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As tends to happen after Google puts out its latest updates for Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird — what you should think of as the gatekeepers of the Silicon Valley giant’s tech empire — digital marketing firms are freaking out a little bit. The changes to Google’s menagerie of animal-themed policemen are said to affect a full 90% of all listings on the search engine, which earns upwards of 100 billion search queries per month. With 93% of all online experiences beginning with a search engine — the vast majority of which start with Google — the updates aimed at removing low quality links and content from search engine result pages could obviously put a big dent in the revenue of a business that relies on digital marketing to generate buzz and sales.
As a new article from The Guardian details, however, the latest Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird updates shouldn’t be met with hysteria. In effect, they only serve to continue Google’s trend of pushing web marketing away from spammy link building and content creation practices. Instead, companies will have to shift to content that delivers utility to web users. In short, they’ll have to do what most top tier SEO companies have been saying they should have been doing for the last couple of years.
What Should a “Shift to Content” Actually Entail?
Quite simply, a shift to content should just be about focusing on high quality content that people find some sort of value in, whether that means making them laugh, educating them, or otherwise. Consider, according to a report from Business 2 Community, 73% of web users feel frustrated when they view a piece of uninteresting or otherwise useless content. The latest Google updates do, indeed, place more pressure on companies to put out great content, but if that means tapping into the $278.9 billion American web users are estimated to be spending online by 2015, the smart company will be willing to make the effort.
How are you modifying your marketing strategies to keep pace with Google’s updates? Let us know in the comment section below.


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You’re reading a copy of this week’s edition of New Cannabis Ventures’ weekly newsletter, which we have been publishing since October 2015. The newsletter includes unique insights to help readers stay ahead of the curve as well as links to this week’s highlights. Newsletter.
Florida, the third most populous state with a population of 22 million, has a mature medical cannabis program dominated by publicly traded MSOs. The program was improved after initially limiting its patients to exclusively medicinal cannabis derivatives by adding the flower and then the nutrients. Florida releases weekly data, but it is not at all related to the size of the dollar. The Latest report from the Office of Medical Marijuana Use It is a good example of the type of information conveyed – number of patients and unit size for each licensed company by type:
Leading cannabis companies in Florida
The four leading companies, Trulieve, Verano Holdings, Curaleaf and Ayr Wellness, own more than 59% of the licensed dispensaries. In the week ending 9/15, they produced 74% of the produce manufactured in Florida and about 76% of the state’s flowers sold.
The Florida program is unusual in that the market is almost vertically integrated, meaning that nearly all sales to customers are produced by the dispensary owner. There is very little wholesale activity. Thus, margins in a state tend to be higher than in other states. For example, projected 2023 EBITDA margins for Trulieve and Verano are 34.9% and 36.6%, respectively. This is significantly higher than their peers, who are 16% (Planet 13 Holdings) to 32.1% (Green Thumb Industries). While we don’t strongly anticipate the margin pressure in Florida that we’ve seen in other states, it will drop sharply if the state becomes significantly less vertically integrated. The Florida Supreme Court in May 2021 upheld this aspect of their program.
Florida hemp data
The state releases unit sizes each week, but does not share historical growth rates. Florida revealed that it now has 751,311 eligible patients, 3.4% of the state’s population, which is a healthy proportion. This week, growth from last year was 22.0%, a record low. At the end of 2021, the annual growth rate was 41.9%. Looking at the data from BDSA Analytics, one can get a better idea of the dollar volume. In July, sales of $193.8 million grew 27.2%. This was slightly higher than the 24-25% annual growth rate in patients during the month.
A year ago, with patient numbers increasing 22.0% as of 9/15, MMJ products unit volume grew 23.6%, and flower sales were up only 11.7%. With strong but slow patient growth and companies improving their production capabilities, we believe the market can become more competitive even without moving toward wholesale.
Adult use could be coming
We don’t foresee major problems in Florida, and we also note that the state could move toward legal adult use and that we think it would be beneficial to incumbents. State residents could vote on adult use in 2024 if activists succeeded in collecting 900,000 valid signatures from registered voters.
As one of nine publicly traded US cannabis companies generating more than $100 million in quarterly revenue, Ayr Wellness is poised to capitalize on new growth from adult-transformed states such as New Jersey and Massachusetts. The company’s stock is down significantly to date, and results for the August second quarter came in line with expectations. Founder and CEO Jonathan Sandelman said: “With our core operating footprint, the vast majority of our capital expenditures behind us, and a strong cash position of $117 million on our balance sheet, we believe we are well positioned to weather this economic environment and appear stronger on the other side.” .
Get up to speed by visiting Ayr Wellness Investor dashboard which we maintain on their behalf as a customer of New Cannabis Ventures. Click the blue Follow Company button to stay updated on their progress.
New Cannabis Ventures publishes curated articles as well as exclusive news. Here are some of the most interesting business content from this week:
Greenlight, a multi-state private operator, has 23 operating dispensaries and another 15 dispensaries under construction. The company, which has grown its footprint largely by winning licenses, focuses on midwestern states that compete I have generally overlooked. However, the company sees opportunities there as those countries prepare to transition to adult use. In an exclusive interview, CEO John Mueller, a serial entrepreneur, spoke about the company’s market presence, upcoming polling initiatives, and plans to grow the company.
Cannabis sales in Michigan sequentially retreated in August. Pharmaceutical sales fell 53.9 percent from a year ago to $18.5 million, down 12.4 percent from the previous quarter. Adult use sales expanded 50.9% year-over-year to $189.4 million, up 0.3% sequentially. Sales are up 26.1% so far this year at $1.45 billion.
Fire & Flower Q2 revenue decreased 6% to C$40.7 million from C$43.3 million in the same period last year. The company reported higher revenue with lower retail stores but also Significant drop in digital revenueWhich affected the company’s results for the second quarter. New CEO Stephane Trudel served in the position for only one month out of the reported quarter and said the company is “focused on transforming our business and strategic opportunities with the goal of achieving positive adjusted earnings and free cash flow.”
High Tide reported that third-quarter revenue nearly doubled to $95.4 million, compared to $48.1 million in the same quarter last year. Conversely, revenue increased by 18%. The company indicated that its results came despite gGlobal easing of e-commerce sales as pandemic-related restrictions are lifted. “I have always sought Under promise and more than offering. This is a value that I constantly instill in our team. We set goals and are held accountable as a team if we don’t meet them. “I am pleased to report that based on our most recent financial results, we are consistently beating our targets as they are communicated to the market,” said Raj Grover, President and CEO.
For real-time updates, download our free mobile app for Android or apple devices like Facebook page, or follow Alan on Twitter. Share and discover industry news with like-minded people from the largest group of cannabis investors and entrepreneurs in LinkedIn.
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Hey website builders – stop stealing my expensive bandwidth! Video autoplay is a terrible idea (I’m looking at you, ESPN.com). And according to AdWeek, it might be coming to your Facebook walls.
Auto-play video a terrible user experience. It’s annoying. It bothers co-workers. It feels a little like a hacker has taken over your computer and made it do things you don’t want it to do. It’s stealing from advertisers by generating less-than-credible click counts. But most important, it’s STEALING from consumers. It should be banned the way unsolicited telemarketing calls were initially banned from cell phones — because most consumers used to pay for cell phone minutes.
Like many consumers, I am an avid user of broadband wireless. My cell phone is a hotspot, and I work on the road often. Like all “tethered” users, my bundle of data has a hard limit, and the overage fees are high. Video gobbles up my data plan. Auto-play video will really gobble up my data plan. This is why I am afraid to click on TheWorldWideLeaderInSports.com when I am on my broadband. I’m paying for those ads.
AdWeek says Facebook is testing auto-play video ads. The temptation might be too great for the service, which boasts of “Super Bowl sized” audiences. Well, unless Facebook is prepared to pay consumers’ wireless bills, it better rethink the idea. They could cost wireless broadband audiences dearly, and they might even seriously eat into smartphone users’ caps, too.


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Battery technology stands among the most significant barriers to exploration and innovation. While most of our gadgets rely on power, most of them use batteries that takes too long to charge. Today, the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) has found a breakthrough. They have developed a battery technology that stores a larger capacity and provides for high-speed charging. The technology is set to benefit mobile phone users and electric cars. Currently, we have the fast-charge technology. As compared to the new advanced tech, SAIT said that the new tech charges the battery five times faster than the old-tech.
The New Technology
The new extreme fast charging technology adopts the use of a single layer of carbon atoms. The atoms are drawn from a known graphite called graphene. The carbon conducts electricity 100 times more effective than copper. On the other hand, it beats silicon and lithium in the transfer of energy at the ratio of 140:1. It’s expected that the technology will also improve the battery life and store a larger capacity as compared to the regular batteries. The lifespan of the battery is still unclear, but the high-speed technology brings convenience when topping up devices. As a result, sparing five minutes once in a while will ensure your gadget remains operational. The breakthrough, will consequently, help us in pushing tech a little further as power storage and charging inhibits growth.
The concept of the tech is similar to today’s fast charging technology where 30 minutes of charging gives you 50 percent battery power. The extreme-fast charging tech reduces the overall charging time to almost 12 minutes. According to Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, they have also developed a means of mass productions. Consequently, the price comes at an affordable rate. However, the company made no indications of using the tech on smartphones or other electric devices. Additionally, there is no information on when the technology will be ready for the consumers to use.


