text:
Remember 3D printing? It was supposed to be massive by now. The technology would improve so quickly, and prices would fall so sharply, that we'd soon be sitting around printing guns, pirate copies of cars and extra legs.
But we don't all have 3D printers churning out all manner of household goods, and there aren't plentiful websites giving us blueprints to make the things we need. However, 3D printing is changing the world – it's just doing it in places you might not expect.
3D? Over my dead body
A funeral parlour isn't the most obvious place for a 3D printer, but the Longhua funeral parlour in Shanghai offers a very unusual service: 3D printing of body parts for damaged or disfigured corpses.
It's believed to be the first such service in China, and the cost of a replacement face is 4,000 to 5,000 yuan (around £450-£540, $650-$780, or AU$890-AU$1,070). It sounds weird, but it's a valuable service for grieving families who want an open-casket funeral.
But it's the living who really benefit from 3D printing: in February, an Australian man became the first person to have 3D-printed vertebrae installed.
He had a tumour in his neck that would have rendered him paraplegic, but replacing the affected vertebrae with bone from elsewhere in his body would be exceptionally difficult and dangerous.
The solution: a world-first, with 3D-printed vertebrae providing a perfect fit.
As neurosurgeon Ralph Mobbs put it: "It was as if someone had switched on a light and said 'crikey, if this isn't the future, well then I don't know what is'."
Heads, shoulders, knees and toes
3D-printed prosthetics are transforming lives around the world, not least because they make such prosthetics much cheaper.
As professor John Schull of Rochester Institute of Technology told PBS: "A prosthetic arm these days costs about $40,000. One in 2,000 kids are born with some kind of an arm or hand abnormality.
"They don't get prosthetics because it makes no sense to spend $40,000 on something they're going to outgrow in a year. With a 3D printer, we can start making these things almost for nothing. Instead of $40,000, you can do it with about $10 or $20 worth of plastic.
" ...it's not as sturdy as a $40,000 titanium artificial arm. On the other hand, if you outgrow it or break it, you can make another."
The next step is to have 3D-printed organs for transplants, and that's getting closer too: also in February, US researchers published details of a 3D 'bioprinter' that can print muscle, cartilage and bone.
It's not quite ready for human use – so far the tests, while successful, have been on animal subjects – but the potential is enormous.
3D printers can save lives indirectly too. In Nepal, the aid organisation Field Ready used its 3D printer to make parts for water systems, ensuring safe water and sanitation for 200 people displaced by earthquakes.
Field Ready's engineering adviser Andrew Lamb told The Guardian: "It's that process of identifying the need, doing the design and then printing it out and fitting it out – and doing all that in less than 12 hours in a remote area. It's a pretty important step forward, I think, for the use of this kind of technology."
Lamb believes that relief agencies and other non-governmental bodies will soon be taking 3D printers into disaster areas as a matter of course, making everything from water fittings to spare parts for the Toyota 4x4s so many people rely upon.
That's all very impressive, but when will we be able to 3D-print Teslas via the Pirate Bay?
Where are the pirate printers?
Piracy has often been described as 3D printing's killer app, with 3D printers doing to manufacturing what Napster and the MP3 did to CDs – and the possibilities become more outlandish by the day.


text:
News Report: Anime Industry Up 12% in 2015
posted on 2016-09-29 16:20 EDT
The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) published its "Anime Industry Report 2016," which examines industry trends from 2015, on Friday.
According to the report, the total market value of the anime industry in 2015 was 1.83 trillion yen (about US$18.1 billion), up about 12% from 2014's 1.63 trillion yen. This continues the industry's upward trend; the total market value in 2014 was up 10% from 2013.
Last year, the AJA attributed part of the industry's success to the sale of streaming rights in China, and in 2013 the report noted an increase in anime-related events and exhibits. This year, the AJA reported a 78.7% rise in the sale of streaming rights in China and a 68.2% growth in the live events field.
The AJA has been publishing annual reports since 2009, when the anime industry was in decline.
this article has been modified since it was originally posted; see change history
Available Now: Juni Taisen: Zodiac War ― Welcome to Anime News Network's Fall 2017 Preview Guide! Here's how it goes: our team of critics write up their impressions instantly, to be posted here as they go along. Each critic will cover as many shows as they can handle, giving you alternate takes on most every show. The guide is ongoing, or...

domain: news


text:
Recently, a report surfaced claiming that at one point in time, Apple was actually considering making the Apple Watch compatible with Android phones. Internally, this was known as "Project Fennel," and it reportedly almost came to fruition as "the work was nearly complete."
The reason for Fennel being canceled is an obvious one, as it would affect the sales of iPhones. One quote goes so far as to say, "If you gave up the watch to Android, you would dilute the value of the watch to the iPhone."
None of that should come as any surprise, especially given Apple's stance on the world of smartphones outside of Cupertino. The company continues to ignore Google's relentless #GetTheMessage pleas to support RCS, despite others such as Samsung joining the "fight."
However, the reality of the matter is that it might actually be in Apple's best interests to release a smartwatch that works with Android phones. On one hand, the company already leads the way in terms of market share despite seeing a 10% decline YoY in shipments (according to Counterpoint). Apple seems committed to just trucking along as if nothing is happening.
On the other, making the Apple Watch compatible with Android phones would likely result in Apple owning even more market share, putting it handily out of reach of the competition. Unfortunately, there's one thing getting in the way of that dream, and it happens to be the most popular smartphone in the world.
What would an Apple Watch with Android look like?
Playing the hypothetical game, I doubt Apple would change anything about the software or design of its wearable. The only major difference would likely be to release a dedicated Watch app onto the Play Store. Then, you could just purchase an Apple Watch, create an Apple ID (if need be), download the app, and be on your way.
One of the bigger questions would be how Apple would handle the app situation. This is part of why Android compatibility would be so intriguing. Would Apple work with Google to allow apps from the Play Store? Would we end up with an Amazfit or Fitbit type of situation where you're basically "stuck" with whatever apps come pre-installed? I would venture to guess the latter, but it's still fascinating to ponder.
From the report, it seems as though Apple wouldn't be pulling a Samsung and limiting features, instead giving all Android and iOS users roughly the same experience. By comparison, if you want to have access to the ECG and blood pressure monitor from the Galaxy Watch 6, it must be paired with a Samsung phone.
Google made the correct decision to not limit any features when using the Pixel Watch or Pixel Watch 2 with non-Pixel devices. This is part of the reason why I've called Google's latest smartwatch "The Apple Watch for Android."
That being said, if an Apple Watch were released with the ability to be used with an Android phone, it would be great for everyone. Well, everyone besides Google and Samsung. I know it doesn't matter to these enormous companies, but the users would be happy, as they wouldn't have to settle or feel the pains of being locked out of Apple's walled garden.
There's a reason why the Apple Watch is so popular, and the reliable software ecosystem is a big part of that. My compadre, Harish, recently explained why he prefers the Apple Watch to Wear OS watches, noting that "it's this continued reliability that gives watchOS a distinct edge over Wear OS." Google continues to improve the landscape of Android smartwatches with its re-commitment to the platform, which started back with Wear OS 3.
But, even then, Wear OS 3 was exclusive to Samsung smartwatches for a year. Meanwhile, we're up to Wear OS 4, and there's no indication as to when options like the TicWatch Pro 5 will get the update. This is something I mentioned in my review, as everything still feels really fragmented outside of the Galaxy Watch and Pixel Watch.
Apple coming into the Android space would definitely put pressure on Google and Samsung to continue improving the platform.
There's money to be made
Apple is projected to earn around $40 billion in revenue from its "wearables, home products, and accessories" in 2023. This number is expected to slowly rise over the next few years before projections suggest Apple crossing the $60 billion threshold in 2027.
Unfortunately, the Bloomberg report doesn't give us an idea of when Project Fennel was canned, so it's unknown whether this was last year, or back in 2015 before the Apple Watch was unveiled. Knowing this would've better informed my opinion on the matter, as the tech world now is drastically different than what we had eight years ago.
Even still, I would go so far as to say that it's more likely for the Apple Watch to come to Android than for Apple to adopt RCS or open up iMessage. There's money to be made, and the best way for these companies to keep printing cash is to sell services.
The Apple Watch on Android would open the door for the company to earn even more money from "services." Apple Fitness Plus is similar to Fitbit Premium in that it provides various workout types to follow and can automatically create custom workout plans. And while you're working out, you are able to see all of the relevant metrics appear on your wrist.
It could even funnel sales for other Apple products, as Fitness Plus is also available on the Mac, iPad, and Apple TV. So, if you wanted to keep your Android phone but live the rest of your life in Apple's garden, you could, and you wouldn't have to sacrifice anything.
Never say never, but it's never happening
While I do feel as though there's an area of opportunity for Apple to take advantage of, it's highly unlikely that it will ever happen. It would probably take some governing body to get involved, like the European Commission, and I would really prefer for that precedent not to be set.
Plus, if it were going to happen, there's a very good chance that it probably already would have. So unless a miracle happens, I'll keep wearing my Apple Watch Ultra and dual-carrying both an iPhone and a foldable phone.
Sign up for Black Friday email alerts!
Get the hottest deals available in your inbox plus news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more from the Android Central team.
Andrew Myrick is a Senior Editor at Android Central. He enjoys everything to do with technology, including tablets, smartphones, and everything in between. Perhaps his favorite past-time is collecting different headphones, even if they all end up in the same drawer.
There are 3 reasons why they won't do it:Reply
1. It would make a serious dent in iPhone sales. And they may not make that back on Android sales.
2. The features would be quite limited. Only calls, notifications and exercise tracking. No android app would work on there
3. Apple don't want to dilute the brand image. They want people to aspire to a Watch and iPhone. That's how they get and keep customers, and get retain second hand retail value
I'd rather just see a better Android Wear Watch


