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02/12/2007 YISSUM PARTNER MEDGENICS RAISES ₤3.3M IN AIM IPO
US-Israeli biopharmaceutical start-up Medgenics Inc. raised a gross ₤3.3 million in its IPO on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) on Thursday at a company value of ₤10.4 million, after money. The company offered 104.1 million shares at ₤0.10 per share. Trading in the share will begin on Tuesday under the ticker "MEDG".
Medgenics is registered in the US and has its R&D center in Carmiel, in the lower Galilee.
Medgenics said that proceeds from the offering would be used to fund its second clinical trial, the Phase I/II proof of concept study of its lead sustained-release protein therapy product "Epodure" in anemia patients, as well as further development and testing of its Biopump platform technology and products. The company's second product, Infradure is designed to produce interferon-alpha (IFN-alpha) on a sustained basis to treat hepatitis C.
Blomfield Corporate Finance Ltd was the nominated adviser (nomad) for the IPO and SVS Securities plc was the broker. The company said that US, UK, and Israeli institutional investors bought shares.
Medgenics is developing a unique platform technology called a “Biopump” - a toothpick-sized protein “factory” derived from patients’ own tissue that enables patients to produce therapeutic proteins in their own bodies for the long-term treatment of a range of chronic diseases, initially focusing on anemia, hepatitis C and haemophilia.
The company believes that the Biopump treatment is a major advance over the current method of treating these diseases, which involves frequent and often uncomfortable protein injections involving the risks of repeated cycles of overdose and underdose. In providing a sustained source of the patients’ own protein in the patient within the therapeutic range, the company believes it has potential to capture share in the large and growing protein therapy market, which is forecast to reach $87 billion by 2010.
Medgenics president and CEO Dr. Andrew Pearlman founded the company in 2000. The company has raised $25 million from Israel Angels Management Ltd., Koor Corporate Venture Capital, Aurum Ventures MKI Ltd., Alta Partners, Alta Berkeley Venture Partners, and $1.1 million from the Office of the Chief Scientist, among others.


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The Carson Mall won't be torn down and Carson City has many other sites that can be developed into buildings with a mix of housing and retail stores, a mall representative said.
A panel of planning experts at an Urban Land Institute conference Oct. 25 in Las Vegas said the city had a good plan for its downtown, but recommended the city tear down the Carson Mall and build an "urban village" of trendy shops and affordable housing on the 12-acre property.
The city needs more land and the building would be a good place for an impressive development on the south end of downtown, according to Richard Perlmutter, a land institute panel member and head of a Maryland development firm.
"You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket," he said at the meeting, "but you want to have a big enough basket to get people's attention."
But the Carson Mall is an "integral part" of the city and will look great when its $12-million renovation is done in five years, said Kevin Ray, a representative of Eureka, Calif.-based Carrington Co., which owns the mall.
"If the city wants mixed-use," Ray said, "I'm driving down Carson Street right now, why don't they work on all these buildings?"
The renovation will double the number of stores by adding about 20 restaurants and retail shops. The renovation will also redesign the facade.
This will be the first renovation for the building since it was built in 1964 by Francis Carrington, the head of the company.
"Sure, it would be easier to have everyone leave and tear everything down," Ray said, "but that's kind of short-sighted because you're not considering the small-business owner."
City officials didn't say much after the panel proposed razing the mall, though Joe McCarthy, city economic redevelopment manager, did say it was currently a "class D" mall.
City Supervisor Robin Williamson said the idea to tear down the mall was the panel's idea alone.
"That is none of our business," she said. "Whatever he (Francis Carrington) wants to do with his property, we will try to work with him."
The mall renovation, however, probably won't increase sales-tax revenue for the city, she said.
Williamson and other city officials, such as McCarthy, are pushing for a project they say will increase sales-tax revenue, about $300,000 a year.
Supporters of the project want to give the owner of the old Wal-Mart building in South Carson a total of $4.5 million in incentives. The first $2 million was already agreed upon to help the owner, Robert Rothe, bring in Burlington Coat Factory. Supervisors will discuss a $2.5 million tax rebate at their meeting Nov. 15 to help bring in Sportsman's Warehouse, which is considering opening a store in either Carson City or Douglas County.
McCarthy said the project would give the city more money to support mixed-used projects and that he does not support tearing down the mall.
"We are in support of his (Francis Carrington's) future development plans and we will try to help him, especially if he starts looking at mixed-use or starts bringing additional plans to the side," McCarthy said.
Ray said the city needs to consider small businesses more when it spends its redevelopment funds.
"I think we need to balance the desire to have a large-scale success with creating a sense of community that would be the center of our town - where the Carson Mall is," he said. "People want a gathering place, and to have a gathering place you need small boutiques, small restaurants, small shops. People don't gather at a Wal-Mart or a Burlington Coat Factory."
• Contact reporter Dave Frank at firstname.lastname@example.org or 881-1212.

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It was meant to be the “all-new river cruise for millennials” — and then, last week, it wasn’t.
The first U by Uniworld cruise sets sail from Amsterdam next month. It will feature a silent disco, mixology classes, yoga and, of course, free wi-fi, so you can Snapchat the whole thing as you wend your way to Frankfurt along the Rhine. It also had a unique booking condition: to sail with U by Uniworld, you had to be aged 21-45.
This was a bold move by the company — and it seems to have backfired.
Last week, Uniworld put out a statement saying that while “nothing about the product is changing”, it would now be opening up its U cruises to all “adult travellers” (18…


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Its shares raced 555p to a record high of 6085p as it revealed a significantly better than expected 11.9 per cent increase in sales between November 1 and Christmas Eve. Store sales jumped 7.7 per cent with online demand up 21 per cent.
As a result it ramped up its full-year profit hopes by around 4 per cent to between £684million and £700million, which if met would see it beat rival Marks & Spencer, forecast to post a £645million profit, for the first time.
Next’s figures calmed fears that festive high-street shopping had been bashed by weak demand, widespread discounts and stormy weather and helped lift shares in M&S and Primark’s owner Associated British Foods.
Sales were lifted by strong demand for seasonal knitwear, with festive jumpers and onesies in vogue.
Next chief executive Lord Wolfson said its policy of never discounting before Boxing Day had helped while online sales had been lifted by its new next day delivery service which increased confidence amongst customers that their orders would turn up on time. He added: “I don’t want to boast as some retailers have a good period and others a bad. We have had a good one but it will present difficult comparatives next Christmas.”
Wolfson cautioned that despite a steadily improving economy and the end of the credit crunch as customers paid off debt there would be no “consumer spending boom” for some years to come.
Its shares raced 555p to a record high of 6085p
“It is unlikely that the strength shown in this quarter will continue through the first half of the year. We expect sales growth of between 3 per cent and 7 per cent for the year ahead,” he said.
“People aren’t feeling much wealthier as their salaries are not growing.”
Next also warned that a return to significant economic growth would likely result in rising interest rates that could moderate the spending of customers with mortgages.
It also announced a special 50p a share dividend next month worth £75million and another 50p dividend every quarter that its share price is above 5800p. Wolfson stands to net an extra £750,000 every three months.
Analysts at broker Nomura hailed it as an “exceptional” performance.


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New Mondeo is set to be yet another Ford winner
New Mondeo should have been on the UK streets over two years ago but due to production problems in mainland Europe the impressive new Ford which is now being produced at the Valencia plant in Spain had to wait until this year for its UK debut and it has only just gone on sale.
As a result of this delay in Europe the American version of the Mondeo badged as the Fusion has been on sale for two years as visitors to the States will probably have noticed and may even have driven it when hiring a holiday or business car.
This is a significant new chapter for Ford with the latest Mondeo making high specification and premium features accessible to even more drivers including their industry first inflatable rear seatbelt and Ford’s first LED headlights in Europe.
The new car also debuts new pedestrian technology that can identify people in the road ahead or who could cross the vehicle’s path and automatically apply the brakes if the driver does not respond to warnings.
The inflatable airbag rear seat belts that are a world first and an option will reduce rear seat injuries - the groundbreaking inflatable rear seatbelt combines the attributes of an airbag and a conventional seatbelt.
New Mondeo is a very handsome and quite a large car with a premium look about it and a roomy and up market interior which will help its UK sales programme for since the previous model was launched the competition is much more intense with rivals from Germany such as Audi, VW and BMW in particular.
There is a wide choice of petrol and diesel engines including the first ever Ford hybrid electric car which achieves 99g/km and 67.3mpg and there will also be a four wheel drive diesel available.
The new Mondeo will also be the first car in its segment to be fitted with a 1.0-litre EcoBoost three cylinder petrol engine developing 125PS and CO2 emissions of 119g/km and offering 55.4mpg.
It will be interesting to see the reaction to the three pot power unit which will have benefit in kind tax advantages and how it will go down with the legendary Mondeo Man whose main motoring trips involve pounding the UK motorway network with a more powerful engine under the bonnet of the repmobile!
The interior and load area are both very roomy and the instrumentation is very impressive with a large infotainment touch screen plus a voice command system for various functions including one for the driver to say such things as “I’m hungry” and the screen will display restaurants in the area where the car is being driven!
This latest Mondeo is a very impressive car in every way and the long UK launch delay has enabled Ford to tweak the car which no doubt will help to ensure it will again be the market leader.
Model: New Ford Mondeo.
Engines: Petrol and diesel plus hybrid.
Drive: Front wheel drive plus 4x4.
Body styles: Five door, estate and hybrid saloon.
Prices: From £20,795.