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BEIJING (Reuters) - A U.S. decision to impose special duties on Chinese tires could trigger a host of trade complaints against Chinese products and a backlash from Beijing, creating tensions as Western nations seek China’s support at a G20 meeting.
China responded swiftly to President Barack Obama’s announcement Friday of safeguard duties on tire imports from China, saying on Monday it would request World Trade Organization consultations with the U.S. over the duties.
It also announced its own anti-dumping investigations of chicken products from the United States, a trade worth $800 million a year, as well as U.S. automotive exports.
Looming in the United States are complaints about products ranging from electric blankets to a steelmaking ingredient, while Chinese and European trade negotiators are gearing up for a fight over shoes.
Obama, in a speech on Wall Street, said he was committed to expanding world trade and denied protectionist intent.
“When, as happened this weekend, we invoke provisions of existing agreements, we do so not to be provocative or to promote self-defeating protectionism,” he said.
“We do so because enforcing trade agreements is part and parcel of maintaining an open and free trading system.”
The United Steelworkers union filed the tire protection petition earlier this year. It said a tripling of Chinese tire imports from 2004 to 2008 had cost more than 5,000 U.S. jobs.
The U.S. trade deficit with China totaled $103 billion in the first half of 2009, down 13 percent from last year but it has grown considerably over the last decade.
The imbalance is a source of much ire in Washington and the rest of the country.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the Obama administration will strongly object to any attempt by China to retaliate against chicken exports.
“There is no reason why another country should try to even the scale, if you will, by focusing on agricultural products,” Vilsack told a National Farmers Union conference.
Stocks on Wall Street slipped shortly after the opening bell on Monday in part over concerns about the trade dispute but finished squarely ahead, with the Dow industrials up 19 points to 9,624. U.S. tire makers Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co and Cooper Tire & Rubber Co ended higher.
NO FULL-SCALE TRADE WAR
While the intensified sparring between two of the world’s biggest economies could trigger a bout of nerves in financial markets, it is unlikely to spiral into a full-scale trade war.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the Obama administration did not expect the tire spat to cause friction on other issues of interest to the two countries such as the North Korean nuclear standoff.
“I don’t see that a dispute like this will cause ... countries like the United States and China to get off track on things that are very important in terms of global matters,” he told reporters on Air Force One.
The countries have too much at stake and need each other too much when it comes to problems like North Korea to let the dispute spin out of control, said Jia Qingguo, expert on China-U.S. relations at Peking University.
“Both sides will work hard to limit the fallout from this to within certain parameters and not let it affect the broader state of relations and cooperation,” he said.
On Monday, Chinese state media denounced Obama’s decision, which launches additional duties of 35 percent on imports of Chinese-made tires from September 26, a day after the G20 summit of the world’s biggest nations ends in Pittsburgh.
“Even though the duties the U.S. imposed were lower than those recommended by U.S. International Trade Commission, it is still a serious case of protectionism, which China resolutely opposes,” said China’s vice minister of commerce, Zhong Shan.
In Washington, a U.S. trade official said the tire decision could withstand WTO legal scrutiny. “In this case, the United States is confident that our action is fully WTO consistent,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
After the U.S. decision, share prices of Chinese tire makers plunged in trade on Monday, led by major producer Double Coin, which fell by its daily 10 percent limit. Rubber futures in Tokyo dropped 9 percent.
Worries about a deteriorating trade environment could weigh on financial markets.
“In an environment where it looks like global trade will not recover to the levels we saw before the crisis for quite some time, the last thing we need is any sort of inkling of protectionism,” said Glenn Maguire, chief Asia economist with Societe Generale in Hong Kong.
U.S. chicken and motor vehicle products targeted by Beijing’s anti-dumping inquiries were roughly equal in value to China’s tire exports to the United States -- about $2 billion a year, Mei Xinyu, a trade expert with the Ministry of Commerce, told Chinese media.
The two countries have vowed to cooperate in trying to revive global economic growth, but trade friction could spill into the G20 summit. Chinese President Hu Jintao will meet Obama in Pittsburgh and host him in China in November.
The tire duty was the first time Washington has applied special “safeguard” provisions that Beijing agreed to before joining the WTO in 2001.
That could spark a “chain reaction of trade protectionist measures that could slow the current pace of revival in the world economy,” the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said.
But economists and experts said the dispute would not threaten the economic underpinnings of Sino-U.S. relations.
The new duty of 35 percent adds to an existing 4 percent duty. The extra duty would fall to 30 percent in the second year and 25 percent in the third year.
Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard, Kirby Chien, Yu Le, Tom Miles and Doug Palmer and Charles Abbott in Washington; Writing by Lucy Hornby; Editing by Philip Barbara
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.


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As of January 4th, permanent makeup artists in the EU are facing a ban that affects their livelihood. Known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals), the ban restricts the use of 4,000 chemicals, some of which are found in commonly used permanent makeup pigments.
Perma Blend Is Taking Action
Worldwide leader in permanent makeup pigments and supplies, Perma Blend is offering a solution for European PMU artists. The Perma Blend mission is to offer professional EU artists continued access to top-quality pigments.
Responding to the ban right away, Perma Blend has tripled the size of their US-based manufacturing, bottling, and R&D facility. Perma Blend has also enforced a new quality management system, all to create a new REACH-compliant line of PMU pigments.
About the Perma Blend Luxe Line
The Perma Blend Luxe line of pigments so far consists of 44 commonly used colors. Each pigment is carefully formulated to meet the new EU ban’s standards. The Luxe line is available to EU-based permanent makeup artists as of January 10th.
"We’re so proud of the extraordinary work of our artists — they make such an impact on the lives of their
clients. We want to make sure they're able to continue their craft." — Perma Blend Brand Director Anne Marie Rubino.


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Despite the cat already being out of the bag on the new 2010 Ford Taurus, Ford's furiously trying to shove it back in, covering up the new Ford Taurus in all sorts of anti-spy camouflage. And though the sedan is covered and padded to the extreme there's still a lot to learn from these photos. The front bumper appears to have more detail than the previously snapped Taurus, suggesting that wasn't a final product. There's also a tester running around with dual exhausts, which could mean EcoBoost, or Heavens to Betsy, a 2010 SHO Taurus! Like Mulder, we want to believe. Full spy report below the jump.
Here are some shots of Ford's invigorated 2010 Taurus, caught testing in Detroit. This new Taurus is what the car should have been all along, according to Ford's CEO Alan Mulally. Although the car is very heavily camouflaged, the prototype definitely looks related to the camera phone shots of a purported Taurus clay model, which leaked earlier this year. We think we can see some differences on the front bumper—around the fog lights—suggesting that the finer points of the 2010 Taurus' design were still in flux at the time the photo was snapped inside Ford's Design Center. We have seen photos two different prototypes—with single exhaust and dual exhaust. The dual exhaust set-up likely points to the Ecoboosted 3.5L V-6, which will produce 340-hp in the Lincoln MKS.


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Boston, USA – April 11, 2014 – The “PAX East 2014” is from 11 to 13 April 2014 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC), Thermaltake has partnered with premier eTailer Newegg to capture visitors’ attention to bring a spectacular display of Thermaltake and Tt eSPORTS’s newest products into the hands of gamers and DIY enthusiasts alike.
PAX east is the premier east coast gaming event in the USA started by the team at Penny Arcade in 2004. From there it has grown to be a huge event with massive amounts of sponsors and a very diverse gaming crowd with cosplay and even game developers showing off what they have to offer.
Thermaltake will be in full force at PAX east 2014 partnered with Newegg in their expansive booth is where you can find many of the latest and greatest from Thermaltake brands including a high end liquid cooled Core V71 showing off the awesome capability of the new Thermaltake chassis. Also for gaming duty you will not be let down with the Poseidon Z making an appearance with the THERON Infrared ready to show its gaming prowess.
If you are in attendance be sure to stop by as there will be giveaways and competitions to attend at the booth which can win you a new Poseidon Z or other great prizes!
Also during the PAX event keep an eye on Newegg.com for the special deals and even PAX store which can get select Thermaltake and Tt eSPORTS products for special pricing during the PAX show!
As always be sure to follow Thermaltake brands Facebook and social medias to ensure you get the most up to date news and event coverage for PAX and all upcoming major events!
Thermaltake official website: www.thermaltake.com
Thermaltake Facebook Fan Page:www.facebook.com/ThermaltakeInc
Tt eSPORTS official website: www.ttesports.com
Tt eSPORTS Facebook Fan Page: www.facebook.com/TteSPORTS
Thermaltake Technology was established in January, 1999 and has been market to the world with “Thermaltake” brand name ever since. The brand personality of Unique, Aggressive, Vivid, and Stylish makes Thermaltake an expert in creating Exciting things and Fascinating environment for gamers and enthusiasts, also Keep them Constantly High physically and mentally.
Moreover, Thermaltake Technology get close to consumers and observe lead users’ behavior and requirement, to design aesthetic and high quality products which will greatly improve system performance and bring the user to the up most potential. With innovative design and unique style, Thermaltake products spread rapidly among the enthusiasts in DIY market and soon become the number one choice for PC DIY enthusiasts worldwide.
About “Tt eSPORTS”
Thermaltake is a well known brand for gaming & DIY in Case, Cooler, and PSU for years. Due to the constant requests for keyboards and mice from gamers and end users, Thermaltake decided to create a series of gaming keyboards, mice, and headsets with the Tt eSPORTS brand. By using Tt eSPORTS, we want to extend our product lines into the gaming industry, and provide more “personalized gaming” gears to gamers and enthusiasts worldwide. With years of experience in gaming industry, Tt eSPORTS is committed to bring the most personalized and the highest quality weapons for the most competitive cyber battles, and advances with the idea of products designed by gamers for gamers.


