String id, String type);

        @Template("<input id=\"{0}\" tabindex='-1' type=\"{1}\" checked disabled />")
        SafeHtml inputCheckedDisabled(String id, String type);

        @Template("<input id=\"{0}\" tabindex='-1' type=\"{1}\" />")
        SafeHtml inputUnchecked(String id, String type);

        @Template("<input id=\"{0}\" tabindex='-1' type=\"{1}\" disabled />")
        SafeHtml inputUncheckedDisabled(String id, String type);
    }

    private static final CellTemplate templates = GWT.create(CellTemplate.class);

    private boolean multiSelection;

    private static final CommonApplicationResources resources = AssetProvider.getResources();

    public LunSelectionCell() {
    }

    public LunSelectionCell(boolean multiSelection) {
        this.multiSelection = multiSelection;
    }

    @Override
    public void render(Context context, LunModel value, SafeHtmlBuilder sb, String id) {
        ImageResourceCell imageCell = new ImageResourceCell();
        imageCell.setStyle("text-align: center;"); //$NON-NLS-1$

        if (value.getIsIncluded()) {
            // ImageResourceCell sets the id
            imageCell.render(context, resources.okSmallImage(), sb, id);
        } else if (!value.getIsAccessible()) {
            // ImageResourceCell sets the id
            imageCell.render(context, resources.logWarningImage(), sb, id);
        } else {
            boolean checked = value.getIsSelected();
            boolean disabled = value.getIsGrayedOut();
            String inputId = id + "_input"; //$NON-NLS-1$

            String type = multiSelection ? "checkbox" : "radio"; //$NON-NLS-1$ //$NON-NLS-2$
            SafeHtml input = null;

            if (checked && !disabled) {
                input = templates.inputChecked(inputId, type);
            }
            else if (checked && disabled) {
                input = templates.inputCheckedDisabled(inputId, type);
            }
            else if (!checked && !disabled) {
                input = templates.inputUnchecked(inputId, type);
            }
            else {
                input = templates.inputUncheckedDisabled(inputId, type);
            }

            sb.append(templates.span(id, input));
        }
    }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


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Флаг муниципального образования Вороговский сельсовет Туруханского муниципального района Красноярского края Российской Федерации — опознавательно-правовой знак, служащий официальным символом муниципального образования.

Флаг утверждён 19 июля 2011 года и 2 ноября 2011 года внесён в Государственный геральдический регистр Российской Федерации с присвоением регистрационного номера 7202.

Описание
«Прямоугольное полотнище с отношением ширины к длине 2:3, воспроизводящее композицию герба Вороговского сельсовета в зелёном, голубом, белом и жёлтом цветах».

Геральдическое описание герба гласит: «В зелёном и лазоревом поле, пересечённом серебряным тонким чешуевидно изогнутым поясом, в зелени — золотой, идущий  и обернувшийся, соболь с опущенным хвостом; в лазури — выгнутая и бьющая хвостом золотая стерлядь».

Символика
Флаг разработан на основе герба, который языком символов и аллегорий отражает природные особенности Вороговского сельсовета.

Богатая сибирская природа стала основой жизнедеятельности местных жителей. Разнообразная флора и фауна позволяет развиваться многочисленным промыслам и различным отраслям промышленности. Однако помимо использования природных ресурсов жители заботятся и о их сохранении — село Ворогово расположено на территории одного из крупнейших в Европе заповедников — Центральносибирского государственного природного биосферного заповедника. О чём на флаге говорит изображение жёлтого (золотого) соболя в зелёном поле.

Жёлтый цвет (золото) — символ богатства, стабильности, уважения и интеллекта, жизненной энергии.

Зелёный цвет — символ природы, здоровья, молодости, роста.

Вороговский сельсовет расположен в среднем течении Енисея. Здесь расположены важнейшие в регионе нерестилища рыб осетровых пород — протоки Вороговского многоостровья, что отражено на флаге волнистой полосой и жёлтым (золотым) осётром.

Белый цвет (серебро) — символ чистоты, совершенства, мира и взаимопонимания.

Голубой цвет (лазурь) — символ чести, благородства, духовности.