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Amazon today announced the launch of new Fire TV edition smart TVs in India, in partnership with domestic electronics brand Onida.
The Fire TV edition TVs come with Alexa support and come with a host of leading OTT apps pre-installed. Apart from Amazon’s Prime Video, the TVs come with YouTube, Netflix, Sony LIV, Hotstar, ZEE5, and Apple TV apps. Thanks to the bundled voice remote with Alexa, you can launch apps, search for movies or TV shows, control your smart home devices, and more, with your voice.
Onida 32 Fire TV edition comes with a 31.5-inch HD resolution display, dual-band Wi-Fi, an unnamed “multi-core processor”, Dolby + dts sound support, and Lucent Picture Engine. On the other hand, Onida 43 FHD Fire TV edition has a 42.5-inch Full HD resolution panel. Both the models have 3x HDMI, 1x RF Antenna, 1x Composite Video, 1x USB, and 1x Ethernet port.
The Onida Fire TV smart TVs will go on sale in India via Amazon.in from December 20. While the 32-inch model has been priced at ₹12,999, the 43-inch model will cost ₹21,999.


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In October 2014, Canadian intelligence leaders were invited to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s headquarters in Chantilly, Va. The DEA had a theory: the upper echelons of global money laundering, terrorism, drug-trafficking and organized crime all bleed together. And only a handful of men in this murky world of extremely powerful criminals had organizations capable of laundering more than $10 billion annually. (Global News)Read Full Article
Sounds like a set up to me. The allegations keep changing. First they said he was selling secrets to China, then they said he was selling secrets to their own mole on the encrypted blackberry case.


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Newly Launched Android 10 With User-Friendly Features
Android 10 has been launched loaded with mega features. Google released the final version of the new Operating System for the Android Smartphone. Even though Android 10 has been under the beta version, Google has released the OS with more number of features. One of the essential elements that most of the Android lovers are seeking in the modern day is the dark mode option in the Smartphone. In this new Android 10, Google has announced that option which would conveniently help conserve as well as focus mode. Android 10 has been mainly enabled with the couple of features that would set your mind-blowing. Android 10 will be available on the upcoming Pixel phones and suitable for the modern user. Google launched Android 10 with the month-long wait in a much more unique way and ideal for the people to enjoy mega features. Google started to roll the Android 10 on the Pixel Smartphone that includes the Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL, and many others. Below are some of the essential feature that has been added in this Android Operating System uniquely. When you are an Android Smartphone user, then Google has introduced this new latest version mobile operating system.
Android users have been long waiting for the Dark Theme on Android's ecosystem. Google uses Black mode for quickly increasing the battery life in the Smartphone. It could easily choose the different system-wide basis for the apps in a more efficient way.
Android new version has been updated with the automatic caption video along with the audio messages along with the podcasts across apps. It is one of the most magnificent features in upcoming Pixel Smartphone.
Smart Reply feature recommends users with the appropriate action for messages that have been received. For example, when a friend sends the user text message along with the address, email link, or YouTube video, then it would automatically open the link, or it would ask for the suggestion in the YouTube.
Android 10 has been enabled with more privacy aspects so that the user could quickly get more privacy settings on the Web and App Activity. Now the user could change the Ad Settings with personalization.
The Gesture Navigation has been enabled with the great advanced option with the better fluidity in the Smartphone. Now the user could quickly swipe backward and forwards or go home using smooth gestures or even switch between the apps in a unique way.
For more updates and reviews about the tech world, stay tuned with Kninevox


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ACT Research will now publish a monthly report that will focus on the future of the U.S. trucking industry. The report, ACT Freight Forecast, U.S. Rate and Volume Outlook, will cover the truckload, intermodal, LTL and last mile sectors.
“Truckload spot rates are set to soften further due to tractor capacity additions, pulling the contract rate market down by mid-year. LTL rates will be most resilient and continue to rise due to the unique dynamics in that market, but TL and intermodal rates are heading lower,” said Tim Denoyer, ACT Research’s vice president and senior analyst.
With dry van rates and net fuel falling 15% y/y in the first quarter of 2019, ACT predicts they are likely to continue to drop in the coming months by 20% y/y. Freight growth has slowed significantly from not only the timing effects from shippers positioning around tariff threats, but also tariffs, tighter financial conditions, the industrial slowdown, housing and auto softness, and increased growth of private fleets.
“While this presents risk of a freight recession in 2019, we do expect the U.S. consumer to keep volumes growing, just very slowly,” added Denoyer. “Critically, this slowdown in freight is happening just as truckload capacity is accelerating. After growing less than freight for most of last year, truckload capacity has accelerated to 7% y/y growth in early 2019. We think this is the key story behind lower spot rates and why the pricing pendulum is starting to swing to the shipper.”
ACT’s Freight Forecast also includes a section on last mile delivery, which debates that changing supply chains are starting to affect equipment purchasing, though the Class 8 tractor sleeper is having a strong cycle.
For more information about ACT’s Freight Forecast, U.S. Rate and Volume Outlook, click here.


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Blackburn with Darwen Council have released updated guidance around face coverings in readiness for them to be compulsory in shops and supermarkets from Friday (24 July)
Shoppers across the country will be required to wear a face covering when they go shopping from Friday.
Blackburn with Darwen Council’s Director of Public Health Dominic Harrison introduced new precautionary measures last week in a bid to avoid a Leicester-style lockdown. This included advising residents to wear face coverings when out shopping and in enclosed public spaces – ahead of the new government rules.
He went further asking residents not to hand shake or hug, maintain two metre social distancing, increasing targeted testing and limiting household meetings to just two people from another household.
The new Government rules, which come into force on Friday, mean there will be a £100 fine for failing to wear a face covering in enclosed public spaces such as shops and supermarkets.
Here’s everything you need to know:
Do face coverings actually work?
Scientific evidence suggests face coverings help prevent you from passing coronavirus on to other people if you are sick. It does not protect you from breathing in the virus unless it is a full-blown piece of medical PPE – something which is not recommended. If you have symptoms, you should be self-isolating at home, but many people get Covid-19 without symptoms and can spread it rapidly.
Face coverings are not a replacement for social distancing, you should do both.
Why are Blackburn and Darwen taking extra precautions?
We lobbied Government early as we know wearing a face covering is an important control measure. By wearing a face covering, the principal works in that you protect me and I protect you.
We know that the main route of spread is from people who have no symptoms, touching surfaces and then touching your face and eyes. Washing hands regularly remains key. By taking these special measures in Blackburn and Darwen and by asking everyone to wear a face covering in enclosed public spaces, it makes Blackburn with Darwen even more Covid safe.
Are there any exemptions?
Yes. As with public transport, children under 11 will not have to wear a face covering. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own#exemptions-to-wearing-a-face-covering-where-they-are-mandated) Those who can’t affix a face covering without suffering severe distress, or who have difficulty using it due to a physical or mental disability, are also exempt.
Will it be the law or just ‘guidance’?
The Government measures mean it will be law to wear a face covering in shops and supermarkets. Regulations will be made under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 – the same law used as the basis for many lockdown restrictions. The additional measures introduced in BwD are guidance that we are asking everyone to adhere to help control the spread.
Is it a mask or just a ‘covering’?
The law will define a face “covering”. This is not a surgical mask and can be a piece of cloth. It must however cover your nose and mouth. Here’s a handy guide to making your own: https://theshuttle.org.uk/make-it-wear-it-wash-it/?highlight=face%20covering, or they can be bought relatively cheaply from many shops or online.
How much can I be fined?
Those caught by police contravening the law will be fined £100, reducing to £50 if paid within 14 days. Unlike previous lockdown laws, this £100 fine will not double on each repeat offence. It remains fixed at £100 each time.
What if I refuse?
On public transport, for example, those who obstruct or ignore orders from police “without reasonable excuse” commit an offence and can be prosecuted.
What about pubs, cafes and restaurants?
The guidance says you don’t need to wear a face covering if you are eating or drinking but it is advised that people wear a covering when not eating/drinking. The environment secretary George Eustice has said that face masks will not be made compulsory in pubs/restaurants. We want to go further than this and ask people to wear face coverings wherever practical to do so in enclosed spaces.
Establishments have a duty to remain Covid safe and are expected to keep records of customers, provide hand sanitiser and ensure social distancing is adhered to. Guidance for these settings is being kept under review.
For further information visit https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own/face-coverings-when-to-wear-one-and-how-to-make-your-own#exemptions-to-wearing-a-face-covering-where-they-are-mandated
What about face coverings at work
There is no universal face coverings guidance for workplaces because of the variety of work environments in different industries. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has provided detailed guidance for specific workplace settings.
Employers must make sure that the risk assessment for their business addresses the risks of COVID-19 using BEIS guidance to inform decisions and control measures including close proximity working.
As a general rule, it is important to note that coronavirus (COVID-19) is a different type of risk to the risks normally faced in a workplace and needs to be managed through a hierarchy or system of control including social distancing, high standards of hand hygiene, increased surface cleaning, fixed teams or partnering, and other measures such as using screens or barriers to separate people from each other.
These measures remain the best ways of managing risk in the workplace. If employees choose to wear a face covering, normal policies relating to occupational workwear and PPE will continue to apply.


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While E.U. mobile operators are rushing to build out new digital services, their investments in digital marketing and e-commerce lag those of OTTs and electronics retailers. These are the most common opportunities neglected by brands in L2’s Digital IQ Index: Mobile Operators Europe:
Merchandising smartphones: Device deals can attract new mobile customers, but compared to electronics retailers like Fnac and MediaMark, European providers severely underinvest in merchandising smartphones on their sites. Just a handful of brands in L2’s study offer advanced preview features like product videos and photos with 360-degree views, and only half make clear which plan options are compatible with each device.
Upselling: New device launches can also create hype that helps brands convert new customers and upsell existing users. But only one in six operators offers an on-site tool letting customers check whether their plan is eligible for a device upgrade. Even more damaging, just two brands include a special page for upcoming device releases, and only one, O2 UK, lets customers sign up to get emails when new devices are launched.
Incentivizing prospects: With consumers increasingly expecting an intuitive online experience along the lines of an in-store consultation, brands can no longer neglect on-site guided selling functionalities. While two-thirds of operator sites provide a tool indicating coverage speeds across their network, just 16% offer a similar interactive tool to navigate plan and device options.