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A new line of perfume is about to explode onto the Icelandic market, made of melt water from a glacier sitting on top of the Eyjafjoell volcano that erupted in April, spreading ash and flight chaos across Europe.
"When Eyjafjoell started erupting I suddenly got the idea to bring the power of Icelandic nature into people's homes," Icelandic designer Sigrun Lilja Gudjonsdottir, head of company Gydja Collection, explained Tuesday.
The citrus-smelling perfume, which will be produced in Grasse in southern France and will be sold in square bottles with a lava rock attached, has been named EFJ Eyjafjallajoekull.
The letters EFJ are there "so that non-Icelanders can pronounce the name of their perfume," Gudjonsdottir explained, adding however that the full name of the glacier on top of Eyjafjoell also needed to be on the bottle since "I wanted the perfume to represent the strength of Icelandic nature."
The article is here and I thank Daniel Lippman for the pointer.


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Between Monarch and Ryanair, a Million Holidays Just Got Ruined
By Michael Fraiman
Every Friday, Outpost’s online editor rounds up the weeks’ biggest travel headlines.
Canadians may be unfamiliar with Monarch Airlines, a British airliner founded in the late 1960s that flew to often sunny vacation spots such as Egypt, Cyprus, Greece and Turkey. But this week, the airline shut down operations entirely, forcing the United Kingdom to undergo its biggest-ever peacetime repatriation effort, bringing back some 110,00 vacationers who found themselves literally stranded around the world. About 200,000 more have been issued refunds for their anticipated vacations, their holiday plans kiboshed by the sudden collapse. The reason? With so many low-cost rivals, they couldn’t compete; spokespeople have also cited fears of terrorism and the British pound’s fall since Brexit as major issues. Airline executives simply found themselves having to do more with rising costs, and they couldn’t handle it.
Monarch customers in the UK: don’t go to the airport. There will be no more Monarch flights. This page will no longer be monitored. pic.twitter.com/hzfQGZ0Ty8
— Monarch (@Monarch) October 2, 2017
So what’s going on with Ryanair, arguably Europe’s most famous low-cost carrier? While not quite collapsing, it’s not in much better shape than Monarch. The airline—which is famous for boasting remarkably cheap fares that offer barely anything more than a seat on the aircraft (extra luggage, water, even printed tickets at the gate cost extra)—announced last month that they cancelled more than 20,000 flights between November 2017 and March 2018, effectively ruining Christmas for an estimated 700,000 travellers. While not due to financial mismanagement, this one is chalked up to pilot scheduling errors, unionization and vacation time. I guess you get what you pay for?
And on that note, let’s segue over to Google’s new US$159 earbuds. Google just announced earbuds that can translate up to 40 languages—real-time, in your ear. They hook up to Google phones and Google Assistant (the voice-activated command controls), using a combination of their machine-learning tech with Google Translate. The future is now! No longer will tourists be flustered when trying to ask where the bathroom is in Germany. “It’s hard to overstate the impact this feature could have on the global travel industry, especially coming from a company like Google,” an analyst wrote for Skift. Watch the demo video above to see it in action.


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10 November 2016 – 20 December 2016
The UK’s original, award winning Manchester Christmas Market return with the biggest and best festive offering to date.
04 November 2016 – 08 January 2017
For the first ever time, alongside the traditional fairground, Festive Cathedral Gardens will be home to a glittering ice rink.
11 November 2016 – 26 December 2016
Winter markets, an ice skating rink, street food stalls, bars, an art space and a programme of live music and DJs.
09 November 2016 – 11 November 2016
Swiftly following the release of their eagerly anticipated new album ‘The Ride’, Brit Breakthrough Award winners Catfish and the Bottlemen announce a UK Tour this November
12 November 2016 – 12 November 2016
Doki Doki – The Manchester Japanese Festival is an event held in Manchester, UK, celebrating both traditional and modern Japanese culture.
09 November 2016 – 24 December 2016
Visit Europe’s tallest walk-in Christmas tree for a truly magical Christmas feel at Cheshire.
10 November 2016 – 13 November 2016
Deck The Halls at The Ideal Home Show at Christmas, back this November.
12 November 2016
Manchester’s iconic Albert Hall unveil a new party room in the Bell Tower and an electric line up.
02 November 2016 – 28 January 2017
Manchester Central Library presents a photographic journey into the history of Oasis.
10 November 2016 – 12 November 2016
Over 100 real ales, ciders and perries will be available at the 2016 Rochdale Beer Festival, organised in partnership with CAMRA.
07 November 2016 – 24 December 2016
Make sure you head North this Christmas and embark on a magical and breathtaking adventure to the North Pole – The Polar Expedition at intu Trafford Centre!
12 November 2016
Tameside’s spectacular lantern parade will be the first of many exciting events in the borough during the countdown to Christmas.
Have a great weekend exploring the region. For more inspiration go to visitmanchester.com.


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SAN JOSE, Calif. Taking a different tack from its competitors in the structured ASIC market, Fujitsu Microelectronics America, Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) said Tuesday (Sept. 9) it plans to bring 90 nm and direct-write e-beam technology to bear on the market in 2004.
Far from seeing the market as a time-to-market play for mid-range and low-end ASIC designs and hence a defensive move against FPGAs Fujitsu sees the technology as a primary delivery vehicle for advanced ASIC processes.
"We expect to release the first 90-nm AccelArray family in the first quarter of 2004," said Vincent Shen, senior director of ASIC engineering at Fujitsu. "We believe that the AccelArray, which eliminates many of the back-end design steps for customers, will be an excellent way of offering customers the benefits of 90-nm technology without exposing them to the complexities of being an early adopter of a challenging process."
On this schedule, the first 90-nm AccelArray product will be available just a few months after the first external customer tapeout on Fujitsu's 90-nm process. That is now scheduled for a U.S. foundry customer for later this month or early October.
That compares to the delay of a year or more that has typically separated the release of a gate-array family from the release of the underlying process to advanced COT design teams.
The first 90-nm AccelArray is expected to be a general purpose device much like the existing 130-nm AccelArray MegaFrame chips. Not far behind, however, will be the first in Fujitsu's line of more application-directed AccelArrays. The device will have a large number of instances of Fujitsu's diffused serdes and universal PHY macros, providing as many as 32 high-speed serial channels.
The AccelArray devices, like other structured ASICs, are built on a base wafer that includes configurable I/O cells, metal-configured logic cells and memory blocks. Power and clock distribution and test circuitry are also pre-defined, as are analog PLLs.
Customers will hand off a verified net list or RTL design to Fujitsu, which will then perform back-end design mapping the net list onto the array elements and creating the three metal layers that characterize the elements, configure the memories and establish the user-defined interconnect.
Shen said the back-end process at Fujitsu takes from two to four weeks, with perhaps another week for synthesis if the customers chooses to hand off at RTL. Approximately one month after the customer signs off on the returned timing, Fujitsu can deliver sample chips.
This represents a six- to eight-week turnaround for 90-nm chips, according to the company, in exchange for some sacrifice in maximum speed and density. "Let us just say that the largest AccelArray today in 130 nm offers about 3.5 million user gates," Shen said. "We feel that is too small for some of our customers, so we are enlarging it in the 90-nm process."
Another major technology move will shrin k the turnaround time for samples even further. In mid-2004 Fujitsu intends to begin using direct-to-wafer e-beam technology to pattern the three user-defined metal layers, eliminating the process of making masks for those three layers for prototype chips. This could potentially reduce the time from timing sign-off to sample dice to two weeks, Shen said.
"We have used the e-beam equipment for other purposes on earlier process generations, so the equipment is there and ready to go," he explained.


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A former Microsoft worker was charged for allegedly stealing $10 million in digital currency.
Volodymyr Kvashuk, a 25-year-old Ukrainian citizen, is accused of stealing gift cards and other digital currency and reselling them on the internet for profit. He allegedly bought a $1.7 million lakefront home and $160,000 vehicle with the proceeds.
Kvashuk, who was arrested yesterday, helped test Microsoft's online retail sales platform.
Read more from MarketWatch.
Missouri Association of Manufacturers event sets record in third year.


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US car sales plunge in March
But automakers are encouraged by a recent increase in showroom traffic.
Automakers insist they see signs of life in the marketplace. But March was another dismal month for US car sales, as consumers clung to their old vehicles in the face of America’s economic woes.
These results weren’t exactly a surprise, considering that the Big Three are mired in a historic slump. But still, the poor showing might:
• Increase pressure on GM bondholders, as well as the United Auto Workers, to make concessions to keep GM out of bankruptcy.
• Give Chrysler a further shove toward an alliance with Fiat.
• Get Congress to seriously consider a government-sponsored “cash for clunkers” incentive program meant to break the industry’s downward spiral.


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The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved a proposal for setting up public WiFi hotspots across the country via public data offices or PDOs, which could even be a kirana shop or a paan shop. The move, aimed at helping accelerate the uptake of broadband Internet services, will not require the PDOs to get a license or pay a fee.
The public Wi-Fi Access Network Interface, which will be called ‘PM-WANI’, was first recommended by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in 2017. This will involve multiple players, including PDOs, Public Data Office Aggregators (PDOA), app providers, and a central registry.
PDOs — comparable to a PCO or a cybercafe — will establish, maintain, and operate Wi-Fi access points and deliver broadband services to subscribers, while the PDOAs will be aggregators of PDOs and perform functions such as authorisation and accounting. The app provider will develop the app to register users and discover PM-WANI compliant WiFi hotspots nearby. The details of all three will be maintained by the registry.
According to TRAI, in most major economies, for 50%-70 % of their total usage time, mobile users use WiFi technology to communicate. However, in India, this figure is less than 10%. Service providers had in 2018 stated that they aimed to provide 5 lakh hotspots by March 31, 2019 and 10 lakh hotspots by September 30, 2019. However, these targets have not been achieved.
“The move will help unleash a Wi-Fi revolution in the country. For PDOs, there will be no license or fee or registration. This could be a tea shop or kirana shop...PM-WANI is going to be a power transformative digital platform to empower ordinary Indians… it offers a lot of scope for various sectors, particularly education,” Minister for Communications, Electronics & Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad said while announcing the decision.
An official release added that while no registration will be required for PDOs, the PDOAs and app providers will get themselves registered with the Department of Telecommunications through an online registration portal without paying any registration fee.
Registration will be granted within seven days of the application, else they will be deemed registered, Mr. Prasad added.
“COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated delivery of stable and high speed broadband internet (data) services to an increasingly large number of subscribers in the country, including areas which do not have 4G mobile coverage. This can be achieved by deployment of Public Wi-Fi,” the government said.
It added that this would also help create employment and enhance disposable incomes in the hands of small and medium entrepreneurs, and boost India’s GDP.


