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Larry Friedrich found himself in a "hemp" of trouble with Melbourne Police for selling a low-grade hemp product at his shop at the Renniger Flea Market in melbourne Wayne T. Price/FLORIDA TODAY
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That's exactly what happened to 64-year-old Larry Friedrich, who runs a medical hemp business, Doc Holiday’s Medical Hemp Dispensary, at Renninger’s Super Flea in Melbourne.
Just before Christmas, he was served a warrant by Melbourne police on suspicion of marijuana and drug paraphernalia sales. Several officers entered his store, searched him and his business before leaving with what they suspected were illegal cannabis products.
Friedrich said he lost tens of thousands of dollars in sales because police confiscated his inventory of plant material, hemp oil, lollipops and other edibles, just as people were shopping for the holidays.
No charges have been filed, but Friedrich said the detective working the case told him to expect felony charges because he was going to recommend prosecution to the State Attorney's office.
"He said, 'Listen, I think you're a nice guy and we'll let you know in a few months when we're going to come arrest you and take you to jail,' " Friedrich recalled the detective telling him.
"It's just a nightmare," he said.
It's a scenario that's playing out across Florida. As marijuana laws become more liberal in many places, and medical marijuana dispensaries open around the Sunshine State, both law enforcement and those selling cannabis and hemp products, including cannabidiol, or "CBD" oils, are navigating a hazy landscape of what's legal and what isn't.
Last November, Tallahassee police raided a business called Natural Life — the second time in two months — seizing about $25,000 worth of hemp flowers.
More: Tallahassee business raided, thousands of dollars in hemp seized
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Products like CBD oil and flowered hemp, some claim, have natural anti-anxiety effects, anti-seizure effects, anti-tumor effects, anti-inflammatory effects and can be used to battle a host of mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders.
Friedrich’s lawyer, Michael Minardi of Tampa, said as states change marijuana laws and cannabis proliferates and specialty strains are grown, he’s seeing more hemp business operators like his client facing serious legal consequences for selling flower material with low levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. That also could include products like edibles and oils that have THC.
These are products that have been deemed OK by the federal government in a roundabout way, Minardi said, but in some states and communities it's often up to the whim of law enforcement and state prosecutors to decide whether an individual is violating the law.
More: Marijuana-themed bar/restaurant scheduled to open in Cocoa
“It’s something we’re getting calls for all the time,” said Minardi, whose practice is centered on marijuana issues in Florida.
“People have to stop living in fear and start understanding the issue,” Minardi said.
“They’re living in fear and getting attacked. And in Larry’s case he is having his livelihood taken away. It’s really sad that law enforcement continues to act in a way that they do without coming together and having a real meeting of the minds about the issue and how it works.”
It may look like traditional marijuana but Larry Friedrich, owner of Doc Holiday's Tattoo Medical Hemp Dispensary, said it contains extremely low levels of THC which he and his attorney say is not illegal.
Wayne T. Price/FLORIDA TODAY
In Florida, low-THC cannabis is different from medical cannabis because contains very small amounts of THC. Because of its low potency, the products don't bring on euphoric properties of full-potency cannabis and typically do not result in patients experiencing the “high” commonly associated with cannabis.
In Florida, to qualify as low-THC, the flowers, seeds, resin, and any other product derived from the cannabis plant must contain 0.8 percent or less of THC.
On the federal side, the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, signed into law last December, removes hemp and related products with less than 0.3 percent THC as a controlled substance, and not illegal, under federal law.
What this often means, though, is forcing local law enforcement to make a snap judgement if they suspect something amiss with a particular product.
In Friedrich's case, he said he provided documentation to the officers that his flower hemp material had been tested and didn't meet the threshold of being over the 0.8 percent THC limit. In fact it was far lower, he said.
Before it was confiscated, he had about 15 pounds of a specialty strain — specifically grown to have very low levels of THC — from a hemp farmer in Colorado.
"You could smoke this all afternoon and not get high," he said. "It provides a soothing effect."
Friedrich opened a package of his flowered product when FLORIDA TODAY visited his shop and it seemed to possess the characteristics of marijuana: it looked and smelled like pot.
It didn't really matter how much THC was in the hemp flowers, police said. That it has any THC makes it a controlled substance, they said.
"The law is very clear what is, and is not, legal," said Commander Marc Claycomb of Melbourne police. "The amount of marijuana/cannabis is what makes it go from a misdemeanor to a felony."
Claycomb added: "We are only the enforcement side. The state attorney will decide what goes forward as the formal charge. There have been no arrests made in this case to this point. It is still under investigation."
Minardi,chairman of Regulate Florida and a cannabis industry advocate, said all this contradicts the 2014 U.S. Farm Bill Act, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against Drug Enforcement Agency interference in hemp commerce from earlier this year and an administrative law judge’s ruling that the plant is not a Schedule 1 drug and can be sent through the mail.
He suggests the best way to proceed on these cases is to have a discussion with police, and prosecutors, to iron out definitions of legal and non-regulated THC, which would save a lot of money and more time for law enforcement to focus on bigger drug issues.
"Many products that are sold in Walmart, Whole Foods and similar stores," Minardi said, "would test positive and be illegal under the current testing methods used by law enforcement in Florida."


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MOTU has announced the MicroBook (http://www.motu.com/marketing/motu_products/audio_interfaces/microbook/), a USB bus-powered audio interface that purportedly delivers studio-grade audio performance in a compact size small enough to fit in your pocket. The MicroBook -- which will ship next month and cost US$269 -- turns a Mac or PC computer into a personal 4x2 recording studio with audio I/O and mixing.
"The MicroBook is small in size but huge when it comes to audio quality," says Jim Cooper, MOTU marketing director. "Our tests show that it matches or exceeds the measured audio specifications of other so-called 'high-end' interfaces on the market that cost two and three times as much. So it's perfect for discriminating users who want quality I/O for on-the-go recording, personal studio tracking, laptop-based...| Read more »

domain: news


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Why Do Drugs and Medical Devices Receive Black Box Warnings?
Last week, we published a blog on the dangerous type 2 diabetes drug Invokana. Once the FDA has evidence that an FDA approved product has serious or life-threatening risks, it can receive a black box warning. The FDA required a black box warning for Invokana after receiving evidence that it increases the risk of leg and foot amputations.
A black box warning is the strictest type of warning required by the FDA for a drug or medical device. This warning is only reserved for drugs and medical devices that can cause you serious harm. The black box warning describes a list of serious or life-threatening risks associated with using the product.
Deadly or serious side effects may not be noticed while these products are in the process of receiving FDA approval. A dangerous product may cause harm to consumers for years before a black box warning is issued. Invokana was FDA-approved in 2013, but only received a black box warning earlier this year.
It may take months or years before the FDA decides to issue a black box warning for a product. The FDA receives adverse event reports from consumers or their physicians. These are reports that warn a drug has caused serious or deadly side effects. The FDA investigates adverse event reports and then decides whether to take further action. Studies may also determine that a drug or medical device is associated with serious health risks. These are also taken into consideration by the FDA.
Hundreds of FDA approved products carry black box warnings. You can tell if a drug or medical device you are using has one of these warnings. Look on the labeling or marketing materials for a black box that surrounds text describing the risks associated with using the product.
Can I File a Lawsuit if I am Harmed by a Dangerous Drug or Medical Device?
If you or a loved one were harmed while using a dangerous drug or medical device, then our attorneys could discuss your situation at no cost. The Philadelphia defective drug attorneys at Eisenberg, Rothweiler, Winkler, Eisenberg & Jeck, P.C., could help you determine whether you have options to pursue damages.