text:
The Kindle Paperwhite could send your Windows 10 PC into full BSOD meltdown
More Windows 10 Anniversary Update problems have emerged, with users on Microsoft’s support forums reporting Blue Screens of Death after plugging in their Amazon Kindles.
Microsoft’s latest Windows 10 update has already caused network and USB-connected webcams to freeze, and now seems to be affecting Kindle users.
The first issue was reported on August 6th, with user Tuscat reporting: “I recently [installed] the summer anniversary update for Windows 10 on both my laptop and my desktop which went without any errors.
Related: A history of the Amazon Kindle
“Today I plugged in a Kindle Paperwhite and it immediately crashed my laptop to a blue screen with a QR code regarding the sys_part_mgr or something similar.
“I figured it might be a driver issue even though my laptop is fairly new so I plugged it into my desktop and got the exact same thing. A blue screen of death.”
The post was followed by numerous other reports of the same problem, identifying the Anniversary Update as the cause of the issue.
It seems, since the update, Windows 10 tries to mount the Kindle’s filesystem as a removable storage device, which evidently sends it into meltdown.
Related: Kindle Voyage vs Kindle Paperwhite
A Microsoft spokesperson told TrustedReviews: “We are aware of an issue with a small number of Kindle Voyager and Paperwhite e-Readers causing an unexpected behaviour when plugged into Windows 10 devices after installing the Anniversary Update. We are currently working on an update to address this issue.”
In the mean time, the support forum thread has yielded a temporary fix – at least for some.
It’s been reported that plugging the e-reader in while the machine boots up or while it’s sleeping will circumvent a crash.
The latest Windows 10 update brought a host of new features to Windows 10, including tweaks to the digital assistant Cortana, and improved stylus support with Windows Ink.
WATCH: Kindle Oasis review
Have you experienced any issues? Let us know in the comments.


text:
Watchfire Signs Scholarship Recognizes Student Creativity on Video Scoreboards
Watchfire Signs, a leading manufacturer of LED virtual scoreboards and video boards, is offering a scholarship to recognize a high school student who develops inspiring content for high school Watchfire video scoreboards or displays. Click to Tweet.
The Fired Up Watchfire Scholarship will provide $500 in financial assistance to a graduating high school senior who demonstrates excellence in creating and using digital content on a Watchfire sports display during a live event.
“We are looking for students who make a positive impact on school pride with their ability to fire up players, fans, students and the community using the school’s video display or virtual scoreboard at events,” said Mary Ellen Fricke, sports marketing lead at Watchfire Signs.
Schools install Watchfire video displays and virtual scoreboards to entertain fans, increase sponsorship revenue, and provide learning experiences for students. Indoor and outdoor display models can be used in any stadium or sports facility to engage fans and deliver a professional-quality sports experience.
“We’ve noticed an increase in schools integrating the displays into the curriculum, enabling students to learn video production, design and content management skills,” said Fricke. “This provides real-world experience to students and we want to recognize that effort.”
Eligible content must be created by the applicant and displayed on an indoor or outdoor Watchfire sports display between January 1, 2019 and April 1, 2020. Submissions can be static graphics, animations, videos, crowd prompts, advertisements, or any other content that creates fan engagement.
The deadline to apply is April 17, 2020, and the winner will be announced in May.
Additional information and selection criteria can be found at watchfiresigns.com/firedup.
Watchfire Signs designs and engineers the best looking, most durable outdoor LED signs, digital billboards and video scoreboards, which help businesses and organizations increase visibility and drive growth. Headquartered in Danville, Ill., Watchfire has manufactured electric signs since 1932 and LED signs, using meticulously sourced components from around the world, since 1998. The company has more than 60,000 Watchfire LED signs in operation worldwide and has more digital billboard customers in the U.S. than any other brand. For information, go to http://www.watchfiresigns.com.
For information contact:
Linda Muskin, 847-432-7300
Mara Conklin, 847-816-9411


text:
TULSA – Judge Rebecca B. Nightingale will consider a temporary restraining order Wednesday against Native Boutique co-owner Michelle L. Owens.
The Tulsa County District Court hearing also may weigh arguments for naming a receiver over that Utica Square retailer.
Pediatric dentist James F. Owens, along with Native LLC and Rockin Sooner Ranch LLC, requested the TRO last week to prevent Michelle Owens from damaging Native Boutique records or mishandling company funds.
The Owens created the two limited liability corporations in 2012 to own their two Tulsa retail clothing stores. Both became co-owners, with Michelle Owens managing daily operations. This continued as James Owens initiated divorce proceedings in May 2014, which remain before the Tulsa County court.
His concerns over Native Boutique operations rose later that year, according to the lawsuit, as the Broken Arrow dentist learned the store had fallen several months behind in lease payments at both locations.
“I personally made several payments on that (Utica Square) lease because Michelle represented to me that there was insufficient revenue from the business to do so,” James Owen said in an affidavit.
His wife could not be reached for comment.
Those lease concerns led to multiple financial records requests, according to the lawsuit. It said the minimal statements received raised more concerns.
“The bank statements provided by Mrs. Owens showed numerous transfers in and out of the account to and from other bank accounts in whole dollar amounts, as well as transactions which strongly suggest use of the account for nonbusiness related purchases,” wrote Conner & Winters attorney P. Scott Hathaway, who prepared the petition with Isaac R. Ellis.
The plaintiffs also pointed to examples where statements did not seem to reflect business income and expenses.
“At this point, it appears as though Mrs. Owens is using the business bank account as a personal piggy bank from which to pay for her personal expenses,” Hathaway wrote.
According to the lawsuit, James Owens paid $22,758 to settle almost a year of back rent on Native Boutique’s south Tulsa location, shutting it down. The store allegedly owes more than $5,000 on the Utica Square lease.
“Dr. Owens has already made several payments to Utica Square to avoid litigation and will likely have to personally incur additional expense going forward in order to avoid litigation,” Hathaway wrote.
Besides the TRO request, the plaintiffs seek immediate discovery for a permanent injunction hearing and naming a receiver to handle the business until the divorce case is settled. James Owens also seeks an accounting of the operations, plus damages and other fees.
“I have not received any income from the businesses since their inception,” Owens said in his affidavit.
The case was settled and dismissed with prejudice at the plaintiffs’ request on April 14, 2016.o