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Why haven’t you been to a cat cafe yet? It’s 2019, cat people! It’s not 2014 anymore, kit kats. Sure, we’d scarcely heard of a cat cafe in those early years of the decade. Cat cafes were an exotic destination, an internet novelty. But then the first cat cafe opened in California. In five short years, you can now find cat cafes in well over half of states in the country, with many states having multiple cafes. Cat cafe out of the bag? Cat cafe fever? 2018 proved to be giant year for cat cafe growth, with fifteen cafes opening across the country.
2019 promises to be the best year yet for cat cafes. January pounced on the scene with the opening of three new cat cafes. Two debuted in Ohio in the first days of the new year. California has several new cafes and Virginia is set to double the number of cat cafes they started the year with. Now mid-way through the year, there are eleven new destinations to our USA cat cafe map. And more are set to open even before the summer’s end.
This makes it is easier than ever to find a cafe near you! If you still don’t have one in your neighborhood, build a visit into your next trip. There’s good reason for why cat cafes are so popular: they’re AWESOME! Time for a cat cafe roadtrip!


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For 70 days at the beginning of this year, Daniel Ek and a group of friends competed to see who could cut their body-fat percentage the most. Ek, the 35-year-old cofounder and CEO of the streaming service Spotify, went on a special regimen, which included twice-a-day workouts and a single meal—specially configured for him—eaten at a set time each afternoon. “You look great,” teased music impresario Scooter Braun, a participant in the contest, who texted his friend after noting Ek’s slimmed-down physique during Spotify’s web-broadcast Investor Day presentation in late March. “Too bad you lost.”
When I see Ek a few days later, on the eve of Spotify’s listing as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange, he acknowledges that he’d been bested in the body-fat battle by several competitors. “I made a strategic error,” he says. In an analytical fashion that is typical of Ek, he then deconstructs both the limitations of the contest (“some folks were heavier to begin with,” he says) and the missteps that he made (“I lost too much muscle mass too early”). Somehow, he doesn’t sound like he’s making excuses; he’s focused on learning, on improving—a trait that has defined him, and Spotify, from the very beginning.
As for the next day’s stock market debut, Ek willfully downplays its importance. “I keep forgetting it’s tomorrow,” he says at one point.
Spotify’s IPO in early April, like Ek’s body-fat obsession, was unconventional. The company didn’t offer any new shares to raise money, instead listing ones already available. There was no bell ringing at the exchange, no public media blitz. Despite the lack of fanfare, though, it was a breakthrough success: Spotify ended its first day with a $26 billion valuation, making it one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. It quickly inspired speculation that other mega-unicorns, like Airbnb and Uber, might come to market via Spotify’s nontraditional method.
Ek is Swedish, and like the Swedish word lagom—which means “in moderation” and is often used to describe that country’s character—he has a proclivity for understatement. He deflects attention (“It’s never one person,” he told me at the outset of our first interview. “It’s the team”) and describes himself as an introvert (“I don’t really do social calls. I tell my friends that I like to be invited, but I probably won’t come”). But Ek isn’t shy about his ambitions: “What motivates me is impacting culture.”
Since its 2008 launch, Spotify has realigned the global music industry toward streaming, popularizing the idea of music as a service rather than goods that consumers own. As the company has grown—it now has 170 million users in more than 60 countries and 75 million of them are paying subscribers—it’s turned around the fortunes of what had been a declining industry. After global music revenues slumped from 2001 to 2014, streaming has put the recording business on an upward trajectory again, growing more than $3 billion in the past three years. Spotify reported $1.3 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2018, and analysts expect it to generate more than $6 billion this year, 90% of it from subscriptions and 10% from advertising.
What emerged over my many hours of discussion with Ek in New York and Stockholm over five months, and was reinforced by interviews with more than three dozen key Spotify leaders, partners, artists, and competitors, is how unlikely Spotify’s rise has been and how central Ek’s character has been to the company’s evolution. The CEO is patient yet fueled by an internal intensity that can border on ruthlessness. He is a staunch believer in transparency (that Investor Day presentation went on a mind-numbing four-plus hours) yet personally reserved. Prior to this article, Ek had not participated in a major media profile in more than three years.
The Headbanger: Allison Hagendorf
Title: Curator, Rock Music
Employee since: 2016
First album: Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits
First concert: Green Day, Dookie Tour
First music business job: Recruited bands and made records for Sony, coordinated album production for David Bowie and Cypress Hill
Pre-Spotify brush with fame: “I hosted the CW’s music competition show, The Next, alongside celebrity judges Gloria Estefan, Joe Jonas, Nelly, and John Rich.”
Artist she hipped listeners to early: Greta Van Fleet
Artists she’s listening to on repeat: Grandson and the Fever 333
Spotify is as contradiction-laden as its leader. Despite its influence and growing fan base, the company’s future is hardly secure. It has yet to earn a penny, racking up a lifetime operating loss of $1.7 billion, and its deficits have only accelerated as revenue has grown. Meanwhile, it is being stalked by the world’s most voracious competitors. Although Apple launched its music subscription service just three years ago, some analysts predict it could pass Spotify in U.S. subscribers this year, thanks to the power of the iPhone user base. Amazon, which has a hit in its Echo smart speakers, now claims “tens of millions” of Amazon Prime Music Unlimited customers. Google already has the globe’s most popular digital music-listening destination in YouTube, and in an effort to make more money from it, the company recently introduced a Spotify-like YouTube Music subscription service.
To vanquish these rivals and make good on the promise of its high market cap, all Spotify has to do is continuously improve its best-in-class product, mollify music artists and labels who are still skeptical about the shift to streaming (despite the fact that the company has distributed almost $10 billion in licensing fees across the industry), and attract enough new customers to turn around its negative economics. Bulls, such as NYU professor Scott Galloway, argue that Spotify will do this and be the next tech giant. Bears believe the company is simply “not a good business,” as venture capitalist and former digital music entrepreneur David Pakman described Spotify to the Guardian.
As for Ek, he feels the precarious nature of Spotify’s success. He’s happy being underestimated—and just as unhappy losing.
When Ek came to save the music industry, he did so with a premise that evokes the charlatan Harold Hill in The Music Man. Hill contended that anyone could learn to play an instrument if they just believed enough. Ek was convinced that if you give music away for free and make it easy and pleasant for people to listen, then they will become regular listeners. As a habit formed, these users would—almost magically—be willing to pay for what they had been getting for free. (As Ek puts it: “The more you play, the more you’ll pay.”) This counterintuitive idea continues to form the basis of Spotify’s business model, even as it has confounded music labels and artists.
I ask Ek about this, wondering if he could build a playlist for me of Spotify’s history. “The first song would have to be something from ABBA,” he says, because “the roots of Sweden have influenced a lot of the decisions that we make.” In fact, the only reason Ek got a chance to prove out his original theory was that in his home country, record companies basically had nothing to lose in licensing their libraries for streaming. Piracy had obliterated CD sales and decimated revenues. File-sharing services like Pirate Bay were so popular in the country that citizens formed an actual Pirate Party, which won 7% of the vote in one parliamentary election.
Ek, however, stood out as the true renegade: He believed that artists were being taken advantage of. “I had a friend, a bassist, who complained to me at a party about how he had to take a second day job to make ends meet,” he recalls. Ek—a guitarist himself who at 18 had dedicated a year to becoming a professional rocker, unsuccessfully—recruited a class of engineers from Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology in 2006 to help him build a free desktop application that could offer a better experience than file sharing, with revenue generated via ads. As Spotify’s chief R&D officer, Gustav Soderstrom, recalls, the group figured out how to cut the delay time between pushing play and hearing a song from 3 or 4 seconds to 400 milliseconds.
From the beginning, Ek’s plan was to compete with Apple, which in the mid- to late-2000s dominated the digital-download business through iTunes. In essence, he wanted to replace the iPod by offering on-demand music via mobile phones. “Daniel was pretty adamant that he wanted to be the music solution,” says Soderstrom. Ek was so convinced, in fact, that he was willing to brazenly disregard the company’s own internal data. He knew that he’d never get the music labels to license their catalogs for a free mobile service, so he decided to offer mobile access only via subscription. “We did user research, and everyone said, ‘I’m never going to pay for this,’ ” recalls Soderstrom. Ek went ahead anyway.
He was right. When Spotify debuted in October 2008, people loved the experience, and the company signed up millions of users in its first year and 250,000 paying subscribers. Even before it launched in the United States in 2011, it developed a cult of American fans, including Napster cofounder Sean Parker and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It turned out that people weren’t paying for access to music,” Soderstrom explains. “They were paying for convenience.” The free, ad-supported desktop version effectively became a feeder for the $9.99-a-month mobile subscription.
The Curator: Austin Kramer
Title: Curator, electronic culture
Employee since: 2015
First album: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
First concert: Boston, at Rushmore Plaza Civic Center in Rapid City, South Dakota
First music business job: Local radio and club stuff in Denver, where he studied music in college, then XM satellite radio
Artists he hipped listeners to early: Keeno, Illenium, Michael Brun, Gryffin, Kasbo, Don Diablo
Artists he’s listening to on repeat: “Besides Mint and Housewerk? The David Guetta remix of ‘Flames’ with Sia is gorgeous.”
Ek’s two-tiered product strategy has continued to both define and haunt Spotify. Today, 60% of Spotify’s paying customers have been sourced from its free product, an unquestionable success. Every time the company expands what it offers for free, though, the red flags go back up as artists and labels fear that Spotify is devaluing their work. “They need to be careful,” warns one high-placed music industry insider, channeling the fears of traditionalists that profits will fall in the long run and cripple record companies. “Spotify has always engineered itself from the philosophy, ‘Oh, you don’t need record labels.'”
“It has been such an uphill battle,” says D.A. Wallach, the former lead singer for the indie-pop group Chester French who served as Spotify’s ambassador to the music industry as its artist-in-residence from 2011 to 2015. “Obviously, streaming is a better way to listen to music: How would you like to have all the music humans ever made in your pocket for $10?” But Wallach, who’s also a longtime Spotify investor, adds, “It’s been impossible to deal with the labels, the artists. For a streaming service to succeed, it almost certainly was going to be at the expense of existing sales channels.”
“My challenge is still the free tier,” says Scott Borchetta, CEO of country music label Big Machine, which distributes Taylor Swift’s music (among others). Swift famously pulled her songs from Spotify in 2014, in perhaps the highest-profile protest against Ek’s model.
Eventually Swift returned to the fold, and she even posted an original video on Spotify in late March, just days before the IPO. “It doesn’t matter what we felt two or three years ago,” Borchetta says. As consumers have committed to streaming, the music industry has had no choice but to go along. “What we have now is what we have to make work.”
This has been Ek’s plan all along: to get the music industry so dependent on Spotify that even the doubters can’t live without it. “We need this company to be robust,” Borchetta says of Spotify. “It’s important to the ecosystem of the whole business that they are successful.”
It’s a typically dark, cold, and snowy February evening in Stockholm, and Ek and I are strolling along a slushy path around Skeppsholmen, one of the city’s islands. He is wearing white sneakers, which he earlier told me were a gift from Nike executive Heidi O’Neill, who joined Spotify’s board a few months ago. (“She said they’re worth $3,000,” he’d mentioned, which I can’t help recalling as we slog through mud and ice.)
On the way, he acts as a tour guide to both the city and his own life. “That boat is like one I used to work on in the summer, helping my uncle as a ticket taker,” Ek says, pointing across the water at a ferry that transports seaside revelers in warmer months but now serves commuters. He explains that he grew up 30 minutes south of here, in a working-class housing project known back then for its vigorous illegal drug trade.
He’s the child of a single mother who married his stepfather when he was a toddler. (Ek only engages with his biological father once a year, when he receives a birthday greeting, he says.) He began playing guitar at age 4, as part of a free community instruction program. He got his first computer not long afterward, and his interests have vacillated between music and technology ever since. He also played on his neighborhood’s club soccer team, but as with music, he ultimately concluded that he had neither the passion nor the skill to distinguish himself on the field. “I wasn’t the best musician, or the best soccer player. For a time, I thought I could be the best programmer, but it turned out that wasn’t true either.”
What he had was a gift for entrepreneurship. In high school, Ek began designing websites for businesses, at a fraction of the cost other firms charged. He recruited friends and classmates to expand his services, ended up launching several other businesses, and eventually sold all of them when he was 22 for enough money to reach the financial goals he’d set for himself by 40. He still seems mystified by the heights he’s reached. “You’re not supposed to be a billionaire in your thirties,” he tells me. (“In Sweden, there’s an inherent tension for anyone who is ambitious,” explains Wallach, who calls Ek a good friend. “How do you do great things without sticking your head up too high?”)
The World Shaker: Rocîo Guerrero
Title: Head of global cultures
Employee since: 2011
First album: “Not the first, but definitely one of the most important albums that marked who I am musically speaking is Sueños Líquidos from Maná.”
First concert: A classical music concert at the Conservatory of Music where she grew up in southern Spain.
First music business job: Classical music teacher
Song she’s listening to on repeat: “Olha a Explosão” by Brazilian funk artist MC Kevinho featuring 2 Chainz, French Montana, and Venezuelan artist Nacho. As she says, “This remix always makes me smile and reminds me why I do what I do. Talk about global cultures!”
As the dark deepens and the snow swirls on Skeppsholmen, I ask Ek about his wedding, on Lake Como in northern Italy, two summers ago, which was officiated by the comedian Chris Rock. It seems incongruous that someone who has avoided the limelight would want a superstar at the center of his private celebration. “My wife and I were discussing what kind of wedding we wanted,” he explains, “and we said, ‘The whole ceremony part, it’s kinda boring.'” They’d heard about another wedding where the priest inadvertently misspoke a line, which got everyone laughing. “I was like, ‘That’s what a wedding should be,'” Ek goes on, “and we said, ‘Okay, what would our dream be?’ ” They were both fans of Rock, who happened to be friends with Spotify investor and talent manager Guy Oseary. (When I ask Rock about the experience, he says, “Well, I got to meet Mark Zuckerberg, so that was cool.”)
Ek pauses momentarily during our walk and looks out over the water. “You can hear a little bit of the city,” he says, the vague echo of Stockholm’s traffic in the distance. “But it’s a totally different atmosphere here”—only 20 minutes or so from the office—”and you can sit for hours and just think.” Ek walks this path often, and if he’s not alone, he says, he’s usually one-on-one with one of his lead reports. “Getting to the right decision is inversely correlated to how many people you have,” he says. “Anything bigger than eight people, you can’t really debate strategy.”