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This week’s TIME cover features an exclusive interview with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz: Schultz is transforming his company. Changing the country is going to be harder.
Howard Schultz isn’t afraid of his feelings. Or anybody else’s for that matter. The 61-year-old Starbucks CEO doesn’t mind tears or hugs or displays of emotion of any kind. This is front and center on an icy January afternoon in New York City, where Schultz is leading a forum on race. Shocked by recent police shootings and unrest in Ferguson, Mo., New York City and Oakland, Calif., he decided to hold open meetings in five cities where Starbucks employees from top managers to entry-level baristas could speak frankly about their experiences with racism.
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A little more than 40% of the company’s baristas are minorities, and the audience of 400 or so at Cooper Union’s auditorium reflects that. Schultz has just come from a meeting with New York City police commissioner William Bratton in which the two discussed ways the company could help ease tensions. Like a candidate holding forth during a televised town hall, Schultz is speaking from a spot on the floor near the crowd. “People have told me we shouldn’t touch this issue, that we might stir things up, upset the shareholders. I don’t agree with that, ” he says. “Conversations are being ignored because people are afraid to touch the issue. But if I ignore this and just keep ringing the register, then I become part of the problem. So here we are. Let’s talk.”
Pretty soon, the floodgates are open. The microphone is passed around, and dozens of partners, as Starbucks employees are called, begin sharing their stories. Some are crying, others angry. A young Senegalese immigrant, Tafsir Mbodje, a district manager who runs the Grand Central store among others, points out the slow police-response times in his former neighborhood, East New York. “I feel like we are at a tipping point in this country, ” Mbodje says. “And it’s only going to take one more thing, one more event, to make things boil over.” Schultz takes the microphone. “I was born in East New York, and I agree with you. We are at a tipping point. There’s a lack of leadership in Washington, in government, and so it has to come from us.”
The forum is quintessential Schultz. He is at his best with his people, talking about issues that other CEOs would rather not come up in mixed company. In recent years, Schultz has taken on student debt, health care, veterans’ rights, youth unemployment and gun violence. All this do-goodery can be hard to live up to 24/7. A progressive image can sting if it appears hypocritical, as it did in 2014 when a New York Times story chronicled how Starbucks’ staff-scheduling software could wreak havoc on the lives of workers with kids. (Schultz says the problem has since been fixed.) And though investors have cheered Starbucks’ recent performance—on Jan. 22, the Seattle-headquartered company said sales in the most recent quarter had grown by 13% year over year, to $4.8 billion—a CEO’s personal passions can irk investors when times turn tough.
Lately Schultz has been focused on one intractable problem in particular that will take more than a few feel-good forums to tackle: the future of the U.S. economy. The Great Recession and the recovery that followed have warped the economic landscape. What has emerged is an hourglass-shaped comeback with growth at the high and low ends and shrinking in the middle. Wealthy households have made huge strides while middle-income Americans struggle, reshaping businesses from housing and cars to groceries and clothing. Labor Department data show that wages for the vast majority of American workers have stagnated over the past decade. The U.S. is increasingly a nation of latte drinkers and latte makers, with very little room in between. Schultz, of course, depends on both.
His plan to address this, he tells Time, could change your local Starbucks as you know it. Those changes also reflect the challenges facing the country as a whole. “Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, ” he recently said, “we can all know and recognize one thing: the country is not going in the right direction.” That’s the kind of talk that had some, including Schultz’s powerful pals, wondering if these are the musings of an outspoken billionaire flirting with the idea of taking a run at the world’s most powerful job.
America Is “Fragile”
A few weeks back, when starbucks released its impressive quarterly numbers, Schultz got up in front of a bunch of Wall Street analysts and gave them the bad news. “There is no company you can point to that is as dependent as we are on human behavior, the human condition and the people that wear the green apron, ” he said. And unfortunately that condition is, as he put it, “fragile.” Schultz was referring to consumer sentiment, which, while improving, is still volatile. Spending can collapse at a moment’s notice, just as it did during the Ferguson riots, when coffee sales nationwide suddenly dipped as consumers hunkered down at home rather than going out and spending.
Schultz is acutely aware of this because four times a day, he gets what may be the most up-to-date consumer-confidence indicator in America—Starbucks’ coffee-sales figures. With nearly 12, 000 stores nationwide, “we have a lens on almost every community in America, ” he says. “At 4:30 in the morning, I wake up and see the numbers of basically every store from yesterday.” Those numbers give a picture that is very different from and much more sensitive than quarterly GDP figures. Over the past few years, says Schultz, they’ve pointed to a “fractured level of trust and confidence” that he attributes in large part to a sense that government is no longer functional and that no one is looking out for the welfare of the middle and working classes.
Sales will rise and fall with the national mood, tanking quickly during events like the New York City police protests—or the 2013 government shutdown, just one of the recent moments when Schultz has worried about the effects of partisan politics on the economy. “I called the White House after the government shutdown and shared with them [figures showing] that leading into the shutdown and for weeks afterward, we saw a significant drop in consumer spending.” He spoke to people “at the very highest level on both sides of the aisle” to stress his feeling that this effect would be “lingering” and would result in a more skittish consumer. “And that’s exactly what’s happened, ” he says.
Starbucks—whose baristas, at Schultz’s suggestion, wrote come together on coffee cups in protest over the shutdown—already had a reputation at that point as a progressive company, having been one of the first retailers in the country to offer affordable, comprehensive health care to full-time and eligible part-time employees and their families, as well as a stock-grant program (Bean Stock) for all. And there have also been big pushes in areas like workforce training (the company and the Schultz Family Foundation together have trained nearly 700 disadvantaged young people for jobs in retail or customer service), hiring and training of returning veterans (Starbucks has pledged to employ 10, 000), student debt and access to education (the company has promised to help pay for employees to get their bachelor’s degree, an investment that will likely cost Starbucks tens of millions of dollars).
Schultz says he is deeply invested in these ideas not only because making the company a preferred employer helps keep turnover costs lower and service quality higher than the industry average but also because he believes corporations have a duty to help people realize the American Dream. “I think the private sector simply has to take a larger role than they have in the past. Our responsibility goes beyond the P&L and our stock price. We have to take care of people in the communities that we serve. If half the country or at least a third of the country doesn’t have the same opportunities as the rest going forward, then the country won’t survive. That’s not socialism, ” says Schultz. To him, it’s practical reality.
Schultz believes that keeping the economy viable will also require major changes in corporate business models, Starbucks’ included. And that’s where customers will begin to notice some changes. Just as fashion brands have haute couture and mass-market lines, Starbucks this year will open the first of a series of luxury Reserve stores, where customers can get a more rarefied and expensive assortment of coffee. (Some may also experiment with selling wine.) Expect many more specialized formats designed for specific places, like express stores coming to New York City or mobile trucks currently on college campuses. Over the next five years, Schultz will be busy transforming the Starbucks experience, in large part by experimenting with ways to draw in ever-more-fickle consumers.
In part, that will involve taking seriously the crowded space for cheaper coffee, a phenomenon that along with the financial crisis helped lead to a steep downturn in Starbucks’ fortunes in 2008. Starbucks will have to compete more directly not only with McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts but also with budget outfits like 7-Eleven. (When even Taco Bell is advertising its coffee, you know things are getting tough.) You will start to see the mermaid logo near places like your local bowling alley. The firm that built its image on an “emotional” connection to coffee that allowed for personal indulgences like $5 mocha Frappuccinos is going to have to find ways to compete with those that sling bare-bones $1 coffee—and a lot of it. (Starbucks hasn’t decided yet how the menu might change.) The company is approaching this in a characteristically cool way—building outlets from used cargo containers at highway exits, for example—but it’s not going to be easy to make one brand mean two things to different customers.
More important, this change of course puts the company in an awkward position. To continue to grow, it must adapt to the economic landscape, making a play for high-end consumers with disposable income while also tailoring outlets and products to lower-end consumers who have less to spend. But doing this means Schultz is implicitly accepting a truth that he has been rallying against for years. That leaves Starbucks aggressively changing its business model to make the most of a country in which the middle class is shrinking while its outspoken CEO loudly cries out against the forces that shrink it. The future of Starbucks, like the economy itself, has a split personality.
Kid From Canarsie
This divide is not unfamiliar to schultz. he grew up the watchful, working-class child of a depressed, blue collar father. The elder Schultz, a military veteran without health care who was driving a diaper truck in the days before disposables were ubiquitous, fell on the ice when Howard was little and was let go with no benefits or pay. He never recovered, physically or mentally. With Schultz’s dad couchbound and unable to work, the family struggled with poverty in the housing projects of Canarsie, Brooklyn. “I saw my father, who was unfortunately very bitter about his own life, not ever having the self-respect that he thought he deserved, because he was an uneducated blue collar worker, ” says Schultz. “Consciously or unconsciously, I think one of the things I was trying to do was build the kind of company my dad never got to work for.”
That focus on the working poor is something that sets Schultz apart from many in the 0.001% of which he is now a part. (Forbes estimates his net worth at some $2.4 billion; famous friends include JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Oprah.) His wife Sheri, an equally kinetic and emotive blonde who looks a little like actress Ellen Barkin, helps run the family foundation. She remembers humility and appreciation for people as the qualities that initially drew her to Schultz when the two met in a Hamptons house share 36 years ago. “You know how they say you can find out about a person when you’re in a restaurant and you see how they treat someone who helps you? He would be that guy who before he left would go to the boss and say how great the person was that served our dinner, ” says Sheri. “That’s Howard.”
One Friday afternoon at the Camp Pendleton Marine base near San Diego, Schultz sits signing copies of For Love of Country, a book he co-wrote with Washington Post senior correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran about the struggles of returning veterans. A hundred or so people have lined up for copies, and Schultz is quietly scribbling his signature until a middle-aged man from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, strikes up a conversation. Within seconds the two are backslapping and joking about who came from the tougher neighborhood. “When you say you went to Canarsie High School, you get a whole new level of street cred!” boasts Schultz. He waves over his genteel-looking public-affairs director, Vivek Varma. “Hey, how long do you think Viv would last in the Bayview projects?” Schultz asks his new buddy. “With that watch?” the man fires back. “How fast can you run?” He and Schultz both double over laughing.
Schultz may be of the people, but he’s no saint. He’s more sensitive than most executives to criticism and tough questions. So much so that he has a tell: when he’s on the defensive, his eyes open wider than normal. And like many business leaders from hardscrabble backgrounds, he can be a control freak. Top staffers say multiple 5 a.m. emails from him aren’t unusual. Is that tough? I ask one lieutenant. “Only if you are a normal person who gets started at 8 a.m., ” he responds, a little weary. Schultz also has a tendency to parachute into situations, pre-empting members of his staff who are trying to do their jobs. He says he needs to combat his tendency to “override the people who are responsible. [It’s] not healthy for the organization.” One rare rich-guy move, Schultz’s purchase of the Seattle SuperSonics in 2001, ended with a very unpopular sale that relocated the team to Oklahoma City; Schultz was frustrated by the experience in part because he didn’t get as much control as he would have liked.
Schultz continues to push generous benefit packages for staff, despite protests from the Street. In 2008, when bankers wanted him to cut health care to make his margins, he refused. “We found that 70% of the people working for Starbucks did not have a college education, ” Schultz says, “and a large percentage of them had started and stopped.” To solve that, he partnered with Arizona State University, which has an extensive online curriculum, to allow Starbucks employees to go to school on their own time while continuing to work. So far, 1, 500 employees have taken up the offer (Starbucks says job applications have jumped too as a result), giving the notion of online education a boost in legitimacy and earning Schultz praise from both liberals and conservatives.
Grover Norquist, the right-wing tax activist, sees Starbucks as a model for a kind of business federalism in which the private sector does things better and faster than government. “Howard isn’t saying, Hey, I’ll give you a check. He’s saying, I want your skills, [at the same time] that he’s changing the cost of education by revolutionizing education itself. He’s backing into the reform of public education, ” says Norquist, who also believes Starbucks’ lead on the veteran-hiring issue could displace entire departments of the federal government. “More people live close by a Starbucks than a VA office.”
Howard For President?
Inevitably, all the talk about a leadership void in Washington has led people to wonder whether Schultz might be privately positioning himself for public office. (He is a Democrat.) There is, after all, a rich tradition of wealthy businesspeople pushing political agendas, from Edward Filene, who started Filene’s Basement before helping develop community credit unions and pass the first workmen’s-comp law, to former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who unsuccessfully ran for governor of California five years ago. People close to Schultz, like entertainment mogul David Geffen, have suggested he think big. “I first told Howard he should run back in 2008, ” Geffen says. “We were having a very intense conversation about things that were happening in the country, and Howard had a strong point of view about various things, ” like, for example, the bank bailouts. “We both felt there was a lot of corruption in government and a lack of conviction to put things right.”
Bill Etkin, a financier and lawyer who is a close friend of Schultz’s as well as a consultant for Starbucks, says the CEO did think seriously at one point about entering the political arena. Schultz and his wife hosted a dinner for Michael Bloomberg a few years back when the former New York City mayor was considering a run for President. The two discussed the challenges of moving from the business world to politics. Etkin says Schultz ultimately feels he can do more for the public good from his current perch than he could in Washington. Mellody Hobson, president of the $10 billion asset-management firm Ariel Investments and a Starbucks board member as well as an Obama campaign supporter, says, “Howard is a maverick, and mavericks don’t do well inside big institutional structures.” Norquist puts it more bluntly: “‘You should run for office’ is what people in this country say to you when they mean ‘I like your ideas. I wish people in Washington thought like you did.’ That’s what Ralph Nader’s friends said to him, and when he ran, they screamed at it and said, ‘Hey, you are funneling money away from the mainstream of the party!’”
For his part, Schultz insists he’s not interested in running for office at the moment and has neither the temperament to make the compromises necessary to embark on a Democratic political career nor the desire to be a third-party candidate. “I don’t think that is a solution. I don’t think it ends well.” There is also the baggage that every successful businessman turned politico has to carry in terms of translating his successes—and his failures—in one realm to another. In 2012, for example, Starbucks ran into PR trouble in the U.K. after revelations that it had paid only minimal corporation taxes on many hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. The company, which had been domiciling in the Netherlands, as many large companies do, says it complied with all tax laws. Starbucks has since voluntarily paid more, and it has moved its European headquarters to the U.K. Still, the episode shows how difficult it would be to balance running a multinational company with running a progressive political campaign. For now, Schultz says, he’s content to “see what Hillary does.”
Whatever his future ambitions, Schultz is caffeinated and eager to do bold things both for his business and for the country at large. Wherever he goes, he pops into Starbucks stores, sometimes recognized, often not. “Hey, how is that Pumpkin Spice Latte doing?” he asks the somewhat shocked manager of a store in San Diego, where he has made a surprise visit for his fifth Sumatra of the day between meetings with veterans’ groups. Baristas scramble to fill the order, looking a little awestruck. “Maybe we should move the holiday display cards up a few inches?” Schultz offers.
Schultz is busy mapping Starbucks’ future. The company recently announced the hiring of a new No. 2, 16-year Microsoft veteran Kevin Johnson, to help lead a push into mobile payments. Through its smartphone app, Starbucks already does more of those per week than any other retailer, and Schultz has visions of competing with the likes of Apple Pay. In Seattle, Schultz just opened a flagship Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room, a Willy Wonka–esque coffee fantasia where customers can watch every part of the coffeemaking process, from bean roasting to foammaking. A hundred high-end Reserve stores are coming in the next five years to cities including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Washington. And Starbucks says customers in some cities will be able to get their caffeine fix delivered to their door by the end of 2015.
There will be challenges along the way. Aside from the bargain-basement competitors, Schultz will have to keep his eye on a raft of high-end bespoke coffee chains trying to re-create Starbucks’ early formula, including Blue Bottle, based in Oakland, Calif. Other enthusiastically unveiled initiatives, like a push into food, have been hit or miss. Schultz’s founder’s passions still burn, but he has a hard road ahead in the split economy, and the future of Starbucks after him is unclear at best.
On the policy front, the company is planning to dramatically ramp up the number of out-of-work young people, veterans and other struggling groups that get workforce training through Starbucks. On Feb. 9 in L.A., Schultz is holding the company’s first open forum on racism with non-Starbucks participants. Meanwhile, the early-morning emails with the next big idea—to staffers, friends, his wife, other CEOs—are unlikely to stop coming anytime soon. “I like to take big swings, ” says Schultz, smiling and chugging yet another Sumatra. “Maybe it’s all the coffee.”
- On whether he will run for President in 2016, Schultz insists to TIME that he’s not interested in running for office at the moment, saying, “I don’t think that is a solution. I don’t think it ends well.” For now, Schultz says he’s content to, “see what Hillary does.”On the current state of politics in the U.S.: “Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat…. we can all know and recognize one thing: the country is not going in the right direction.”
On Starbucks’ coffee-sales figures from nearly 12, 000 stores nationwide, Schultz says: “We have a lens on almost every community in America…. At 4:30 in the morning, I wake up and see the numbers of basically every store from yesterday.” Over the past few years, says Schultz, they’ve pointed to a “fractured level of trust and confidence” that he attributes in large part to a sense that government is no longer functional and that no one is looking out for the welfare of the middle and working classes.
On calling the White House after the government shutdown in 2013: “I called the White House after the government shutdown and shared with them [figures showing] that leading into the shutdown and for weeks afterward, we saw a significant drop in consumer spending.” He spoke to people “at the very highest level on both sides of the aisle” to stress his feeling that this effect would be “lingering” and would result in a more skittish consumer. “And that’s exactly what’s happened, ” he says.
On how businesses should operate in America: “I think the private sector simply has to take a larger role than they have in the past. Our responsibility goes beyond the P&L and our stock price…. If half the country or at least a third of the country doesn’t have the same opportunities as the rest going forward, then the country won’t survive. That’s not socialism.”
On how the experiences of his father shaped him as a businessman: “I saw my father, who was unfortunately very bitter about his own life, not ever having the self-respect that he thought he deserved, because he was an uneducated blue collar worker…. Consciously or unconsciously, I think one of the things I was trying to do was build the kind of company my dad never got to work for.”
On his management style, Schultz says he needs to combat his tendency to “override the people who are responsible. [It’s] not healthy for the organization.” He also adds:“I like to take big swings…. Maybe it’s all the coffee.”
Grover Norquist talks to TIME about how Starbucks can act as a model for a kind of business federalism in which the private sector does things better and faster than government, saying: “Howard isn’t saying, Hey, I’ll give you a check. He’s saying, I want your skills, [at the same time] that he’s changing the cost of education by revolutionizing education itself. He’s backing into the reform of public education.”
David Geffen: “I first told Howard he should run back in 2008. We were having a very intense conversation about things that were happening in the country, and Howard had a strong point of view about various things…. We both felt there was a lot of corruption in government and a lack of conviction to put things right.”
Mellody Hobson, President of the $10 billion asset-management firm Ariel Investments and Starbucks board member: “Howard is a maverick, and mavericks don’t do well inside big institutional structures.”


