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EEAA calls for business events sector to employ entry-level staff
The Exhibition and Event Association of Australasia (EEAA) has called on the Business Events industry to employ entry level staff through a new traineeship program developed with TAFE NSW and Apprenticeship Support Australia.
This was the major message of the Association at the Asia-Pacific Incentives and Meetings Expo (AIME) in Melbourne today.
EEAA Chief Executive, Joyce DiMascio said that the Business Events industry must take responsibility for making the sector an employer of choice. She said the new traineeship opportunities developed specifically to attract entry level staff to the sector were an historic opportunity to leverage Government support for attracting staff.
“We are immensely proud of the partnership we have developed with two key agencies in the education and employment services sectors.
“We urge the industry to act now and employ trainees in order to feed the employment pipeline and address the skills and labour shortage in the sector.”
TAFE NSW Deputy Regional General Manager, Paul Williams, has welcomed the opportunity to work with the Exhibition and Event Association of Australasia (EEAA) to deliver provide training solutions to address skill shortages.
“TAFE NSW is the education and training innovator and is investing in the future of education by meeting the needs of industry.
“For the business events sector to reach its full potential, it needs a pipeline of skilled talent. TAFE NSW teachers ensure that students are equipped with practical, job-ready skills.” Mr Williams said.
The EEAA and TAFE NSW will be on stand 1840 at AIME 2018 to discuss the traineeship opportunities with industry.
At its AIME Press Conference, the EEAA released data on the business landscape for 2018.
Ms DiMascio said the findings of the EEAA Survey of Members showed that 67 percent of Organisers and 87.5 percent of Venues planned to launch at least one new show in 2018. She said of those who are planning a new show in 2018, at least 43 percent expect they will deliver two or more new shows over the coming year.
“The findings signal that the industry is constantly evolving. It also shows that our sector is nimble and responsive, creating exciting new marketplaces to meet the needs of emerging and new industries.” Ms DiMascio said.
“For example, of the new shows planned for 2018, 35 percent are technology-based, with a focus on space and satellite technology, and cybersecurity and last year, we saw a new show specifically for drones.”
The key findings from the survey include:
- 66.6 percent of Organisers and Association Organisers, and 87.5 percent of Venues plan to deliver or host new exhibitions in 2018, with expectations there will be more new trade shows than consumer shows
- 43 percent of Organisers and Association Organisers plan to deliver two or more new shows in 2018, and 86 percent of those organisers plan to include a paid or free conference/seminar component to their exhibition
- The most popular sectors for new shows are technology (35 percent) and health & wellbeing (35 percent)
- Other sectors that will be home to new shows in 2018 are space & satellite, science / health, pet, accommodation, design, home, and lifestyle
- 40.9 percent of Organisers and Association Organisers, and 87.5 percent of Venues delivered or hosted new exhibitions in 2017
- 55.5 percent of Organisers and Association Organisers that delivered new exhibitions, delivered two new shows or more
- 9.5 percent of Organisers and Association Organisers retired a show in 2017 (all consumer)
- There were equal numbers of new trade and consumer shows across a diverse range of industry sectors, including drones, retail, gift & homewares, build, design, safety, manufacturing, pet, recreation, waste, food & beverage, wellbeing, lifestyle & health, and accounting, finance & professional services
- Close to 30 percent of Organisers and Association Organisers either acquired or sold a trade or consumer show in 2017
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| Mar 28, 2011
| 7:43 PM
A couple of years ago I was in a craft-beer bar in Helsinki and felt more than a little pride when I spied Bourbon County Brand Stout on the menu.
I didn’t order it — the thick, black Goose Island brew was close to $40 for a 22-ounce bottle....
| Mar 29, 2011
| 10:00 PM
One reason I haven’t been too worried about Anheuser-Busch’s takeover of Goose Island Beer Co. is that even if Goose is ruined – which I don’t necessarily think will happen – there will continue to be no shortage of great...
| Apr 8, 2011
| 12:06 PM
I often wonder how I would enjoy life with a sensitivity to gluten. Spaghetti is hands-down my favorite food and I would have a hard time giving up sandwiches.
But imagining the horror of a beer-free existence led me to explore gluten-free brews, and...
| Apr 11, 2011
| 3:18 PM
It wasn’t celebrating the $38 million acquisition of his family’s brewery by Anheuser-Busch – it was just a birthday party. But it ended with a bartender saying that Goose Island brewmaster Greg Hall urinated into two beer glasses...
| Apr 22, 2011
| 5:40 PM
MARYLAND -- Seventeen state attorneys general are urging Pabst Brewing Co. to stop marketing to young drinkers and halt production of a new malt beverage promoted by rapper Snoop Dogg.
In a letter sent to the Pabst Brewing Co., Maryland Attorney...
| Oct 27, 2010
| 7:46 PM
Meeting and eating a new food can be exciting. The other night at El Hidalgo, a Tex-Mex restaurant in an Elkridge shopping center, I was introduced to tlacoyos.
They were Mexican corn cakes ($7) shaped like torpedoes, stuffed with chicken and topped with...
| May 10, 2011
| 12:55 PM
HOW TO ENTER: No purchase necessary. You must write your name, address, age, email address and phone number on a postcard or plain piece of paper. Entries should be mailed to the following address:
"Bud Light's Thirst Row Seats Ticket Giveaway...
| Apr 3, 2012
| 8:04 AM
Blue Moon in Bulgaria? Carling and Coors Light in Croatia? With its $3.54-billion purchase of Prague- and Amsterdam-based brewer StarBev, Molson Coors Brewing Co. may be able to place more of its brands in Central and Eastern Europe.
| Nov 30, 2011
| 1:34 PM
LOS ANGELES -- The famous Budweiser Clydesdales will not be part of the upcoming Rose Parade for the first time in 58-years.
"We've truly enjoyed being a part of the Rose Parade and appreciate the great work on our floats over the years," Rob McCarthy,...
| Feb 4, 2012
| 5:25 PM
Super Bowl Sunday promises to be another epic day in the annals of gluttony, with Americans consuming 1.3 billion chicken wings, 2,000 tons of popcorn and enough avocados to cover the floor of the Indianapolis stadium 28 feet deep.
But there will...
| Feb 15, 2012
New Orleans police ended Wednesday on a good note. The department received more than $25,000 and a two-year-old Clydesdale horse during the "Horses, Hops and Cops" fundraiser at City Park. The department could use the horse for crowd control during events...

domain: news


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Restaurants engagement platform Mobikon makes its second acquisition in a year, nabs MassBlurb
F&B marketing platform Mobikon on Thursday announced the acquisition of MassBlurb, an automated online platform for restaurants.
Founded by Samir Khadepaun and Salil Khamkar, Mobikon provides a single CRM dashboard to restaurants for engaging with customers intelligently across tasks of ordering, reservations, feedback, loyalty, and marketing.
The acquisition with MassBlurb will help Mobikon take its customer engagement solution to social networking platforms, allowing restaurants to generate social leads, convert likes and followers to business. Mobikon will also be able to offer website automation, cloud telephony integrated with CRM and automation in social media management.
The founders of MassBlurb, Sanket Shah and Pankit Chheda, will take up key roles at Mobikon. In their new role, Sanket will be managing key accounts and partnerships across the company, while Pankit will be working closely with Mobikon’s CTO for driving new product initiatives.
Commenting on the acquisition, Samir, Founder and CEO of Mobikon, said,
This is a strategic acquisition in line with our vision to be the single marketing and customer experience platform for restaurants. MassBlurb has been successful on social platforms for F&B, and Mobikon, on the other hand, has been very successful in India and South East Asia on its in-store engagement platform. We now have a significant market share with over 650 brands across India and S.E. Asia. We are planning to reach over 800 leading restaurant brands by the end of this year.
Mobikon claims to have been witnessing a growth of 12 percent month-on-month, this year. With the acquisition, it claims that at present it has more than 2,800 restaurant outlets using its brand (from over 650 brands) across the world.
Speaking on the acquisition was Sanket, Co-Founder of MassBlurb, who said,
Our vision for the company was very similar to Samir's. Mobikon has a deep technology suite and with operations in five countries and complimentary products, the synergies were extremely strong. Together we can become a de-facto tool for restaurants over a next couple of years.
Present in six geographies including Singapore, Philippines, Dubai, Macau, Kuala Lumpur, and India, Mobikon claims to be adding over 170,000 new diners month-on-month, while engaging with more than 1,000,000 diners every month. Over the last one year, the company has also grown from 59 to 116 employees; with 18 employees internationally and 98 employees in India.
In July 2015, Mobikon had raised $2.3 million in funding led by Singapore-based Jungle Ventures. The company planned to use the funds to fuel the rapid growth of the company across markets like India, Manila, Singapore, and Dubai.
Previously in 2012-13, Mobikon had raised 2.7 million in funding from Jungle Ventures and other investors like Spring Singapore and Lion Rock. It had also raised an undisclosed amount in October last year from Life.SREDA and Qualgro.
On the other hand, MassBlurb had raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Vikram Chachra and other independent investors from Mumbai Angels.
This is the second acquisition for Mobikon within a year. Earlier, it had acquired analytics startup Trii.be for an undisclosed amount in August 2015.
Just this week, it was reported that CRM edged past ERP as the top application software investment priority, according to Gartner analysts.
It is predicted that by the end of 2017, CRM spends will be $36.5 billion, when compared to $34.5-billion spends on ERP. This year, CRM is closing the gap on ERP; spends on ERP were $31.8 billion, while it was $31.7 billion for CRM.
This validates the business potential of enhancing customer experience with both mature and emerging markets emphasising investments in CRM.