text:
Jo and Randy Partipilo were marred 50 years ago at Dillon Falls. With the bottle of champagne, they celebrated their wedding day and began an annual tradition of adding memories on their anniversary.
“We each put a note in the bottle every year, and capped it and buried it. Then we’d come back and put in new memories in every year,” Husband and father Randy Partipilo said.
The bottle was buried underneath a tree near where the couple got married. It wasn’t until this last Easter weekend the family discovered that the bottle — which had been buried at the same place every year for more than 49 years — had vanished.
“On our 50th, we brought our family back which includes three daughters, three son-in-laws, three grandchildren. I went down to pull the bottle out from where it’s been for 50 years, and it wasn’t there,” Randy said.
The Great Outdoors: Plan a Lava River Cave visit
Deschutes National Forest raising camping fees
It was also the first time the Partipilos showed their family the location of the bottle — a keepsake their daughters had heard about their entire lives.
“We knew that they did it every year. We had heard about it. And with it being their 50th wedding anniversary, they just wanted to share that with us and they wanted us to know where it was in case something happened to them some day,” daughter Jessica Ruhl said.
The Partipilos have a couple theories of what could have happened to the bottle.
“Mother nature I guess took it away. Erosion,” Randy said.
“We’re hoping that maybe someone has seen it the last few months. maybe took it home. Saw there were notes, but there was now information they had to get back to us,” Jo said.
The Partipilos say they are thinking about replacing the bottle and starting the tradition over, hoping they can get another 25 years out of it. They also say they’re thinking about changing the location from where the previous bottle was.


text:
PALO ALTO, Calif. — It’s an odd place for a pilgrimage: a quiet suburban street of low-rise shingle-style houses near the Stanford University campus. But the GPS on their phones leads a steady stream of tourists from around the world to 367 Addison Ave.
What they’ve come to see is even more surprising: a singularly plain wooden 12-by-18-foot one-car garage.
It was here, in 1938, that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built an audio oscillator, the first creation of the company that would ultimately bear their names. And that has made this unassuming structure, with its barn-style green door, into not only a national historic landmark, but a planetary shrine: the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
Just as people have long traveled to sample foreign food or see art or historical relics, they’ve begun to journey to attractions that connect them to a much more recent era: the technological one.
Once only grudgingly tolerated, technology tourism has slowly come to be embraced by the behemoth companies that drive it. Hewlett-Packard helped restore the garage. Apple just opened a $108 million visitor center at its headquarters in (as everyone knows who ever checks the time or weather) Cupertino, Calif. Google HQ has a gift shop; Facebook, a kitschy selfie sign on its Silicon Valley campus, with its “like’’ symbol. There’s a months-long waiting list for tours of the new Amazon headquarters in Seattle.
“It’s definitely a thing. The tech tours of Silicon Valley are incessant,’’ said Tim Ritchie, president and CEO of the Tech Museum of Innovation in downtown San Jose.
“People have this deep sense that the future really does rise and fall with our ability to use technology,’’ Ritchie said. “So it’s more than just the appeal of technology. It’s that this is one of the most dominant forces shaping the world, so let me see more.’’
This has led to an entire industry that caters to technology tourists. The San Jose tourism agency produces a brochure of Silicon Valley tech attractions, including not only the Hewlett Packard garage but the garages where Larry Page and Sergey Brin cofounded Google (232 Santa Margarita Ave. in Menlo Park) and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked on the first Apple computer (2066 Crist Ave., Los Altos).
That, of course, gave way to the corporations whose massive headquarters still are here. Busloads of tourists crowd the signature Apple store at Apple headquarters, which has merchandise available only there (though the rest of the complex is off limits) and the new glass-walled visitor complex and café at Apple Campus 2, which opened in November and includes an exhibit about the 2.8 million-square foot circular building, nicknamed “the Spaceship.’’ (You can see it from the visitor center’s roof.)
Facebook’s Frank Gehry-designed HQ in Menlo Park is also closed to the public, but its thumbs-up sign is constantly crowded with tourists taking selfies. A four-digit semaphore at the top of Adobe’s Almaden Tower building in San Jose attracts puzzle fanatics who try to crack the code. Google adds a new sculpture to its Android Statue Garden every time another operating system is developed, and has a company store.
Technology is also beginning to get the museum treatment. Silicon Valley visitors can tour the NASA Ames Research Center, the Computer History Museum, and the Intel Museum, a veritable entomological exhibit of bug-like silicon and microchips. At the Tech Museum of Innovation, they can design real robots and play with the newest tech; the solar-paneled building itself is futuristic, with exposed cables, ducts, wires, and wireless repeaters, wide-open spaces, and huge skylights. “The world is full of problems that are just waiting to be solved,’’ someone has written on a blackboard.
The IMAX theater and the overpowering smell of popcorn confirm that the Tech Museum is mostly for children. That’s one of the reasons people come to areas like this, said Christian Lorentzen of the Silicon Valley Innovation Center, which runs tours: to inspire their kids.
“The tourists that we see, often they’re with their children getting them excited about robotics, artificial intelligence, and technology,’’ Lorentzen said.
But adults can revisit their childhoods here, too, test-“driving’’ driverless cars at Tesla or checking out the Beam store — staffed completely by robots.
“There are always those technology geeks, the ones who are going to wait on the curb and get the latest thing,’’ said Sharon Traeger, who also runs tours.
Nor are these kinds of experiences confined to Silicon Valley. Other tech hubs have them, too. There are tours available of the National Renewable Energy Lab near Denver, where research is under way into sun, wind, biomass, and other forms of power.
Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., has a small museum (and gift shop) in its Building 92, which covers the history of computing in general and the company in particular, and the newest Microsoft video games and other tech, all free to try.
A few miles away at Amazon’s ever-expanding downtown campus in Seattle, the Amazon Go store is an attraction in itself; so far the only one of its kind, the cashier-free store uses sensors and machine learning to scan shoppers’ Amazon Go apps when they walk in, and tracks what items they take, putting them in a virtual cart and charging for them later.
Amazon’s glass Spheres, which opened in January, are so wildly popular that to take a tour you need to sign up months ahead of time — though a small visitor center is open seven days a week. The “biophilic design’’ includes some 40,000 plants separating meeting and work spaces.
Experiencing cutting-edge technology like that is one of the things luring tourists to these kinds of places. Soon they’ll have entire neighborhoods where they can do it.
Sidewalk Labs, owned by Google parent Alphabet, is redeveloping 12 acres of the Toronto lakefront into an area called Quayside, with driverless cars, adaptable spaces, ultramodern public transit, and technology used to monitor energy output, waste disposal, and other services.
Popular culture is also helping to propel technology tourism, from HBO’s Silicon Valley to the film The Internship, with their stereotypical portrayals of socially awkward coders and venture capitalists. Tourists line up for lunch at Buck’s of Woodside, where deals were purportedly made for Facebook, Netscape, and PayPal, and for beers at Gourmet Haus Staudt, a German restaurant where an Apple engineer famously (and unintentionally) left behind a prototype of the iPhone 4.
“It’s kind of like going to a zoo and looking at a different species of human,’’ Lorentzen jokes.
Among the biggest groups that come here are East Asians, South Asians, and Europeans who make stops in Silicon Valley as essential parts of US road trips, said Ritchie, just minutes after welcoming some visiting Germans to the Tech Museum.
“That happens every week,’’ he said. For them, said Ritchie, Silicon Valley and other technology centers “stand for an idea, and the idea is about optimism, problem-solving with technology, and creating vast amount of wealth, and people are interested in that confluence. It intrigues people because people want optimism. They want to believe it’s possible to both solve problems and make money.’’