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#GlobalPrideCrossing highlights how social movements and brands have found welcoming homes in the game
The Shaq-a-Roni, as the brand is calling it, launches today. And for every Shaq-a-Roni purchased, Papa John’s is donating $1 to the Papa John’s Foundation, which was created to give back to the community and address social injustice.
Popeyes is giving a Netflix username and password to 1,000 customers who tweet a picture of their at-home fried chicken order with the hashtag #ThatPasswordFromPopeyes. The Netflix accounts will be active for one month.
With parents and children stuck together at home and plenty of creatives out of work due to the Covid-19 outbreak, Pebbles cereal is offering a way to help people make it through the day.
Tribeca Enterprises Teams With Imax, AT&Tribeca Enterprises Teams With Imax, AT&T On Summer Drive-In Theater SeriesT On Summer Drive-In Theater Series
Tribeca Enterprises, in partnership with Imax and AT&T, announced plans today for Tribeca Drive-In, a film series set for this summer at drive-in theaters and other exclusive venues nationwide.
Home is also a great place to enjoy a beverage, and one beverage-making company is stepping up to make sure your boos are still heard. Bud Light is asking NFL fans to record their boos, then post and tag @budlight with the included hashtag #BooTheCommish.
Virtual 48-hour Artisan Pop-Up Market lets you shop direct from small UK businesses with exclusive discounts
On 9th and 10th May 2020, Country Living is hosting an Artisan Pop-Up Market online, where people with a passion for unique, handmade gifts and homewares can shop direct from small UK businesses, using exclusive discount codes, for 48 hours only.
Carlsberg is supporting bars in its homeland of Denmark by asking people to adopt a keg, which they can fill up virtually from home now and exchange for real beer in a real bar as soon as they are able to reopen.
Wingstop announced that it's giving away free merchandise and Venmoing $10 to each person who posts an ad about Wingstop on their public Instagram.
This year's State Of The Industry conference went virtual due to COVID-19 and opened it to the public for free.
To promote its new series Spy Wars, Smithsonian Channel hosted an immersive event on March 4 at New York’s Spyscape, proving that in order to catch the bad guys you need keen covert skills—and a strong martini.
Amazon Flies 20 Fans to Las Vegas for Latest Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Promotional Push
"We want everyone to feel comfortable here, to have an environment where they can come cheer on the team, but if they need a break, we have a dedicated space where they can come and relax."
The September event was designed to promote American Horror Story: 1984, the series’ new season that premiered on September 18. “We always take our inspiration from the show and lean into the elements that we believe will hook our audience and drive them to tune in,” explained Kenya Hardaway Green,...
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s beloved fossil hall reopened this June after a 5 year, $110 million reno. They hosted two evenings of celebrations for the opening. The rotunda was transformed into a jungle for a private donor dinner. The idea was to try to make you feel...