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PRADA'S hopes of turning its flagging fortunes around were bolstered on Thursday when designer Miuccia Prada's latest womenswear collection was given a warm reception at Milan fashion week.
The spring-summer 2017 catwalk show was hosted against the backdrop of a multi-screen
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“Like most conservatives, I don’t like subsidies or government intervention in markets.” So began a column in the Daily Caller by Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.).
Anyone familiar with the ways of Washington knows what’s coming next: a series of sorry excuses for why — just this once — the congressman’s alleged commitment to free-market principles must be jettisoned. Rooney does not disappoint.
“But,” he continues, cluing in the reader who did not foresee this turn of events, “I do like U.S. sugar policy, which, according to some, runs counter to these core conservative ideals.”
That may be the understatement of the year. The sugar industry is among the most coddled industries in the United States. The federal government simultaneously restricts the amount of sugar that domestic producers can sell in the United States and slaps a roughly 150 percent tariff on sugar imports above a fixed quota. It also makes loans to sugar processors on the condition that they pay sugar producers at set minimum prices. As a result, Americans pay three times the world price for sugar.
The savvy reader will not be surprised to learn that Rooney represents one of the largest sugar-producing states in the Union and therefore has a vested interest in keeping that industry free from foreign competition. Of course, he couches his pork-barrel politics in the language of the common good. Why, without forcing the domestic price of sugar to triple the world price, Rooney claims, Americans would be at the mercy of dastardly Latin American countries whose governments (ahem) heavily subsidize their domestic sugar industries!
Brazil is Rooney’s biggest bogeyman. The Portuguese-speaking nation is “the OPEC of the sugar world,” controlling “nearly half of the global sugar market,” he writes. Its government “plans to plow another $1 trillion into its sugar market over the next few decades” — a pittance compared to what Washington spends on corporate welfare — and its sugar labor force “in some cases, makes just 50 cents an hour.”
Rooney insists that U.S. sugar producers “have some of the lowest production costs in the world,” yet “they cannot compete with the heavy hand of the Brazilian government.”
“Government intervention,” he concludes, “will be necessary to maintain America’s sugar industry.”
Being a good Republican, Rooney naturally doesn’t want the government to play “too large” a role in the sugar industry or to “dictate business practices”; but he does want it to skew the playing field in favor of American sugar producers and against American consumers. Thus, he favors maintaining the sugar program as it currently stands. This, he says, “is the least intrusive way to keep 142,000 Americans off unemployment rolls.”
This is a textbook example of examining only those effects of a policy that are readily apparent while ignoring other, less visible effects. While the tariff may keep Americans employed in the sugar industry, the fact that it bumps the domestic sugar price to triple the world price is surely of some consequence. Aaron Goone observed in the Dartmouth Business Journal,
Politically, the oft-stated case for this type of protectionism is that it preserves jobs. This is true for the U.S. sugar industry, but the tariffs involved negatively affect the majority of the population. In fact, despite “saving” a few low-wage jobs in the uncompetitive sugar farm industry, these tariffs bring the U.S. a net economic cost. In his book Free Trade Under Fire, Dr. Douglas Irwin, a professor of International Trade in Dartmouth’s Economics department, states that artificially high sugar prices due to tariffs cost the American economy $1.9 billion of deadweight loss a year, on average. Since there would be an estimated 3,600 jobs at risk due to international competition if the industry was liberalized, this means that it costs around $600,000 to preserve a single at-risk job through the tariffs. Considering that the mean wage of the industry is $37,000, the implication is that the opportunity cost to our economy of saving one job in the sugar industry is $563,000. This is about 3.5 times the average CEO salary!
Moreover, Goone points out, “an astounding 42 percent of the benefits from the tariffs go to just 0.02 percent of the farms, most of which are under the control of just one family.” In addition, he notes, “these firms receiving the most benefit are the ones that would be least affected by international competition. Not only are the tariffs not helping those they are intended to support but they are also simultaneously destroying jobs in downstream industries, which are forced to bear the tariff’s costs.”
The candy industry is just one of those suffering from Washington’s sugar protectionism. A 2006 U.S. Department of Commerce report found that sugar quotas were “a major factor” in the loss of 10,000 candy-manufacturing jobs: companies simply moved their operations to countries where sugar is cheaper. That is why Life Savers, for example, are now made in Canada, and why Brach’s and Hershey’s candies are increasingly being produced in Mexico.
The number of other jobs lost because of the sugar program may not even be quantifiable, but it seems clear that in order to save 142,000 jobs in the sugar industry — or, as Goone would have it, 3,600 — the government is putting tens of thousands of Americans out of work. In fact, more jobs may be lost to the sugar program than are saved by it!
As for “the OPEC of the sugar world,” if Brazil wants to keep trying corporatism, let its government have at it. There is no reason to punish Americans — or Brazilian sugar laborers, who might experience higher wages and growing ranks if Americans could buy more of their product — for the actions of Brazilian officials and their corporate cronies. Brazil’s experiment with an unfree market will, of necessity, come crashing down sooner or later. In the meantime, should that country try to use its market dominance to force up the world price of sugar, it will undoubtedly find that other countries’ producers will rush to undercut it — if their governments stay out of the way.
Finally, it is amusing to note that Rooney argues that the United States should protect its own sugar industry because “[all] of the 120 countries that produce sugar have governments that aid their sugar producers and protect their domestic sugar jobs in some way.” Conservatives tend to pooh-pooh liberals’ arguments that Washington should enact certain programs (such as universal health insurance) because “everyone’s doing it”; and they don’t take too kindly to U.S. courts’ citing foreign court rulings. Why, then, should the U.S. government engage in foolish, counterproductive, and unconstitutional sugar protectionism just because every other country does so?
In the end, Rooney wants the sugar program to continue because it visibly benefits his monied constituents, as his arguments for maintaining the program reveal. The largely invisible harm it brings to others does not figure into his calculation. After all, those who benefit directly from the sugar program, though few in number, can be counted on to contribute heavily to the campaigns of those politicians who keep the gravy train running; while those who are harmed by it, though they far outnumber the beneficiaries, will neither recognize that it is the source of their woes nor contribute significantly to politicians promising to repeal it — if any can be found. No wonder Big Sugar gets such a sweet deal.


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Good news for wannabe iPhone jailbreakers: The Chronic Dev Team and pod2g have finally released the first untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2.
"But wait," you ask. "Haven't we been able to jailbreak these devices for months now?"
No. Don't confuse iPhone 4S and iPad 2 jailbreaking with iOS 5 jailbreaking apples and oranges, thanks to the inclusion of Apple's new dual-core A5 processor in these two devices. Prior to yesterday's release of the "Absinthe A5" jailbreak, there has been no working, public hack for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2. Other Apple devices running iOS 5 were first treated to a tethered jailbreak in late October, all of one week or so after the launch of iOS 5, with a full untethered jailbreak not arriving until late December.
"Ten months ago, I myself was live tweeting from a tediously long line at the nearest Apple retail store, where I anxiously waited to become one of the world's first owners (& hackers) of the newly-released iPad 2," writes the Chronic Dev Team.
"At that point, I don't know if any iOS hacker anticipated how much the A5 chip would completely change the game & up the stakes. The endless war we fight to jailbreak has become more & more difficult with each new device released, and our recent battle against A5 only proved this further."
To assist in exploiting the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, Chronic Dev Team members used a utility called "CDevReporter" to collect a war chest of crash reports for both devices more than ten million flooding over to the Chronic Dev Team in less than a week's worth of time, they said. This allowed the team to crowdsource the process of discovering new vulnerabilities for A5 devices, or the act of transforming standard bugs uncovered during a normal device's operation into potential attack vectors for full jailbreak exploits.
So what's the benefit of jailbreaking your Apple product anyway? Unauthorized applications specifically, you can now fire up third-party app libraries like Cydia to install apps you wouldn't otherwise be able to find on the official Apple Store. And these, in turn, can help you customize your device beyond what Apple itself would ever allow you to do, which includes turning your device into a Wi-Fi hotspot (and angering your wireless carrier in the process).
The downside to jailbreaking? You void your Apple warranty and could waste precious hours begging Apple Genius Bar employees to make your iPhone 4S or iPad 2 better should some part of the device's software or hardware go buggy. You're also likely going to be stuck waiting when future iOS updates are released, as you won't want to install Apple's update without first verifying that your jailbreak will still be able to function.
Provided the site isn't still getting slammed, you can download the Mac-only jailbreak utility (for now) over at greenpois0n.com.
For more from David, subscribe to him on Facebook: David Murphy.