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Iranians to use Asian credit cards soon
Iran says it is preparing the grounds for its nation to use credit cards provided by Asian banks until the restrictions for using American payment operators like Visa and MasterCard are removed.
The country’s media have quoted an official with the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) as saying that negotiations to the same effect are currently underway with Japan Credit Bureau (JBC) as well as China UnionPay (CUP).
Davood Mohammad-Beigi, the CBI director for payment affairs, has told been quoted as saying that JCB and CUP cards will be available to the Iranians before September.
Mohammad-Beigi has further emphasized that the CBI is determined to bring the global credit card payment systems into the country, stressing that the related technical talks on the same front have been going on with international suppliers for the past five months.
The official added that certain steps have also been planned to prepare the infrastructure required for using international credit cards in Iran, including connecting the domestic banking payment transfer systems to overseas payment networks like the ones that Visa and MasterCard are using.
Mohammad-Beigi said the conditions for using Visa and MasterCard services are not prepared yet. This, he added, is because both are US enterprises and are still subject to the sanctions that the US government has put in place in dealing with Iran.
The legal department of the CBI is nonetheless preparing to take actions to remove the obstacles that are hindering Visa and MasterCard from operating in Iran in light of the openings that have been created after the January removal of anti-Iran sanctions, Mohammad-Beigi emphasized.


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Hotel room prices in Dublin have risen 7.8 per cent over the last year, according to figures from business advisory and accountancy firm Deloitte, as occupancy levels rose across the city.
The average rate for a hotel room was €86.91 in the first half of the year, compared to €81.32 in the same period in 2011. Meanwhile occupancy levels rose by 2.1 per cent to 70 per cent for the first half of 2012 against the same period in 2011.
“The increases observed over the first half of the year are not as significant as those achieved in the same period in 2011″ said Kevin Sheehan, partner in charge of travel, hospitality and lesiure services at Deloitte. “However, we must remember that the gains made last year were on the back of significant drops in activity in the previous years. This trend was also demonstrated in the first quarter of 2012 findings.”
…hoteliers will need to be cognisant of the fact that one of Dublin’s key selling points is that it is now considered a good value city break destination. A challenge for the market is not only communicating that message to the consumer, but also maintaining this favourable price proposition.


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Small businesses sometimes must dump bad customers
It’s not me, it’s you: Though it can be painful, sometimes, a business owner needs to break up with a customer.
When Gil Gildner’s big client started paying more slowly and stopped communicating well, cash flow was at stake.
“The payments became a week late, two weeks, a month late and then the final month it never came,” said Gildner, co-founder of Discosloth, a marketing company in Little Rock, Arkansas. “We decided, you’re not even invested in this project. We have to cut this off.”
Letting go of customers is something most small-business owners do at some point. Sometimes the survival of the business could be at stake, or it may be a client who cannot be satisfied and becomes an emotional drain on everyone. Even if it’s a big account, it may not be worth the risk of unhappy employees quitting.
Gildner found a silver lining: “Within the first month, we found that jettisoning the client gave us enough bandwidth to pick up new clients who ended up giving us even more revenue.”
Many times, the problem is a frustrating customer. Steve Cooper, co-founder of Excella, an information technology firm in Arlington, Virginia, recalled a project in which he couldn’t speak with top executives, only with lower-level managers. Cooper’s staffers did the work only to be repeatedly told to redo it.
“Eventually, we recognized that our employees’ satisfaction and well-being were more important to us in the long term than investing in this futile relationship,” Cooper said.
It can be especially hard to drop a big corporation. But Nancy Cramer found that big companies dictated payment terms that didn’t work for her, and felt she wasn’t treated with respect. Cramer, a leadership consultant in Dallas, was told, “If you want to play with the big boys, you have to wait in line.”
After working with the client for 15 months, Cramer gave up, saying, “Some customers are not worth having.”
More: Small businesses: This is why your customers are dumping you
More: Not all customers are good for small business
Lawyers may not be able to end client relationships. If they’re in the midst of litigation, they must ask for court permission to withdraw, and a judge may say no. But when the attorney-client relationship is about routine business matters like reviewing contracts, there’s more leeway. Bob Horst, an attorney with Timoney Knox in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, has stopped working with business clients when they “want to achieve something that’s unreasonable or highly impractical.” Or when they fall behind in payments.
“No one likes to see a promising relationship end, but it’s a hard reality,” Horst said.
The breakup itself should be handled diplomatically and without rancor, owners say.
“I typically make an excuse, such as, we aren’t able to handle that project at this time, or we raise our prices,” said Veronica Kirin, who owned a Grand Rapids, Michigan, website design company until earlier this year. “You don’t want to burn a bridge and you don’t want to hurt your company’s name.”
Usually the problem was an impossible-to-please customer, but Kirin also stopped working with clients who made inappropriate comments about a new female staffer.
“I’m protective of my team, and don’t want to work with someone whose first reaction is about the looks of one of my employees,” said Kirin, who now has a business coaching and speaking company.
More: Small businesses must surprise, delight their customers
More: Small-business owners, show your customers some love
Complaints from a customer don’t have to mean ending a relationship. They can be valuable feedback, said Paige NeJame, who has a CertaPro painting franchise.
“A picky customer often points out our weaknesses to us in a way from which we can grow and get better. There is a big difference between ‘picky’ and ‘intolerable,’ ” said NeJame, whose company serves the Boston area.
But NeJame recalls one customer who complained after his house was pressure-washed to prepare for a painting, and a ladder flattened a small part of his lawn — unavoidable and not permanently damaging. NeJame told the homeowner, “We don’t think we can make you happy. You don’t have to pay, and we’ll find you another contractor.’ ”
Owners who want to drop some clients also worry about negative reviews online. Greg Shepard, who owns Dallas Maids, a cleaning service, begins by saying, “I really want to keep you as a customer,” and outlines what he and the person need to do to keep working together. But he isn’t sorry when an unhappy customer chooses to move on.
Shepard recalls a time when a staffer was in a car accident en route to a job, and her replacement couldn’t arrive until three hours later. The angry homeowner demanded that Shepard promise it would never happen again.
“We’re going to make every effort, but if something out of our control happens, we can’t do that,” he told the customer. She decided to find another cleaning service.
At Greenpal, which matches homeowners with lawn care companies, co-founder Zach Hendrix has learned not all customers are a good fit and that a small percentage of unhappy customers can monopolize staffers’ time.
An impossible-to-please customer can be referred to a business that will make them happy.
“We keep a private Rolodex in the 30 cities where we operate,” Hendrix said.
It’s hard for Jonathan Marsh, who’s in the business of caring for people, to break up with customers. But Marsh, who owns a Home Helpers senior care franchise in Bradenton, Florida, has stopped working with clients who didn’t pay or were abusive to his employees.
“The job satisfaction of my staff is very important. Without great caregivers, who are hard to come by, it is difficult to provide only the best care for our clients,” he said.


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Do you know that you can get free bitcoin? If you’re wondering how possible is that, I’ll reveal several ways to earn free crypto coins on the internet right now without any investment.
On this page, “Cryptocurrency blog Nigeria” we’ll give you some of the opportunities in the digital asset.
How you can safely tap into the many opportunities in crypto. And what you should do to avoid scam.
One of the best pieces of news to the cryptocurrency community in Nigeria lately is the announcement by the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) that crypto-based companies will now have to be certified by the regulatory body.
The Bitcoin price (BTC) has finally surpassed its $20K benchmark for 2020, trading at $22,753 (N10,881,625) at the time of this report, that the highest price in history.
It seems online advertising can no longer depend on Google’s Adsense for cryptocurrency ads as Ethereum launched a platform for advertisers to reach millions of crypto enthusiasts around the World.
The trouble isn’t over for Facebook’s Libra Foundation even as it changed its crypto name to Diem.
It is facing legal action over the new name. A UK-based FinTech firm Diem is laying claim to the name.
German finance minister Olaf Scholz stated that his government isn’t impressed by Facebook’s stablecoin name change from Libra to Diem, describing it as, “A wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf.”
President-elect Joseph R. Biden will use cryptocurrency as an infrastructural change in a way to make America more competitive when he assumes office next year.
Cryptocurrency enthusiast David Valenz has tattooed BitcoinCash on his body in an effort to spread BCH message to the World.
We’ve seen people who wear T-Shirt with Bitcoin logo on them while some people wear a cap with a crypto logo.
The administration of President Donal Trump will roll out postive cryptocurrency regulation before leaving office on January 20.
The Acting Comptroller of the Currency of the Federal Banking System Mr Brian Brooks hinted that the proposed crypto regulation will work for everybody.
Young, hardworking, smart, clever, brilliant, and innovative are some of the adjectives to describe the 2020 cryptocurrency leaders who made Forbes under 30 list released recently.
More Nigerians are likely to look for a better alternative to preserve the value of their hard-earned money, cryptocurrency is one of their best options, a survey has revealed.
Nigeria’s plan to generate a whopping $10 Billion from blockchain by 2030 received a boost a few hours ago as the Ministry of Finance mandated the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) to come up with a framework for the adoption of cryptocurrency in Nigeria.
Did you know that you can buy bitcoin with gift cards? In this post, we’ll show you how to exchange Gift Cards for cryptocurrencies and cash.
Most importantly, we’ve also included major platforms that let you exchange gift voucher for fiat currency (e.g Naira) if you’re Nigeria residents.
One of the world biggest cryptocurrency exchange firms Gemini has chosen ClearBank to provide banking services for its customers in the United Kingdom.
One of the largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance has sued Forbes for misleading article leading into “millions of dollars” in losses.
Filing the lawsuit in the state of New Jersey against Forbes Media and two of its journalists, Michael del Castillo and Jason Brett, Binance claimed that “Leaked ‘Tai Chi’ Document Reveals Binance’s Elaborate Scheme To Evade Bitcoin Regulators” published by Forbes on Oct. 29 was defamatory.
Some Nigerians who abandoned their crypto portfolio are back on trading following the latest surge in the price of bitcoin.
It isn’t just Nigeria, the trend started when BTC surpassed $10K a few months ago, some Indians are doing the same.