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7th December 2020 – Based on popular demand and customer feedback, ABiQ decided to add two new countries to its world-class platform. ABiQ is really excited to announce that it has expanded its research scope and will be tracking business opportunities in both UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Opportunities worth over $1.5 Trillion
The research team has been working hard behind the scenes for over a few months now and ABiQ is pleased to announce that it will be tracking opportunities worth over $1.5 Trillion in both UAE and Saudi Arabia.
ABiQ will be adding more projects and data in the coming months.


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Ever since it hit the shelves, many iPhone X users have complained about facing some issue or the other.
While these changes are now limited to beta testers, Apple recently released iOS 11.1.1 to all customers with a fix for the notorious autocorrect issue that turned "I" into 'A [?]'. iOS 11.1.2 included a fix for iPhone X screens not working momentarily during cold conditions. Apple iOS 11.1.2 update applies for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch (sixth generation).
Danica Patrick to end racing career at next year's Indy 500
She started her press conference by saying it was her final season driving full-time and immediately broke into tears. But I definitely was faced with situations at the beginning of the year that I had never faced before.
Recently, iPhone X faced an issue where its screen stopped responding in cold weather conditions. Apple started shipping the iPhone X on the 3rd of November, and a majority of the apps were updated to support the device's notch. After several seconds the screen will become fully responsive again.
On Thursday, Apple released iOS 11.1.2 with the fix. Soon after that, Apple gave a statement to the publication The Loop, assuring its fans that an upcoming software update would fix the issue. The changelog for the update mentions only these two points. The latest update, version 8.4.28, allows the music streaming app to take full advantage of the 5.8-inch display, making it look quite good, but otherwise there isn't any added functionality.
Zuma to be launched into orbit
On November 16th, between 8PM and 10PM Eastern, SpaceX is sending a secret payload called "Zuma" beyond our atmosphere. The company also sent a new spy satellite into space for the National Reconnaissance Office earlier this year, .
The barrage of iOS 11 updates continue. Additionally, the update is supposed to fix an issue with the iPhone X and its Live Photos looking distorted. Apple is now testing that feature in the iOS 11.2 beta, which also improves wireless charging speeds.
New research shows that owning a dog could save your life
Who's a good dog? The study, which spanned a 12-year period, involved 3.4 million Swedish people between the ages of 40-80. In addition, the single adults with dogs were 36 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease.


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SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Softbank-backed Grab is preparing for a potentially "long winter", co-founder Tan Hooi Ling said on Thursday, as the ride-hailing firm's revenue takes a hit from the coronavirus outbreak.
The Southeast Asian company has seen an uptick in food and parcel deliveries, but its core ride-hailing business has dropped, she said.
Overall revenue was "lower than it used to be pre-COVID", she said. "During this time, we are preparing for the worst case scenario, which is potentially a very long winter."
The company is taking measures to be more capital efficient and conserve cash, she said.
Last month, Grab CEO Anthony Tan said the pandemic was the single biggest crisis to affect the eight-year-old company, with volumes in its ride-hailing business down by double-digit percentages in some countries.
(Reporting by Aradhana Aravindan and John Geddie; editing by Clarence Fernandez and Jason Neely)


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Recent News About Menard Auto Sales Inc
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The British Insurance Brokers’ Association (Biba) has signed up with Jackson Lee Underwriting for a further three years on its GAP scheme.
It is the second renewal for the scheme after the relationship began in 2012.
The trade body detailed that the GAP scheme, which is exclusive to members, covers most personal and commercial vehicles from motorcycles to 44-ton tractor units and fleets.
It added that the arrangement will cover most uses including courier, driving instructors and taxis.
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- Government reveals recalculated Ogden rate
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- Lloyd’s strategy change gets market backing
- Danish regulator orders Gefion not to expand its business volume
- FCA issues fresh clone broker warning
- Chris Guillaume formally hands over CEO role
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MINNEAPOLIS, Jan. 18, 2016 -- SPS Commerce, Inc. (Nasdaq:SPSC), a leader in retail cloud services, unveiled the latest advancement to the SPS Commerce Sourcing solution, including an expanded service for retailers that streamlines the process of selecting and onboarding vendors by tapping into the vast SPS Retail Network and its team of experts. SPS Sourcing empowers retailers to fulfill their growth potential by guiding merchandisers through a proven process that brings compelling brands to the shopping experience. Retailers, including SHOP.COM, are using Sourcing to strategically expand product offerings in current and new categories, offer local items and enter new markets with qualified vendors that align with their merchandising strategies.
"The SPS Commerce cloud platform is powering the digital retail era, offering retailers access to thousands of brands across countless categories," said Peter Zaballos, vice president of marketing and product at SPS Commerce. "Our newest sourcing service gives retailers a powerful merchandising advantage, providing access to vendors that meet their merchandising and supply-chain requirements. Traditional vendor discovery and onboarding programs simply can't keep pace with the demands of the omnichannel consumer for product variety and the pressure that puts on retailers."
SHOP.COM, a global e-commerce retailer ranked No. 64 in the 2015 Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide and the 18th fastest growing Internet Mobile Retailer, used Sourcing from SPS Commerce in late 2015 to expand its sales volume in select product categories, including soft goods and consumables. To date, the retailer has added more than 50,000 items from 50 drop-ship capable vendors and distributors from the SPS Retail Network.
"SPS Commerce introduced us to scores of qualified vendors that we didn't know existed but were a perfect fit for our merchandising strategy," said Eddie Alberty, vice president of strategic partnerships at SHOP.COM. "The solution has streamlined our sourcing process by relying on SPS to identify and pre-screen vendors, allowing our merchandisers to focus on vendors that met our merchandising, supply-chain and financial requirements. SPS is a strategic part of our growth strategy as we expand into new markets with the compelling brands that improve the SHOP.COM consumer experience."
SPS Sourcing's new capabilities use a data-driven process that helps retailers facilitate relationships with well-matched vendors and filter out incompatible brands. Once vendors are identified from the SPS Retail Network, hundreds of retail professionals at SPS Commerce can screen each vendor for compatibility and broker introductions
Company: SPS Commerce