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Customer magazine launch for Tesco Ireland
Posted by Karen Hesse
February 5th, 2014
Supermarket giant Tesco has just given a big thumbs-up to content marketing with the news that it plans to launch a free customer magazine in Ireland in April 2014. The customer magazine will be published ten times a year and distributed free in Tesco stores around the country. With a print run of over 200,000 copies the customer magazine is set to be Ireland’s largest lifestyle title.
Why launch a customer magazine?
So what might Tesco gain from the launch of its own customer magazine in Ireland? The Irish grocery market is hotly contested. While Tesco is the market leader homegrown retailer Dunnes Stores is jostling for the top spot with 24.2 per cent of the market according to figures from Kantar World Panel. SuperValu has 19.5 per cent of the grocery market and discount retailers Aldi and Lidl also show strong growth.
Tesco doesn’t do things by chance and has been using analytics to drive strategy before Google was even invented. So the planned launch of a customer magazine focused on food, family and living is a real vote of confidence in magazines as a strategic way to engage with customers.
Since the launch of its Clubcard in the UK in 1995 powerful data from customer insights company Dunhumby has helped Tesco get to know its customer better and increase market share. So its use of the magazine medium is based on fact rather than fancy. Research by the Content Marketing Association in the UK backs this up. Consumers spend an average of 25 minutes reading a customer magazine. This leads to an average 8% increase in sales.
Magazines as part of the marketing mix
Given the research findings it’s no surprise that magazines are already a significant component of big brand strategy in the UK. Tesco itself leads the field publishing Tesco Magazine, the largest circulation free magazine in the UK with an average of 1.9 million copies per issue according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.
Tesco already knows that quality branded editorial in a magazine format can play an important role in a content marketing plan. And all the main UK grocery retailers appear to agree as four of the top circulating consumer magazines in the UK are published by supermarkets.
Big brands like Asda, John Lewis, Morrisons, Sainsburys and Marks & Spencer have also become publishers in their own right. But this is not just restricted to retail as in the last few years Virgin Media, ASOS, British Airways and 02 have all launched magazines.
However, Irish brands, with some exceptions like Aer Lingus and Carphone Warehouse have yet to capitalise on the benefits of magazines as a way to engage with their customers. Hopefully Tesco’s new Irish magazine will be bespoke to the audience it plans to serve and not just a re-purposed version of its UK titles.
As any publisher will tell you, the real strength of a magazine is how closely it identifies with its readers, and it would be a mistake to take a one size fits all approach.
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Karen Hesse | Oct 1, 2015


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Live tracking and notifications + flexible delivery and options. Finally, make sure that the company can operate in your area. Some local regulations require platforms to obtain special licenses in their country while others are not crypto-friendly at all.
- CoinDesk journalists are not allowed to purchase stock outright in DCG.
- Bitcoin Price Predictionpage — when deciding on your own price targets.
- Every record included the hashes of previous records’ certificates.
- In early February 2014, one of the largest bitcoin exchanges, Mt. Gox, suspended withdrawals citing technical issues.
If you want to exchange Bitcoins to another cryptocurrency, go to the Exchange tab. What you should do next is just select the currencies from the drop-down list and click Exchange Now button. Right after that you’ll have the desired coins or tokens on your CEX.IO account. If you’re a CEX.IO customer, you just need a debit card or credit card.
In October 2012, BitPay reported having over 1,000 merchants accepting bitcoin under its payment processing service. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group, started accepting bitcoins in January 2011, then stopped accepting them in June 2011, citing concerns about a lack of legal precedent about new currency systems. The EFF’s decision was reversed on 17 May 2013 when they resumed accepting bitcoin. In May 2013, Ted Nelson speculated that Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki is Satoshi Nakamoto.
Bitcoin users predict 94% of all bitcoins will have been released by 2024. As the total number creeps toward the 21 million mark, many suspect the profits miners once made creating new blocks will become so low they’ll become negligible. But with more bitcoins in circulation, people also expect transaction fees to rise, possibly making up the difference. The price of Bitcoin is determined by the market forces of supply and demand on cryptocurrency exchanges.
How Secure is Bitcoin?
When using cards online, people care most about the security of their operations and card data. Because no one wants to lose funds as a result of an internet scam. So, LTC when you found a Bitcoin trading platform, make sure it’s secure enough before making any operations.
Dust on Crust – hackernoon.com
Dust on Crust.
Posted: Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:03:14 GMT [source]
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is an internationally recognized set of security requirements related to gathering and storing card credentials. If the platform has this certificate, that means it passed the regular checks by independent auditors. Thus, you can be sure that no one can steal and use your card data. Consequently, we can see the market spread — the difference between the lowest bid price and the highest ask price. Usually, the smaller the spread, the higher the market liquidity. And high liquidity means fast execution of even large-volume trading orders.
BTC to USD – Convert Bitcoins to US Dollars
World currency prices are based on rates obtained via Open Exchange Rates. In November 2013, the University of Nicosia announced that it would be accepting bitcoin as payment for tuition fees, with the university’s chief financial officer calling it the « gold of tomorrow ». During November 2013, the China-based bitcoin exchange BTC China overtook the Japan-based Mt. Gox and the Europe-based Bitstamp to become the largest bitcoin trading exchange by trade volume. When you’re looking for a place where to buy Bitcoin or other virtual currencies, a robust crypto exchange platform will come in handy. To make your crypto purchases simple and convenient, many of them are supporting transfers from debit cards and credit cards, since it’s probably the most popular payment methods for now.
What do they do next? Buy Gold or Buy Bitcoin? In a devaluing currency – both are at a premium. But atleast they are available. Bitcoin can be carried across borders and thag would happen eventually. One of the indirect effects of FED rate increases. Everyone wants dollars. https://t.co/1mAK8p3jPe
— Count of Monte Crypto (@dcxeth) January 1, 2023
Since hashes are completely random, it’s just a matter of trial and error until one miner is successful. Each bitcoin is made up of 100 million satoshis , making individual bitcoin divisible up to eight decimal places. That means anyone can purchase a fraction of a bitcoin with as little as one U.S. dollar. Earn up to $1,000 when you fund a new account, and earn up to $100 in Bitcoinwith your first qualifying crypto trade . The future of bitcoin and bitcoin’s price remains uncertain. « A group of miners who didn’t like SegWit2x are opting for this new software that will increase the size of blocks from the current 1 megabyte to 8, » Morris told Business Insider.
There is no physical BTC token so you can think of bitcoin as digital money. Bitcoin transactions are fully transparent and can’t be censored. It’s a financial system backed by thousands of computers, known as ‘nodes’, around the world, instead of a single central bank or government, i.e. hence the term ‘decentralization’. A fork, referring to a blockchain, is defined variously as a blockchain split into two paths forward, or as a change of protocol rules. Accidental forks on the bitcoin network regularly occur as part of the mining process. They happen when two miners find a block at a similar point in time.
« Japan OKs recognizing virtual currencies as similar to real money ». On 26 October 2013, a Hong Kong–based bitcoin trading platform owned by Global Bond Limited vanished with 30 million yuan (US$5 million) from 500 investors. In early August 2012, a lawsuit was filed in San Francisco court against Bitcoinica – a bitcoin trading venue – claiming about US$460,000 from the company.
Crypto bank Silvergate says it’ll shut down as the market meltdown claims its first mainstream casualty
One of the possible solutions was a system where document timestamps could not have tampered with. Every record included the hashes of previous records’ certificates. Thus, the data structure keeps the strict chronological order. Additionally, the system used private keys or digital signatures to sign the document. The answer is simple — the higher the trading volume is, the more people are supporting the current trend. So, if you can see a significant increase or decrease in the BTC price, but the trading volume pillar is lower than many others shown nearby, that means market participants will most likely don’t support this shift.
The first rationalization of cryptocurrencies, although symbolic, revolutionized the perception of BTC in the eyes of numerous investors. Another further milestone in the history of digital currencies was the purchase of the first material property. May 22, 2010 is commonly called the « Bitcoin Day of Pizza », or the worst investment in the history of cryptocurrencies. The transaction took place in the city of Jacksonville, Florida. Nowadays, cryptocurrencies are often called digital assets, because we can buy, sell, trade them just like traditional assets on the stock market. Thus, the majority of crypto enthusiasts are investors or traders who are trying to get a profit by speculating on crypto prices.
But even for those who don’t discover using their own high-powered computers, anyone can buy and https://www.beaxy.com/ bitcoins at the bitcoin price they want, typically through online exchanges like Coinbase or LocalBitcoins. It’s organized through a network known as a blockchain, which is basically an online ledger that keeps a secure record of each transaction and bitcoin price all in one place. Every time anyone buys or sells bitcoin, the swap gets logged. Several hundred of these back-and-forths make up a block. The live price of Bitcoin is $ 19,872.41 per (BTC / USD) today with a current market cap of $ 383.80B USD. There are also faucets that dispense alternative cryptocurrencies.
- In June 2011, WikiLeaks and other organizations began to accept bitcoins for donations.
- This lesson is a compilation of the most commonly used crypto trading terms.
- If you look at the Trade page on the CEX.IO website, you can see the chart representing the fluctuations of BTC market value.
- Each new block has a value called a “target hash.” In order to win the right to fill the next block, miners need to produce a hash that is lower than or equal to the numeric value of the ‘target’ hash.
Bitcoins can be stored in a bitcoin cryptocurrency wallet. Theft of bitcoin has been documented on numerous occasions. At other times, bitcoin exchanges have shut down, taking their clients’ bitcoins with them. A Wired study published April 2013 showed that 45 percent of bitcoin exchanges end up closing. In January 2015, Coinbase raised US$75 million as part of a Series C funding round, smashing the previous record for a bitcoin company. The exchange remained offline for several days amid speculation that customers had lost their funds.
Theoretically, the price will soon return to the previous level. Mobile App Buy, sell, earn and exchange crypto anywhere and anytime. Margin Trading Trade digital assets with leverage on CEX.IO Broker. Whoever successfully unlocks the next block is rewarded with a set number of bitcoin known as “block rewards” and gets to add a number of transactions to the new block.
Should you still invest in Bitcoin?
It should only be considered if you have a high risk tolerance, are in a strong financial position and can afford to lose any money you invest in it. If you choose to invest, it's important to maintain a diversified portfolio that includes several different types of investments to reduce your overall risk exposure.
The bitcoin rate in dollars began to recover, peaking once again on 1 October at $140. The price quickly rebounded, returning to $200 several weeks later. The latest run went from $200 on 3 November to $900 on 18 November. On 24 January 2018, the online payment firm Stripe announced that it would phase out its support for bitcoin payments by late April 2018, citing declining demand, rising fees and longer transaction times as the reasons. In October 2013, the FBI seized roughly 26,000 BTC from website Silk Road during the arrest of alleged owner Ross William Ulbricht.
Expert Warns of Possible Deflationary Depression as Money Supply … – Bitcoin News
Expert Warns of Possible Deflationary Depression as Money Supply ….
Posted: Thu, 09 Mar 2023 19:43:21 GMT [source]
On 11 November 2022 FTX filed for bankruptcy with an estimated $8 billion missing in customer funds. The price of a bitcoin reached US$1,139.9 on 4 January 2017. Global economic factors that stemmed from Russia’s War in Ukraine negatively affected the price of Bitcoin. On April 22, 2022, its price fell back down below $40,000. It further dropped to as low as $26,970 in May after the collapse of Terra-Luna and its sister stablecoin, UST, in addition to a shedding of tech stocks.
Faucets usually give fractions of a bitcoin, but the amount will typically fluctuate according to the value of bitcoin. To reduce mining fees, faucets normally save up these small individual payments in their own ledgers, which then add up to make a larger payment that is sent to a user’s bitcoin address. On 1 June 2021, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced his plans to adopt bitcoin as legal tender; this would render El Salvador the world’s first country to do so. Based on bitcoin’s open-source code, other cryptocurrencies started to emerge. The supply of bitcoin available to be mined is limited to a maximum 21,000,000 coins by software design. In the early days, Nakamoto is estimated to have mined 1 million bitcoins.