text:
DraftKings has officially become the first operator to open a mobile app sportsbook outside Nevada. After an invite-only soft launch last week, the sportsbook in partnership with Resorts casino in Atlantic City has become the first operator to take advantage of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in the case of Christi v. NCAA, that overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), de facto opening the doors on legalized sports betting across the United States.
In the aftermath of the ruling various state governments have been scrambling to draft local, state laws to allow and regulate legalized sports betting. New Jersey, who had previously passed a legalized sports betting law which prompted the NCAA lawsuit attempting to block it, was already well positioned to implement legalized sports betting once the Supreme Court overruled PASPA.
After the soft launch of the DraftKings sportsbook app, the New Jersey regulator gave the thumbs up to launch the app live.
DraftKings had previously focused exclusively on fantasy sports and the move to a live, real money sportsbook app marks a new chapter in the company’s history.
The race to market
Other major operators are now set to follow suit to tap into what is estimated to be a $150 billion market.
Earlier this week MGM Resorts International announced that it had inked an exclusive partnership with the NBA, hot on the tail of signing a deal with UK based GVC Holdings to create the platform for their sportsbooks. GVC Holdings has long been a major player in the UK sportsbook market and the deal looks set to give MGM a serious leg up in the nascent nationwide market.
MGM had already been poised to open New Jersey’s first sportsbook through its Atlantic City based Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, when DraftKings beat them to the punch. MGM CEO and Chairman Jim Murren had said the company will start taking bets in New Jersey by the end of the week, but the announced launch date came and went with no action. With MGM already operating a Nevada based mobile sportsbook app running on a platform created by IGT the launch of a New Jersey based sportsbook app is expected any day.
Further down the track
To date, Caesars Atlantic City has remained silent on any possible plans to launch a retail sportsbook but its sister properties, Bally’s and Harrah’s opened sportsbooks on their properties last week. However, the company has announced that it plans to launch a mobile sports betting app called Casears Casino & Sports mobile in time for the start of this years NFL season, which kicks off on September 6. To do so, the company has partnered with Las Vegas based Scientific Games, who already operate lottery and casino games in both the retail and digital space.
At the same time, FanDuel Sportsbook, the US sister company of Irish betting giant and London Stock Exchange listed Paddy Power Betfair opened its doors last month at the Meadowlands racetrack in New Jersey. Some teething pains were reported but the company has hinted that it plans to have a mobile sports betting app up and running by the start of the American football season.
The U.S. arm of UK sportsbook and gaming giant William Hill also announced plans to partner not only with casinos in New Jersey but across the United States to launch its own sportsbook app. The company currently operates a sportsbook app in Nevada and has partnered with two New Jersey casinos, the Ocean Resort Casino and the racino at Monmouth Park, for what many expect will be an app to launch in the coming days or weeks. The company had opened its physical sportsbook at the Ocean Resort just weeks after the physical sportsbook at Monmouth Park went live.
To date, New Jersey has six operational sportsbooks, with four being based in physical casinos.
Other players likely to enter the mobile app sportsbook market include the Golden Nugget Atlantic City, who currently has partnerships in place with SBTech and the racetrack at Churchill Downs but the time line for launch of a mobile app remains unclear.
Hard Rock Atlantic City, which recently opened in the space of the former Trump Taj Mahal, has been tight lipped about its sportsbook plans in light of PASPA being overturned. Hard Rock has already partnered with UK based Bet365, who may be looking to use the Hard Rock as its point of entry into the lucrative U.S. market. A mobile sports betting app is expected to hit the market in the very near future as operators jockey for first mover position in what is undoubtedly the largest market opening in the gaming space in U.S. history.
Disclaimer: All images are copyright to their respective owners and are used by USA Online Casino for informational purposes only.


text:
Darknet markets, or cryptomarkets, are changing the way that people buy, sell, use, and make drugs around the world. These anonymous online markets are.By J Martin Cited by 276 This study explores the rapidly expanding world of online illicit drug trading. Since the fall of the infamous Silk Road, a new generation of cryptomarkets. These websites also sell significant amounts of psychedelic drugs, opioids and other prescription medications. Dr. Miotto found that hallucinogenic compounds. Authorities from nine countries seized 31 million and hundreds of kilograms of drugs as part of an effort to disrupt criminal rings. It's never been easier to buy cocaine, prescription medication, marijuana, ecstasy, ice and heroin, which are all easily available on the. A common form of criminal activity on the dark net is the sale and distribution of illicit drugs, which has been bolstered by a change in the. So far, the engine can search the listings of eight dark web marketplaces, including SilkRoad2, the second incarnation of the infamous drug.
Chester Anderson, the alleged boss of a dark web drug-peddling ring, will serve a nine-year prison sentence. Steven Hirsch. DOJ today announced the results of Operation DisrupTor, a darknet market bust in which 179 people around the world were arrested. So far, the engine can search the listings of eight dark web marketplaces, including SilkRoad2, the second incarnation of the infamous drug. Law Enforcement Agencies are increasingly collecting intelligence in the sale and trafficking of drugs over the internet / darknet. Additionally, this. In alphabay market url recent years, illegal drug sales have flourished on the so-called Dark Net, part of the Internet that is only accessible via special. Authorities have been increasingly cracking down on the use of the dark web to solicit illegal drug activities. In 2022, a BBC report revealed. Whilst a great many products are sold, drugs dominate the numbers of listings, with the drugs including cannabis, MDMA, modafinil, LSD, cocaine, and designer.
DarkFox Market is one of the largestmarkets on the darknet that sells all kinds of products. You will find your typical drug selection but there is also a. So far, the engine can search the listings of eight dark web marketplaces, including SilkRoad2, the second incarnation of the infamous drug. Drugs make up two thirds of all offers on the dark web. Whether heroin, LSD or cannabis - these illegal alphabay market link intoxicants can often only be found on a. Drug trade moves from street to web. There are many others like Liam. They're shopping for drugs on the so-called dark net, accessible not through traditional. A darknet club drug kingpin who sold the likes of ecstasy, ketamine and generic Xanax in a hard-to-access internet marketplace will. Melissa Scanlan, The Drug Llama, Sentencing, trafficking fentanyl, money laundering, conspiracy, distributing fentanyl, death, Dream Market. DrugsOn the DarkNet: HowCryptomarkets Are Transforming theGlobal Tradein Illicit Drugs. Ba Macmillan, 2022.
The Phoenix-based drug ring that sold heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine on the dark web prided itself on customer satisfaction. In recent years, illegal drug sales have flourished on the so-called Dark Net, part of the Internet that is only accessible via special. Investigators discovered a plethora of black market goods available on Silk Road. There were various illegal drugs including heroin, Ecstasy. They were accused of illegally selling fentanyl, oxycodone, amphetamine, cocaine and ecstasy. Among the darknet drugs. targets were the operators of two. By S darknet drugs Miller 2022 Cited by 3 We present a novel method to predict drug use based on high-frequency sales data from darknet markets. We show that models darknet drugs based on historic. DOJ today announced the results of Operation DisrupTor, a darknet market bust in which 179 people around the world were arrested. A common form of criminal activity on the dark net is the sale and distribution of illicit drugs, which has been bolstered by a change in the.
OxyMonster sold drugs on the dark web marketplace Dream Market. Something happened though, and it all came crashing down. PDF Darknet markets, also known as cryptomarkets, are websites located on the Darknet and designed to allow the trafficking of illicit products. The dark web is an internet shadow world where the good and the bad in an assortment of contraband such as opioids and other drugs. Law Enforcement Agencies are increasingly collecting intelligence in the sale and trafficking of drugs over the internet / darknet. Additionally, this. In 2022, drug-related products accounted for 70 of total sales in darknet markets. Darknet Market Products. In addition to drugs, which include prescription. By R Smith 2022 Cited by 1 Market and The Drug Store in 2009 was the first unofficial documentation of dark-web markets also reported buying drugs from the dark-web 29. Just like the deep web, the dark web is not indexed by or accessible through alphabay market darknet search engines. For drug dealers and anyone looking to buy.
Torrez Market Darknet
Telegram apps are standalone, so you don’t need to keep your phone connected. It both compounds already-existing information and publishes new, including in-depth trip reports and factual articles from its widespread community of members. The harm score is then used to generate the overall rankings of the HS on the Tor dark web dataset. Now, they are hiding on the dark web to become drug dealers. Bios: Manjula Martin is a darknet drugs writer and editor with more than a decade of experience in print and online publishing. It also doesn’t require any cross verification from an email and immediately activates the account as soon as all the mandatory details are filled. Why Are The Darknet Marketplaces More Advantageous Than Other Platforms? Below are the Darknet Websites Links, hidden services by TOR, onion links, Hidden websites and all types of darknet websites sorted in a category that you can easily navigate your. That was probably too harsh a sentence, but a point was being made: Just because breaking the law on the Internet is so easy shouldn’t give it cachet. With increased sophistication of anti-fraud systems, marketplaces like Genesis will see a boom. And yes, I agree, also smoking should be banned and the health insurance limited.