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“Shoppertainment” is set to be the major shopping trend across the UK and Europe according to Alibaba which pioneered the cutting-edge concept.
Shoppertainment, a new model which has exploded across the Chinese and Asian retail markets over the last 18 months, involves retailers providing highly immersive digital interactive experiences via live streaming events which ultimately drive sales.
New research, commissioned by AliExpress, suggests that while shoppertainment is still nascent in Europe compared to Asia shoppers are “open to embrace new trends and technologies that can enhance their shopping experiences.”
A survey of 14,460 adults in France, Poland, Spain and the UK revealed that 70 per cent of shoppers expressed interest in shoppertainment specifically, while almost half have increased their consumption of shoppertainment content during the pandemic.
“This is a real commercial opportunity for sellers and retailers who knows how to leverage this trend strategically,” AliExpress’ head of content operations ecosystem Vita Chang said.
Electronics, fashion and cosmetics were found to be the categories shoppers were most keen to engage with, while shoppers were found to be most engaged during livestreaming events featuring short, trustworthy, relatable content.
“When exploring the European opportunity, it is important to look into distinctions of each country to cater the right messages for different consumers in different countries,” Change added.
In the UK shoppers were found to need more trustworthy, entertaining content that is suitable for mobile screens, while customers in France preferred content that is endorsed by influencers.
AliExpress says it is now committed to expanding shoppertainment’s growth across Europe and has provided more than 44,000 live shows in thirteen different languages since July 2019.


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Wall Street Journal's own Walt Mossberg just came on record to confirm that Steve Jobs intends to continue being involved in the development of future products and strategy and that he'll stay active in the company.
The following video gives us a 10 minute summary of Steve Jobs' legacy at both Apple and Pixar. Within the video, he states:
Extremely well-informed sources at Apple say he intends to remain involved in developing major future products and strategy and intends to be an active chairman of the board, even while new CEO Tim Cook runs the company day to day.
Many of us believe that with Steve Jobs in the Board of Directors, many projects will actually move faster across Apple's minimal bureaucracy than they currently do, but time will begin to prove that from today on.


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Procter & Gamble Co. made a commitment to focus on “product superiority” four years ago and now the consumer products giant is reaping the reward of customer loyalty as a result, according to Truist Securities, which upgraded P&G to buy from hold in a Tuesday note.
Truist raised its price target to $175 from $165.
Analysts say that nearly every consumer staples company saw gains during the COVID pandemic, making it difficult to determine which were sustainable and which were temporary.
But as we head into a “new normal,” analysts say investors will be able to see P&G’s
momentum and the stock will turn upwards.
P&G shares have slumped 7.1% for the year to date, and shares are up 16.8% over the past year.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average
is up 5.6% for last 12 months.
“Roughly four years ago, the company set a goal to have 75% of its portfolio deemed technically superior to the competitive set. The thought being consumers would readily trade up to superior, higher-priced products if they could easily see the enhanced benefits of the product,” Truist wrote.
“We believe this strategy was a key reason why the company started to outperform pre-pandemic in terms of market share and top line growth. We also believe it created a stickier base of consumers, who are less willing to give up superior products to save a few cents.”
P&G brands include Tide laundry detergent, Dawn dishwashing soap, Pampers, Bounty paper towel and Always feminine hygiene products.
Analysts note that growth of branded and premium products outpaced private label during the pandemic, which is also a positive for P&G.
“We believe the combination of a technically enhanced portfolio, a more brand-centric consumer base and a strong economy in PG’s major markets will enable the company to pass off the pricing needed to offset higher costs with less demand elasticity than in prior cycles,” the note said.


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You might have read several posts online claiming that Windows RT is now dead given that the Nokia Lumia 2520 tablet is no longer being produced. Surface 2 met the same fate and there are no ARM devices with displays over 8-inches that will receive a full-fledged Windows 10 upgrade. Microsoft itself hasn’t said that Windows RT will bite the dust. The company has reiterated its commitment to Windows RT and will share more about its future later.
On January 21st Microsoft’s Terry Myerson said at the company’s Windows 10 event that the team is working on an update for Windows RT and more will be revealed about this update over the next few months.
A spokesperson for Microsoft has said that ARM devices will continue to be a “crucial part” of the devices supported by Windows 10, with experience optimized for ARM-based phones, phablets and small tablets that have displays up to 8-inches.
It remains to be seen whether a new device will be released in the coming months that will run Windows RT out of the box. Many believe that this isn’t likely to happen even if Microsoft won’t stop supporting the software immediately.
A few days back an ARM tablet was spotted in the benchmarks but not much is known about it at this point in time. Microsoft hasn’t talked about any new tablets for a while now so we’ll wait and see when this one comes to the market.


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3 Mins Read
Four Seasons Hotel Kuwait is going all-in on plant-based fare, launching new dedicated menus created by Chef Matthew Kenney at its signature restaurants. In a collaboration with Prince Khaled bin Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud’s KBW Ventures, diners at Dai Forni and Sintoho can now choose vegan dishes from the new standalone Folia plant-based menus.
Four Seasons Hotel Kuwait at Burj Alshaya is hopping on the plant-based trend, adding standalone Folia menus to its two renowned eateries, the rooftop Italian establishment Dai Forni, and Asian fine-dining restaurant Sintoho. Folia, meaning “from the leaves” in Latin, is a dedicated plant-based menu concept developed by globally acclaimed plant-based chef Matthew Kenney, in partnership with Prince Khaled’s KBW Ventures.
KBW Ventures is an investor in the chef’s global restaurant group Matthew Kenney Cuisine, as well as a number of other alternative protein companies including Beyond Meat, Rebellyous Foods, Upside Foods and BlueNalu, to name a few.
Diners at Four Seasons Hotel Kuwait restaurants Sintoho and Dai Forni will now be able to choose from the Folia menu, which features Kenney’s progressive plant-based, health-conscious dishes tailored to the establishments’ cuisine.
At Italian restaurant Dai Forni, for instance, Kenney has created a Sicilian-inspired Eggplant Caponata with raisins, pine nuts and capers as a starter and a Cauliflower Pizzaola featuring charred cauliflower, roasted chickpeas and housemade sauce as a main. Meanwhile, Sintoho diners are treated to Kenney’s raw vegan dessert, the Raw Banana Cream Pie, made with coconut cream.
Commenting on the launch of plant-based menus at the hotel’s establishments, Four Seasons Kuwait general manager Didier Jardin said: “I am excited to be launching these outstanding plant-based menus because it sends such a positive signal to our much-valued diners.”
Rising plant-based demand
Jardin, who has managed the hotel since 2017, says that clients have been increasingly demanding vegan options, and now, it “gives me great pride that we are evolving our product to meet changing needs of our much-valued guests.”
Four Seasons’ Kuwait location is just the latest to launch Kenney and KBW’s Folia menu, with similar collaborations already rolled out in the hotel group’s properties in Los Angeles, Dubai and Bahrain.
Speaking about the expansion of Folia across Four Seasons’ properties, Prince Khaled said he was “especially pleased to see another GCC country partner up to present this delicious and healthy dining experience.”
“The Folia concept for Four Seasons is an incredibly exciting moment in the transition to a more sustainable future,” added Chef Kenney. “Creating menus that are seamlessly interwoven into the fine-dining that already exists at the property is a project that we enjoy, and to be working with the team in Kuwait is a dream come true.”
As sustainable and plant-forward gastronomy takes over the F&B industry, more upscale restaurants and hospitality groups are now offering vegan menus. Three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park in New York, for instance, reopened its doors earlier this year with an entirely plant-based menu.
It followed the move by Mei Jiang, a Chinese restaurant in The Peninsula Bangkok, to relaunch with a new 100% plant-based Cantonese private fine dining experience, a first-of-its-kind offering in Thailand.
All images courtesy of Matthew Kenney Cuisine / KBW Ventures / Four Seasons.


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Binance Offering U.S.-style Bitcoin Options Contracts
Confirming hints from earlier in the month, on April 13th, one of the top cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance launched Bitcoin options on its futures trading platform. For the time being, it will only be limited to the exchange’s when used via the mobile app.
The options contracts offer traders an opportunity to buy either a call option (right to buy) or a put option (to sell) for a given asset at a specifically defined “strike price.” They are offering the “American” approach (rather than the European one) where traders can settle the contract at the “strike price” chosen at any point in time before the expiry date itself.
For Binance’s BTC/Tether (USDT) options contracts, traders would first transfer their USDT holdings from their spot wallet to a futures wallet. They would then choose an expiry date which can have a range of anywhere between 10 minutes to one day.
Binance indicates in a note to readers that the fixed value premium has to be paid right off the bat so that any prospective profits on trades will be net (profits minus premium). However, the exchange does issue a caution indicating that there are no guarantees that your purchase will garner a profit once the premium has been deducted, and that most options purchases will end up not being profitable, while a minority will be very profitable. Investors were encouraged to act at their own discretion.
Options Contracts In the Crypto-Space
Back in December 2019, Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange OKEx already launched their version of Bitcoin options trading for a small group of traders. They formally launched the platform earlier in 2020.
Additionally, back in September 2019, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group announced plans to launch a product of their own option for Bitcoin futures. They indicated later that they were expecting high demand in this venture specifically from Asia.
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the biggest dollar gainer on Forbes’ 2017 World’s Billionaires List, in a year when 56 percent of billionaires saw their fortunes increase.
Forbes on Monday released its 31st Annual World’s Billionaires List, with 2,043 billionaires in the rankings, with an average net worth of $3.75 billion.
Bill Gates remains in the top spot for the fourth year in a row and has been the richest person in the world for 18 out of the past 23 years. Gates has a fortune of $86 billion, up from $75 billion last year.
Warren Buffett, worth $75.6 billion, up from $60.8 billion in 2016, reclaimed the No. 2 slot, after a two-year hiatus.
Bezos' net worth jumped by $27.6 billion in the past year -- more than the total net worth of all but the 24 richest billionaires, Forbes.com reported.
Amazon stock climbed 67% in the past year in part because of the success of its cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services.
With a net worth of $72.8 billion, Bezos is now the third richest billionaire in the world, behind Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett.
Last year, Bezos cracked the ranks of the top 10 richest billionaires in the world for the first time, ranking fifth on Forbes 2016 World’s Billionaires List.
Spanish clothing retailer Amancio Ortega (best known for the Zara fashion chain) drops to No. 4, despite his net worth increasing to $71.3 billion.
Rounding out the top five is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, worth $56 billion.
Click here for the complete list.
As for Bezos' empire itself, Amazon is literally steamrolling its competitors.
With a current market cap of $390 billion, the Seattle-based retail giant is now worth more than the top eight traditional brick-and-mortar retailers combined, as Credit Suisse analysts led by Eugene Klerk mentioned in a recent note, Yahoo Finance reported.
For the record, that roster includes Best Buy (BBY), Macy’s (M), Target (TGT), JCPenney (JCP), Nordstrom (JWN), Walmart (WMT), Kohl’s (KSS) and Sears (SHLD).
“That’s an impressive, even astonishing feat, no doubt, given Amazon was founded in chief executive Jeff Bezos’ garage in 1994," Yahoo Finance reported.
"But it’s not exactly shocking, given the rapid transition over the last 20 years away from shopping in physical retail stores in lieu of online shopping, where retailers like Amazon can offer lower pricing on products and services because they don’t have to offset the costs of also paying for physical stores," Yahoo Finance reported.
(Newsmax wires services contributed to this report).
© 2023 Newsmax Finance. All rights reserved.