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As Asia Pacific ventures into the brave new world of future payments, how long will it take until it reaches its kingdom come?
The mobile payments space in Asia Pacific has seen an impressive growth spurt when it comes to the expansive mobile payment user population over the years and with the region being predicted to see the fastest e-commerce growth, it is only inevitable that mobile technology will continue to play a supreme role in ensuring a consistent market growth.
“Asia-Pacific is predicted to see the fastest e-commerce growth, and mobile technologies will play a more important role as this market grows. North America and Western Europe, which have been slower to adopt mobile payments technologies, will also see growth,” said Kevin Dallas, WorldPay Chief Product and Marketing Officer when speaking to Mobile Payments Today.
As Asia Pacific holds home to three of the largest non-cash payments in the world with South Korea, Japan and Australia representing the region’s biggest markets; let’s have a look at how these three countries manage to pull through their weight in the world of innovative payments.
In South Korea’s well-developed non-cash payments markets, electronic card payments accounted for over 60 percent of total volume growth in 2010 with high penetration rates through the combination of credit, debit and prepaid cards. The explosive growth rate in cards is also attributed by government tax incentives and aggressive marketing efforts by card issuers. However, debit-card usage continues to be relatively low in comparison to other developed economies.
Although the volume of non-cash payments has seen a surge of up to 8.5 billion transactions in 2010, non-cash transactions are considered to be relatively low for a developed market. Credit cards accounted 81 per cent of the total 2010 volume for payments. The popular “Osaifu-Keitai” mobile wallet developed by NTT DoCoMo allows consumers to further drive mobile payment transactions higher especially with Japan’s ongoing and developed payments infrastructure.
In Australia, the payment system is still in the phase of evolution and is moving away from bilateral clearing and shifting towards setting up hub infrastructures that enable future growth. With the support of The Reserve bank of Australia’s Payments System Board, stakeholders and regulators involved are able to cooperate in promoting innovation and opening the market to newcomers and investors.
Frost & Sullivan estimates that mobile payments could top $3.6 billion at a compound annual growth of 14.8 per cent in the Asia Pacific region, indicating an increased growth rate of more than 100 per cent in five years.
With Japan and South Korea leading the region in the adoption of mobile payments due to owning one of the most advanced mobile cultures in the world together with the rapid adoption of mobile banking services in the emerging mobile market regions such as Indochina, Indonesia and the Phillipines, the Asia Pacific region is a force to be reckoned with in the mobile payments sphere.
It’s also impossible to rule out the fact that China is currently being touted as the world’s largest smartphone market in the world with plans to further add and additional 400 million smartphones for the year 2014 together with India owning the fastest growing smartphone market with a 167 per cent growth in Q4 2013 according to Gartner.
Let’s also not forget that in several Asian countries as well, mobile penetration rates exceeds the access to traditional banking services. MasterCard also indicated that there are around three times more mobile phones than bank cards in China, thus creating opportunities in the mobile payments sphere to drive millions of Asian consumers to adopt mobile phones as a primary portal to the online space.
Undoubtedly, the mobile payments market carries immense potential for additional growth and that issues such as fragmented services and solutions are unavoidable in Asia Pacific’s conquest in achieving total domination in mobile payments due to the extensive demographics permeated throughout the region.
Nevertheless, these can be resolved with technology providers catering solutions to the different markets with selective access technologies, business models and partners while keeping in mind the different regulatory conditions in doing so.
Asia’s varied market makes it an impressive and attractive portfolio for investors to flock in and it’s definitely a matter of time before Asia Pacific emerges as dominant player in the mobile payments stream; but what’s interesting is that given the region’s eventual success, will it be then able to remain united in its efforts to maintain sovereignty?


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Peach Fuzz: Pantone Color of the Year 2024
Although it was announced in December, Pantone’s Color of the Year 2024 doesn’t officially start until January, so 3rings waited until the new year to celebrate Peach Fuzz by Pantone, the company that created reliable color formula guides across industries.
Post-pandemic (or quasi-post-pandemic), people are still yearning for normalcy and connection. Pantone’s solution? Fuzzy Peach. According to Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, “In seeking a hue that echoes our innate yearning for closeness and connection, we chose a color radiant with warmth and modern elegance.”


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As premium brands shift to the digital arena, the news from the Middle East about the rise of Smartphones is likely to further boost the luxury sector’s fortunes. Telecom and IT research firm, IDC, said in a recent report that the market share of Smartphone shipments to the Middle East has grown from 27 percent in 2013 to 41.9 percent by the end of 2014 – indicating an increase of 83 percent.
The region has more than 100 percent mobile penetration and approximately 60 percent Smartphone penetration, which could indicate its readiness to embrace the digital aspect of luxury brands. According to the IDC, the Smartphone penetration in the GCC countries is set to reach 80 percent by end of 2015 – this is on par with markets such as the United States, Russia and China.
Arab Luxury World, a two-day conference taking place from June 1-2 at the Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi, will aim to help attendees understand the technological dynamics of the luxury sector in the Middle East. Presentations will highlight questions related to the latest technologies, digital marketing and the readiness of brands in the premium spectrum.
Some sessions, lead by senior executives from IT companies and luxury brands, will discuss the different aspects of building bridges between digital and premium brands:
Can digital media replace print?
The investment toward digital media has risen in 2014. With brands spending four to ten percent of their budget on digital advertising, how is media adapting to those new challenges and to this migration? Can digital media kill the double spread? How does the Arab World fare against the trends in the US and Europe?
Technology’s impact on luxury
With Smartwatches, 3D printing and the Internet of Things coming to the market, the luxury industry needs to prepare for all-new categories. What is the current landscape in the region? How will this impact a market that was once driven by novelty? What is the new digital equation in the luxury industry?
The use and abuse of social media
With bloggers and Instagram users becoming tools for brands to promote their products, can social media market luxury brands as effectively as a traditional medium? Is the tool overused and losing an aspect of genuineness?
As the digital infrastructure of the region keeps growing, the bandwidth of the connection allows the deployment of new strategies. Brands are attempting to reproduce the in-store experience through purpose-designed sites. The market can also expect an update on the on the status of e-commerce, advertising, branding and content. What have been the changes over the last 12 months and what are the trends for the region?
E-commerce… still loading
How can the issue of credit card payment limitation in the region be solved? Can the luxury experience be reproduced online? Can other modes of payments be applied to luxury brands?


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Nexteer Automotive has announced the grand opening of a new production facility in Chennai, India.
Nexteer is one of the leaders in intuitive motion control, and is known for its steering and driveline business delivering electric and hydraulic power steering systems, steering columns, driveline systems, as well as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving technologies for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
According to the company its EPS systems enhance driver comfort, control and feel-of-the-road, while also enabling ADAS features, such as lane keeping, park assist, lane departure warning, traffic jam assist and more. EPS systems also offer automakers increased fuel efficiency and reduced emissions.
The company has 26 manufacturing plants, three technical centers and 14 customer service centers strategically located in North and South America, Europe and Asia. The company serves more than 50 customers in every major region of the world including BMW, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, GM, PSA Group, Toyota and VW, as well as automakers in India and China. Chennai takes its place as Nexteer’s third manufacturing plant in India – joining plants in Bengaluru and Pune.
Tao Liu, Senior Vice President and Global Chief Operating Officer, Nexteer Automotive commenting on the development said “The opening of Nexteer’s facility in Chennai and our expanded production capacity in India are important pieces in our global strategy and represent our confidence in the growth potential of the automotive market within this region.”
Source: Press Release


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Revlon Inc has declared bankruptcy after succumbing to debts incurred in its efforts to compete with online-focused upstarts.
In a court statement on Wednesday, the 90-year-old company, known for its nail polishes and lipsticks, stated assets and liabilities ranging from $1 billion to $10 billion.
Revlon, founded in 1932 by brothers Charles and Joseph Revson and Charles Lachman, has lost shelf space and revenues in recent years to celebrity-backed companies such as Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics and Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty.
It has also been impacted by supply concerns, which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Product shortages were another important role in the company’s bankruptcy, and analysts suggested they were unlikely to be rectified in the foreseeable future.
Coty Inc, on the other hand, has gained market share by investing extensively in improving supply.
“Our challenging capital structure has limited our ability to navigate macro-economic issues,” said Debra Perelman, Revlon chief executive since mid-2018 and daughter of Ron Perelman, who owns its controlling shareholder MacAndrews & Forbes.
Revlon began by selling nail enamel and was sold to MacAndrews & Forbes in 1985 before becoming public 11 years later. Revlon bought Elizabeth Arden in a $870 million skincare bet in 2016 to fight off competition. It carries Britney Spears Fragrances and Christina Aguilera Fragrances.
However, the company’s revenues have languished in recent years, falling 22 per cent from 2017 levels in 2021. It also made news two years ago when Citigroup Inc delivered over $900 million of its own funds to Revlon’s lenders by mistake.
Revlon, which had $3.31 billion in long-term debt as of March 31, said on Thursday that if court clearance is granted, it expects to receive $575 million in debtor-in-possession financing from its existing lender base.
Revlon stock has more than halved since media reports indicated the company was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.
(Adapted from FinancialPost.com)
Categories: Economy & Finance, Entrepreneurship, Geopolitics, Regulations & Legal, Strategy, Sustainability
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October 29, 2012 |
MUMBAI: India's entertainment and media industry , the fastest growing in the world, is poised to clock an average growth rate, or CAGR, of 17 per cent over the next five years to exceed Rs 1,75,000 crore, a CII-PwC report has said. The burgeoning internet segment has the potential to outshine the print sector by 2014, according to the CII-PwC's 'India Entertainment and Media Outlook 2012', which says the overall growth will be driven by advertising spend, consumer spend, infrastructure and policy support.
October 12, 2012 |
AHMEDABAD: E-tailing in India will be a $76 billion industry by 2021, management consulting firm Technopak has projected. In a white paper on FDI in retail , the firm has projected creation of additional 1 million direct jobs by the end of the current decade. E-tailing in India is currently a $0.7 bn industry, providing employment to near 11,000 people. Technopak says the industry is poised to grow manifold in the next decade due to the convergence of multiple factors that will enable the creation of an ecosystem for the take-off.
October 8, 2012 |
BANGALORE: It's one more thing to do on a flight, and it doesn't come too soon in a connected world. Four Lufthansa routes between India and Germany have started providing wi-fi broadband as a paid in-flight service -- one of the first airlines to do so on Indian skies. Passengers in all three classes on these flights can now browse the Internet on their laptops and tablets without interfering with radio signals from the cockpit. Lufthansa plans to extend this to mobile phones also by year end, enabling text messaging and data transfer.
October 2, 2012 |
Plumber: That's the workmanlike, ungainly descriptor NandanNilekani likes to use to sum up his work after crossing over from the corporate sector to the government . Nilekani explains he is assembling , reorganising and cleaning the pipes - in his case, assigning a unique identity number called Aadhaar to every Indian - through which all manners of government benefits will flow to citizens, efficiently and transparently. Nilekani is not the only one. Removed from the delayed response that has been policymaking , there are at least four more ongoing projects that will change the way a large majority of Indians work, bank, transact , engage and live.
September 25, 2012
By Rohit Prasad Growing internet-based businesses depend on net neutrality , the ideal of treating all communication passing through an electronic network independent of (a) content, (b) application, (c) service, (d) device, (e) sender address, and (f) receiver address. Today, the freedom of the internet is under threat from the very sources of its success: the 'killer apps', including videoconferencing , and file-sharing that take up increasing amounts of bandwidth resulting in congestion.
September 5, 2012 |
NEW DELHI: Driven by youth, Internet subscriber base in the country is expected to reach 150 million by the end of this year, says a report. The report by Internet and Mobile Association of India ( IAMAI ) and IMRB said, "the number of claimed Internet users has seen a growth of 16 per cent over last year. This number is estimated to grow up to 150 million by December 2012. " There will be 105 million users in urban India while the rural areas will contribute 45 million subscribers, it added.
August 22, 2012 |
A report in our Sunday magazine pointed out that Indian internet service providers (ISPs) pay extraordinarily high rates to access intercontinental undersea cables, something that has kept internet services relatively costlier in India compared to, say, Singapore. The industry is divided into three segments: companies that run the intercontinental cables under the sea, those that operate landing stations and own a part of the cable companies, and ISPs that provide connections to homes and offices.
August 19, 2012 |
In Dubai next month, 50-year-old telecom entrepreneur Sunil Tagare will pitch a new cable project — his third — to telecom carriers from around the world. In the late 1980s and early '90s, Tagare, then with US telecom company Nynex (now Verizon ), helped implement the giant 28,000-km FLAG cable system which was the first privately financed submarine optic fibre cable network. FLAG, now owned by Anil Ambani's RCom, remains one of the cornerstones of the global telecom network, moving phone calls and internet pages across the world, from Singapore to Europe to the US. It's too early to talk of success or failure for Tagare's latest project — and even if it does take off, any new cable venture will only add to a decade-long global oversupply of bandwidth.
August 9, 2012 |
SHIMOGA: Karnataka government is all set to introduce a simplified internet access system which can be used even by illiterate rural masses to get essential information such as market prices and weather data. "D-RAX (Data Rural Application Exchange) system", the first of its kind in the country, will be launched on a pilot basis in two zilla panchayats in Shimoga and Ramanagara districts tomorrow, official sources told PTI here today. Through this system, jointly developed by Karnataka Science and Technology Council and C-DOT ( Centre for Development of Telematics )
July 18, 2012 |
Indians will continue to abandon their fixed line telephones, mobile phones but will opt for fixed line broadband for Internet access. Though the penetration of Internet through copper-laid networks is slower than expected, mobile phones are enabling last mile connectivity. Research firm Gartner revealed that revenue from fixed line services including landline connected telephones, broadband and internet access is expected to go up by 2% to Rs 24,000 crore from Rs 23,500 crore the year before.