Примечания

Флаги с изображением соболя
Флаги с изображением рыбы

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Archivo del Autor: Belen De Leon
Articles posted by Belen De Leon
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11 Jun 0
How Tech Shaped San Francisco's Unresolved Mayor's Race
This was supposed to be the election where the city rebelled against years of tech-fueled growth. It's not turning out that way.
Source: Wired
Belen De Leon
The FCC's Net Neutrality Rules Are Dead, but the Fight Isn't
Efforts continue in Congress, the states, and the courts, to prevent internet providers from blocking or favoring certain content.
Amazon's Prime discount at Whole Foods coming to 10 more states – CNET
The company also introduced a handful of new discounts just for Prime members.
Pan-European seed fund firstminute hits a final fund close of $100M
New UK early stage VC firstminute Capital launched in June last year to the tune of $60m, with European VC Atomico as its first cornerstone investor. They were joined by 30 unicorns founders from Europe and the US. Last September they brought in the huge China-based company, Tencent reaching a fund size of $85m.
Today firstminute capital, the London-based pan-European seed fund announced a final close of $100m, and detailed its first batch of early-stage investments made since September.
Two institutional investors have now joined. Henkel, the €60bn publicly-listed FMCG giant, is making its first investment into a European seed fund, and Lombard Odier, one of Europe's largest private banks, also joins.
The fund has three partners: Brent Hoberman CBE, Spencer Crawley and Henry Lane-Fox. Hoberman is chairman and co-founder of Founders Factory, a corporate-backed incubator/accelerator based in London, and also of Founders Forum, a series of invitation-only, but influential annual global events for leading entrepreneurs. He co-founded lastminute.com in April 1998, and sold to Sabre for $1.1bn in 2005. Crawley is co-founder and General Partner was previously Business Development at AppDirect (a San Francisco-based cloud commerce platform provider, backed by Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital, latest valuation $1bn+), Investment Associate at DMC Partners (Goldman Sachs spin-out Special Opportunities fund), and Analyst in the Moscow office of Goldman Sachs. Lane-Fox is a partner at Founders Forum, Co-founder and CEO of Founders Factory, Co-founder of SmartUp.io, and previously part of the founding team of lastminute.com.
Hoberman said: "We're excited to reach a significant milestone for firstminute, that helps us continue to support the most ambitious entrepreneurs globally. The latest investors to get behind the fund further increase our ability to have real impact, and we are buoyed by the rapid progress our portfolio founders are making. With our young and hard-working investment team, and our invaluable venture partners, we are hopeful that we can make our brand promise – of aspiring to be Europe's most helpful seed fund – a reality. We were aiming to raise $60m for our first fund, and so to have closed our first fund at $100m is a strong signal for European technology."
The link to Founders Forum is not insignificant. Hoberman curates an eclectic mix of founders investors and new entrepreneurs which has allowed him to tap a wide range of enthusiastic investors to his fund. These include the co-founders of lastminute.com, Adyen, Supercell, Skyscanner, Trulia, Skype, Autonomy, Betfair, King.com, BlaBlaCar, Qunar, Carphone Warehouse, Datamonitor, PartyGaming, Tradex Technologies, Net-a-Porter, Capital One Bank, Fox Kids Europe, Webhelp, Airtel, PartyGaming and others, alongside other successes such as Marketshare, Ticketbis, Nordeus and LoveFilm. Tommy Stadlen, author, former Obama campaign speechwriter and co-founder of Swing, which exited to Microsoft, is both an investor in firstminute and a venture partner.
firstminute says it has a European focus – with the flexibility to follow local lead funding events in the US and Israel – and says it typically plans to invest $1m into seed-stage businesses.
There will be a sector agnostic remit for the fund, but wil take a particular interest in Robotics, vertical AI, Healthtech, Blockchain, SaaS, Cyber, Gaming and D2C.
The fund also released more details of its portfolio companies to date including:
• Cambridge self-driving start-up Wayve<br />
• Fuel delivery business Zebra
• Wireless charging platform Chargifi
• ICO exchange Templum (which has raised an additional $10m).
Firstminute says three of its portfolio have raised subsequent rounds within 6 months of its investment.
The geographic spread of their 17 investments to-date has been UK, Germany, Portugal and Israel, as well as four investments in the US.
Family offices also feature heavily in the fund.
These include the JCDecaux family (€6bn market cap business), Baron Davies of Abersoch (former Labour minister and Standard Chartered CEO & Chairman), Sir Paul Ruddock (former CEO of Lansdowne Partners and Chairman of Oxford University's Endowment) and Alex de Carvalho (founder of Public.io and Heineken non-executive director).
Firstminute is also now introducing its full-time operating team consisting of six investors: Lina Wenner (Cambridge, BCG), Camilla Mazzolini (OLX, Berenberg), Elliot O'Connor (founder of Code at Uni), Sam Endacott (Goldman Sachs), Anais Benazet (Founders Forum) and Clara Lindh (former freelance journalist).
Finally, three venture partners complete the set-up. Steve Crossan, formerly of DeepMind and Google and co-founder and former CTO of Brandwatch.com, currently also an XIR at Atomico; Arek Wylegalski, formerly of Index Ventures in London, and currently exploring opportunities in the blockchain space; and Tommy Stadlen.
Source: TechCrunch
2019 Volvo V60 first drive review: The best kind of cookie cutter – Roadshow