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I'm back to provide you with the week's biggest stories in the logistics space. So, here it goes:
- The Ever Given has help up billions in trade, having blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week.
- FourKites announces a $100m investment round to push its expansion in the supply chain visibility space.
- DHL is investing €7bn over the next 10 years in its sustainability efforts.
- Daniel Carrera takes on the top job for UPS in Europe.
If you'd like to speak about this or would like to share your own logistics stories with me, please email firstname.lastname@example.org. For more content like this, please see my profile page.
RaaS could be the secret weapon in reaping the benefits of warehouse automation with none of the hassle, here's how...
Sameer Jaffary analyses the advancement of warehouse technology including the impact of Brexit and the Coronavirus pandemic. Click to read.
This past year has seen a huge boost in e-commerce activity across the globe. To keep up with such demands, there's been an accelerated rate of automation adopted within warehouses and distribution centres.


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All for a good cause: bargain hunters stock up on top labels at celebrity sale
Where else could you buy a dress from Norma Smurfit or shoes from Jackie Lavin?
THEY queued from 7am for a Dolce & Gabbana jacket worth €700 -- but selling for €75.
Also on sale was a Roberto Cavalli dress worth €600, selling for €50, and a full-length fur coat and hat worth thousands -- but yours for just €500.
The setting was the Spring Clean For Charity Sale in the RDS, Dublin, yesterday.
In its second year, the sell-off allows people from across the country to clear their wardrobes in order to raise funds for St Vincent de Paul (SVP) and Focus Ireland.
But behind the stalls were some well-known faces who had come to shift their own stock.
Where else could you buy an evening dress from Norma Smurfit? Or costume jewellery off 'Dragons' Den' publishing magnate Norah Casey, or a pair of ladies shoes off 'Apprentice' star Jackie Lavin?
But be warned -- these celebs were no soft touch. For TV presenter Lorraine Keane it was a case of deal or no deal.
"I was doing this last year and you wouldn't believe how many people tried to bargain me down on stuff. I had to say 'here lads, this isn't a market in Marbella, this is for charity' and only one person during the whole day told me to keep the change," Keane told the Irish Independent.
Last year more than €80,000 was raised for charity at the event, but organisers are hoping to improve on that this year with 120 stalls manned by volunteers.
Any leftover stock from yesterday's sale will be sold off in St Vincent de Paul shops nationwide.


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Giant Food adds tracking codes to eggs
CARLISLE, Pa. Giant Food Stores and Martin’s Food Markets are helping customers easily identify egg freshness.
The Ahold-own chains have etched freshness dates and tracking codes on the shells of all store-brand and the private label Nature’s Promise eggs.
The initiative was launched with EggFusion and local suppliers and, according to Giant’s Web site, “is the first and only USDA-accepted solution for applying permanent, tamperproof marks to eggs.”
Customers looking to find out when an individual egg was packed can do so by visiting www.GiantFreshEgg.com and entering its tracking code. The Web site also provides information on the name of the plant that packed the egg and where it is located, as well as the name of its distributor.
Safeway predicts ’08 growth
PLEASANTON, Calif. Safeway today announced its earnings outlook for the year 2008.
Safeway said that it expects earnings per share for 2008 to be in the range of $2.25 to $2.35. The company said it anticipates that identical-store sales growth (excluding fuel) will be in the range of 3% to 3.2%. According to Safeway, the identical sales growth will be strongly affected by contributions from Lifestyle stores and product innovation.
“Innovation has been, and will continue to be, the key to our success,” said Steve Burd, chairman, president and ceo. “We have developed highly successful programs to reduce costs, improve service, enhance the quality of products and the shopping environment, and have established new growth vehicles. We believe this will ensure our long-term growth.”
Meijer looks to enhance supply chain
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. As part of Meijer’s new requirement for suppliers to generate their own replenishment orders as part of its scan based trading (SBT) program, the company has partnered with Prescient Applied Intelligence, a provider of supply chain and advanced commerce solutions, to test a store level replenishment (SLR) pilot program with one of its major suppliers.
“The SLR pilot program includes about a dozen stores,” said Tim Cronk, supply chain planner at Meijer. “We are using the pilot phase to set benchmarks and expectations for the 150+ store rollout, currently planned for early 2008.”


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A DIALOGUE session between the Agriculture and AgriFood Department and farmers and livestock breeders in Temburong were recently held at Bumiputera Hall in Bangar Town.
The event was attended by Hjh Aidah binti Hj Mohd Hanifah, the Director of Agriculture and AgriFood, Acting Deputy Director, assistant directors and senior officers.
According to a press release, some 250 farmers and livestock breeders attended the dialogue session, which was held as part of the annual activity to mark the Farmers, Fishermen and Livestock Breeders Day, which was launched on November 1.
Last year, the overall gross production of agriculture and agrifood industry contributed to some $291.67 million nationwide, of which Temburong produced some $3.97 million.
The main contributor from Temburong was its fruits industry at $1.78 million, followed by rice industry ($0.59 million) and poultry ($0.57 million). Vegetable industry contributed $0.36 million, agrifood processing based on crops product ($0.31 million), crops ($0.17 million), livestock ($0.15 million) and agrifood industry based on livestock products ($0.04 million).
The department also shared progra-mmes to enhance the production of agriculture and agrifood which are currently and will be implemented.
To date, there are 902 farmers and companies in Temburong, which is 17 per cent of the total farmers, livestock breeders and agriculture and agrifood entreprenuers nationwide.
There are 103 livestock breeders, 757 crops farmers and 42 agrifood processing entreprenuers nationwide.
Among other things, the dialogue session was aimed at assessing the current development of the Agriculture and AgriFood industry in the country and looking at ways to improve the quantity and quality of products in order to ensure it is safe for consumers and up to par with foreign competitors’ products.


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The great American author O. Henry once wrote, "smite the poet in the eye when he would sing to you the praises of the month of May. It is a month presided over by the spirits of mischief and madness."
Investors most likely agree with that sentiment now that May is behind us. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (INDEX: ^DJI) was down 6.2% for the month, which was its the worst performance since May 2010. The S&P 500 was down 6.3%, which was its worst result since September 2011. One of the biggest busts of all in May, of course, was the Facebook (NAS: FB) IPO, which Bloomberg Business Week dubbed the worst IPO of the decade.
Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a lot of optimism out there. Europe continues to fester. China is beginning to slow down. And the U.S. economy just sputters along with its anemic recovery. One might say that increasing pessimism was the big story of last week, which may herald attractive opportunities for ordinary investors. As always, we'll be looking intently for such opportunities. Let's review some other top stories of the past week, along with our takeaways.
Internet trends. Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins delivered a powerful presentation at the D10 Conference this week on the state of the Internet. We were particularly encouraged by her optimistic thoughts on mobile monetization. She believes that mobile monetization has more going for it than early desktop monetization had and thinks that mobile monetization in the U.S. could surpass its desktop analog within one to three years.
Takeaway: This is a fascinating insight that has important ramifications for Google (NAS: GOOG) , Facebook, and LinkedIn (NAS: LNKD) . Conventional wisdom has said that the increasing shift toward mobile would hurt these companies considerably. Meeker seems to think that's not necessarily the case. That's good news for our 10-Bagger portfolio, which holds positions in all three of these companies.
Boy, do people hate Facebook. Facebook continued to dominate the financial media, and most of the coverage was extremely negative. As natural contrarians, we are attracted to different perspectives, and we found The Case for Facebook a refreshing alternative to a lot of the groupthink that has been so prevalent lately. Here is a quote from the piece that is very powerful:
Facebook is bigger than tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter.com, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Google Plus ... times two. Put all these numbers together and what you get is: One in every five page views on the Internet is a Facebook page. If the Internet is valuable, Facebook is valuable.
Takeaway: We bought a small stake in Facebook at $31.52 per share, and we may consider picking up additional shares, especially if the stock continues to get cheaper. All of the negativity may ultimately be a good thing for investors looking to pick up shares in the company for the long term.
We like Tim Cook. Apple CEO Tim Cook was interviewed at the D10 conference this week, and we came away very impressed. He's a thoughtful leader who has done a terrific job in balancing the need to both preserve Apple's unparalleled culture and make key changes in certain areas.
Takeaway: We're very bullish about Apple's future and believe that Cook has been almost flawless since taking over the reins. David Einhorn recently jested that he saw no reason Apple can't become a $1 trillion dollar company. And we agree completely.
Our senior technology analyst is just as bullish as Einhorn on Apple's outstanding prospects going forward. He details in our new premium research report exactly why he thinks Apple holds such upside potential. Claim your copy.
See you next week, Fools! Don't forget to follow us at @10-Bagger Stocks on Twitter for all of the latest information relating to our portfolio. And don't forget to add each of the companies mentioned here to your very own My Watchlist so you can track them and monitor their progress.
At the time thisarticle was published John Reeves owns shares of Apple and Google. David Meier owns shares of Apple. The Motley Fool owns shares of LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, and Apple.Motley Fool newsletter serviceshave recommended buying shares of Google, LinkedIn, and Apple and creating a bull call spread position in Apple. The Motley Fool has adisclosure policy. We Fools don't all hold the same opinions, but we all believe thatconsidering a diverse range of insightsmakes us better investors. Try any of our Foolish newsletter servicesfree for 30 days.
Copyright © 1995 - 2012 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.