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Image courtesy of AST&Science.
A new satellite factory has opened in the heart of Texas—and it promises to revolutionize satellite production.
AST&Science will manufacture its Micron LEO satellites at the Midland International Air and Spaceport. The company expects to invest $30 million in the 85,000 square foot facility, which will also create 160 high-tech jobs. It will also move its corporate headquarters from Miami, Florida to Midland.
The factory will be used to design, b…
Source URL: New High-Volume Satellite Factory Opens at Texas Spaceport
Source Website: Advance Engineering – Engineering.com


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This is typical ‘trade bullying’, Chinese ministry said on its website
US tariffs on $34bn in Chinese imports have come into effect today, and with Beijing having vowed to respond immediately in kind, a trade war has been triggered between the world’s two largest economies.
China’s commerce ministry confirmed that the latest tariffs had come into effect and added it was forced to retaliate, meaning $34bn worth of imported US goods including autos and agricultural products also faced 25 per cent tariffs.
“China promised to not fire the first shot, but to defend national core interests and the interests of the people it has no choice but to strike back as necessary,” the Commerce Ministry said in a statement, shortly after the deadline passed.
“This act is typical trade bullying,” the ministry further said on its website, adding: “It seriously jeopardises the global industrial chain . . . hinders the pace of global economic recovery, triggers global market turmoil and will affect more innocent multinational companies, general companies and consumers.”
Trump reiterated plans for a further $16bn in trade to be targeted in the coming weeks.


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Bed Bath & Beyond’s Port Arthur location on closings list; local store shares timeline information
Published 4:19 pm Thursday, September 15, 2022
Bed Bath & Beyond is closing its Port Arthur location.
A list of 56 stores nationwide are being closed by the company. Two of the impacted stories are in Texas.
The Port Arthur location is joined by another in Wichita Falls.
Store officials don’t know an exact local closing date but anticipate it is still a couple of months away.
The local favorite has been a bedrock location in Central Mall for many years.
Numerous outlets are reporting the home goods chain is cutting its workforce by approximately 20%. The retailer has released a list identifying over one third of those stores set to close.
As of May, Bed Bath & Beyond operated 955 stores: 769 namesake stores, 135 buybuy Baby stores, and 51 stores under the names of Harmon, Harmon Face Values or Face Values.


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Nevada retailers on a roll for holidays
A robust Thanksgiving weekend for retailers portends a solid holiday shopping season ahead, a report shows.
The Retail Association of Nevada said Nevada consumers spent more than $531 million over the long Thanksgiving weekend followed by Cyber Monday.
And nationwide, the average American consumer spent more than $250 on gifts, according to survey data.
Add in the current economic prosperity, including low unemployment, and a busy holiday season ahead is expected.
“Consumer confidence is high, jobs are plentiful and wages are rising, creating the ideal environment for a strong holiday shopping season in the Silver State,” Bryan Wachter, senior vice president of RAN, said in a statement accompanying the report.
In all, RAN is forecasting holiday-related shopping sales statewide this year to grow by 4 percent and top $4 billion.
That compares with predictions by the National Retail Federation of nationwide holiday sales to increase between 3.6 percent and 4 percent.
During the Thanksgiving shopping period, Nevadans took advantage of the competitive retail environment to find deals at both traditional bricks-and-mortar and online retailers, the NRF reported.
An estimated 586,100 people used both methods to shop, while 467,100 shopped only in-store and 531,200 shopped only online. Shoppers who used both in-store and online channels spent $82 more than the average online-only shopper and $49 more than the average in-store shopper, according to the NRF.
Black Friday was the most-popular shopping day for in-store shoppers (66.6 percent), followed by Saturday (47.4 percent) and Thanksgiving Day (29.6 percent). For online shoppers, Cyber Monday was most popular (66.0 percent), followed by Black Friday (53.8 percent) and Saturday (38.7 percent), according to the NRF.
Online sales continue to play a growing role in American shopping habits during the holiday season. According to an analysis by Adobe Digital Insights, online sales in the U.S. reached nearly $20 billion during the Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday, a 15.2 percent increase over a year ago. That total included $5.0 billion on Black Friday and $6.6 billion on Cyber Monday, which was the largest online shopping day in history. Total online sales in November climbed 16.8 percent compared to a year ago to reach $50 billion, prompting Adobe Digital Insights to project online sales this holiday season to break $100 billion for the first time.
Nevada’s nonstore retail sales, which include online retailers, are at record highs. In the 12 months through August, nonstore retail sales totaled more than $1.2 billion, a 21.6 percent year-over-year increase.
Based on recent trends, RAN estimates that total non-store retail sales this holiday season could approach $300 million, surpassing last year’s total of $269.9 million.
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Truckee is offering a one-month extension for downtown businesses, allowing restaurants to continue to use outdoor patio spaces as a means to operate through the end of October, according to Assistant Town Manager Hilary Hobbs.


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By Western standards, Minmetals Resources Ltd.'s $6.5 billion all-cash offer for Equinox Minerals Ltd. merits a short footnote in the history of corporate mergers and acquisitions. While transactions like this are above average in dollar amount, they aren't big enough to effect structural market changes and are usually quickly forgotten after a short while.
For Minmetals, though, the Equinox deal represents another piece in a gigantic puzzle China -- yes, China, the country, and not its local businesses -- is meticulously assembling as part of a broader plan to ensure its economy can maintain its strong growth rate and keep rivals at bay. While China may be concerned about its economy overheating, hence recent decisions to jack up borrowing rates, it still needs to keep workers busy and continue to improve its competitive position. To attain this goal, China needs raw materials, especially metals; and what China wants, it is increasingly able to afford today.
For the rest of the globe, though, China's voracious appetite for natural minerals is sparking a bidding war for control of precious global resources, including oil reserves and many of the metals used in the production of high-tech products. It may also result in other governments and national regulators keeping a closer watch on, and perhaps refusing to approve, transactions they believe could tilt the odds even more heavily in China's favor.
Minmetals' unsolicited bid for Equinox will no doubt attract interest from Australian regulators. The Chinese company made its offer contingent on Equinox dropping its own bid for copper miner Lundin Mining Corp. Equinox has said it is reviewing the Minmetals offer.
Australia has previously blocked mining transactions negotiated by other Chinese companies, and the Minmetals-Equinox deal could suffer the same fate if the parties fail to agree to regulatory conditions. Although Equinox is considered an Australian company, Minmetals is actually interested in the company because of its large copper holdings in Zambia and Saudi Arabia. With copper prices soaring, China needs to expand its interest in the market to guarantee supply for its growing manufacturing industries, including the high-tech sector, one of the major users of copper.
In case you are wondering, Minmetals is not just another Chinese mining company. The Hong Kong-traded company is part of a group of businesses focused on the production of metals such as aluminum, copper, gold, lead, silver, zinc, and other precious metals -- businesses that are directly controlled by the Chinese government. Its parent company, China Minmetals Corp., is a multibillion-dollar enterprise founded in 1950 and "classified among the 39 key enterprises under the direct supervision of the Central government," according to a statement on Minmetals' Website.
In an investor presentation, Minmetals said its offer for Equinox would be financed through "a combination of existing cash reserves, long-term credit facilities from Chinese banks, and equity, including financial investments in Minmetals by Chinese institutions. The proposed offer is supported by MMR's ultimate controlling shareholder, China Minmetals Corp."
In other words, it helps to have a really rich parent.