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Italy: Manufacturing conditions improve in December
The IHS Markit manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) rose to 52.8 in December from 51.5 in November. Therefore, the index moved further above the crucial 50-threshold, indicating improving conditions in the manufacturing sector.
The improvement in the headline PMI came on the back of a faster increase in production, a turnaround in new orders and stronger job creation. Moreover, export orders expanded solidly amid looser Covid-19 restrictions. On the price front, input costs rose at the quickest pace since July 2018 amid higher raw material and transport prices and supply chain disruptions. Consequently, firms raised their output prices, although the pace of increase was only modest. Lastly, business sentiment grew more positive, thanks to hopes of a global economic recovery.


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Wrapping up our series this week on mobile payments, today we look into why some social platforms are well positioned to offer their own payment services.
Clocking up an average of 2 ¼ hours of consumer attention per day, social media services are increasingly becoming the main platforms for daily activities. That includes entertainment, or in this case, commerce and transaction-related activities.
In some Asian markets where consumers devote the longest periods of their day to social media, popular social platforms have become so ingrained in daily routines that consumers are now comfortable with using them as a way of paying for products in-store and online. The most notable example of this is WeChat Pay in China, but messaging services Kakao and LINE also enjoy strong usage as payment services in their respective regions.
As for whether we’ll see a service like Facebook follow suit and offer its own payment service, recent developments have shown that this is already happening in some regions. Wednesday’s chart demonstrated the consumer trust obstacles which are particularly pronounced in Western markets, and that’s why Facebook-owned WhatsApp has chosen India as a testing ground for the beta version of its own payment service.
Even so, we are seeing evidence that Western consumers are easing to the idea of carrying out some commerce-related activities on social media, especially among younger generations. Along with Snapchat, Facebook has offered peer-to-peer (P2P) payments in the U.S. for some time along with Snapchat, and has been granted an e-money license in Europe. It’s convenience which is social media’s main advantage in the mobile payments space, and demonstrating this convenience initially with P2P payments could be an ideal way of appeasing consumer trust issues.


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It's been said that logistics professionals are like offensive linemen: They're only noticed when they make a mistake. Or as a conference speaker recently quipped: "If your phone doesn't ring, don't complain. You're getting a compliment. It means you're doing your job well."
Most logistics professionals recognize and accept this. But there's a downside to being taken for granted, nonetheless. Over time, people forget how important logistics really is.
Years ago, a presenter at a small trade conference I attended made that point in a particularly memorable way. He showed two slides. The first showed a modern supermarket with its aisles full of shoppers and its shelves full of foodstuffs. "Now," the speaker said, "close your eyes for a moment and imagine this store in a world without logisticians." He flipped to the next slide and told everyone to open their eyes. What they saw on the screen was a picture of the same store with no customers. There were no customers because all the shelves were empty. The shelves were empty, the speaker said, because there were no logisticians. No logisticians means no distribution, and no distribution means commerce grinds to a halt.
What brought that to mind was a string of recent news reports about attempts to reduce road congestion in some of the nation's most densely populated areas.
Such initiatives are nothing new. Over a decade ago, California flirted with the idea of banning trucks from the interstate highways ringing its largest cities during rush hour. The initiative failed, thankfully, but the problem of congestion remains. And motorists' complaints continue to mount.
Now, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has come up with a new twist on that plan: congestion pricing for busy roads. The thought is that charging an exorbitant toll for traveling on the busiest roads at the busiest times will discourage motorists from doing so, thus reducing congestion. Trouble is, it won't work, and there is evidence to prove it.
In London, where a congestion pricing program is already in place, reports show that traffic jams have dropped by a mere 8 percent from pre-program levels and that congestion is already on the rise again. Despite a $14-per-vehicle fee, the program isn't producing much in the way of revenue either. To date, the city has spent nearly half of the money it has collected just to run the program.
Such pricing schemes are ineffective at best and excessively costly at worst. But consider the impact on motor freight carriers. Unlike consumers, truckers would not have the luxury of deciding whether to pay a premium to use busy roads at peak hours or wait for off-peak times. Because it's shippers, not truckers, who determine delivery schedules, truckers will either be forced to pay the extra fees or shift to nontoll routes and secondary roadways, thus adding to their costs.
Either way, the expenses will be passed on to the shipper, and then to the shipper's customer, and so on. Ultimately, it will be the same private motorists who complained about truck traffic in the first place who pay the price. And given that the costs of moving goods from the raw material stage to the point of final consumption represent as much as 75 percent of a product's end cost, it's likely to be a pretty hefty price.
But those motorists rarely stop to think about the implications of their actions, which means the clamor won't die down anytime soon. They may even get what they wished for. Then, they'll realize that trucks are only bad until you don't have them.
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Hyderabad, 20th September 2017: Keeping up with the festive celebrations fbb, the fashion destination by Future Group launched a special Dasara collection for ladies, men and kids. The new collection was unveiled by Tollywood diva Pranita Subhash through a starry event at the fbb Big Bazaar store at Ameerpet in Hyderabad.
Offering a wide range to choose from, the Dasara collection comprises of all clothing needs right from classy heavy ethnic wear like elegant churidhar, kurtis, to trendy fusion wear, to comfortable & colorful casual wear for everyone including women, men and kids.
Speaking about the launch Mr. K.V Rao, CEO for TS & AP Zone says, “India is a land where one gets a chance to celebrate many festivals which means a lot of gatherings with friends and families. As a brand fbb will always ensure that we offer the best and latest of fashion so that such get-togethers are fondly remembered for a lifetime.”
Sharing her views on the new collection the beautiful Pranita Subhash Says, “The new collection at fbb is extremely stylish and at the same time has the traditional appeal. It has something to offer for kids, women and men. I am sure that the new range will make the auspicious occasion like Dasara a memorable one.”
The Dasara collection is available at all fbb and Big Bazaar stores.
fbb has been the face of affordable fashion destinations in India since 2008. With a mission to make India ‘ThodaAur Stylish’, its philosophy reinstates the fact that it doesn’t cost much to be stylish with fbb. It believes in aspirational value fashion. From business meeting to casual resort wear, from versatile ethnics to comfortable home wear, fbb creates exclusive merchandise for its audience under its own private labels. With a wide variety to choose from, fbb has something in store for everyone. fbb targets a youthful audience in India that wishes to stay synonymous with current trends. The brand has 288 stores including 54 standalone stores spreads across all the metro cities, mini metros and also penetrates well in tier-II cities.