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The Nasdaq Composite is on a tear, approaching an vital degree as
and the semiconductor trade elevate it increased.
gained nearly 2% Thursday. The
Dow Jones Industrial Industrial Common,
which consists of extra mature firms, was barely within the purple.
The Nasdaq’s achieve is pushed by Nvidia inventory (ticker: NVDA), which gained 24% after its per-share earnings beat estimates by 18%. The corporate additionally issued a vivid gross sales outlook, partly pushed by the expansion of information chips and optimism over synthetic intelligence.
Its market worth was simply over $750 billion coming into Thursday’s buying and selling, which was simply over 3% of the Nasdaq’s combination market worth, so the chip-making innovator is bringing the index increased.
Nvidia’s outcomes had been additionally lifting different names within the trade or with ties to it:
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Superior Micro Gadgets
(AMD). These firms mixed for a market cap of about $800 billion coming into Thursday, serving to push the Nasdaq upward.
It’s yet one more booster for a tech sector that has been surging. The Nasdaq is up about 21% for the 12 months now, as different firms akin to
(MSFT) embed AI into their merchandise, enabling them to seize extra of a rising info know-how market.
Now, the Nasdaq is nearly at a key degree of just about 12,700. It couldn’t surpass a degree of roughly 12,000 from March to September, however with AI developments spurring extra earnings progress, consumers are prepared to come back in to ship the index increased.
Thursday’s achieve brings it nearer to 13,000, the index’s peak in August. If it will probably transfer above that, it means buyers lastly see a motive to purchase there.
Attending to that time pretty quickly appears sensible, given different technical indicators. The index’s 50-day transferring common is simply over 12,100, and has risen up to now few months, based on FactSet. In the previous few days, it has risen additional above the 200-day transferring common of about 11,500. When a more moderen common of costs strikes above a longer-run common, which encapsulates decrease costs from earlier than the rally, it means shopping for strain has lately constructed up. That signifies growing confidence in tech names.
The Nasdaq could pause from the positive aspects close to 13,000, however whether or not it sees harsh promoting strain there or extra of a flatlining—wherein case consumers would nonetheless be pretty lively—shall be telling.
“The zone from 13k as much as 13.2k would be the subsequent vital resistance zone to punch via,” mentioned Frank Cappelleri, CappThesis.com founder, who additionally talked about the rising transferring common is a constructive signal.
If the Nasdaq’s technicals do look encouraging, that isn’t an enormous shock given extra basic evaluation. Analyst’s combination EPS estimates for Nasdaq firms name for a roughly 17% annual progress price from the tip of 2022 via 2025, based on FactSet, forecasts that would even get a lift from semiconductor analysts Thursday.
The Nasdaq’s ahead price-to-earnings ratio is about 26 occasions, which is just about 1.5 occasions the anticipated progress price. That isn’t so dangerous, contemplating the
P/E a number of is simply over two occasions anticipated EPS progress, so tech buyers are paying much less for extra earnings progress. That may very well be one other issue retaining consumers engaged.
Let the chips fall the place they might, however tech shares seem like they’ve begun a longer-term run.
Write to Jacob Sonenshine at [email protected]
Read the full article here
Discussion about this post


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David Patterson: RISC-V will be the most important instruction set in the world
A decade ago, an idea was born in a lab at the University of California, Berkeley, who created a general language for computer chips, a set of instructions that they envisioned would be used by all chip makers, not part of any company.
It wasn’t meant to be an impressive new technology, it just wanted to put the entire industry on the same page to simplify chip manufacturing to drive things forward.
But an interesting thing happened on the way to a global chip standard: RISC-V has begun to produce some technological breakthroughs in chip design, just as Berkeley has done.
To name just one example, recent microprocessor designs using RISC-V have reached clock speeds of 5 GHz, much higher than the latest Intel top-of-the-line Xeon server chip E7 running at 3.2 GHz. However, the new RISC-V chips consume only 1 watt at 1.1 volts, less than one percent of the power consumed by Intel Xeons.
RISC-V’s speed and power efficiency also surpassed the specifications of Exynos 4, Samsung Electronics’ top-of-the-line product for its smartphones, which is based on computing cores provided by Intel’s main rival, ARM Holdings Plc.
“It’s pretty surprising, because I think IBM mainframes with a 5GHZ frequency should require liquid cooling and consume 100 watts,” David Patterson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told ZDNet.
To Patterson’s surprise, technological innovation was on the rise. “The potential for innovation is always there,” he said, but when he and Berkeley colleague Krste Asanović first wrote the manifesto for RISC-V in 2011, that wasn’t their main expectation.
“I think one of the things that’s going to happen is because it’s open, we’re going to see all this competition,” he said.
“Maybe because of all the competition, we’re starting to see some really interesting perspectives in the design space,” Patterson said.
This prototype of the new 5 GHz processor was not created by a startup. It is made by Micro Magic Inc., a Silicon Valley intellectual property design company that has worked with all the big Silicon Valley companies for 25 years. The ability of a small but experienced chip designer to accomplish the task suggests that a design renaissance may be on the horizon.
The Embedded Benchmark Microprocessor Consortium records that not only is the chip faster with less power, but it also scores higher than Intel on a benchmark score of raw CPU performance called CoreMark and Samsung. The RISC-V chip scored 13,000, more than double the performance-per-core score of the ARM-based Exynos. Although the Intel Xeon’s per core is nominally higher at 26,009, the Xeon part requires 120 more execution threads to reach that performance.
Dr. Andy Huang, a longtime chip industry executive, serves as Micro Magic’s business liaison. The breakthrough, he explained to ZDNet in a phone interview, is in the way the CPU and memory interact. Micro Magic’s two founders, Mark Santoro and Lee Tavrow, patented the SRAM computer memory chip in the early ’90s, the fastest such memory ever.
The RISC-V prototype removes the bottlenecks that can exist with fast memory and slow chips.
“If the memory runs at 5 GHz and the logic runs at 1 GHz, where is the bottleneck?” Huang smiled, but didn’t reveal details.
The point, Huang said, is that because RISC-V is open, unlike the complex instruction set architecture of Intel chips or even the version of RISC found in ARM chips, RISCV can address this bottleneck through chip design. Not possible if the chip’s instructions are locked.
The analogy he uses is Android vs iOS.
“I asked my son why he liked Samsung (smartphone) more than Apple and he said it was because if he wanted to change something, he could ask one of his programming friends to do it for him, because Android is open, unlike iOS different,” Huang said.
“That’s why we attribute all our success to Dr. Patterson,” Huang said. “He has created the most efficient and elegant RISC architecture to date.”
“We should call him Saint Patterson,” Huang said.
The ability to tinker with the instruction set is just part of what Micro Magic is showing. There are economic factors at play.
Dr. Huang emphasized that, unlike CISC or ARM, which each have more than 1,000 instructions, RISC-V’s instruction set is less than a hundred.
Because of the simplicity of the RISC-V instruction set, Micro Magic is able to produce chips using standard silicon wafers without special adjustments. This makes it possible to use what’s called a shuttle run, where chips are grouped together on the same wafer as someone else’s chips during the manufacturing process. This can be much cheaper because the cost of the wafer is shared in many ways.
“People talk about spending $100 million to customize an ASIC,” Patterson noted. “Well, they didn’t spend $100 million to do it,” Patterson said of Micro Magic.
Although not emphasized by Patterson and Huang, there is a second factor at play. If you don’t pay the overhead of an ARM license, it’s much easier to use shuttle run, which then has to be amortized over many parts.
In a sense, RISC-V could facilitate the micro-batch production methods seen in many modern product lines, from breweries to cheese to clothing.
The question of economics is contentious, considering that Nvidia, one of the world’s largest chipmakers, is buying ARM for $40 billion. The sale will allow Nvidia to receive royalties from ARM’s intellectual property and set a roadmap for the world’s most widely used chip instructions.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described his ambitious plans for ARM, and he assured Wall Street that ARM’s licensees, his rivals, wouldn’t mind him buying the biggest supplier.
But the move clearly opens up new opportunities for alternatives. When asked about the deal, Patterson responded cautiously. Because Nvidia is a member of the RISC-V ecosystem and supports the technology wholeheartedly.
“I think people tend to think of RISC-V as just an academic idea,” Patterson told ZDNet. “Then, when it proves that proprietary instruction sets can be bought and sold, that becomes yet another reason for an open architecture.”
Micro Magic’s Huang said he has attracted interest from tech giants since Micro Magic made its brief chip announcement.
“I have received emails from two listed companies,” Huang said, without giving his name.
Huang offers a hypothetical scenario in which Apple or Google could use the chip to make a breakthrough in power consumption.
“Google already has Android, the mobile open source software, and think about how it would benefit all mobile customers if they also had the most power-efficient, high-performance open-source RISC core,” Huang told ZDNet.
“Imagine the latest Apple Watch not having to charge overnight,” Huang said.
With or without such a big deal, Micro Magic hopes to incorporate its RISC-V intellectual property into more and more designs to have a material impact on global electricity usage, Huang said.
“Our intent with this IP is to help the world, to help the world of PCs, the world of laptops, the world of tablets, the world of mobile phones, wearables, gaming, electric vehicles and IoT – whatever you name it, our goal is to bring the world’s carbon Emissions are cut in half.”
A prototype CPU is not revolutionary. Comparisons with actual shipments from Intel and others reveal the fact that many more parts are required to complete the chip design.
This is where the ecosystem of companies around RISC-V becomes important. The number of announced companies announcing that they will use RISC-V is small but growing.
“Everything you can think of, right down to the data center, people are seriously considering RISC-V right now,” Patterson said.
“In a sense, we’ve come to an end,” he said, “from why would I use RISC-V a few years ago, to why would I not use RISC-V?”
Prominent among the ecosystem parties is SiFive, a Silicon Valley-based startup that has specialized in developing chip intellectual property based on RISC-V for many years. In August, the company launched a business unit dedicated to producing custom chips for a variety of applications, including AI and edge computing, called OpenFive. Patterson’s collaborator, Professor Asanovi?, is the chief architect of SiFive.
Another is embedded processor maker Andes Technology of Taiwan, which has sold billions of CPU designs to electronics makers over the years.
Last month, both SiFive and Andes Technology showcased new chip designs for AI using RISC-V at the Linley Fall Processor Conference, a well-known chip technology conference.
SiFive told ZDNet that it has now won more than 200 design orders from more than 80 companies, including six of the top ten semiconductor manufacturers. SiFive told ZDNet: “SiFive currently ships tens of millions of cores with Design Win from FADU, Huami, Qualcomm, Samsung and Synaptics.”
Andes told investors in its quarterly report this month that about a third of its revenue this year came from RISC-V-based parts.
Seagate Technology Corp. and large disk-drive maker Western Digital Corp. are both sponsors of next month’s RISC-V Summit, the ecosystem’s third annual technology conference. The event was sponsored by the RISC-V International Association, a non-profit corporation that currently represents more than 750 parties working to advance the standard, including Chinese smartphone maker Huawei, chipmakers Xilinx and Qualcomm, and IBM. Asanovi? is the chair of the group, and Patterson is the vice-chair.
But no matter how successful RISC-V is, the world may never know the full scope of its usage. That’s because, while ARM and other commercial technology providers are signing documents with their licensees, no one is using RISC-V to disclose usage.
RISC-V International requires suppliers to voluntarily disclose usage, but does not compel such disclosure.
As a result, Patterson said, “it’s hard to see concrete evidence” of the extent of RISC-V’s use.
Still, evidence of technological advances in products such as Micro Magic suggests to Patterson and others that the impact of RISC-V could ultimately be significant.
Recently, Patterson conducted a series of one-on-one interviews with collaborators via video to virtually celebrate the tenth anniversary of RISC-V.
Patterson told ZDNet that a collaborator made a surprising point.
“In five to ten years, RISC-V could be the most important instruction set in the world,” recalls Patterson. “On the one hand, it sounds crazy, but it’s not impossible,” he said.