text:
Much ink has been spilled over Wal-Mart, particularly ink related to the benefits and drawbacks of its impact not only on local communities and their economies, but also on the broader economy. Nevertheless, I found interesting a recent Wall Street Journal story about how the economic downturn has turned former Wal-Mart opponents into advocates.
As the story notes, Wal-Mart has been in a long battle to expand into Chicago–extending at least as far back as 2004, when, as the Wall Street Journal put it, the city “rebuffed its efforts.” Apparently its expansion efforts met with a wall of resistance from those concerned about Wal-Mart’s wages, benefits, and its potential impact on local businesses. Recently, this wall has begun to crumble. Wal-Mart itself has tried to turn the tide, producing studies reflecting its positive impact on communities, workers and families. However, it has been the economy that appears to have made the difference in attitudes. The recession has “softened skepticism” of those who opposed Wal-Mart’s expansion efforts as recently as last year, or at the very least that skepticism has been outweighed by “the need for jobs and tax dollars.” As a Wal-Mart manager notes, the economy has given both customers and community members a “renewed appreciation for the Wal-Mart brand.” That sentiment is clearly understandable, especially given the unemployment rate in Chicago and other cities.
To be sure, while some do seem to have a renewed or better appreciation for Wal-Mart, others give their support reluctantly.
Despite this reluctance, and the opposition Wal-Mart still faces in this area, the company has been looking to enter cities like Chicago. This is because Wal-Mart “has begun saturating suburbs.” Hence, Wal-Mart “sees Chicago as a potential testing ground for approaches it could use in other big cities.” Thus, whether one has positive or negative feelings about Wal-Mart, as the Wall Street Journal points out, the push into cities like Chicago is an important one.