Volvo's launched several knockout vehicles in a row, and the V60 keeps that trend alive.
Xiaomi posts $1.1B quarterly loss ahead of much-anticipated IPO
A month after it filed for a much-anticipated Hong Kong IPO, Xiaomi has revealed a little more financial information after a monster 621-page document disclosed a $1.1 billion (seven billion RMB) loss for the first quarter of the year.
The IPO, which could raise up to $10 billion value Xiaomi at high as $100 billion, is set to be the largest IPO raise since Alibaba went public in the U.S. in 2014. That prospect got a boost with a dose of positive financial growth despite a loss incurred by one-off payments.
The document, which was filed was an application to issue a CDRs as part of a dual-listing that would include Mainland China, showed that Xiaomi's revenue for the quarter jumped to 34 billion RMB, or $5.3 billion. That's compared to 114.6 billion RMB ($17.9 billion) in total sales for all of last year, according to digging from TechCrunch partner site Technode.
While Xiaomi posted a loss for the quarter, the firm actually posted a 1.038 billion RMB ($162 million) profit for the period when one-time items are excluded. Xiaomi previously registered a 43.9 billion RMB ($6.9 billion) loss in 2017 on account of issuing preferred shares to investors (54 billion RMB) but it did post a slim profit in 2016.
Xiaomi officially files for Hong Kong IPO to raise a reported $10 billion
The company is ranked fourth based on global smartphone shipments, according to analyst firm IDC, and it is one of the few OEMs to buck slowing sales in China.
China is, as you'd expect, the primary revenue market but Xiaomi is increasingly less dependent on its homeland. For 2017 sales, China represented 72 percent, but it had been 94 percent and 87 percent, respectively, in 2015 and 2016. India is Xiaomi's most successful overseas venture, having built the business to the number one smartphone firm based on market share, and Xiaomi is pledging to double down on other global areas.
Interestingly there's no mention of expanding phone sales to the U.S., but Xiaomi has pledged to put 30 percent of its IPO towards growing its presence in Southeast Asia, Europe, Russia "other regions." Currently, it said it sells products in 74 countries, that does include the U.S. where Xiaomi sells accessories and non-phone items.
Despite its design progress, relative age as an eight-year-old company and the fact it is shooting for a $100 billion, Xiaomi left some spectators disappointed when it wheeled out a very iPhone X-looking new device earlier this month. While the company claims the Mi 8 is packed with new technology, it's hard to look past the fact that a number of its visual designs are identical to Apple's flagship smartphone. Xiaomi could have made a stronger statement of intent with the launch, but it will hope its financials can do the talking as it moves into the last moments of preparation before its public listing.
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Notorious Kindle Unlimited abuser has been booted from the bookstore
A few levels past the bestsellers and sci-fi/romance/adventure titles on Kindle Unlimited, in the darkest corners of the Kindle Direct Publishing market, there are books that are made entirely out of garbage designed to make scammers hundreds of dollars a day. One user, who called his or herself Chance Carter, was one of the biggest abusers of the KDP system and, more important, made over $15 per book they uploaded to the system, over and over, for books that contained no real content.
Carter, according to the Digital Reader, would create large novels out of other books. The books, which were simple hack jobs written by Fiverr writers, were hundreds of pages long and, on the first page, featured a recommendation to flip to the last page to get a free giveaway. KDP pays authors for both paid downloads as well as for pages read and it doesn't sense reading speed, just the highest number of pages reached. Therefore Chance's "readers" were instantly sending him or her about twenty dollars a read.
The way that the book-stuffing con works is that scammers stuff lots of extra content into an ebook before uploading it to Kindle Unlimited, and then trick readers into jumping to the end of the book.
Thanks to a flaw in the Kindle platform, namely that the platform knows your location in a book but not how many pages you have actually read, the scammers can get paid for a user having "read" a book in Kindle Unlimited by getting the user to jump to the last page.
So how are clever authors getting around Amazon's new review policies? By giving readers a chance to win some Tiffany jewelry of course. All you have to do is purchase & review Chance's new book on Amazon. This is so ridiculous pic.twitter.com/k3l9Z25jPa
— nikki (@ease_dropper) May 30, 2018
This sort of KDP scam is actually quite unusual. Amazon has worked to prevent scams like these from taking cash out of the KDP "pool" – a multi-million dollar account that is passed out to the best KDP authors – but this one was so long-running and ingenious that it's not surprising that it took so long to pull these books from the store. Interestingly, the flip-to-end scam doesn't quite work on newer Kindles but still works on older, non-updated Kindles which makes it still a lucrative scam.
Chance, for his part, offered free Tiffany jewelry if you flipped to the end of his books. This was, obviously, against KDP rules.
Carter and his books are gone but books stuffers like him still exist. While it's not a crime per se, it does muddy the Kindle ebook waters and brings garbage content into the market. While most of us wouldn't fall for these cynical tricks, plenty will and that makes it a danger to readers and a boon to scammers.
Memrise raises $15.5M as its AI-based language-learning app passes 35M users