Ek thrives on tossing around ideas and theories, gaming out future strategic possibilities. He has one office in Stockholm and another in New York, where he spends an average of a week a month. Each of his work spaces is dominated by a large whiteboard, and he says he can lose himself in long sessions in front of one. “I’m weird about time,” he says. Each evening, he reviews a list of goals for the day, the week, and the month. “And then I just over-allocate time to [addressing] those goals.”
This past December, as the IPO approached, Ek got caught up in a multiday brainstorm about the future of what Spotify calls its content group, which includes label and artist relations, playlisting, and the company’s original content studio. As the conversations continued, Ek’s questions for the head of that group, chief strategy officer Stefan Blom, became more pointed. He kept asking whether Blom was still up for managing these tasks.
“He worked incredibly hard getting these label deals done,” Ek says of Blom, who had been with Spotify for four years, “and then you realize, Holy shit, it’s going to be more of this for another few years. I wasn’t forcing him to do one thing or the other, I’m just asking the questions.” Their dialogue concluded exactly as he’d expected it to, with Blom deciding to step aside. Ek ran the unit personally until he hired veteran media exec Dawn Ostroff in June. (Blom says he had been considering new challenges before his conversation with Ek; the two remain in close contact and have said they hope to work together again.)
The Funky One: Mjeema Pickett
Title: Curator, R&B/soul music
Employee since: 2015
First concert: New Edition (with opening acts Force MD’s and Ray, Goodman and Brown) at the Washington Convention Center circa 1984.
First music business job: “While a student at Clark Atlanta University, I interned at two top-rated, major-market radio stations, V103 in Atlanta and WPGC95.5 in Washington, D.C.”
Song she hipped listeners to early: “‘Khalid’s ‘Location.’ We came across this track and featured him in various global R&B playlists, such as Are & Be, Alternative R&B, and Soul Lounge, while he was still an independent artist.”
Album she’s listening to on repeat: Innervisions by Stevie Wonder
The episode is representative of how Ek manages. To an outsider, his pressing of Blom may sound combative. Ek says he was just being transparent about expectations. He orients his leadership team around what he calls “missions”—discrete, goal-based assignments, rather than open-ended positions. Ek likens his approach to LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s concept of a “tour of duty.” He explains: “You don’t have the same job for more than two years. The more honest we are about that, the better it is.” (That’s right, every two years, you have to re-up.) Ek goes on: “Very few people at Spotify last more than two or three rounds. It’s not about poor performance. At this level, it never is. It’s about future performance.”
Spotify’s current R&D chief, Soderstrom, a chisel-jawed, blue-eyed Swede who’s been at the company for nine years and is among Ek’s closest advisers, almost departed several years ago after an Ek-driven performance discussion. Soderstrom had been running the product team, and Ek was hesitant to give him more responsibility. “He didn’t seem to have much interest in leading people,” Ek recalls. “From his own team, he was getting mediocre scores, not very inspirational as a manager.” He told Soderstrom as much. But Soderstrom pushed his boss to give him a chance. “He really wanted it badly,” Ek says, so the CEO acquiesced. “And he completely outdid my expectations.” Soderstrom’s portfolio now encompasses 40% of Spotify’s workforce.
“Had we not had that conversation, he probably would have left,” Ek says. “That honesty is an important part of our culture,” which is one topic that particularly animates Ek. “One thing that I hate,” he says, is “when people worry, ‘How do we keep our culture?’ It’s horseshit. The culture will change. With every person who leaves, every person who joins, there’s change. The question is, what change do we like and what change do we not? What are the things we will embrace?”
Constant change is among Spotify’s most defining characteristics. In the fall of 2013, for instance, Spotify secretly faced an existential moment. Its user growth mysteriously stalled, putting the company’s future in peril. For each of the previous summers, Spotify had noticed a pattern among its users, who at that time were still predominantly desktop-based: As summer vacation set in and people spent time away from their computers, monthly active use would fall off, only to roar back in August when people returned. But in 2013, the annual late-summer bounce didn’t materialize. “It’s like people put their computers away, and never took them back out,” Soderstrom recalls.
The Spotify team realized that they needed a mobile product that could be accessed by everyone, not just paying subscribers. And they needed it quickly. They had already been negotiating with labels about licensing rights for a free mobile version, but the deals weren’t done. Nor were engineers ready with a product. The sudden crisis sparked company-wide urgency. When the licensing deals were finally signed, in December 2013, “we literally just pushed the button on the same day to get it out there,” says Soderstrom of the new app. There was no time for rigorous testing. “If it had taken another six months, it might have been too late to recover.” The strategy worked: At the end of 2013, Spotify had 36 million users and 8 million paying subscribers; by January 2015, it announced 60 million and 15 million, respectively. Forty-two percent of time spent on Spotify was now via phones and 10% on tablets, the first time mobile listening surpassed desktop.
That fearlessness (some might say recklessness) is why Spotify is the industry leader, and it continues to drive its culture and actions. Just three weeks after the company went public, Spotify announced that it was again dramatically altering its free mobile product, adding a slew of features that listeners used to have to pay for—plus some new ones that had never before been available, including a mode to consume less data while streaming. The move risked shaking investor confidence in Spotify’s stock, but Ek says, “Success for us will be determined by our ability to move faster than everyone else in this space.” Indeed, his reimagining of Spotify’s free service came a few weeks before Google, which has had countless opportunities to lead the industry shift to streaming music, debuted a revamped YouTube Music.
Each quarter, Ek creates what’s internally called “the bets board”: a list of seven to 10 priorities, selected from among proposals made by the operating teams. Resources are allocated to the top bet first, then the second, and so on. “If you fail, fail from the bottom up,” Soderstrom says, describing Ek’s strategy. “So number one should never fail, and eight should fail before seven. It’s surprisingly effective.”
The new free tier has been a top priority for more than a year. It reflects how important it is for the company to keep acquiring new customers (and turn them into paying ones), but it also has its own commercial element. “Billions of people listen to radio, and most of that today isn’t monetized very efficiently,” Ek says as we chat on the couch in his Stockholm office. “Commercial radio, that’s conservatively a $50 billion industry globally. The U.S. radio industry is $17 billion, close to the size of the whole global recorded music industry, which is $23 billion. And what do people listen to? Primarily music.” Ninety percent of Spotify’s current revenues come from subscriptions, but if the free product expands, so can Spotify’s radiolike advertising business. As Ek notes, with typical understatement, “We still have a lot of room to grow.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook is seated in his personal conference room inside the company’s spaceshiplike headquarters in Cupertino, talking to me about his love of music. “I couldn’t make it through a workout without music,” Cook says, when he and I meet in January to discuss Apple as an innovative company. “Music inspires, it motivates. It’s also the thing at night that helps quiet me. I think it’s better than any medicine.”
Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
Spotify Is Global, Growing–And Losing Gobs Of Money
Apple dominated the download era of digital music, and did not adopt streaming until almost two years after download revenues started to decline. The company purchased Beats by Dre for $3 billion in 2014, in part to get its nascent streaming service, and a year later, Apple Music debuted. Although the service has been maligned as difficult to use, Apple has been able to leverage its active installed base of 1.3 billion devices to attract 50 million Apple Music subscribers and trial customers. All those iPhones are a formidable advantage over a stand-alone operation like Spotify, and Apple has something else that Spotify doesn’t: profit, almost $14 billion in its second quarter of 2018. Apple can approach music as a loss leader, or as Cook says directly, “We’re not in it for the money.”
Yet Spotify still has more listeners, more paid subscribers, and a more central cultural position in the music world, because its software is more elegant and its playlists (created by both algorithms and humans) are wildly popular. Ek, who doesn’t like to mention Apple by name any more than Cook likes mentioning Spotify, points to his company’s focus as the reason: “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good.”
Ever calm, Ek believes it’s this singularity of purpose that will help him defy all the skeptics, from those who believe he can’t beat Apple to those who think that there’s no difference between the streaming music services to those who can’t imagine Ek ever overcoming the high licensing fees he gives back to the record business. All these arguments are shortsighted, he says. Lower-margin businesses can turn the corner once they hit an inflection point (as Amazon has done, after two decades of deferring profitability for growth), and critics mistakenly believe that access to tens of millions of songs is the endgame rather than just the beginning of a much bigger opportunity to transform the music industry.
Take playlists, which have emerged as a key differentiator for Spotify. From the outset, Spotify users generated their own music playlists. The company itself, though, stayed out of that curation. But in 2013, not long after Spotify opened up its platform to outside developers, it noticed a small Swedish firm called Tunigo that was providing human-created playlists defined less by genre than by activity: music for studying, music for cooking, music for a sunny day or a rainy one. It was a different, more emotional way to engage listeners. Spotify quickly purchased Tunigo and moved its team and leader, Nick Holmstén, inside the company’s operations.
Ek didn’t see the value at first—”Oh, this is going to be a disaster,” he recalls thinking about one playlist innovation—but playlisting did more than increase Spotify’s consumer appeal. It turned Spotify into a user’s personal DJ. The company told investors in its prospectus, filed last February, that “we now program approximately 31% of all listening on Spotify” via playlists, which has created powerful new brands within Spotify such as Rap Caviar and ¡Viva Latino!. There are now Rap Caviar and ¡Viva Latino! concert series, pointing the way toward an even broader role for the company within the music business, where it’s generating live event and merchandising revenue without having to pay record labels.
In addition, Ek brokered a remarkable deal last December with Tencent that could buy Spotify enough time to prove its model financially. The Chinese tech giant invested in Spotify, and Spotify, in turn, invested in Tencent Music, which has 700 million monthly active users. The deal is both a savvy bet on the Chinese market without having to learn an expensive lesson first (see: Uber) and a potential windfall. Tencent Music is rumored to IPO later this year, and Spotify’s stake in the company would be worth several billion dollars.
“There’s never a moment in a meeting with Daniel [Ek] when he says some genius shit and your brain explodes,” D.A. Wallach says, comparing Ek with his other tech-titan friends. “Sean Parker [the Napster founder] is a crazy big-picture intellectual. Elon Musk is essentially an engineer; he views everything from finance to marketing as an engineering problem. Daniel has a similarity to [Mark] Zuckerberg, disposition-wise, but he doesn’t have the same world-historical aspirations. He’s succeeded in the [music] business because he’s extremely patient and not high on his own supply, meaning he has not been susceptible to the vices that ruin people in entertainment.”
Ek’s personality has opened the door to a different kind of relationship with musical artists from what prevailed in the era of cocaine-snorting, thieving record execs. So far, Ek has been focused on changing how creators get paid; in streaming, an artist is compensated every time a song is played, creating lifetime revenue (albeit a fraction of a penny at a time), whereas in the old model they got paid (sometimes) after selling a CD or download. But that’s only the beginning. “Spotify’s first eight to 10 years were focused on consumers,” says R&D chief Soderstrom. “The next eight to 10 will be focused on artists.”
Spotify for Artists is the most visible example of this new directive. The service, which launched in its current form in 2016, allows musicians to access data on who is listening to their work on the platform and to personalize their presence to enhance engagement. Iconic rock band Metallica, which once helped sue Napster out of existence, used this data on tour to customize its setlists based on what local fans listen to most. Smaller artists have used it to identify where to tour, and to activate their superfans. “Whatever your genre is, you can find an audience,” says Spotify chief marketing officer Seth Farbman.
This goes deeper than it might seem. Troy Carter, the music manager who discovered Lady Gaga and helped turn her into a global phenom, gave up his talent-management business to join Spotify full-time two years ago, as an emissary to artists and industry insiders. “Daniel and I were at the Soho House in L.A. the week of Coachella, and we began talking philosophically about the idea of creator services,” Carter says. “I said my dream is for Spotify not to be a means to an end for artists but to be the end.”
Carter clarifies that he wasn’t talking about Spotify becoming a music label. “I have zero interest in that. I don’t necessarily think labels are even going to be labels in the future. All our roles are going to change.”
The Mood Elevator: Nick Holmstén
Title: Global head of editorial programming
Employee since: 2013
First album: The Eagles’ Hotel California
First concert: Peter Gabriel
First music business jobs: “After a couple of bands, I ended up as a songwriter and producer for 10 years.”
Spotify claim to fame: Holmstén’s startup, Tunigo, introduced the idea of contextual playlists to the service, such as “intense studying” and “confidence boost.” Their popularity inspired Spotify to acquire his company.
Artist he’s listening to on repeat: Post Malone
Ek has been talking a lot this year about Spotify’s mission to get 1 million artists to make a living off the platform, but he doesn’t mean there will be 1 million Lady Gagas or Bruno Marses. Financial analysts often compare Spotify to Netflix—a comparison Ek pushes back against—but Ek’s vision of the future looks more like YouTube: a meeting spot for creators and fans, in groups both large and small, and Spotify benefits when transactions happen in this “marketplace.” Ek says: “In that model, it’s almost like you’re managing an economy.”
“The major-label system was built out for the 5,000 biggest artists in the world,” Carter notes. “If we’re going to [enable] a million artists to make a living, that’s going to require an entirely different ecosystem.” In this world, “an artist might be happy making $50,000 a year, supplementing income from other work to help pay their mortgage, raise their kids, by doing what they love. I’m just as committed to that kind of artist. How do we make it so there are a lot more winners,” Carter says, “to redefine what it means to be a winner?”
“We are only in the second inning,” Ek said repeatedly in the months leading up to and just after the IPO, an echo of Jeff Bezos’s notion that it’s “day one.” He’s right, but there’s also plenty of time to get crushed before the ninth rolls around.
Despite Ek’s achievement in popularizing streaming music, his company in many ways remains an underdog. Spotify ships out so much of its revenue in licensing fees to labels that it needs to be tightly cost conscious, to a degree that its competition does not. (Spotify’s new Stockholm offices are nicely designed, but have none of the jaw-dropping presence of Apple Park or the Googleplex.) Ek says this pushes his company to be more disciplined: “Did I ever believe that we were going to be alone? No.” Still, vanquishing the world’s most profitable businesses will not be as easy as steamrolling once-hyped startups such as Grooveshark and Deezer.
Ek relishes this uncertainty, in a way few CEOs do. When we talked in New York just before the IPO, shortly after he’d lost that body-fat contest with his friends, he began musing about what personal challenge he might tackle next. “I’d like to do some boxing,” he told me. “There’s that boxing expression: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ ”
I mention that his board of directors might not like him putting his brain at risk, that at the least he might consider wearing protective headgear. He brushes that idea aside. He wants to see what it’s like to be rattled that way, to be prepared for whatever may come next.