text:
SAN FRANCISCO — We count on a lot from our computer systems these days. They ought to talk to us, recognize every little thing from faces to flowers, and maybe soon do the driving. All this artificial intelligence requires an enormous quantity of computing power, stretching the limits of even the most contemporary machines.
Now, some of the world’s largest tech businesses are taking a cue from biology as they respond to these expanding demands. They are rethinking the extremely nature of computer systems and are building machines that look far more like the human brain, exactly where a central brain stem oversees the nervous method and offloads particular tasks — like hearing and seeing — to the surrounding cortex.
After years of stagnation, the pc is evolving once again, and this behind-the-scenes migration to a new kind of machine will have broad and lasting implications. It will permit work on artificially intelligent systems to accelerate, so the dream of machines that can navigate the physical planet by themselves can one day come accurate.
This migration could also diminish the power of Intel, the longtime giant of chip style and manufacturing, and fundamentally remake the $ 335 billion a year semiconductor sector that sits at the heart of all issues tech, from the information centers that drive the net to your iPhone to the virtual reality headsets and flying drones of tomorrow.
“This is an massive alter,” said John Hennessy, the former Stanford University president who wrote an authoritative book on pc design in the mid-1990s and is now a member of the board at Alphabet, Google’s parent firm. “The current strategy is out of steam, and men and women are trying to re-architect the system.”
The existing approach has had a quite good run. For about half a century, pc makers have constructed systems around a single, do-it-all chip — the central processing unit — from a company like Intel, a single of the world’s greatest semiconductor makers. That is what you’ll discover in the middle of your personal laptop laptop or smartphone.
Now, pc engineers are fashioning more complicated systems. Rather than funneling all tasks through one beefy chip made by Intel, newer machines are dividing perform into tiny pieces and spreading them among vast farms of easier, specialized chips that consume much less energy.
Adjustments inside Google’s giant data centers are a harbinger of what is to come for the rest of the business. Inside most of Google’s servers, there is nonetheless a central processor. But huge banks of custom-built chips perform alongside them, running the computer algorithms that drive speech recognition and other forms of artificial intelligence.
Google reached this point out of necessity. For years, the business had operated the world’s biggest laptop network — an empire of information centers and cables that stretched from California to Finland to Singapore. But for one particular Google researcher, it was a lot as well little.
In 2011, Jeff Dean, one particular of the company’s most celebrated engineers, led a analysis group that explored the idea of neural networks — essentially computer algorithms that can find out tasks on their own. They could be beneficial for a number of factors, like recognizing the words spoken into smartphones or the faces in a photograph.
In a matter of months, Mr. Dean and his team constructed a service that could recognize spoken words far more accurately than Google’s existing service. But there was a catch: If the world’s far more than 1 billion phones that operated on Google’s Android application employed the new service just three minutes a day, Mr. Dean realized, Google would have to double its data center capacity in order to help it.
“We require another Google,” Mr. Dean told Urs Hölzle, the Swiss-born personal computer scientist who oversaw the company’s data center empire, according to an individual who attended the meeting. So Mr. Dean proposed an option: Google could develop its own computer chip just for running this kind of artificial intelligence.
But what began inside information centers is starting to shift other components of the tech landscape. More than the next couple of years, businesses like Google, Apple and Samsung will create phones with specialized A.I. chips. Microsoft is designing such a chip particularly for an augmented-reality headset. And everybody from Google to Toyota is developing autonomous vehicles that will want equivalent chips.
This trend toward specialty chips and a new personal computer architecture could lead to a “Cambrian explosion” of artificial intelligence, mentioned Gill Pratt, who was a plan manager at Darpa, a study arm of the United States Department of Defense, and now works on driverless vehicles at Toyota. As he sees it, machines that spread computations across vast numbers of tiny, low-energy chips can operate much more like the human brain, which efficiently utilizes the energy at its disposal.
“In the brain, energy efficiency is the crucial,” he mentioned during a recent interview at Toyota’s new research center in Silicon Valley.
Adjust on the Horizon
There are a lot of sorts of silicon chips. There are chips that shop info. There are chips that perform fundamental tasks in toys and televisions. And there are chips that run various processes for computers, from the supercomputers employed to generate models for global warming to personal computers, net servers and smartphones.
For years, the central processing units, or C.P.U.s, that ran PCs and equivalent devices had been exactly where the cash was. And there had not been much need for modify.
In accordance with Moore’s Law, the oft-quoted maxim from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, the number of transistors on a laptop chip had doubled every two years or so, and that supplied steadily improved performance for decades. As performance improved, chips consumed about the exact same amount of power, according to yet another, lesser-identified law of chip design and style known as Dennard scaling, named for the longtime IBM researcher Robert Dennard.
By 2010, however, doubling the quantity of transistors was taking significantly longer than Moore’s Law predicted. Dennard’s scaling maxim had also been upended as chip designers ran into the limits of the physical components they utilized to build processors. The outcome: If a firm wanted much more computing power, it could not just upgrade its processors. It necessary much more computers, more space and more electricity.
Researchers in sector and academia had been working to extend Moore’s Law, exploring completely new chip materials and style methods. But Doug Burger, a researcher at Microsoft, had an additional idea: Rather than rely on the steady evolution of the central processor, as the industry had been performing because the 1960s, why not move some of the load onto specialized chips?
In the course of his Christmas trip in 2010, Mr. Burger, functioning with a few other chip researchers inside Microsoft, started exploring new hardware that could accelerate the performance of Bing, the company’s web search engine.
At the time, Microsoft was just beginning to increase Bing making use of machine-studying algorithms (neural networks are a sort of machine finding out) that could increase search final results by analyzing the way folks employed the service. Though these algorithms have been much less demanding than the neural networks that would later remake the net, existing chips had difficulty keeping up.
Mr. Burger and his group explored many choices but at some point settled on some thing named Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or F.P.G.A.s.: chips that could be reprogrammed for new jobs on the fly. Microsoft builds application, like Windows, that runs on an Intel C.P.U. But such software program can not reprogram the chip, because it is hard-wired to perform only particular tasks.
With an F.P.G.A., Microsoft could adjust the way the chip operates. It could plan the chip to be genuinely great at executing certain machine understanding algorithms. Then, it could reprogram the chip to be actually great at running logic that sends the millions and millions of data packets across its laptop network. It was the exact same chip but it behaved in a different way.
Microsoft began to install the chips en masse in 2015. Now, just about every single new server loaded into a Microsoft data center includes a single of these programmable chips. They help pick the outcomes when you search Bing, and they help Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing service, shuttle info across its network of underlying machines.
Teaching Computers to Listen
In fall 2016, one more group of Microsoft researchers — mirroring the work carried out by Jeff Dean at Google — built a neural network that could, by 1 measure at least, recognize spoken words far more accurately than the average human could.
Xuedong Huang, a speech-recognition specialist who was born in China, led the effort, and shortly right after the team published a paper describing its perform, he had dinner in the hills above Palo Alto, Calif., with his old buddy Jen-Hsun Huang, (no relation), the chief executive of the chipmaker Nvidia. The guys had explanation to celebrate, and they toasted with a bottle of champagne.
Xuedong Huang and his fellow Microsoft researchers had trained their speech-recognition service using massive numbers of specialty chips supplied by Nvidia, rather than relying heavily on ordinary Intel chips. Their breakthrough would not have been feasible had they not made that adjust.
“We closed the gap with humans in about a year,” Microsoft’s Mr. Huang stated. “If we didn’t have the weapon — the infrastructure — it would have taken at least five years.”
Simply because systems that rely on neural networks can find out largely on their personal, they can evolve more rapidly than conventional services. They are not as reliant on engineers writing endless lines of code that clarify how they should behave.
But there is a wrinkle: Training neural networks this way calls for in depth trial and error. To generate one that is capable to recognize words as well as a human can, researchers must train it repeatedly, tweaking the algorithms and enhancing the education data over and over. At any offered time, this approach unfolds more than hundreds of algorithms. That calls for huge computing power, and if firms like Microsoft use regular-situation chips to do it, the approach requires far also lengthy because the chips cannot deal with the load and as well much electrical power is consumed.
So, the major internet companies are now coaching their neural networks with help from another type of chip referred to as a graphics processing unit, or G.P.U. These low-energy chips — usually made by Nvidia — were initially designed to render photos for games and other software program, and they worked hand-in-hand with the chip — normally created by Intel — at the center of a pc. G.P.U.s can procedure the math necessary by neural networks far far more efficiently than C.P.U.s.
Nvidia is thriving as a outcome, and it is now promoting huge numbers of G.P.U.s to the world wide web giants of the United States and the greatest on the internet organizations about the planet, in China most notably. The company’s quarterly revenue from data center sales tripled to $ 409 million over the past year.
“This is a tiny like becoming right there at the beginning of the internet,” Jen-Hsun Huang said in a current interview. In other words, the tech landscape is changing rapidly, and Nvidia is at the heart of that change.
Making Specialized Chips
G.P.U.s are the principal automobiles that organizations use to teach their neural networks a particular task, but that is only part of the process. Once a neural network is educated for a process, it need to perform it, and that calls for a distinct sort of computing power.
Right after education a speech-recognition algorithm, for example, Microsoft provides it up as an on the web service, and it truly starts identifying commands that men and women speak into their smartphones. G.P.U.s are not quite as efficient in the course of this stage of the process. So, numerous firms are now creating chips especially to do what the other chips have learned.
Google constructed its own specialty chip, a Tensor Processing Unit, or T.P.U. Nvidia is building a equivalent chip. And Microsoft has reprogrammed specialized chips from Altera, which was acquired by Intel, so that it as well can run neural networks much more effortlessly.
Other firms are following suit. Qualcomm, which specializes in chips for smartphones, and a quantity of start off-ups are also working on A.I. chips, hoping to grab their piece of the rapidly expanding market. The tech research firm IDC predicts that revenue from servers equipped with option chips will attain $ 6.eight billion by 2021, about 10 % of the all round server industry.
Across Microsoft’s worldwide network of machines, Mr. Burger pointed out, alternative chips are nevertheless a comparatively modest component of the operation. And Bart Sano, the vice president of engineering who leads hardware and software development for Google’s network, mentioned a lot the very same about the chips deployed at its information centers.
Mike Mayberry, who leads Intel Labs, played down the shift toward option processors, perhaps due to the fact Intel controls far more than 90 percent of the data-center industry, creating it by far the biggest seller of conventional chips. He stated that if central processors have been modified the right way, they could handle new tasks without added help.
But this new breed of silicon is spreading swiftly, and Intel is increasingly a organization in conflict with itself. It is in some methods denying that the market is changing, but nonetheless shifting its business to hold up with the modify.
Two years ago, Intel spent $ 16.7 billion to obtain Altera, which builds the programmable chips that Microsoft utilizes. It was Intel’s biggest acquisition ever. Last year, the firm paid a reported $ 408 million purchasing Nervana, a company that was exploring a chip just for executing neural networks. Now, led by the Nervana group, Intel is establishing a dedicated chip for training and executing neural networks.
“They have the classic massive-organization problem,” mentioned Bill Coughran, a companion at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital who spent almost a decade assisting to oversee Google’s online infrastructure, referring to Intel. “They want to figure out how to move into the new and expanding regions without having damaging their traditional enterprise.”
Intel’s internal conflict is most apparent when company officials talk about the decline of Moore’s Law. In the course of a recent interview with The New York Times, Naveen Rao, the Nervana founder and now an Intel executive, said Intel could squeeze “a couple of far more years” out of Moore’s Law. Officially, the company’s position is that improvements in standard chips will continue nicely into the subsequent decade.
Mr. Mayberry of Intel also argued that the use of added chips was not new. In the past, he mentioned, computer makers utilised separate chips for tasks like processing audio.
But now the scope of the trend is significantly bigger. And it is altering the marketplace in new ways. Intel is competing not only with chipmakers like Nvidia and Qualcomm, but also with businesses like Google and Microsoft.
Google is designing the second generation of its T.P.U. chips. Later this year, the organization stated, any enterprise or developer that is a client of its cloud-computing service will be able to use the new chips to run its computer software.
Even though this shift is taking place mostly inside the huge information centers that underpin the web, it is almost certainly a matter of time just before it permeates the broader business.
The hope is that this new breed of mobile chip can help devices manage much more, and much more complex, tasks on their personal, without having calling back to distant information centers: phones recognizing spoken commands without accessing the internet driverless automobiles recognizing the globe around them with a speed and accuracy that is not achievable now.
In other words, a driverless automobile wants cameras and radar and lasers. But it also wants a brain.


text:
CHAGRIN FALLS, OHIO – According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the United States has 3,091 active—and more than 10,000 inactive—municipal landfills. Thirty-eight percent of landfill waste comes from construction and demolition activities annually. Installed vinyl composition tile (VCT) makes up 75 percent of the total commercial resilient floor market, creating 1 billion pounds of waste material sent to landfills.
Tarkett, an integrated high-performance flooring system provider and an industry leader in sustainability, has positively impacted these statistics through its ReUse / ReStart™ programs.
ReUse / ReStart is a key component of Tarkett’s Balanced Choice philosophy, which encompasses four distinct goals: creating people-friendly spaces; using better raw materials; practicing resource stewardship; and reusing and recycling.
Launched in 2003, the ReUse / ReStart programs entail the recycling of installed flooring in the commercial market, installation waste and product samples. In 2009, the programs led to the recycling of 154 million pounds of flooring globally. The recycling process was conducted in-house at several plants worldwide and in the United States. In Tarkett’s North American facilities, 19 million pounds of flooring were internally recycled. 2010 reclaimed and recycled volume is projected to hit 35 million pounds.
The success of these programs is due in large part to the collaboration between Tarkett North America and its major customers to return installed flooring materials, including competitor’s products, to be recycled and then shipped back to the market as “new” tile.
The post-consumer content is incorporated into the production of Tarkett VCT, specifically the Expressions and Azrock lines. All Azrock tiles contain pre- and post-consumer recycled content with standard and premium VCT containing a minimum of 20 percent and depending on color, up to 30 percent, recycled content—and Tarkett is working to further increase these levels.
“The results to date have been extremely positive, demonstrating our program can significantly diminish the environmental impact of these materials well into the future,” says Diane Martel, vice president, environmental planning and strategy for Tarkett North America.
Going forward, Tarkett is developing methods and creating opportunities for incorporating the waste stream into its full range of products, including commercial vinyl and rubber flooring and accessories and expanding beyond the commercial market into residential products as well.
“Tarkett’s long-standing commitment to recycling and the dedication of our company and customers has helped drive the success of our program,” adds Martel. “Tarkett is known for developing durable, high-performance flooring solutions and as our product development capabilities increase, we will be able to maintain growth in not only recycling flooring, but in incorporating pre- and post-consumer recycled content into our products.
“We understand that each commercial project has unique environmental objectives, and our reclamation and reuse programs contribute to satisfying many of these sustainability needs. This is the essence of our Balanced Choice philosophy,” concludes Martel.
About Balanced Choice/Tarkett
Globally, sustainability is an integral part of the way Tarkett approaches every aspect of its business—from manufacturing to product development to shipping. It’s part of the company’s core philosophy—Balanced Choice. It’s how the company works to build floors that enable customers to balance their impact on the planet, their people and their budgets. For more than 50 years, sustainability has been a key component of Tarkett’s strategy, and through its ongoing focus in four areas—creating people-friendly spaces; using better raw materials; practicing resource stewardship; and recycling and reusing—the company has been able to create floors that are good for the environment, good for people and good for the bottom line. Tarkett provides customers with a wide range of sustainable solutions that will work for any application. The company believes that sustainability is an ongoing effort and works to approach challenges and find solutions through Balance Choice. For more information, visit www.tarkett.com.