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A partnership between Ulster University and Cookstown-based window manufacturers, Keylite, has helped the company to compete in international markets and increase sales by over 25 per cent year on year.
The university and the company worked closely to develop new products, enhance existing designs and improve business processes as part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP). Keylite is now exporting its range of products to major builders merchant stores in Europe, Russia and New Zealand.
The new product innovations are designed to improve heat efficiency and decrease window installation time. A new system to provide manufacturing traceability was also introduced which has dramatically reduced the time to market.
Managing Director of Keylite, John Duffin said: “As one of the UK’s fastest growing manufacturers of roof windows, we are continually investing in innovation and engaging with the knowledge base to remain competitive. The KTP has been a huge success. It has provided us with access to invaluable knowledge from Ulster University, transforming our operational effectiveness and significantly increasing market penetration and sales worldwide.”
Tim Brundle, Director of Research and Innovation at Ulster University said: “Ulster University works closely with businesses to support research and development, ensuring that our knowledge and expertise delivers maximum benefit to businesses and to the local economy. KTP is a key initiative that allows us to do precisely that.
“This collaborative approach is helping local businesses to thrive globally while also providing company-based training and employment opportunities for our skilled and talented graduates.”


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The long-planned Delta Shores master plan will begin to appear in about a year with a 97-acre retail center along Interstate 5 in south Sacramento, planned to open in summer 2017, according to developer Merlone Geier Partners.
Starbucks has become as much about technology as triple mocha lattes. Here's how and why that has happened.
The new mixed-use project from Fuqua Development LLC will include a 118,000-square-foot Kroger.
The lease isn't big by D.C. commercial real estate standards. At the same time, it is another sign of life that Rosslyn's office market is starting to pick up momentum after an historically slow leasing period.
Cousins Properties Inc. will develop the new Midtown campus for technology giant NCR Corp., as the venerable Atlanta real estate company renews its focus on the city it helped build.
In 1989, Bob Goldstein started selling women’s pantyhose and Tylenol out of his trunk. He then hired friends to distribute through independent routes across the country, building his Orlando-based company, Mr. Checkout Distributors, into a network of 1,100 independent distributors and five employees.
Acuity Brands Inc. bought ByteLight Inc., a maker of indoor location software for LED lighting.
Joel Goldstein, 31, likes the fact that his job enables him to see new products before they hit the shelf.
Tourist visits are up as gasoline prices have come down.
The researchers found strength in nearly every sector.
The Lakeland-based grocer continues to go head-to-head with The Kroger Co. in the Carolinas for store locations.
Local First Arizona's Kimber Lanning believes the report on low-wage jobs costing Arizona taxpayers millions is another reason consumers should shop locally.
New 'super center' planned for former flea market property.
Airlines actually provided better service when they were losing money.
This weekly blog details the real estate sales, leases, new assignments, grand openings and other deals that have taken place recently in the San Antonio area. Do you have newsworthy real estate or retail news to share? Contact real estate reporter Katie Burke at email@example.com.


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It looks like HMD Global is all set for a global launch of Nokia 6 at MWC 2017. According to a report on NokiaPowerUser, the international variant of Nokia 6 smartphone with the model number TA-1003 has just passed the certification process in Taiwan.
The TA-1003 model supports CDMA and GSM networks alongside the FDD-LTE networks, with support for LTE bands 3,7,8,28, 38 and 41. The same model number also showed up on GFXBench and the Bluetooth certification site.
There will be no change in the internal specifications from the China version. The smartphone houses a 5.5-inch Full HD display with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. It is powered by a Snapdragon 430 processor coupled with 4GB RAM and 64GB of internal memory, and will support 128GB of expandable storage space via a microSD card.
The smartphone gets a 16-megapixel rear-facing camera with phase detection autofocus (PDAF), while an 8-megapixel shooter on the front. for selfies. The phone also comes with an integrated fingerprint scanner embedded in the home button. Nokia 6 is expected to run Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box.
Nokia 6 which was exclusive to China, was spotted on e-bay India, where it is being sold for Rs. 32,440. As of yet, there is no information on smartphone’s launch in the Indian market.


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Put off by the universally dismal reviews for Duke Nukem Forever, but still intrigued to see how the game turned out after 15 years in development hell? Well, here's your chance for a spot of rubbernecking.
Developer Gearbox has announced that a demo for the game is now available to all via Xbox Live and Steam.
"We are working with Sony to get the demo out [for PlayStation 3] as soon as possible too," added a post on the studio's official blog.
Access to a demo for the game was previously limited to those who picked up the Game of the Year edition of Borderlands.


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The UK's best technology podcast brings you all the week's biggest gadget news and a potted history of Motorola. Plus, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales explains his new social network.
The $16.6 billion deal will see the companies combine their networking and telecoms strengths.
As part of its global ice cream delivery promotion, the ride-sharing company plumps for something a bit more sci-fi in the island state of Singapore.
New tech showcases a fingerprint scanner embedded into glass. Plus, Apple has another massive earnings report but gives no details about the Apple Watch.
The mega retailer takes full ownership of China-based Yihaodian, an online marketplace that sells food, home goods, electronics and more.
Apple, along with Dow Chemical and Levi Strauss & Co., voices its support for non-discrimination legislation that would establish federal equality for LGBT Americans.
"Huge numbers of people want to do good things," says the Wikipedia co-founder as he brings company to the US.
The European Union contends that the studios and British pay-TV provider Sky UK are violating antitrust regulations by restricting the broadcasting of studio films to only the UK and Ireland.
The social network says the event was organized by one team at the company and was done "in poor taste."
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio drops his proposal to place a cap on the number of Uber cars in the city, while the ride-hailing service agrees to hand over previously undisclosed data.
In its third-quarter financial report, the chipmaker lays out restructuring plans and slashes projections due to lower expectations for the semiconductor business.
It looked like compression technology for superhigh-quality video would be free for watching movies and TV online. Not so, according to a new patent-licensing group that wants a cut of the revenue.
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Emarat, also known as Emirates General Petroleum Corporation, has recently announced a groundbreaking partnership with Al Maryah Community Bank, granting them the exclusive naming rights to one of its fuel stations. This marks the first time in both local and global history that a company has secured the rights to name a fuel station under Emarat’s Project Landmark initiative.
Ali Khalifa Al Shamsi, Director-General of Emarat, expressed pride in the collaboration with Al Maryah Community Bank, emphasizing the confidence in Emarat’s strategic approach demonstrated by the partnership. He highlighted the positive economic impact of the project and the unique opportunities it provides for companies to prioritize customer satisfaction in their business operations.
Through the Mbank mobile app, customers will now be able to make quick and secure payment transactions by scanning a QR code at checkout counters using their mobile phones. This seamless payment option is set to enhance the overall customer experience at Emarat fuel stations.
Mohammed Wassim Khayata, CEO of Al Maryah Community Bank, expressed gratitude for the strategic partnership with Emarat, which has allowed them to secure the naming rights for a fuel station on a global scale. This initiative aligns with the bank’s innovative strategies to increase visibility and improve customer experiences at fuel stations and affiliated stores.
As part of the collaboration, Emarat stations have introduced Al Maryah Community Bank’s Mbank wallet digital wallet services, enabling customers to make contactless payments after refueling or purchasing goods at FreshPlus station stores. By scanning the QR code at mobile payment counters, customers can enjoy a safe and convenient payment experience at Emarat stations.