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It seems like big companies are in the real mode of acquisition. Aren’t they becoming some kind of shopaholics day by day? The breaking news is that iPhone maker Apple has acquired yet another mapping company named Embark to enhance its Maps platform by adding several cool features in it.
Recently while browsing over the web, I found it this news in NDTV Gadgets. It reported that Apple has completed the acquisition of Embark, which is basically a small Silicon Valley based startup that designs transit apps with the aim of helping the users navigate the important public transportation with super ease.
However, the total monetary value of the deal is yet to be disclosed by both the companies. But, it is easily understandable that soon Apple will integrate the advanced technology of Embark in its own Maps to make it more developed and user-friendly.
Earlier we published that Apple has started giving priorities to its Maps, and they are looking forward to establish it as the best alternative to the Google Maps. In this process Apple already acquired ‘Locationary’, which was a fairly popular location-based crowdsourced data startup. Now it buys out Embark to carry on the momentum I guess.
An Apple spokeswoman confirmed the transaction. She said, "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."
Jessica E. Lessin recently published an article on her blog on this deal. In her post she mentioned that Embark was established in 2011, and since then it has been developing Android and iOS apps featuring public transit systems information for the busiest US (United States) cities like New York, San Francisco, Chicago and a few more. The blog post added that the iOS apps are still available in the Apple store for download but the Android apps have already been removed from the official Google Play Store.
Embark was having a large user base of more than half a million in November 2012, and certainly it would be benefitted by joining Apple, which earlier decided to move to its own Maps platform rather than recommending its users to use Google Maps. Prior to the acquisition, Apple Maps did not feature public transport information and earlier it used to recommend several other top level third-party apps in its App Store (including Embark).
In last couple of months we have seen Apple trying its level best to strengthen the features of its own Maps platform by acquiring popular online mapping services like HopStop, which offers directions to major transit systems and biking routes.
Apple’s Map was being criticized for number of experts for not having several key features like transit information, which are the most popular features on Google's maps.
Yeah it’s true that Apple is continuously developing its Maps to make it useful for the users. But it has yet to cover a long route to take on Google Maps, which is still the no. 1 choice of most of the people while searching some places on the web.
What are your thoughts on Apple’s Maps platform and this latest acquisition? Do you think later it will be able to challenge the Google Maps? Let us know your opinions, as like always they are very much precious to us.