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Exiting from the ecommerce bubble, Yebhi’s co-founder Danish Ahmed has launched his new venture by the name ShopSity. ShopSity is an app-based information provider for fashion products which are being sold in the users’ vicinity.
Danish realizes that although mobile penetration is increasing and consumer buying patterns have changed; there is something that is hindering this expected growth of billion dollar ecommerce market.
“When I took customer calls or delivered products to them I realized that a lot of people are shopping online not because it is convenient, but because the alternate is so inconvenient”, says Danish.
The need to launch a venture like ShopSity arises from the fact that people risk to choose intangible products and wait for longer time for their products to be available in online buying against the alternative of going from store to store or mall to mall. Hence, neither ecommerce which is efficient but tedious and unnatural nor offline shopping which is laborious but fun, have nailed to the customers’ needs.
This move comes time when offline stores are establishing their online presence and India’s apparel industry is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 9%, reaching $102 Bn by 2023. As per Google India, online fashion retail market, which is the largest contributor to the organised retailing market in India, is expected to reach $35 Bn by 2020.
At Shopsity, Danish aims at targeting the $50 Bn offline fashion apparel market to amalgam the convenience of online with the offline shopping. The company is focussed on fashion and has over 2000 stores from Delhi/NCR, already listed on its android app. By the next year, they aspire to take that number to over 40,000 fashion stores across the top 10 cities.
The ShopSity mobile app will enable the users to select the designs, checkout latest offers, check size availability from the nearest stores online. Later which, the users can make a shopping list and go out to experience the product and purchase it.
This being his second venture is much inspired from Yebhi.com. Danish along with other founders build Yebhi.com into a $100 Mn company with a headcount of 1500 people. Yebhi had seen tremendous growth of its position in the ecommerce industry. But after going cash crunched for over a year, in September 2014, Yebhi.com pivoted its business model to become an aggregator of products from other ecommerce platforms, like Myntra, Jabong and Flipkart among others.
Scope for ShopSity
It has been seen in countries like the US and China, where ecommerce is more than a decade old phenomenon, that 80% of ‘non-food’ shopping still happens offline. This indicates that the user is still addicted to the traditional shopping model despite the heavy discounting and marketing strategy of etailers. Since, these discounts are coming from marketing budgets, they will soon taper down, says Danish.
I believe that retail is at an inflection point and the next five years will see a retail revolution. The way we shop will change, and Shopsity will be an important part of that change. A year from now, we’ll have thousands of retailers that’ll connect, engage and transact with customers digitally. You’ll see retailers offering personalised recommendations and discounts using beacons, retailers advertising on facebook and google, retailers with ipads and tablets, offering a much richer user experience. Shopsity aspires to become the platform where retailers connect with customers, and offer this experience.
Though there is no other player in the fashion industry dealing in this particular space, however, Pricebaba and Zopper are doing something similar in mobile handsets and consumer durable and electronics space respectively. Pricebaba and Zopper follows a hyper local marketplace model to facilitate consumers to search the product on its app and then displays the details of all the retailers who have it in the neighbourhood, along with price comparisons.


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NAIROBI, Kenya, Feb 14 – British American Tobacco Kenya has posted a 22 per cent increase in profit to close 2018 with a net profit of Sh4.1 billion.
Net revenue increased by 11 per cent to close at Sh20.8 billion driven by excise-led pricing in the Kenya and export markets.
BAT Kenya Managing Director Beverley Spencer-Obatoyinbo said the company delivered strong performance in a difficult trading environment where illicit cigarettes in Kenya has risen.
“Worryingly and despite heightened attention from the authorities – whose efforts we welcome and fully support – this figure had reached 14.1% at the end of 2018 from 12 percent in the previous year, meaning that some 700 million cigarettes in the market have evaded tax and denied as much as Sh2.5 billion in revenue to the Government,” said Obatoyinbo.
“From our research the majority of illicit cigarettes seen in the Kenyan market appear to be labelled as one product – Supermatch. Other industry players have also recognised the prevalence, denied their involvement and raised similar concerns with the relevant authorities.”
The company contributed Sh18.3 billion to the exchequer in the same period.
Shareholders will receive a total dividend of Sh35 per share.
“Going forward, regulatory and fiscal stability in the domestic business is critical for business growth and to further contribute to the advancement of manufacturing as a pillar of the Government’s “Big Four” agenda,” added Obatoyinbo.
BAT Kenya Chairman, George Maina said the company invested over Sh600 million to transform the Nairobi manufacturing hub into a “modern and great place to work for employees.”
With this infrastructure, alongside the exceptional quality of talent within the Company and our partnerships with over 80,000 trade partners and tobacco farmers, I am confident that we have the right strategy and the right people in place to deliver business growth and continued value to all our stakeholders in the years ahead.”


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How Much Broadcast and Cable Should Advertisers Really Buy?
The big four broadcast networks' prime-time programming still gets the highest TV ratings, and with them the highest advertising prices. So it's no surprise to see advertisers and their agencies steadily adding cheaper alternatives, like prime-time cable, and decreasing their share of dollars spent with broadcasters. But an increasing amount of evidence suggests that not every rating point is created equal.
There was a strong correlation between how much broadcast prime-time a packaged goods brand bought and the return on its TV spending, for example, according to the Advertising Research Foundation's Adworks II study in 1998, which used over 400 BehaviorScan tests -- about $200 million in research.
Brands with 31% or more of their gross rating points in broadcast prime-time achieved 67% higher sales response, according to the study. Putting about half of the brand's dollars in broadcast prime-time, about 24% of its gross rating points, turned out to be the optimal allocation. The rest of the TV gross rating points would optimally be 31% daytime broadcast, 31% cable and 14% syndication and spot TV.
We now have more recent evidence from other sources confirming broadcast TV's apparent extra effect. TiVo Research and Analytics(TRA) matches individual households' set-top box data with their frequent shopper card information and other purchase records. When it examined four TV ad schedules with more than half their money in broadcast and four schedules that went the other way, TRA found that favoring broadcast averaged three times the return on investment.
MediaVest research head David Shiffman also used TRA data to determine that three of the agency's top clients got a better return from broadcast prime-time, despite the much higher ad rates there.
And Effective Marketing Management, a well-known research company that has done over 5,000 studies for the elite packaged goods companies, has found similar results with brands that ran base tests in cable and syndicated TV, then added broadcast prime-time.
Now we have to try to understand why.
One hypothesis worth testing: Because broadcast prime builds reach among consumers so much faster than any other TV environment, viewers all know the same thing and can talk to each other about the shared stimuli very quickly -- the next day or, with second screens on iPads and smartphones, in the same moment. Perhaps something about sharing experiences quickly goes more deeply into people's hearts and minds, getting them to think about brands in more positive and prominent ways.
If reach is an indicator of sales power because of both audience size and this sharing enhancement effect, however, then what we should really be talking about may not be broadcast prime-time, but high-rated programs, whether they run on CBS or The History Channel.
That may be the simplest way to look at it, meaning marketers and media buyers would be wise to lock in substantial percentages of their budgets on high-rated programs, even if the higher prices mean they can't run the same ad as many times. They should not treat all rating points equally, assembling broadcast-sized reach from an expanding sprawl of small cable shows. But neither do they need to exclusively buy broadcast for the sake of it. That's the first takeaway.
It would also appear that the traditional marketing mix models have limited abilities to separate out different kinds of TV buys and creative executions. More data following individual households' media and purchases alike need to be used to make sure returns are maximized, as the media landscape keeps changing. That's the second takeaway.


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Midlands water company Severn Trent has more than doubled its pre-tax profit after driving forward a radical overhaul of its management and spending.
The supplier beat analyst expectations by reporting pre-tax profit of £322.3m for 2015, up from £148m in 2014, despite recording slightly lower revenue of £1.78bn.
The water company’s underlying pre-tax profits - which strip out one-off costs - were £313.6m, 10pc higher than analyst expectations.
Severn Trent serves more than 3.3 million households and businesses in the Midlands and mid-Wales. It has been pursuing a radical business overhaul including a management shake-up and an aggressive cost-cutting drive.
James Bowling, Severn Trent's chief financial officer, said: “The restructuring of the organisation took place 18 months ago, streamlining the company. We took out some layers of management so that we can make faster decisions and respond quicker to issues and that’s worked really well.”
Over the next five years Severn Trent is targeting savings of £670m, outperforming the amount expected by the regulator by £260m.
“This has been achieved through lots of hard work from lots of colleagues,” said Severn Trent boss Liv Garfield.
“We’ve seen internal sewer flooding down 31pc, external sewer flooding down 28pc, and serious pollution incidents down 80pc. We’ve had very creative people thinking of new ways of doing things and we’ve just tried to work very hard across these various areas. The other big measure we’ve been proud of this year is customer complaints,” she said.
Customer complaints fell by more than a quarter despite warning customers not to use their tap water in March this year after unusually high levels of chlorine were detected in a Derbyshire reservoir that supplies almost 4,000 people.
“With any customer we always apologise upfront if they don’t have access to water. We’ve found the better we communicate and the more we engage with our customers - and explain things - that tends to help,” Ms Garfield said.
“In terms of handling customer complaints we’ve also invested in case management so we now have dedicated people owning issues end to end, which has definitely helped our complaints performance,” she added.
Water companies are under pressure by the industry regulator to improve their performance and will face increased competition in the coming years as the sector shifts away from a regional monopoly model to allow businesses to choose their supplier from next year. Households could follow by the end of the decade.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley praised a “strong set of results”. “The revitalised management approach, which has been clear for some time, is now evidently coming through in results,” they said.
Separately, Thames Water, which serves London and parts of the South East, said telecoms veteran Steve Robertson would replace its outgoing chief executive Martin Baggs. Mr Robertson has headed up Truphone since 2011, and was previously in charge of BT Openreach. He will bring the ability to “innovate and meet customer needs in a regulated environment”, said Thames. Mr Baggs announced his intention to step down in November.


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E15 is on a roll, despite big oil’s best efforts
No matter how hard they try, oil companies can’t seem to steer consumers away from E15.
And boy, they have tried. Using their lobbying heft, the oil companies have forced gas stations to put a big, orange warning-type sticker on pumps selling E15, a blend of 15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline....
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The latest phantom Nokia buyer: Samsung Electronics.
Last week, the market was filled with chatter about Microsoft bidding for Nokia. The ailing Finnish handset maker called that rumor “baseless.” Probably not much base in the current speculation, either. Nokia is down 3% in New York trading.
“It seems like a market rumor and we don’t comment on rumors,” a spokesman for the South Korea-based company said.
The near-flurry of takeover talk likely means somebody, or a lot of somebodies, are lugging a big, losing position in Nokia — the company’s shares are down 46% since Feb. 9.
It’s an old Wall Street gambit. Spread semi-plausible takeover theories in hopes that the target stock will pop, and the money-losing position can be dumped more easily.
Nokia is struggling to keep pace in the rapidly changing phone market. At the high end, Apple’s iPhone has become a dominant player. At the low end, where Nokia has traditionally been strong, cheaper Google Android-driven phones are causing problems. Nokia is betting that a partnership with Microsoft will revive its fortunes. (Hence, the Mister Softee rumors.)
Even at its depressed levels, Nokia still sports a market value north of $24 billion. So, the number of plausible takeover candidates is exceedingly small. But don’t be surprised if more such chatter emerges in coming days, especially if Nokia keeps on skidding.