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Dutch printer ink vendor 123inkt has accused HP of intentionally reprogramming its printers to reject third-party cartridge.
123inkt, says it received "more than a thousand" complaints on 13 September from customers claiming the firm's third-party cartridge are no longer working in HP printers.
According to 123inkt, HP claims that the problem is caused by a firmware update that unintentionally stops third-party cartridges from functioning in certain HP printers.
123inkt however states that there have been no firmware updates on the affected printer models for some time, with the last update being applied on 22 March 2016, and that printers with even older firmware versions were experiencing the same problem. Furthermore, the Dutch firm claims that even printers with no network access, which could not be updated, were also affected.
Error messages reported to HP include "cartridge problem," "one or more cartridges are missing or damaged" and "older generation cartridge".
"The problem is not the result of a recent update, but the manner in which printer firmware has been programmed some time ago. HP's statement that the problem is caused by a recent firmware update, is in our opinion, incorrect and misleading," the ink vendor claimed in a press release.
"The (un)intended result usually is that the operation of lower-price private-label cartridges is disturbed and error messages are triggered. This time the problem was not the result of an update to improve the operation of the printer, but the HP firmware was apparently programmed in such a manner that this problem started at 13 September 2016."
123inkt claims several HP OfficeJet Pro and OfficeJet Pro X products have been affected.
CRN sister title Channelnomics Europe had contacted HP and was awaiting response at the time of publication
A summary of what you get if you subscribe to our premium market intelligence service
Matthew Polly says CrowdStrike is looking to branch out from the UK and into mainland Europe
Southampton-based VAR states that further acquisitions are in the pipeline
With UKFast launching a public cloud consultancy, Tom Wright asks if this is the way forward for all local hosting providers


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Irn-Bru maker AG Barr has posted record first half profits as the out-of-home soft drinks market rebounded, but warned second half margins will slide on rising costs.
For the 27 weeks ended 1 August 2021, AG Barr posted a 19.5% revenue increase to 135.3m, reflecting strong trading across its soft drinks and Funkin cocktails divisions.
On a like-for-like basis, excluding the extra week of trading, revenue was £128.5m, an increase of 13.5%.
AG Barr said the 2020 soft drinks market was characterised by the migration of out-of-home consumer demand into the home environment, which is now reversing as the hospitality sector and on-the-go channels begin to recover.
Its Barr Soft Drinks has benefited from recovery in “on-the-go” consumption, growing volume and improving product mix, while “at home” sales have remained strong. Recent new product launches are “performing well”, with positive consumer feedback and encouraging customer listings.
The Irn-Bru brand as a whole has grown revenue by 18.9%, supported by marketing activity and the continuing recovery of on-the-go consumption.
Total Rubicon brand sales (excluding Rubicon RAW Energy) increased by 26.2% with still, sparkling and spring variants all delivering growth.
Funkin has capitalised on the increase in demand for cocktails at home, through both traditional retail and direct to consumer channels, becoming the UK’s No.1 ready to drink cocktail brand.
Its “at home” cocktail sales have grown by 114.3% to £10.2m, representing 54.5% of Funkin’s total sales in the first half of the year. The group will accelerate investment in the second half of the year to develop Funkin as a premium consumer brand.
Statutory profit before tax in the period rose almost five-fold to £24.4m from £5.1m in the same period in 2020.
This “record” performance reflects positive underlying volume momentum as well as a number of benefits specific to the circumstances in the first half of this year, estimated to be around £5m.
However, AG Barr said it does not expect to maintain the current level of operating margin in the second half, reflecting the rephasing of our increased marketing investment and its anticipation of increased cost inflation across the balance of the year.
Full year operating margin is expected to be slightly ahead of the prior full year.
The positive first half performance has seen the group reinstate an interim dividend of 2p per share, having not paid on last year.
CEO Roger White commented: “AG Barr is a growth-focused business operating in resilient and growing market categories, with dynamic brands, great people and a strong financial position.
“Our positive first half performance reflects these fundamentals as well as the encouraging performance of recent innovation launches in both soft drinks and cocktails.
“We remain on track to deliver strong full year profit performance, slightly ahead of our 2019/20 pre-COVID level.”
AG Barr shares have edged back 0.4% to 537p so far today.
English wine brand Chapel Down has grown turnover by 64% in the first half and moved into profit after the disposal of its beer and cider brands.
Wine revenues were up 64% in the six months to 30 June to £7.8m.
Group revenues increased by 35% to £8.1m, reflecting a 76% drop in sales of its now disposed of Curious Drinks beer and cider portfolio to just £287k due to the closure of the on-trade.
On a continuing operations basis, it posted a 76% increase in gross profit to £3m.
Administrative expenses on a continuing basis increased by 42% year-on-year reflecting investment in marketing to support national retailers and the growth in direct to consumer sales.
Adjusted EBITDA on a continuing basis increased 232% to a profit of £801k.
On a group-wide basis adjusted EBITDA was a profit of £618k compared to a £419k loss last year.
Following the successful fundraise in July 2021 which raised £6.876m, and the securing of a new £15m asset based lending facility, the group is able to continue to invest to grow its supply of fruit and to process it into the best wine possible at an improved winery.
It said that the 2021 harvest has been one of the more challenging in recent years with yields expected to be down by some 25%, but it has built stocks sparkling wine over the last four years to enable it to continue to maintain growth momentum.
It will also be planting further vineyards (150 acres) in 2022/3 and expects yields to improve long term as viticulture improves and our latest plantings on better sites start to bear fruit.
Outgoing CEO Frazer Thompson commented: “As I pass on the reins of the business to Andrew Carter, I do so with the business in better shape than ever, and with a great team in place who have managed our growth in this extraordinary crisis. Andrew has an outstanding pedigree, having previously been MD of Chase Distillery and CCO of Treasury Wine Estates, and he has joined at the ideal time.
“As we emerge from the crisis there is a real excitement around English wine from every quarter – trade, consumers, critics and retailers. In Chapel Down we have the leading “power brand” with a growing reputation, the broadest distribution, a rapidly growing on-line business and huge potential for growth.”
On the markets this morning, the FTSE 100 is down 0.3% to 7,041.9pts.
Early risers include Hotel Chocolat, up 1.6% to 404p, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, up 1.6% to €49.15 and Glanbia, up 1.4% to €14.19.
Fallers so far include McBride, down 3% to 76.3p, Ocado, down 2.4% to 1,701.5p and Marston’s, down 2.4% to 81.4p.
Yesterday in the City
The FTSE 100 opened the week slightly up, rising 0.2% to 7,063.4pt yesterday.
Risers included travel retail and foodservice specialists, including WH Smith, up 5.5% to 1,805.5p, SSP Group, up 4.8% to 290.6p, Compass Group, up 3.6% to 1,536.5p, Marks & Spencer, up 3% to 192.8p and Greencore, up 2.8% to 146.1p.
AG Barr was up 1.9% to 539p ahead of its interim results this morning.
Other risers included Associated British Foods, up 3% to 1,937.5p and Devro, up 2.3% to 219p.
The day’s fallers included Glanbia, down 4.3% to €14.00, Naked Wines, down 3.9% to 712p, McBride, down 3% to 78.6p, Nichols, down 2.5% to 1,355p, Deliveroo, down 2.1% 298.3p, DS Smith, down 2% to 424.1p and Sainsbury’s, down 1.2% to 291.9p.


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The entire CeleraOne team would like to thank all customers and partners for an extraordinary 2020!
Last year has been especially challenging not only because of the corona pandemic. In spring, we already made sure that our employees stay safe and healthy in home office.
In consequence, we could guarantee our customers that their publishing business runs smoothly. With even more commitment to our software and more effort from our employees, we could ensure that.
Nevertheless, despite the unusual requirements, our customers could grow exceptional in digital subscriptions.
🎉 We are excites about our customers extraordinary successes in digital subscription growth for 2020:
- +42% Tamedia
- +25% Neue Zürcher Zeitung
- +100% Süddeutsche Zeitung
- +35% ZEIT ONLINE
- +10% BILDplus
- +150% Rheinische Post
- +50% Stuttgarter Zeitung
- +500% NWZ*
- reached 150,000 NOZ
Further customers and Go-Lives accomplished in 2020:
We are looking forward to working with our new publishers and being part of their digital subscriptions journey. We briefly introduce our new publishers:
Media Pioneer pursues a digital-only approach with its innovative membership model. The concept is based on analyzes and assessments of selected topics from politics and business.
Stampen Media is one of Scandinavia’s largest newspaper publishers for local news. Stampen publishes newspapers such as Göteborgs-Posten.
CH Media is a Swiss media company with a significant regional alignment arisen of NZZ Mediengruppe and AZ Medien.
Hanser Verlag is a leader in industrial trade magazines covering a wide range of technical topics for an engineering target group.
Innovations in the CeleraOne organization and customer event:
The Customer Circle 2020 took place as an online event at the beginning of December. It was a great event with many interesting sessions around the topic of hands-on CeleraOne with speakers from both publishers and partners.
Have a look at some insights you can find below:
- Login Strategies for Publishers in a Cookieless Future: Sven Bornemann, CEO of the European netID Foundation, talks about 1st party cookies and intelligent login strategies and how they open up new strategic opportunities.
- How to convert users into subscribers on a news website: Joachim Dreykluft, Head of HHLab and member of chief edition and online chief editor at sh:z, shares insights about how reliability converts users into subscribers.
- Media Pioneers membership-based Subscription Model: Max Franke, COO of Media Pioneer, talks about how the media startup launched a membership-based subscription model with its newsletters, podcasts, and paid content.
Furthermore, there were substantial changes in the CeleraOne organization. We introduced to our customers an agency- and a customer success-unit to guarantee even better customer support and a higher service level.
With workshops and training, we consult publishers, in order to drive their paid content strategies.
2020, an eventful year:
Not only Corona but also the US election in 2020 caused significant traffic on the news sites. Sudden traffic peaks, therefore, had to be absorbed to meet the high demand for information.
The investments in our hosting strategy have paid off for our publishers.
Neither the immense influx of readers due to the corona pandemic nor that of the US election campaign could affect the real-time performance of our customer’s news pages.
Since the high volume of traffic places a significant burden on the server, we have perfected the server configuration so that news pages function smoothly even with exceptionally high traffic loads. The special performance and reliability of the CeleraOne in-memory system make it possible. A temporary doubling or tripling of traffic volume is achievable very well this way.
Therefore, this year’s traffic peaks were a reason for joy for our publishers.
In the new year, we will keep you up to date with our newsletter, paid content blog, and case studies on our customers’ success stories and paid content best practices.
We look forward to starting the exciting year 2021 with you!