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Why Axis, a Bangalore-based design and advertising agency, has been retained by Vision Express, the joint venture between Reliance Retail and Dutch optical retailer Pearle Europe. Why Axis has managed to retain the business amid a tough pitch process, which saw the participation of eight top agencies.
The Mathrubhumi Printing and Publishing Company, which publishers popular Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi, is gearing up to enter the news space in Kerala with a 24-hour news and current affairs channel. The channel, to be called ‘Mathrubhumi News’, will go on air in 2011.
Leo Burnett, which started its Chennai operation on October, 2009, has made the branch the South hub. As an incumbent agency for Uninor, Leo Burnett Chennai services the Uninor business in all the four Southern states. All the regional creative work for the telecom brand is done from Chennai for states like Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh besides Tamil Nadu.
“In the recent past, Vijay TV has pushed the envelope of creativity by a few notches. People look upto the channel for differentiated, innovative programming, be it fiction or non-fiction” said K Sriram, General Manager, Vijay TV when quizzed whether audience fatigue was the reason for the channel shifting its focus from non-fiction shows, which is considered to be its forte.
Muthoot Group’s FM venture, Chennai Live, recently turned two. The talk radio, which plays only English music, is targeted at the 25-plus age group. To mark the occasion, the Chennai-based Fm station has launched a radio reality show – ‘Band Hunt’.
‘A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort’, taking a cue from this quote of Herm Albright, Chennai-based Lead Star Media and Communications has recently launched an online weekly magazine, christened theweekendleader.com, with a self-imposed mandate to focus exclusively on positive news and features.
Malayala Manorama TV (MMTV), the television division of Malayala Manorama, is planning to increase its presence in the television space in Kerala by adding a GEC by mid-2011. The channel is expected to help the group gain foothold in the cluttered GEC space. Jacob Mathew, Executive Editor and Director, Malayala Manorama, revealed this to exchange4media.
With a decade-long presence in the furniture business, Style Spa, the furniture arm of SK Poddar Group of Companies and Zuari Industries Ltd, has relied heavily on print media advertising so far. But now, the furniture retail major, which is on a dynamic store opening and expansion spree, has recently launched two new TVCs for the first time.
There are no surprises in the Kerala market as per the IRS Q2 2010 results as far as newspapers are concerned. While maintaining its leadership, Malayala Manorama has further strengthened its foothold in the market by adding 253,000 readers in Q2. Deshabhimani is the only other Malayalam daily to have shown strong growth in Kerala. Apart from these two, nearly all dailies have witnessed slump in readership.
With substantial increase in readership, market leader in Andhra Pradesh, Eenadu, has further widened the gap with No. 2 player Sakshi, according to IRS Q2 2010 results. While elsewhere magazines have taken a beating, in Andhra Pradesh magazines have displayed a commendable show. Barring Swati, all other magazines have shown growth.
There is some cheer for Daily Thanthi and Dinakaran in the Chennai market as per the IRS Q2 2010 results. The two leading Tamil dailies have added 57,000 (Daily Thanthi) and 58,000 (Dinakaran) readers in this quarter. However, Dinamalar, another leading Tamil daily in the market, has seen a 2.17 per cent decline in its average issue readership (AIR).
While Daily Thanthi has witnessed some growth as per IRS Q2 2010 data, nearly all dailies and periodicals in Tamil Nadu have shown negative growth. The results have garnered mixed reactions from the players in Southern media. Meanwhile, quite a few publishers are seeking a different pattern of estimation for magazines, which, they felt, a large survey like IRS was not able to capture.
It was a mixed bag of growth and decline for Malayalam dailies as per the IRS Q2 2010 results. Among the Malayalam dailies, Malayala Manorama, while maintaining its pole position, has registered a 2.69 per cent growth in its Average Issue Readership (AIR). However, the AIR of Mathrubhumi and almost all Malayalam magazines have dropped.
The Indian Readership Survey (IRS) Q2 2010 data for Tamil publications shows market leader Daily Thanthi recording a marginal growth, even as the Average Issue Readership (AIR) of other Tamil dailies and magazines has dropped. Daily Thanthi leads the Tamil dailies with an AIR of 7,402,000 in this round. The AIR of both Dinakaran and Dinamalar has dropped.
Emami Biotech Ltd, part of Rs 3,000-crore diversified Emami Group of Companies, has announced the launch of its edible oil brand, Healthy and Tasty, in Chennai. This is the Group’s first foray into the food & beverages segment. Emami plans to spend Rs 15 crore in the Tamil Nadu market alone over the next three years on communication and marketing activities.
“We have to stay boringly consistent and we have to be thoroughly innovative in the way we say it,” noted Ranganath NK, MD, Grundfos Pumps India Ltd, while speaking on ‘The challenge of branding industrial products’. Ranganath was speaking at Advertising Club Madras’ ‘Gyan Series’ in Chennai recently.
Onam, the biggest of all festivals in the land of Kathakali and snake boats, is round the corner. Celebrated over a period of 10 days, the Onam carnival reaches its peak during the last three big days – which this year falls on August 21, 22 and 23 – and Malayalam dailies are already having a crack at the ad pie. exchange4media takes a look at what print media in Kerala have been up to in the run-up to Onam.


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Honda has reportedly once again delayed the launch of their premium hatchback Jazz in India. The car was, first expected to be launched late last year but was postponed to accommodate the Mobilio. Now a report in AutocarIndia says that the company has pushed off the launch to June this year!
The new Jazz will pick-up fight against the Hyundai Elite i20, Volkswagen Polo and Maruti Suzuki’s upcoming YRA (iK-2). The report claims that the reason for delay is some problems with production. Honda currently has a production capacity of 2.4 lakh units per annum and most of this is being pulled to the limits by its existing models, especially the mid-size sedan City which has a waiting period of 2 to 4 months on some variants and the compact sedan Amaze which is experiencing an even greater delay of up to 5 months!
After the Jazz, Honda intends to re-launch the executive sedan Accord in the Auto Expo early next year. The company has been recording steady growth and is trying to jump over Mahindra in terms of market share and emerge as the third largest car seller in India. The updated Jazz is expected to house the 1.2 Liter petrol engine from the Brio and the 1.5 Liter Earth dreams diesel engine, a first for the car in India!


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2021 was supposed to be a big year for sports betting in the state of Louisiana, but it hasn’t worked out that way up to this point. Louisiana was expected to launch both retail and online sports betting, but the launch date has continued to get pushed back.
There is still plenty of optimism that legal sports betting will be launching this year, and it appears as if the state is finally starting to gain some traction. Online sportsbooks have already missed out on five weeks of NFL betting, with another weekend underway.
When sports betting is officially offered in Louisiana, it won’t be a state-wide operation. Not all of the parishes in the state agreed to legalize sports betting, creating a unique situation for sports bettors.
Louisiana has the same rules in place for daily fantasy sports, and that industry has finally launched. It took the state a few years to finalize DFS rules and regulations after voters approved legalizing the industry in 2018.
This state has the potential to become a large sports betting market as there will be plenty of sports betting licenses available. Having some professional teams in the state will also help drive the industry, and Louisiana has approved betting on college sports as well.
Hurricane Ida Delayed the Process
Hurricane Ida had a major impact on both professional and collegiate sports in the state of Louisiana, and it also affected the launch of sports betting. The original launch date of sports betting was at the beginning of September, but this coincided with the major impact of this storm.
The hurricane had a major impact on a large portion of the state, and launching sports betting just wasn’t a major focus at the time. Things have started to settle back down in the state, which is why there is another big push underway.
Betfred Takes the Lead
Even though the big launch of sports betting has been delayed a bit, there is actually retail betting currently being offered in the state. The Betfred Sportsbook is up and running at this time, and that company now has a clear lead on the rest of the field.
The Betfred Sportsbook is located at the Paragon Casino, and this could continue to be one of the top retail sports betting locations in the state. Online sports betting is expected to carry the industry, but there will be a handful of retail sports betting options.
Big Names are Coming
A complete list of potential online sportsbooks is not available at this time, but there have been a number of operators commit to operating in the state. As expected, some of the biggest names in the US sports betting industry have applied for a license and are ready to get things up and running.
Caesars recently announced a deal with the New Orleans Saints that will give the company naming rights to the Superdome. This company is going to have some competition, though, as DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, and WynnBET have all confirmed that they are entering the market.