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Artificial intelligence and augmented reality can work hand in hand to support innovations that can change the shopping and advertising game.
Pinterest combined artificial intelligence with augmented reality and incorporated diversity and inclusion in a way that helped the company’s bottom line, Jeremy King, head of engineering at Pinterest, said in a conversation with Matt Marshall, founder and CEO of VentureBeat, at the Transform 2021 virtual conference.
With more than 80 million people searching for beauty items every month, Pinterest had to innovate how people could see themselves in the products they were interested in. The company created the Try On tool, which lets users use their phones to see how they would look with different types of makeup. Offering a palette of skin tone ranges increased engagement, which increased searches, which led to platform growth.
“AR Try On is our augmented reality feature that allows you to use the lens camera on your phone to try on lipsticks and eyeshadows and filter makeup,” King said. “You pick up your phone, and essentially point it right at your face and you can do a search for something like red lipstick or makeup ideas and you’ll see not only a palette of skin tone ranges, but also a button to try on the shades.”
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Pinterest worked to prevent bias from being introduced into the data by diversifying the data sources and testing computer vision and machine learning algorithms on all kinds of skin tone ranges and makeup colors. Pinterest is able to serve diverse recommendations across the board, and the tool is able to understand and process skin tone ranges in complex lighting scenarios.
“Building for diversity and representation isn’t just the right thing to do. For us, it’s really good for our business,” King said.
As for the payoff? When using the skin tone range feature with AR, customers were five times more likely to show purchase intent.
Connecting customers to products
Pinterest has been working to improve customer and vendor experiences in other ways as well, turning its values of diversity and inclusion into action.
“We frankly heard from pinners that we weren’t naturally relevant or diverse in our recommendations, and they had to add more descriptors to their searches to filter it,” King said. “We took that as an action item to create these capabilities not only to allow more diverse content to show up, but to integrate new features like AR Try on. And once we had that, then we really got the engagement that we’re looking for.”
The company has also worked with a diverse set of creators to produce content while also working with retail partners to ingest hundreds of thousands of products from around the world in Pinterest’s catalog.
“Creators are coming in creating unique content,” King said. “We want to be able to not only use creators, but also our computer vision technology, to identify every single picture and every one of those billions of times so that you can make a really great experience.”
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Flip, an Indonesia-based consumer payment platform, has closed a $55 million Series B extension round led by Tencent with participation from Block (formerly known as Square) and existing backer Insight Partners.
Additionally, a number of other investors, including founder and CEO of Checkout.com Guillaume Pousaz; executive of Doordash and board member of Coinbase and Pinterest Gokul Rajaram and former Venmo COO Michael Vaughan participated in the extension.
The latest funding, which follows its first Series B raise of $48 million in December last year, brings Flip’s total raised to $120 million since its inception in 2019. The company did not disclose its valuation. When asked if it was flat or an up round, the company COO declined to comment on it.
Flip has helped over 10 million people in Indonesia as of May this year, up from more than 7 million users in December 2021, to access financial transactions, including online interbank transfers to more than 100 domestic banks, e-wallet top-ups, and international remittances, enabling users to send money from Indonesia to over 45 countries and enterprise payment transfer products, Flip COO Gita Prihanto told TechCrunch. Hundreds of companies use Flip’s disbursement and remittance services for employee payroll, customer refunds, invoice/ supplier payments, and international transfers. Flip processes more than $12 billion in transactions annually, Prihanto noted.
Flip plans to use the capital to ramp up its workforce with a focus on engineering and product teams. Its team has increased by 30% to more than 400 employees by June 2022 from a team of 300 people in December 2021, Prihanto said. The startup also will invest in new products and technology development to provide a higher quality of service and fuel its business expansion.
University of Indonesia alumni Rafi Putra Arriyan (CEO), Luqman Sungkar (CTO) and Ginanjar Ibnu Solikhin co-founded Flip in 2015 to address problems in Indonesia’s financial transactions system, such as money getting stuck while transferring and incurring a transfer fee to different banks and lengthy transfer processes.
“The growth opportunity of the Indonesian digital economy is vast with its massive population and favorable demographics,” co-founder and chief executive officer of Flip Rafi Putra Arriyan said in a statement. “We are laser-focused on helping millions of Indonesians, both individuals and businesses, execute various money transactions at a low cost through our platform.”
“We are humbled to receive trust and continuous support from our investors,” Prinhanto said in its prepared statement. “We are also thrilled to welcome Tencent and Block, who share the same purpose of making fintech accessible to everyone in Indonesia.”
In March, TechCrunch reported that Block also invested in Kyash, a Tokyo-based fintech startup, which appeared to be the company’s first investment in Asia.


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A californian company has developed the hearing equivalent of a contact
lens, providing hearing-impaired people with an invisible hearing aid. The
company, ReSound, believes that its ‘Earlens’ performs better than conventional
hearing aids and does away with the stigma of appearing ‘disabled’ because
there are no visible components worn in or near the ear.
Informal trials with the Earlens have been under way for two years.
In April this year, the company began clinical trials and its backers hope
the device will gain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration
The Earlens was invented by Rodney Perkins, a doctor and head of ReSound,
and Vincent Pluvinage, a former engineer at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
They hope their invention will appeal to many hearing-impaired people who
have rejected hearing aids as ugly or inefficient. More than 1 in 20 of
the population is hearing-impaired to some extent, yet only a tenth of
these people use a hearing aid.
The Earlens has three parts, the central element being a tiny transducer,
about half the diameter of a contact lens, that a doctor attaches to the
eardrum using the surface tension from a drop of oil. The device can be
worn virtually continuously once in place and can be removed easily when
necessary, according to Pluvinage.
Clipped onto the user’s clothing is a small radio microphone. This picks
up sounds and relays them to a battery-powered coil that is worn somewhere
on the user’s body.
Electronic circuits attached to the coil convert the sound signals into
a varying current which passes round the coil. This generates a magnetic
field which in turn makes the transducer, and so the eardrum, also vibrate.
The coil is powered by rechargeable batteries that will last up to 12 hours.
Because the coil needs to generate a magnetic field powerful enough
to excite the transducer in the ear, it must be larger the further it is
from the ear. ReSound commissioned the Californian design consultancy Ideo
to incorporate the coil, its batteries and its signal processing circuitry
into a futuristic necklace.
But is could go almost anywhere. ‘It could be on your shoulder, it could
be in your earrings, in a hat,’ according to David Kelley, an engineer at
Ideo. Other possibilities include placing the components in seatbacks and
car headrests. The researchers are now working on reducing the bulk of the
The advantage of removing these components from the ear, even at the
expense of having to make them bigger, is that the ear canal is left free.
Most hearing aids block the ear canal which can actually make the wearer’s
hearing worse, especially at low frequencies where impairment is often
less severe. Blocking the canal also means that hearing-impaired people
hear their own voices boom uncomfortably as they speak.


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JStew stopped in to talk to Geoff at Sketchbook Comics & Games. What did Geoff think of The Man of Steel? What’s news in comic books?
They also talked about what’s coming out this week.
Check out the store at 224 Glenridge Avenue, in St Catharines ON and on Facebook here


text: Samsonite said on Thursday it may raise as much as $1.5 billion from a share sale in Hong Kong, as the luggage maker and other global retailers tap the region\'s capital markets -- and surging customer base. The firm said it would sell about 671 million shares, about 48 percent of the company, at a price ranging from HK$13.50-HK$17.50 ($1.70-2.25) with the stock scheduled to begin trading in the Asian financial hub on June 16. Samsonite, which makes suitcases, casual bags and travel products, said its sales in 2010 recovered to $1.21 billion from $1.03 billion in 2009, when the global financial meltdown pounded the travel market. \"We ran into some problems especially with the global credit crisis,\" Tim Parker, the company\'s chief executive, told a press briefing in Hong Kong on Thursday. A restructuring has boosted Samsonite\'s profit margins while the company hikes spending on advertising, especially in Asia where the firm\'s business grew 45 percent last year, Parker said. European private equity firm CVC acquired Samsonite in 2007 in a $2 billion deal, following several earlier restructurings by the company which almost went bankrupt in 2003. CVC said at the time that China and India were key to the firm\'s growth, a point echoed by Parker who said the pair were Samsonite\'s second and third biggest markets respectively, after the United States. Italian fashion house Prada has said it would list its shares in Hong Kong later this month after raising about $2 billion, while US handbag maker Coach, already listed in New York, announced in May that its shares may start trading in the southern Chinese territory by year-end. Britain\'s Burberry is also reportedly eyeing a listing in the city as high-end retailers look to profit from the region\'s rising incomes. Firms raised more than $50 billion in Hong Kong IPOs last year, including two monster sales by Asian insurer AIA and Agricultural Bank of China, making it the world\'s biggest market for new listings.


text: BIG RAPIDS \u2014 The 17th annual St. Vincent de Paul Used Coat Sale will be held from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. today at the St. Mary Catholic Church Parish Center, located at 919 Marion Ave. in Big Rapids. Items to be sold at the cash-only event will include coats, sweaters, boots, scarves, hats, mittens, gloves, sweatshirts, snow pants, flannel shirts and children\u2019s clothes. The sale helps thoe in need find winter clothes at a low price. Items will cost between 25 cents and $5. Funds raised during the coat sale are used to help pay rent and utility bills for families in need.