text:
Chuks is a blockchain enthusiast and finance researcher that has covered the crypto sphere for several years. He believes that the evolving technology would change how we do business.
Despite an important announcement of volume production of the Semi trucks, Tesla (TSLA) stock is down today after hitting $1000.
Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) stock soared on Wednesday following an announcement by the chief executive officer of the company Elon Musk. Musk told the staff of Tesla that it is time to scale up the production of the Semi, its medium-class electric truck. Recently, Musk in a tweet said yes when asked if Tesla is poised to volume produce the Semi.
Tesla shares rose by 6% hitting $1000. This makes it the second most valued auto marker after Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp (TYO: 7203). The surge in the market price would likely lead to another stock compensation for the company’s shareholders.
However, today TSLA stock started the day with a drop of 3%. Now the shares are trading at $990.20.
More Room for Gain alongside with Tesla Semi Truck Production
In an earlier call, Tesla shares got a boost from Wedbush which projected that the company’s shares could be valued more than $1000 adding that there is more room for a bullish run. Furthermore, an anticipated unveiling of a new “million-mile” battery capable of delivering longer life at a lower cost by Musk could be instrumental to the rising value of Tesla shares.
According to a tweet by Musk, the production of the battery and its powertrain will take place at a factory in Giga Nevada. This will enable Tesla vehicles to deliver a higher range at a lower cost.
The company is working on building a new factory. An insider source said that plans are in top gear to find location for the planned factory. The source who does not want to be named said that Texas is a likely location even though Oklahoma is lobbying for the investment.
In 2017 when Musk launched the Semi he hinted that the battery-powered Class 8 truck would go into production by 2019. The anticipated volume production has since been shifted to 2021. It is not surprising that the Tuesday announcement resulted in a surge in the market price of Tesla shares.
Tesla Rival Makes Gains
Interestingly the announcement coincided with the appreciation of the share price of Nikola Corporation (NASDAQ: NKLA) another truck maker involved in the manufacturing of electric trucks and a Tesla rival.
Nicola recently merged with VectoIQ, a special purpose acquisition company and has since this month traded on the Nasdaq. This makes it one of the electric truck makers listed. Nikola shares have doubled in price in the past week as the company plans a launch of its electric pick-up truck that rivals Tesla’s Cybertruck.
The Tesla rival in a joint venture partnered with CNH Industrial IVECO, the commercial truck maker to build an electric truck line named Nikola Tre. IVECO announced that demand for its electric truck which is due for production next year is high. The company announced on Wednesday that a former Tesla executive Mark Duchesne as joined its team to lead the manufacturing process.


text:
Digital TV News: Partner Communications
Israel's Partner Communications launches multiscreen TV with Broadpeak
Aug 29, 2017 – Broadpeak has announced that Partner Communications (NASDAQ and TASE: PTNR) has launched a new TV service called Partner TV on 4K Android TV set-top boxes, smartphones, and tablet devices using Broadpeak solutions.
News categories: Broadpeak, Partner Communications, Jacques Le Mancq, Raz Bartov, Android TV, Content Distribution, Digital TV, IBC, Israel, Mobile
Partner Communications announces IPTV launch in Israel
Jun 27, 2017 – Partner Communications (NASDAQ and TASE: PTNR) has announced the launch of television services over the internet in Israel. The service will include 40 linear channels and VOD, alongside features provided by the Android TV operating system.
News categories: Partner Communications, Android TV, Digital TV, IPTV, Israel, Set Top Box
Partner Communications to launch IPTV in Israel in 1H2017
Sep 12, 2016 – Partner Communications (NASDAQ:PTNR) (TASE:PTNR) has announced that the Company plans to enter the television services market in the first half of 2017, and is finalizing arrangements for that objective.
News categories: Partner Communications, Digital TV, IPTV, Israel
- UEI providing voice-enabled remote for Astro's Ultra set-tops
- Ross Video withdraws from IBC 2021 exhibition
- Comcast brings XiOne streaming box to the U.S.
- Liberty Global to sell UPC Polska to iliad’s Play subsidiary
- Subscription fatigue in Australia? Not yet but on the way
- Sofia Digital working on a central service list registry for DVB-I
- Sony Pictures Networks India and Zee Entertainment negotiating merger
- Roku's Shopify app enables small business TV ad campaigns
- Americans move from bingeing on TV to social media in 2021
- VideoElephant makes 150 linear video channels available for licensing
- Android TV in 25% of advanced set-top boxes
- Pure TV launches in Ireland based on the Netgem TV platform
- FreeWheel and Strategus unlock access to CTV inventory
- SVOD subscriptions in Eastern Europe to double
- Roku introduces 4K and 4K+ streaming sticks
- rlaxx TV to monetise linear ad breaks with smartclip
- Conviva releases State of Streaming: Content Discovery report
- Roku OS 10.5 to begin rollout in next few weeks
- Altice France to acquire Coriolis Telecom
- Eltrona launches TV+ with ocilion


text:
Wolverine beats first quarter expectations, reaffirms 2016 outlook
Wolverine World Wide, Inc. on Tuesday reported the financial results for its first quarter of fiscal 2016 ended March 26, 2016.
The company reported revenue of $577.6 million, which exceeded guidance and consensus. Adjusted gross margin on a constant currency basis was 41.6%, an increase of 20 basis points versus the prior year’s comparable period; adjusted operating margin was 9.7%, down 20 basis points from last year but better than company expectations; and adjusted diluted earnings per share was $0.29, which exceeded guidance.
Cash and cash equivalents were $158.2 million and net debt was $712.1 million at quarter end. Wolverine also repurchased 200,000 shares during the quarter at an average price of $17.78 per share.
"The first quarter provided an encouraging start to the year, and we are pleased to have exceeded our expectations for revenue, earnings and inventory management," stated Mike Stornant, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. "More importantly, the initiatives we have recently implemented to drive product innovation, consumer insight and further operational excellence are moving forward on or ahead of our plans. The investments and actions that we are currently taking are focused on accelerating growth and enhancing our future operating margin and cash flow. We are energized by the opportunity to enhance shareholder value through these initiatives."
Wolverine reaffirmed its outlook for fiscal 2016 and expects its consolidated reported revenue to range between $2.475 billion and $2.575 billion. In addition, the adjusted diluted EPS is expected to range between $1.30 and $1.40 and the inventory is expected to reach normalized levels. The inventory in the first quarter was approximately $6 million lower than the company’s plan.
Copyright © 2022 FashionNetwork.com All rights reserved.