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The holding company operates in the realm of consumer packaged goods, offering ready-to-eat and refrigerated retail products. It's best known for its breakfast cereals (including Grape-Nuts and Shredded Wheat) and snack foods like Chips Ahoy cookies.
Lists ranking Post Holdings
Latest news for Post Holdings
- RetailOreo O’s Cereal Is Returning After A 10-Year AbsenceJune 1, 2017 7:00 PM UTC
- RetailAn American Company Is Buying Britain’s Beloved Weetabix in a $1.8 Billion DealApril 18, 2017 8:59 AM UTC
- RetailYour Fruity Pebbles and Tater Tots Could Soon Be Made by the Same CompanyJune 22, 2016 2:37 PM UTC
- FeaturesBig East Coast snowstorm and Greece’s historic election — 5 things to know todayJanuary 26, 2015 1:41 PM UTC


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The latest Plumbing & Heating Merchant Index (PHMI) report, published in May, shows total value sales through specialist Plumbing & Heating merchants were up 2.9% in Q1 2022 compared to the same period in 2021, with no difference in trading days.
The increase in sales again came entirely from price inflation (+8.9%), while volumes were down 5.5%. When compared to the same three-month period (January to March) in 2019, a pre-pandemic year, Q1 2022 value sales were up 6.5% with no difference in trading days.
Quarter-on-quarter, Q1 2022 sales were 4.0% higher than Q4 2021, with three more trading days in the most recent period. Like-for-like value sales were down 0.9%.
Plumbing & Heating Merchants sales in the 12 months to March 2022 were 16.9% ahead of April 2020 to March 2021, with one less trading day in the most recent period. Like-for-like-sales were up 17.4%.
March 2022 value sales were marginally ahead (+0.9%) of March 2021 with an equal number of trading days. This growth came from price inflation (+10.4%), not volume (-8.6%). Compared to the same month three years ago, March 2022 sales were 14.7% higher than March 2019, helped by two more trading days this year. Like-for-like sales were up 4.7%.
Month-on-month, total value sales through specialist Plumbing & Heating merchants were 12.9% higher in March than in February, helped by three extra trading days in March. Like-for-like sales were down 1.8%.
The PHMI Index for March 2022 was 119.3, with two more trading days this year. The like-for-like index was 107.2.
Mike Rigby, CEO of MRA Research, which produces the report, said: “Q1 figures show that sales through specialist plumbing and heating merchants are still moving in the right direction, however growth is being led by price inflation rather than volumes, which are down year-on-year.
“The impact of inflation and rising costs looks set to be the focus for everyone this year – not just plumbing and heating merchants – and how this will affect sales for the rest of 2022 isn’t yet clear. On one hand, escalating energy costs and the prospect of more to come in the autumn will encourage some people to invest in home improvements which boost efficiency, while shrinking surplus income for other households will see projects and purchases being postponed.
“Much will depend on the return of consumer confidence, which has been further dented by the war in Ukraine, and the possibility of Government support for households who are struggling to meet energy costs.”


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Wearable devices are all the rage these days and there’s one device that has managed to generate a lot of hype. Google Glass, the internet search giant’s wearable device, is currently in an invite-only phase where people who wish to purchase a unit have to first receive an invite for the “Explorer” program. Initially only a limited number of invites were sent out but throughout the year Google has ramped up production of units and has opened up the program to new Explorers. A wave of customers will be joining the program soon as Google Glass invites are now going out to Google Play Music All Access subscribers.
The move comes after Google Play Music was released for Google Glass, allowing users to listen to their favorite music using either the bone transducer in the unit or the optional earbuds. A few weeks back Google also allowed existing Explorers to invite up to three friends to the program who would then have to purchase their own units. The company is certainly bringing more people on board the Glass project as it looks towards a public release in 2014. If you are one of the lucky Play Music All Access subscribers to receive an invite, bear in mind that you will have to shell out $1,500 plus tax for a unit and will need to be a U.S. resident in order to purchase it.


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Google I/O brings together all the best – and craziest – that Google has to offer, including this year an interesting session from the ATAP team. They would be the “pirates” messing around with the awesome looking stuff like Project Ara and Project Tango and in their session at I/O they had some interesting news for anyone wondering when they’ll get some Tango in consumer products. 2015.
Warhammer is a popular franchise when it comes to the gaming world, be it with the creation of painted figurines and battlements or classic video games. Warhammer 40,000: Carnage is the latest hit in the series of games we’ve seen launch on Android, which arrived on iOS last month.
Netflix is about to spread its wings and fly to several new European countries as part of a sizeable expansion plan later this year. Without being too specific on when, the streaming video service announced that Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Luxembourg are the lucky six.
An update for Google+ for Android is bringing several updated features, most notably a new Google+ Stories feature. Additionally, the app is seeing several user interface improvements, and handy features like being able to create animated GIF images on demand and browsing big photo libraries. The Google+ app for Android has always been a worthy offering, and the latest updates make it even more so.
Netflix has released their Q1 2014 earnings report today, and bundled deep in the news about numbers and dollars is a short paragraph about pricing, and an even shorter blurb about future Fire TV support.
The Moto G will be joining the Moto X later this week at Republic Wireless, but before that happens they’re bringing back their Refer a Friend program. The Wi-Fi-happy carrier has partner is partnering with FriendBuy to offer customers up to $ 20 in account credit for referrals who are customers for at least 30 days. And the referred customer too will get $ 20 credit too.
Messaging without the internet
FireChat found its way from iOS to Android today, offering an interesting, decentralized way of instant messaging. FireChat plugs into a kind of mesh network, where mobile devices connect to one another over Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth, and not requiring any outside involvement on the internet. Obviously the range on this is limited, but at least it works when you’re outside of cellular coverage, plus it’s an interesting open local network meet [Read More...]
An interface that scales Google Now down to something usable on your wrist, with endless possibilities driven by developers.
Google has officially unveiled Android Wear, an operating system specifically tailored to wearable devices, and with that comes some new usability and interface challenges. Working with small wristwatch-sized devices and sub-2-inch screens, you quickly run out of room for interfaces and information. Alongside the launch of the new platform, Google has given developers an early look at [Read More...]


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By Lauri Kibby
President Biden is not there yet. Neither are Republicans in Washington. But the wave of momentum toward nationally legalized cannabis only continues to mount.
It is time lawmakers in the Capital get on board with what a majority of the American citizens they represent want.
There are signs of progress. The U.S. House recently passed a bill to decriminalize cannabis at the federal level, the first of its kind. When Democrats won control of the Senate this year, the change paved a potential path for legislation in that chamber as well. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said this month he intends to soon introduce a federal cannabis legalization bill.
At the state level, the pace of acceptance is escalating. November ballots in Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota all approved the legalization of recreational use – though South Dakota’s law is currently held up in the courts. More states are following suit this year, including New York, where legalization was signed into law in March.
Already, 35 states and Washington, D.C. regulate the production, sale and use of marijuana for medical purposes. Fifteen of these states also allow adult recreational use, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures.
Change has developed quickly. A decade ago, no states permitted recreational use. Today, more than 40% of the U.S. population lives in a state where some form of cannabis is legal.
A Gallup poll this year showed that 68% of U.S. adults support federal legalization. Strengthening public support is reflected in soaring cannabis sales.
The U.S. marijuana industry is now valued at more than $18 billion, supporting the equivalent of at least 300,000 full-time jobs, according to the 2020 Marijuana Business Factbook. The legal market in California, the nation’s largest, reached $4.4 billion in sales, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier.
Sales in Colorado topped $2 billion last year, up from $1.7 billion in 2019, while Washington state exceeded $1.4 billion, up from $1.1 billion. Oregon and Illinois each eclipsed the $1 billion threshold as well.
States’ need for new sources of tax revenue amid the pandemic provides an extra incentive to increase the size of the legal sector. The same argument applies to the debt-laden federal government.
In addition to tax revenue, medicinal benefits, and freedom to choose, legalization would enable law enforcement to focus on serious crimes. Federal regulation would also refocus oversight to consumer-related issues like product safety.
Based on our discussions with capital markets, we are confident that a growing pool of prominent investors and lenders would enter the cannabis space when nationally legal, expanding its scope, creating more opportunities for cannabis companies, expanding public markets, and contributing to the U.S. economy. We currently see acceptance in the debt markets as competition to lend increases resulting in more competitive terms.
Canada has already legalized pot; Mexico is likely to legalize it soon. The U.S. must not fall behind.
And while Republicans in D.C. are still publicly opposed, legalization efforts indicated a different sentiment with three deep-red states voting approval: Alaska, Montana and South Dakota.
Legalization’s success at the ballot box so far will lead to more success – it is clear Americans stand for it, jobs now increasingly depend on it, and there are clear taxation benefits.
To be sure, Kings Garden would benefit from federal legalization. I do not apologize for that. We have invested in developing safe, high-quality products that the consumer wants. Opening up free markets, a mainstay of the U.S. economy, will only ensure fair and balanced competitive markets.
It is time lawmakers do their part.
Benzinga's Related Links:
- Cannabis Regulatory Update: Federal Legalization Bill, Medical Marijuana For Veterans, Alabama, Minnesota, Indiana, Tennessee
- Poll: 69% Of Americans Support Cannabis Legalization
Lauri Kibby is co-founder and chief financial officer of Kings Garden, California's preeminent cannabis cultivation, processing, distribution and manufacturing company.
Más contenido sobre cannabis en Español en El Planteo.
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