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Classic panamax boxships ranging in size from 3,000 to 5,999 teu are tipped by online pricing portal VesselsValue to appreciate by more than 40% through to 2022, leading all other major shipping sectors.
In a report out today, VesselsValue has partnered with Oslo-based shipping consultancy firm ViaMar to provide future market values for each individual vessel segment in the tanker, bulker, container and LPG fleet.
The overall trend seen in the four sectors is for vessel prices to remain flat or decline this year before picking up around the middle of 2020, likely peaking by the start of 2022.
VesselsValue has been bullish on classic panamax boxships for some time. This particular segment saw massive scrapping three years ago and has since seen very minimal ordering.
Commenting on the sector, Court Smith, an analyst at VesselsValue, told Splash today: “Panamax container vessels have increased their speed from the start of 2019, a positive indicator of demand. The intra-Asia trade is critical for these ships, but they continue to see wide usage in other ports globally as ports continue to adapt to larger, more economical ships. The diversity of the ports these ships are traveling to has increased since the start of 2013, making them less dependent on one specific trade.”


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by Zale Skolnik, Robins Appleby
Ontario is charged with the task of incentivizing electric vehicle infrastructure for condo owners and developers.
Electric vehicles are here to stay. But for Ontario’s ever-growing number of condominium residents, they may want to think twice before putting a deposit down on a Tesla.
Many developers marketing “lifestyle” condominium developments have already taken note of the trend towards electric cars. Electric vehicles lend themselves to the urban driving patterns and lifestyles of urban condo dwellers and the marketability afforded to a development by including electric vehicle compatibility and obtaining LEED certification, which is a selling feature (three additional LEED points are awarded to new buildings that install charging stations). In this respect, many developers are now characterizing charging stations as high-end amenities along with indoor pools and fitness facilities.
From both the attraction and retention perspectives, developers should be aware of the current needs of their prospective purchasers both now and into the future. This awareness is important, as installing the electrical infrastructure during the construction phase of a development avoids all of the financial, logistical and political issues arising from installing charging stations retroactively. But developers need to get creative — shared charging stations are not ideal and there is no mould for what percentage of spaces require electric vehicle parking, nor is there any way to predict who specifically will require an electric vehicle parking space. The best a developer can do is to provide owners with the option of easily installing a charging station in the future by providing the electrical infrastructure at the outset.
Problematically, however, purchasers are unwilling to pay for electric vehicle upgrades.
Currently, the existing Electric Vehicle Incentive Program only incentivizes electric vehicle owners with a rebate for the purchase and subsequent installation of a charging station in their home. The rebates are administered through the electric car purchase incentive and any rebate for installation of a charging station flows through to the owner of the car, not the developer that installed the charging station.
The provincial government is incentivizing electric vehicle ownership without incentivizing the construction of support for the electric vehicles. The province’s seeming misunderstanding of the issues at play have led to a situation whereby people want to buy electric cars because of incentives, but are reluctant to do so because there is no guaranteed infrastructure. It appears evident that owner incentives are just one half of the solution and that developer incentive programs should be initiated so as to provide developers with a reason to create the infrastructure and thereby ease prospective electric vehicle purchasers’ anxiety about not having a place to charge.
There are currently advocacy groups such as Plug’n Drive, which are lobbying the province for change. However, a lot of this change remains owner focused with electric vehicle owner rebate programs. Plug’n Drive has focused on various tenets of Ontario’s Climate Change Action Plan, which is a five-year plan stating specific electric vehicle targets for 2020. Among such tenets are the stated goals of ensuring charging infrastructure is widely available and requiring all new homes with garages to be constructed with plugs capable of charging electric vehicles. For the time being, the plan is fairly general in respect of how electric vehicle charging stations will be incorporated into multi-residential developments. However, there has been speculation that updates to the Ontario Building Code and the impending revised Condominium Act will address the need for newly built condominiums to provide for charging station potential.
With the recently released proposed regulations under the Condominium Act, there has been discussion concerning retrofitting existing condominiums with charging stations but little has been announced on requirements for new builds. The province engaged in a consultation process whereby feedback was collected and we hope to see something more concrete with changes coming into force later this year.
As architects of our future communities, developers are among the people best equipped to enable the increased use of electric vehicles by creating the infrastructure necessary to allow for the installation of charging stations. But to think that developers will create said infrastructure in the face of purchasers who are unwilling to pay for it is misinformed. With consumer demand evident and legislative changes on the horizon, hopefully the province takes this opportunity to incentivize infrastructure construction. Until those legislative changes occur, the horizon remains cloudy and emissions continue to pile up.
|Zale Skolnik is an associate at Robins Appleby Barristers + Solicitors.|
A version of this story first appeared in Ontario Homebuilder, Fall 2017.


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Netflix justifies this price increase by the fierce competition from other streaming platforms. In its early days, Netflix operated alone in an empty
U.S. users will have to pay a higher subscription fee now to take advantage of the Netflix catalog.
As lockdown measures are once again in the news around the world, streaming platforms are rubbing their hands. Indeed, as was the case with the first lockdown, these companies have experienced an impressive increase in new users. It is very likely that this will happen again with the new measures that have been put in place. Today, while the United States is not affected by lockdown, Netflix has just announced an increase in the prices of its subscriptions for American users.
The basic formula has not changed, it remains at $9 per month. However, the most popular intermediate package, which is usually at $13 per month, is going up to $14. The most important increase is for the Premium subscription. This option allows up to 4 people to enjoy the account simultaneously in 4K resolution. Up to now, the Premium subscription was $16 per month, but is now $2 more expensive, reaching $18 per month.
Why make such a decision?
Netflix justifies this price increase by the fierce competition from other streaming platforms. In its early days, Netflix operated alone in an empty ocean where anything was possible. Today, the leader is suffering from fierce competition from new players who are increasingly grabbing market share. To cope with this phenomenon, Netflix is investing heavily in producing and acquiring quality content. In addition, the platform continues to focus on the user experience. Netflix is spending a lot of money to bring new features to the platform.
In the current year 2020 alone, Netflix has spent approximately $18.5 billion on original content. This price increase is one of the only solutions for Netflix to continue to excel. In Europe, a similar increase could be expected.


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Alibaba’s Lazada Hires Ant Group Veteran to Head Up Payments
(Bloomberg) -- Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Lazada Group is creating a new role to lead payments in Southeast Asia for the first time, and tapped a former Alipay executive for the position.
Dayong Zhang, former general manager of Southeast Asia for Ant Group Co.’s Alipay, will become Lazada’s head of payments, the company said, confirming a report by Bloomberg News earlier on Friday. The move underscores the e-commerce company’s effort to generate growth from the business.
Lazada is seeking to take on Southeast Asian internet rivals such as Grab Holdings Inc. and Sea Ltd., which have been aggressively pushing their payment products. The region’s payments market is expanding rapidly on the back of rising demand for online shopping.
“With his payments background and experience, he will be able to lead Lazada into the next chapter of its growth and further strengthen our competitive advantage through payments technology,” Lazada said in a written response to questions from Bloomberg.
Zhang, a graduate of Tsinghua University with a degree in computer software, joined Alipay in 2008 and served as general manager of the Southeast Asia region, according to his LinkedIn profile. Chang was appointed Lazada Singapore CEO in 2019 after joining as co-founder and managing director of Lazada Philippines in 2012, according to his LinkedIn page.
Since Chun Li took the helm of Lazada about a year ago, the company has been investing in technology and focusing on localization to cater to different consumer tastes across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. Lazada recorded more than 90% order growth during the quarter ended in June, and has about 150 million monthly average users.
©2021 Bloomberg L.P.


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October 16, 2008
From Colin Mann in Cannes
Project Kangaroo, the joint venture between BBC Worldwide, Channel 4 and ITV, plans to launch in closed beta by the end of the year, CEO Ashley Highfield has said at MIPCOM: “With the Competition Committee’s blessing, we hope to launch in closed beta by Christmas time.”
As to how Kangaroo will look, Highfield would only say: “It will be a closed beta of some sort…that will go on until February. But we need to communicate to bring this to the market.”
He said there had been talks with US studios to bring US films and programmes on to Kangaroo and confirmed he was in talks with Five and large independent producers.
On advertising, Highfield said the platform will launch with minimal ad inventory while pointing towards using behavioural targeting techniques to drive higher CPMs in the future. “Over time we will build demographics so we can optimise ads and achieve higher CPMs. One of the ways which we will sell ads is by looking at what the individual is doing on the site.”