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In 2010, investment banker Bobby Youakim had a pet peeve: paying for parking — not the fee itself, but how it was collected.
So he set out to modernize the process. And, last week, he closed $6 million in venture capital from Grotech Ventures and Relevance Capital for his Charlotte startup, PassportParking.
“I thought to myself, 'We’re in 2010 and we’re still stuffing cash into little boxes,' ” he says. “'This is messed up. It’s gotta change.'”
Youakim and his cousin Charlie Youakim, who worked as head of research and development for a company that designed and manufactured parking garage equipment, started brainstorming solutions. Together they created Passport, an enterprise software company that provides parking providers and drivers with cloud-based apps to monitor and pay for parking spaces. Bobby Youakim self-funded their launch with a $400,000 investment.
“They are a model of the kind of innovative company we look to get in with on the ground floor,” says Don Rainey, general partner at Grotech Ventures and a Charlotte resident.
Rainey says he was introduced to Passport by Charlotte entrepreneur advocate Dan Roselli. Rainey says venture capitalists were attracted to Passport because it dealt in mobile payments and solved a nuisance — paying for parking. It also already developed a growing client base. The capital infusion will finance a major sales and marketing push.
Passport gives municipalities and private parking vendors the ability to collect payment for parking from a driver’s mobile phone instead of swiping a credit card at a pay station or stuffing cash into a box on the lot.
But Bobby Youakim says the key selling feature, and the reason Passport is more attractive than its competitors, is that the system is built on a subscription, cloud-based model. That feature makes it much easier for vendors to adopt. Passport also sells its products as a white-label offering, so vendors can brand the mobile apps. In Omaha, Neb., for example, the city uses Passport at all of its metered marking lots, calling the app Park Omaha.
Asheville is also a major client, along with Louisville, Ky., and several other large cities are in pipeline. Cities in Australia and Spain are adopting the software. The city of Charlotte uses a competitor. But Passport hopes to win that business when Charlotte’s existing contract expires.
“We won Detroit, too, but they went bankrupt when we were supposed to launch,” Bobby Youakim says.
Altogether, Passport has about 40 municipalities, 30 private vendors and five universities using its product.
Beyond payments, Passport helps parking vendors see and analyze parking use in real time so pricing, enforcement and other aspects of managing paid parking lots can be more efficient.
Bobby Youakim says his company also can offer users special offers from surrounding merchants via social media. For example, a user who pays for parking with Passport might immediately receive an offer from a nearby lunch counter. “The oil strike comes when we bring on the merchants and retailers,” he says.
Passport’s capital raise is one of the largest to date in 2013 for Charlotte startups. The company has 15 employees, mostly at a small office in South End, and it intends to keep growing as sales increase. Bobby Youakim believes the underlying software can be expanded into payment software for toll roads and other transit companies.
“There are always plot twists along the way,” says Rainey, the investor. “A happy ending for us is a growing company that employs people and has value.”


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“By most accounts, Apple Computer has hit the ‘sweet spot’ of the technology market,” Scott Ferguson reports for eWeek Channel Insider.
Ferguson reports, “Several analysts, both in the IT and financial fields, believe that the Cupertino, Calif. company will deliver an upbeat fourth quarter report during its Oct. 18 financial earnings call.”
“Analysts point to the company’s exceptionally fast incorporation of Intel microprocessors into its Macintosh line of desktops and notebooks during 2006, its announcement that the new operating system, called Leopard, will be ready by early 2007 and its domination of the consumer music market through its iPod line,” Ferguson reports. “‘Apple is clicking on all cylinders,’ Tim Bajarin, the principal analyst at Creative Strategies in Campbell, Calif., told eWEEK.”
“Wall Street is calling for earnings per share of 50 cents on revenue of $4.67 billion for the quarter ending Sept. 30,” Ferguson reports. “During a conference call with analysts to announce the third quarter results, Apple officials said that they expect earnings in the fourth quarter of between 49 cents and 51 centers per share with revenue between $4.5 and $4.6 billion.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Apple will announce Q4 earnings on October 18th after market close.
Apple’s 2006 earnings and unit sales information through Q3:
• Q1 (ended 12/31/05): revenue of $5.75 billion, net quarterly profit of $565 million, 1.254 million Macs, 14.043 million iPods
• Q2 (ended 04/01/06): revenue of $4.36 billion, net quarterly profit of $410 million, 1.112 million Macs, 08.526 million iPods
• Q3 (ended 07/01/06): revenue of $4.37 billion, net quarterly profit of $472 million, 1.327 million Macs, 08.111 million iPods
UBS analyst sees strong Mac demand – October 12, 2006
Piper Jaffray analyst sees AAPL upside due to strong Mac sales – October 12, 2006
Apple to announce sales of 1.64 million Macs for quarter? – October 10, 2006
Investrend expects Apple to report earnings of $6.72 billion – October 10, 2006
Analyst predicts Apple to sell 1.4 million Macs this quarter – October 09, 2006
Apple to announce Q4 earnings October 18th – October 03, 2006


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What you need to know
- Google is rolling out the first of the changes to its YouTube platform aimed at protecting kids.
- YouTubers are now able to mark videos as aimed at children, which disables comments, live chat, and data collection features.
- Google still recommends YouTube Kids for children under the age of 13.
First of all, YouTubers can now mark their videos as made for kids or not using a new YouTube Studio option. A video counts as being made for kids "if it is intended for kids, taking into consideration a variety of factors. These factors include the subject matter of the video, whether the video has an emphasis on kids' characters, themes, toys or games." Google will also have a set of tools that can apply a rating, but the firm says that it'll give discretion to creators and override only in cases of abuse.
YouTube will also treat all data from users watching children's content as if it were being watched by a child, regardless of the user's started age. When watching a video marked as for kids, you won't see comments, live chat, notification bell, etc. The firm will also limit the data collected from such videos. Presumably, this is because children's content could be watched on a parent's device or with a family, and Google wants to be as thorough as it can.
Google's best bet for kids is still the YouTube Kids app and the company still recommends it for children under 13. The content there is actively curated, despite a few hiccups, and all the data collection features are disabled in their entirety. Of course, kids may find it a little patronizing, but that's up for parents to handle.
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Note 20 and Galaxy Z Flip getting festive Mystic colors for the holidays
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From the Editor's Desk: My little Black Friday victories
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Do your ears a favor and use one of these great PS5 headsets
The PlayStation 5 has finally launched and for those who are looking to pick up the console, a headset can be a big accessory to get along with it. Here are our favorite options for the best PS5 headsets.


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Sustainable Coffee Challenge Welcomes Four More Partners
September 18, 2017
Pur Projet, Boncafé, Center for Coffee Research & Education and The Coffee Source Join Industry-wide Effort to Make Coffee the First Sustainably Grown Commodity in the World
ARLINGTON, Va. (Sept. 18, 2017) – The Sustainable Coffee Challenge today announced that four new partners — PUR Projet, Boncafé, Center for Coffee Research & Education and The Coffee Source — have joined its mission to make coffee the world’s first sustainably grown commodity despite climate variability, aging farmers and trees and volatile markets. The Sustainable Coffee Challenge has 77 partners, including corporations, governments, NGOs and research organizations.
“Having these dynamic organizations on board presents an even greater opportunity to tap our collective ingenuity and resources to continue meeting the world’s increasing demand for coffee,” said Bambi Semroc, Senior Strategic Advisor at Conservation International. “Together we must increase coffee production on existing farms while conserving forests and water resources and ensuring farmers have the necessary resources.”
“With PUR Projet, we are specialized in developing agroforestry projects within supply chains landscapes of which coffee resides,” said Tristan Lecomte, Co-founder and President, PUR Projet. “We are very inspired by the ambitions of the Sustainable Coffee Challenge and thrilled to be sharing our knowledge, methodologies and projects to help bring about a more sustainable future.”
“After water, coffee is the most consumed drink worldwide. With climate change affecting growing conditions, market volatility endangering the prosperity and wellbeing of this commodity business, Boncafé endeavors to be part of this meaningful move to make coffee the first sustainable agricultural product by pledging ourselves with Conservation International’s Sustainable Coffee Challenge,” said Tammy Chua, Marketing Manager, Boncafé.
“Research has demonstrated that the future of Arabica coffee is threatened. Low genetic variability, climate change, pressure from pests and diseases, and lack of access to resources and education for small scale producers are massive threats that cannot be eliminated by a single country, farm, or company,” said Dr. Leonardo Lombardini, Director, Center for Coffee Research and Education. “We are all in this together, to each do our part to save the future of coffee.”
“The Coffee Source was born from coffee growers and shaped by a longstanding commitment to a sustainable supply chain,” said Arnoldo Leiva, Chief Executive Officer, The Coffee Source. “That is why we are excited to join the Sustainable Coffee Challenge, and work together with roasters and producers to develop diverse and meaningful initiatives that have a positive impact on productivity, quality and sustainability of the coffee business and its people.”
The Sustainable Coffee Challenge recently announced four actions its partners will take collectively to achieve sustainability in coffee growth: coffee farm renovation and rehabilitation, improved labor practices and labor supply, scaling up sustainable coffee sourcing and mapping and monitoring of coffee and forests
To join as a partner, contact Valerie Beard, Coordinator, Sustainable Coffee Challenge at firstname.lastname@example.org.
About the Sustainable Coffee Challenge
The Sustainable Coffee Challenge convenes, unites and urges the coffee sector and conservation partners across the industry to spur the actions and investments necessary to make coffee the first sustainable agriculture product in the world. The Challenge is committed to stimulating demand for sustainable coffee across the value chain, from the policymaking level to the final consumer. By encouraging demand for sustainable coffee, it leads to investments that enable the transition to a sustainable production and ensuring the coffee we drink is a sustainable product.
About Conservation International
Conservation International uses science, policy and partnerships to protect the nature people rely on for food, fresh water and livelihoods. Founded in 1987, Conservation International works in more than 30 countries on six continents to ensure a healthy, prosperous planet that supports us all. Learn more about Conservation International and its groundbreaking “Nature Is Speaking” campaign, and follow Conservation International’s work on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.