Memrise, a UK startup whose eponymous language-learning app employs machine learning and localised content to adapt to users' needs as they progress through their lessons, has raised another $15.5 million in funding to expand its product. The funding comes after a period of strong growth: Memrise has now passed 35 million users globally across its 20 language courses, and it tipped into profitability in Q1 of this year. Ed Cooke, who co-founded the app with Ben Whately and Greg Detre, told TechCrunch that this places it as the second-most popular language app globally in terms of both users and revenues.
(Duolingo has more signups, Babbel more revenue.)
This round, a Series B, was led by Octopus Ventures and Korelya Capital, along with participation from existing investors Avalon Ventures and Balderton Capital. (Previous investors have included the likes of Matt Mullenweg, Lerer Ventures and more.)
Memrise is not disclosing its valuation — it has raised a relatively modest $22 million to date — but Cooke (who is also the CEO) said the plan will be to use the funding to expand its AI platform and add in more features for users.
And also to move into bigger digs. He described the company's current offices in the East End of London as in a "ne'er-do-well" kind of building. But the step up won't be giant. "Funding makes me more frugal," he told me.
The company originally started out as a general learning platform in 2010 before honing in on how to apply its principles of memorization and native content to get people to learn languages specifically. "We saw the importance of focus," Cooke said.
The company uses several modern hooks in its approach to a very old problem: learning to speak different languages. They include building the service around both online and mobile versions, using "crowdsourced" native speakers to give people a sense of how people actually use the language (which can often be different from how it's taught in classes), and by employing artificial intelligence to customise the product to each individual's progress.
Memrise's machine learning, in fact, has been a key factor in helping to raise a little more awareness of the app: during WWDC Apple showed off Memrise on stage in its presentation of Create ML, a new product that lets non-technical people train machine learning services using their own custom data on a Mac (which also cuts down the time needed to do so). It's not an Apple-only shop: Google named Memrise an app of the year in 2017.
The crowdsourced content, meanwhile, had an interesting fillip, too, when Memrise ran a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 to fund a "Membus," a double-decker bus that toured through Europe collecting clips of "tens of thousands" of native speakers. "Learning from native speakers is a popular feature of the app," Cooke said, as it gives users more than "just a computerised version of how you say something."
The clips in turn populate the lessons to give users examples of regular people saying things:
Cooke's background is in psychology and philosophy, and he holds a distinction as a "Grand Master of Memory". And memory indeed comes into the fabric of how the app works, as there is repetition and other devices used to help you not just ingest information but actually retain it. I actually have a personal connection to this: my daughter Eve's school uses Memrise to supplement in-class learning, and well before this funding story came along, Eve had told me that her Memrise training has been a huge help in growing and remembering German vocabulary and how to use words correctly. (That's at least her excuse for staring at a computer screen on a school night…)
The company's services are based around a freemium model, where a free version lets you learn any language from any language (there are 200 combinations possible across the base), along with a review feature; and a paid tier starting at $4.90/month to add on other features like a "grammarbot", pro chats, difficult words, speed review, listening skills, learning stats and more.
The company today is seeing the most growth in the 25-40 age group, but has a lot of younger (like my daughter) and older people using it as well. When raising the funding, Cooke said one regular question was about how likely it would be that a Google might wade in simply improve its Translate app to obviate the need to learn anything at all.
"We believe that this is a misunderstanding about language learning," Cooke said. "People don't want to learn languages for pragmatic reasons but to be socially credible. You have to engage as a human being and be interested." And Memrise things that if they can create an engaging enough experience for that base, its growth can expand even more.
"We're in love with Memrise's vision for language learning, and have been deeply impressed with the high engagement levels and tangible learning among their millions of users. We look forward to supporting this exceptionally diverse and talented team in their mission to enrich human consciousness through learning," said Eyal Rabinovich, of Octopus Ventures, in a statement.
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Michigan State fans celebrated by burning couches, throwing bagels
By Terrence PayneMar 29, 2015, 8:36 PM EDT
Michigan State is heading to its seventh Final Four under Tom Izzo after a 76-70 overtime win over Louisville in the East Regional final on Sunday afternoon in Syracuse.
Following the Elite Eight win, hundreds of Michigan State fans went outside in the snowy conditions to celebrate. At Cedar Village, just outside the school's campus, fans celebrated by throwing bagels:
Bagels, shoes and trash flying in Cedar Village @thesnews pic.twitter.com/S7DqwD6daU
— AJ Moser (@AndMoser) March 29, 2015
And others decided to burn couches:
https://instagram.com/p/003u7jARTJ/?taken-by=morganelysabeth
MLive.com reported there was a heavy police presence and arrests were made.
Michigan State faces Duke on Saturday night in Indianapolis.
Follow @terrence_payne