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Despite Naughty Dog denying the same for months on end.
Though it initially denied that it was in development, Naughty Dog has apparently been developing The Last of Us: Remastered for the PS4 since the original game was completed.
In a recent interview with PlayStation Access, Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells stated, “We had a lot of people on the forums saying ‘can I play this on PlayStation 4?’ We had actually been anticipating that, and started working on it pretty much as soon as we finished the PlayStation 3 [version]. We weren’t sure if it was going to go anywhere, but when we saw the fans clamouring for it we doubled-down, and put more effort behind it.
“The graphic fidelity has been turned up to eleven. We’ve got 1080p, we’re pushing the draw distances further, we’re creating higher resolution character models, better lighting, better shadows.”
The Last of Us: Remastered will be out this Summer and will include all the DLC released till now, including the recently released Left Behind.


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Digital Freight Forwarders Look to Expand Asian Operations
Digital freight forwarder Forto has raised $50 million in funding bringing its total funding to $126 million since its founding in 2016. The funding round was led by Inven Capital. Forto has seen a boost in its ocean freight volume in 2020 and its supply chain management solutions are now used by over 2,500 customers, including industrial manufacturer Viessmann, consumer goods giant Miele and e-commerce brand Home24. Forto’s platform gives customers real time data and on time delivery. It also offers emissions ratings for transport options which allows companies to track their carbon emissions.
Forto will use the new funding to further develop its supply chain management solutions by adding new order management features. It will also focus on expanding its European and Asian operations. Forto currently has five offices in Asia following the recent opening of a Singapore office. Forto is not the only freight forwarder looking to expand its Asian operations. Uk based freight forwarder Beacon recently opened a new office in Hong Kong following a $15 million Series A funding round in June.
We have included a selection of our most popular market research on freight forwarding below.
We will help you find what you are looking for.


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This week at Microsoft’s annual E3 gaming summit, video game titan Ubisoft released the trailer for Assassin’s Creed: Unity the fifth installment in the company’s deliriously successful Assassin’s Creed franchise. The gaming community salivated at the game’s beautiful (if bloody) trailer until it was noted that there were no female characters, contrary to the company’s earlier reports that there would be.
Perhaps this sort of exclusion wouldn’t have lifted as many eyebrows if Ubisoft’s attempts to explain the decision weren’t so nonsensical:
“It [a woman] was on our feature list until not too long ago, but it’s a question of focus. So we wanted to make sure we had the best experience for the character. A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation, a lot of costumes.”
Yes, an $83 million dollar company with nine studios working on one game decided to shelve a female character in favor of having four playable male characters because the female would just be too much work. It’s a strange line of reasoning, given that studies show women make up half of the gaming community, female characters are at the forefront of some of today’s most interesting and exciting video game titles and, notably, the new game takes place during the French Revolution, home to the best-known real life female assassin of all time, Charlotte Corday. The backlash has been successful enough that Ubisoft may consider pulling the game back into development but, if that’s the case, they haven’t said so yet …


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AOL on Thursday launched a $400 million stock buyback in the latest move aimed at improving shareholder value at the Internet and media group.
Facebook struck a $550 million deal Monday to get its hands on hundreds of AOL patents from Microsoft as the social network hardened its defenses before it goes public on the Nasdaq.
(AP) -- AOL's $1 billion deal to sell and license patents to Microsoft is another in a series of "Antiques Roadshow" moments in the technology world. Faded companies have been rummaging through their assets recently, and ...
AOL announced plans to sell more than 800 patents to Microsoft in a $1.056 billion deal giving the struggling Internet pioneer a needed cash injection as it seeks to fend off pressure from shareholders.
Mobile technology appears to be increasing the public appetite for news but it's far from clear whether the news industry will profit from that, a study issued Monday concluded.
A US hedge fund with a large stake in AOL laid claim on Friday to five seats on the board of directors of the Internet company and criticized the strategy of the current management.
The Obama administration is calling for stronger privacy protections for consumers as mobile gadgets, Internet services and other tools are able to do a better job of tracking what you do and where you go.
(AP) -- AOL's Huffington Post Media Group announced Thursday that it will launch the Huffington Post Streaming Network this summer.
The Huffington Post announced plans Thursday to launch an Italian edition in the latest international expansion of the news and opinion website.
AOL is giving its AIM instant-messaging software a new look and new features in hopes of stanching an ongoing exodus of users who have turned to texting and other online messaging services.


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Floating Share Widget
NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay Addresses Business Execs in Northern Virginia on Value of Retail; Highlights Industry’s Public Policy Priorities
Washington, November 10, 2011 – The retail industry has a more hopeful vision for the future of the economy based around four simple words – jobs, innovation, consumer value – said National Retail Federation President and CEO Matthew Shay during a keynote address today at the Interface Retail: Washington, D.C. Metro Conference. In the speech, Shay detailed the retail industry’s impact on the economy and the sector’s long-term outlook to hundreds of real estate, business, technology and finance executives from the Washington area as NRF continues to roll-out its multi-year, multi-faceted Retail Means Jobs campaign.
“The retail industry continues to demonstrate its strength and resiliency in this difficult economic time,” said Shay. “Not only has the retail industry witnessed 15 consecutive months of growth, but it is primed – with the support of good public policy and ‘smart’ reform – to make an even greater contribution to the overall economy and employment.”
Shay delivered his remarks at a conference organized by Shopping Center Business magazine and its publisher France Media, Inc. The conference bought together owners, investors, developers, lenders and financial intermediaries, leasing and operations specialists, and other business leaders from the region’s retail real estate industry.
In the speech, Shay highlighted four major public policy priorities from NRF’s Retail Means Jobs campaign, announced in September 2011:
• Open up new markets for trade and investment
• Fix the broken visa system to encourage greater business exchange
• Reform the tax code to make it more competitive and fair for all retailers
• Ease excessive regulatory burdens on America’s job-creators
At the heart of the Retail Means Jobs campaign is the leveraging of the retail industry’s economic and employment strength toward achievable public policy goals.
“Retail is the cornerstone of our communities and supports one in four American jobs and roughly 20 percent of GDP,” said Shay. “To renew our faith and confidence in the American dream, we need our policy makers and leaders to look toward America’s Main Street retailers to understand what works, what doesn’t and what is needed to spur even further economic growth and opportunity.”
Shay also covered a number of industry trends that are driving a healthy outlook for retail into 2012, including department stores staging a comeback, online shopping driving traffic to brick-and-mortar stores, and the incorporation of mobile retail into company plans.
As the world’s largest retail trade association and the voice of retail worldwide, NRF represents retailers of all types and sizes, including chain restaurants and industry partners, from the United States and more than 45 countries abroad. Retailers operate more than 3.6 million U.S. establishments that support one in four U.S. jobs – 42 million working Americans. Contributing $2.5 trillion to annual GDP, retail is a daily barometer for the nation’s economy. NRF’s Retail Means Jobs campaign emphasizes the economic importance of retail and encourages policymakers to support a Jobs, Innovation and Consumer Value Agenda aimed at boosting economic growth and job creation. www.nrf.com


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U.S. Lamborghini dealers enter 2023 eager for more success. Recent years have seen Lamborghini experience a transformational level of success, and in...read more
Custom software website design developer, digital branding
Sugababes: 'We had a lot of opposition kind of stopping us and we had to fight for the name Sugababes back'
Today, Sugababes performed three songs for BBC Radio 2’s month long Piano Room accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra....read more


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Learning the ropes early is a fact of ranching life, but two Foothills brothers are getting a taste of a whole different business.
“We wanted to promote that kids our age are ranch material and everything we do for the ranch,” said Jack Emerson, 12.
Along with 8-year-old brother Casey, the two began producing “Alberta Ranch Kid” branded hats and patches in April.
Growing up on their family ranch southeast of Black Diamond, sharing the work with their parents Scott and Page has been a fact of life.
As the COVID-19 pandemic kept the two C. Ian McLaren School students learning at home on the family ranch, they started the brand through a mix of entrepreneurial spirit and pride in their family's work.
“It started off one day when we were finishing chores one day and we came up with the idea that we should make a hat company,” Jack said. “We agreed to that and we talked more into it and wanted to make it about the Alberta Ranch Kid."
“Doing barn chores, helping in the winter time, calving, and driving the tractor,” are just some of the tasks Jack said he’s helped out with at home.
“We just want to teach kids what we do around the ranch and promote our business; we have hats, beanies, and patches.”
For younger brother Casey, learning the workings of going into business has been exciting.
“It’s fun. We’ve had a couple bank meetings, we had to go do that stuff,” said Casey, adding the venture has given him an understanding of the costs of doing business and determining profit margins.
Like any business, the two had to pay a supplier up front for their initial run of merchandise with the goal of recovering the initial investment.
“You actually have to start making that money back eventually,” Casey said.
The profits of the venture, however, are part of a long game as the brothers save up to buy cattle for a herd of their own, he added.
Their mom has been proud of her sons’ initiative, helping them run their Instagram account @TheAlbertaRanchKid to promote their hats, where the two can be pictured taking part in everyday agricultural operations and events.
“It’s about showing other kids it’s a family operation,” Page said. “Everybody gets out the door, everybody drives the tractor, and everybody helps out in minus 20.”
Typically a multigenerational family business, children often learn ranching hands-on by helping alongside their parents.
“It’s promoting to show other families as well that it’s okay to have kids do hard work," she said.
Page is also a hairstylist working in the Alberta film industry, while her husband Scott works as an animal wrangler and stunt man.
Dedication to the family business doesn’t make Emerson boys homebodies though, as the two are active in sports such as hockey and golf, as well as helping out neighbours during cattle brandings and other ranching operations.
Jack even made an appearance in season 11 of CBC’s Heartland in 2017, playing the quiet boy Brick for four episodes.
The two can often be spotted at Alberta rodeos, with Jack taking part in wild pony racing, and Casey being a regular in mutton busting events—sporting his signature sheepskin chaps.
Currently, the hats and other items are available for purchase by direct-messaging the Emersons’ Instagram account, instagram.com/TheAlbertaRanchKid


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M&A Mining Activity Heats Up: Americas Silver Merging With Pershing Gold
(Kitco News) - The mining sector continues to build momentum as another merger deal has been announced.
Monday, Americas Silver Corporation (TSX: USA) (NYSE: USAS, TSX: USA) and Pershing Gold Corporation (Nasdaq: PGLC TSX: PGLC) announced an all-stock merger agreement to create an Americas focused precious metals producer.
According to the press release, Pershing shareholders will receive 0.715 common shares of Americas Silver for each common share of Pershing.
“Based on the closing price of Americas Silver on the NYSE American on September 28, 2018, this implies a value of US$1.69 per Pershing common share,” the press release said. “This represents a 39% premium to Pershing’s closing price on the NASDAQ and a 39% premium based on the volume weighted average prices of Americas Silver and Pershing for the 10-day period ending on September 28, 2018.”
Shares of Pershing have surged more than 10% on the day following the announcement. Meanwhile, shares of Americas Silver are down almost 10% on the day.
The press release said that the board of directors of both companies have unanimously recommended support for the transaction.
“This transaction aligns with our stated initiative of building a profitable and low-cost precious metal company in the Americas by operating and building low risk, low capital, high return projects,” said Darren Blasutti, president and chief executive officer of Americas Silver, in a statement.
“We are excited to announce today’s transaction and believe this provides a clear path to the development of Relief Canyon,” added Steve Alfers, president and chief executive officer of Pershing.
While Americas Silver has multiple producing assets in Mexico, a benefit of the merger is giving the company a foothold in North America with Pershing’s property in Nevada.
Currently, America Silver is looking to produce between 1.6 million and 2 million ounces of silver this year and between 7.2 and 8 million silver equivalent ounces. The company also focused on zinc and lead production as silver prices have been lackluster through most of the year.This is the second major merger announcement for the mining sector made in the last couple of weeks. Last Monday, Barrick Gold Corp announced that it would merge with Randgold Ltd. in a $6 billion all-stock deal. The new company would have a market cap of $18 billion – making it the undisputed largest gold producer in the world.


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Why Inflation Matters
The progressive myth of a "good" Fed
Jay Powell just finished his best year yet.
Caught flat-footed by accelerating inflation, the Federal Reserve chairman raised interest rates seven times by a total of 4.25 percentage points.
It was one of the swiftest rises ever. It killed the stock market and it may yet kill the economic recovery. Even as inflation moderates, Fed officials insist there will be no letting up on high—and higher—interest rates until the labor market cools. That means slower wage growth.
It may sound strange to celebrate a slowing economy and labor market, not to mention a bear market in the almighty Dow Jones.
And Powell has faced plenty of criticism. More than a year ago, correctly anticipating that Powell would raise the Fed Funds rate, then close to zero, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) called him a “dangerous man.” But the danger came from accelerating inflation. Powell would have been truly dangerous had he not acted.
This is a good time to remind ourselves why inflation matters. Outside of recessions, there are only a few periods in postwar history when workers suffered declining real wages. All of them were periods of high inflation.
During the 1970s and ‘80s, a period known as the Great Inflation, workers’ living standards repeatedly declined. Thus, consumer prices grew faster than wages from 1973 until 1976—a period encompassing the Arab oil embargo and an overly accommodative Federal Reserve—and again from 1979 to 1981, when the Iranian Revolution sent oil prices soaring once more.
During the 1980s, inflation moderated but remained high, on average about 5%. And as economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out, “Real wages for typical workers continued to decline throughout the 1980s.” By the end of that decade, real wages had fallen 9% from 17 years earlier. That’s a brutal and sustained decline.
Since then, until the pandemic, wages almost consistently rose faster than the cost of living. Not coincidentally, inflation in the last three decades was low and trending lower. Workers’ gains especially outpaced inflation in the few years prior to the pandemic.
But not now. In 2022 (and for most of the preceding year), despite the hottest labor market in memory, wages have failed to keep up with prices. In November, although wages rose to a hefty 5.1% higher than a year earlier, consumer prices were 7.1% higher. In December, wage gains fell further (the December inflation number is expected this week.) The bottom line is that even with the unemployment rate at historic lows, currently 3.5%, workers are falling behind.
The only good news is that as inflation has moderated, the gap between inflation and wages has contracted. If the Fed can squeeze the inflation number back to its target of 2%, workers should start to receive higher paychecks in real terms.
The lesson is that low and stable inflation is neither pro-business nor (as some progressives maintain) anti-worker. High inflation is the enemy of just about anyone, save for debtors and stock market traders.
In short, there is no such thing as a Fed that is good for business but bad for workers, or vice versa. The only “good” Fed is that one promotes sustainable growth. Galloping inflation is never sustainable; rapidly rising prices are the antithesis of stability.
People unhappy that the Fed Funds rate has risen to 4.5% should consider some history. In the earlier inflationary episode, after a recession in 1974 the Fed mistakenly relaxed. Inflation came roaring back, worse than ever. In 1981, a new Fed chairman, Paul Volcker, had to raise rates to 19%. Now that was painful.
Jay Powell made one serious mistake, failing to recognize inflation for far too long. Now that the Fed has corrected course, he is dead right to insist that the Fed remain vigilant until the expectation of rapidly rising prices is quenched.
With Congress failing to exercise budget discipline, and the lower branch of Congress all but ungovernable, the burden of taming inflation will fall entirely on the Fed. It will take time, and some courage. Powell is on the right track.


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Data Protection Officer Gaël Duval, manufacturer of Murena smartphones (Image provided/Murena)
Most smartphone apps collect your data continuously, no matter where you go or what you say to Siri and Google Assistant.
Companies then sell this data to advertisers, which is why it sometimes feels like you’re being recommended ads for products you mentioned in passing.
Data Protection Commissioner Gaël Duval said: Luckily, it’s possible to change the settings to keep this from happening.
Murena believes there are measurable benefits to this: He says poor privacy and personalized ads directly contribute to increasing the amount of time people spend online, making impulse purchases and even worsening mental health problems – the more tech companies know more about you, the more targeted they will target your advertising to you.
Research by TASO in 2022 found that 79 percent of people were worried about online tech companies using their data, and 65 percent felt uncomfortable about sharing their data to use services for free.
Trinity College research from 2021 found that Android smartphones sent 20 times as much data to Google as Apple smartphones, although Google has disputed the research’s methodology.
Check which apps are using your data
Duval recommended that you review which apps are accessing your data and restrict their permissions to do so.
On iPhone, you can generate a privacy report that tells you which apps have accessed your data – go to Settings > Privacy, tap App Privacy Report and turn it on.
You can create a privacy report on iPhone (Apple)
On Android, tap Security & privacy > Privacy > Permissions manager to see apps that have accessed your camera, for example.
Duval said: “Because using and selling user data is so lucrative, many apps collect your data, location tracking and access to cameras/mics are enabled by default, with vendors trusting people not to know they are being tracked will, or assume there is nothing they can do about it.” .
“For example, why would an arcade game need access to your contacts, camera, or microphone?”
Enable advanced privacy protection on iPhone
According to Duval, Apple’s cloud services, including iCloud, are end-to-end encrypted by default. That means your data isn’t completely private unless you update your security settings.
Duval said, “Apple released the Advanced Privacy feature, which enables end-to-end encryption for things like photos, notes, voice memos, iCloud Drive, and Siri shortcuts.” However, note that even with the feature enabled, Apple will still be on Your data in iCloud Mail, Contacts and Calendars can be accessed because this data is not end-to-end encrypted.
To turn it on, open the Settings app on iPhone, tap your name, then tap iCloud.
Scroll down, tap Enhanced Privacy, then tap Turn on Enhanced Privacy.
Stop using Google Maps
Google Maps collects massive amounts of data, and you should uninstall it if possible, Duval said.
Duval said: “It goes without saying that Google accesses your location when using Google Maps, but did you know that the app can also read personal contact information?” It can also record audio, read image and video files and communicate with AdServices – it has extensive access to private information and monetizes it.”
Google Maps collects a large amount of information (Alamy)
Disabling location history on Android doesn’t stop Google from collecting your data — just by creating a timeline, Murena claimed.
Apple users should uninstall Google Maps – and Android users can disable Google Maps access to location by navigating to Settings > Location > Location Permission.
Turn off the voice assistant
Since voice assistants like Google Voice and Siri collect data, you should turn them off so your device doesn’t “eavesdrop”.
Avoid using voice assistants like Hey Siri if you can (AFP/Getty)
To do this on iPhone, open Settings, select Siri and Search, and turn off Listen for Hey Siri.
To do this on Android, go to Settings > Google > Google Apps settings > Search, Assistant & Voice > Google Assistant > Access your assistant and then turn it off.
Uninstall apps you don’t use
Regularly uninstall apps you don’t use, as they may be collecting data in the background, advises Duval.
Duval says, “It’s a good idea to delete unused apps on your device every few months.”
“Your data is likely to be sold for profit and used to tether you to your device.”


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South Korea has announced plans to ban 20,000 BMW (ETR: BMW) cars following public fears surrounding engine fires.
Almost 30 engines have caught fire in 2018 and the ban will apply to those vehicles that have not yet been sent to BMW for safety checks.
Transport Minister Kim Hyun-mee said on Tuesday: “The ministry will ask mayors to order owners of unchecked BMW vehicles to have their cars’ safety checked or to stop driving them.”
“The order will take effect as soon as the owners receive letters from mayors,” he added.
Those who own the affected vehicles are able to drive to the safety checks as the ban is intended for quick safety checks rather than punitive action against those owning the cars.
Officials from the German car-maker have apologised for the engine fires and are carrying out investigations along with the South Korean government.
The group have blamed the fires on to defects in the exhaust gas recirculation system.
The car manufacturer has already recalled 300,000 vehicles this year, extending a UK recall following the BBC’s Watchdog programme that reported the vehicles could cut-off whilst being driven.
In 2017, BMW recalled 36,000 petrol cars over safety issues.
In 2013, the carmaker recalled 500,000 cars in the US, as well as in Australia, Canada and South Africa.