text:
Market research firm Technavio predicts the wearables market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of around 15 percent between 2019 and 2023.
Sharp's home appliance choices reach beyond the kitchen, where it has made its mark with steam cooking technology, into other rooms, with air purifiers that address consumers' health and wellness needs.
The company's diverse line of fitness trachers includes models that take account of and help wearers regulate track sleep, stress, and overall well-being
During its Power Briefing at the 2019 IFA Global Press Conference, Philips highlighted new products coming in the areas of personal health, oral health, and cooking—among others.
Apple's wearables portfolio saw a slight dip in overall market share, even though the company experienced nearly 22 percent growth in overall shipments year-over-year during Q4 2018.
At its Galaxy Unpacked event, Samsung launched a whole lot of new tech, including five new phones, some wearables, earbuds, and—of course—its brand new foldable smartphone.
Amazon recently made an investment in smart baby care by partnering with Hatch Baby Inc. These products will be among the first to incorporate Amazon's new API to track baby statistics like weight, diaper changes, feedings, etc.
A device that simplifies keeping around-the-clock tabs on this vital data
The distributor's top executive on what was new at and what will be next after CES
Ultrasound technology is the foundation of this problem-solving device
A treadmill that converts calories into electricity


text:
Leave this field blank
For B2B Marketers, Video Represents A Golden Opportunity
Business-to-business (B2B) marketers have keenly observed the programmatic performance of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers.
A Bridge To... Better Ads?
Last week, Marketo officially announced the launch of their new Ad Bridge prod
A Programmatic Prediction That Actually Came True: B2B Marketers Get Custom Platform
In an RTB Insider post in late 2014, Turn’s SVP of Business and Corporate Development Maureen Little predicted that in 2015, custom programmatic technologies would be applied to new verticals, incl
Madison Logic Data Rebrands as Bombora
Madison Logic Data, the premier provider of demographic and intent data solutions for leading B2B marketers worldwide, announced that it has rebranded as Bombora.
Ecomm Roundup: Partnerships abound
In today's roundup three new partnerships have been announced for the online space to improve brands' ability to target shoppers and optimize spending.
B2B News: DWA Chooses DataXu As Global Programmatic Partner
DWA, a global media and marketing agency for technology companies, and DataXu, a provider of programmatic marketing software today announced a strategic partnership to bring advanced programmatic s
How Content Data Inputs and Programmatic Technology Are Changing Account-Based Marketing
In the early days of digital advertising, account-based marketing consisted primarily on creating a list of target companies and serving ads exclusively to that list.
New Marketing Technology Event Series - DB8 - Launched in San Francisco
This week, we are excited to launch a new event series called DB8, in conjunction with our partner creative agency April Six and Bloomberg Media.
DWA rebrands amidst a momentous time of change in media and marketing
This week here at DWA, we have unveiled our new brand and launched our new website, which if you’re reading this, you have found.


text:
Monitoring, July 10 (INP): U.S. coffee chain Starbucks announced on Monday that it will eliminate all plastic straws for cold drinks in its 28,000 global stores within two years and replace them with recyclable straw-free coffee-cup lids, and paper-made straws or biodegradable plastic straws so as to reduce waste.
The replacement will start with Starbucks locations in Seattle in the U.S. and Vancouver in Canada this fall. Starbucks’ move follows the international trend of reducing waste. Seattle took the lead in banning plastic straws and utensils in the United States starting July 1 this year. The UK and Ireland are scheduled to ban the use of plastic straws and stirrers.
Consumers have been calling on Starbucks and McDonald’s to ditch plastic straws and utensils. “Currently, there is no feasible non-plastic alternative,” said McDonald’s CEO Stephen James Easterbrook, but the company is testing the alternatives including biodegradable straws.
KFC in Singapore banned use of plastic cup-lids and straws in its 84 chain stores on June 20, 2018.


text:
Commercial Real Estate: Failure of Payless and Home Outfitters further shakes retail real estate market
Together, the closures could vacate nearly 270,000 square feet in B.C.
The Canadian retail market was hit with a double whammy in February as the impending closures of Payless ShoeSource and Home Outfitters were announced in the same week.
In B.C. alone, the closures will shutter 31 Payless stores and five Home Outfitters locations.
Payless locations are usually between 2,400 and 3,000 square feet in size, while Hudson’s Bay-owned Home Outfitters locations usually cover about 35,000 square feet. Together, the closures could vacate nearly 270,000 square feet in the province, according to retail experts.
The Home Outfitters closures will be the more problematic for the retail property market, said Chris Wood, an executive vice-president with commercial property brokerage JLL in Vancouver.
Hudson’s Bay said on Feb. 21 it would be closing all of its 37 home products stores in Canada by the end of the year.
The retailer has five locations in B.C.: Kelowna, Langley, Coquitlam, Victoria and North Nanaimo, according to the Home Outfitters website.
Wood said the spaces currently held by the home products brand suit large format retailers that require “a very mature business model”.
Other, similar retailers could step up to fill that space, but some of the space will end up going to non-traditional users such as gyms, including Goodlife Fitness, Club 16 Trevor Linden Fitness, and Steve Nash Fitness Worlds, he said.
Many shopping centres like that are still dealing with space left vacant by Sears’ complete demise at the end of 2018, Wood said.
He said Canadian retail remains strong overall and the Home Outfitters closure is likely due to poor management, and by HBC cutting a secondary brand to keep its core business afloat.
“I’ve been in several Home Outfitters stores and they’re missing lights and (have) no staff around and the stores are just generally messy,” he said. “So, it comes as no surprise. They’ve been slowly closing a number of stores for the last two or three years.”
As for Payless, the brand has failed to keep up with other massive discount shoe retailers such as Costco, Walmart and Amazon.
“It’s a very, very tough business to be a discount retailer when you’re going up against massive players,” he said.
Wood said there is another important theme behind the Payless closures.
“Payless was doing great when it was a publicly traded company,” he said. “As soon as private equity took it over (in 2012) … there (was) very little room to invest in the business. When private equity takes over a retailer, more often than not it has been a recipe for ultimate bankruptcy.”
It was a surprise that Payless lasted as long as it did, said Craig Patterson, a Canadian retail consultant and editor-in-chief of Retail Insider. (Payless first filed for bankruptcy in mid-2017.)
“I think it was a combination of product, which I think was a bit inadequate … and retail environments (that were) uninspiring,” he said.
The space Payless leaves behind won’t hurt as much as Target Canada or by Sears, Patterson said, noting that the average size of a Payless store is relatively small.
“It will be interesting to see what happens with that real estate,” Patterson said. “Will it all go back to the landlords or will it be packaged up and provided to another retailer or set of retailers?”
Payless Shoes declined an interview when reached by Postmedia, but the Kansas-based retailer said in a release on Feb. 18 that it had again filed for bankruptcy relief in the U.S. and Canada. The 62-year-old company said it planned to “wind-down” all of its approximately 2,500 stores in North America by the end of May. Nearly 250 of those stores are north of the border.
The Payless closure will also put about 2,400 people out of work, Patterson said.
“There are quite often more jobs than people in the retail industry right now, so a lot of people who are being laid off from Payless I think will be able to find positions elsewhere,” he said.
Wood said the Payless locations should be refilled over time. “What you’re seeing is a slow but natural evolution.”
New concepts in health and wellness, food and beverage and entertainment will likely take the empty shoe store spaces, he said. “All of these offerings that are soft goods and apparel orientated, they’re getting taken up by alternative users.”


text:
HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) – The Pennsylvania Auto Show starts Thursday at the Farm Show Complex and Expo Center.
This year’s show will feature more than 800 cars, trucks, SUVs and more.
It runs Thursday from 1-9 p.m., Friday-Saturday from 10 a.m.- 9 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m.- 5 p.m.
Tickets cost $8 for adults online and $10 at the door. People over age 62 and active members of the military can purchase tickets for $6. Children under 12 are free.


text:
XPENG is preparing to launch its own robotaxi fleet, the world’s first fully-electric flying car, and an AI-powered robot. The luxury vehicle maker said that its latest G9 SUV became China’s first mass-produced commercial vehicle to pass the government-led Autonomous Driving Closed-field Test. The G9 will be used for XPENG’s robotaxi fleet. “Obtaining the road… Read more »
The post XPENG prepares its own robotaxi fleet, flying car, and robot appeared first on Internet of Things News.


text:
We found 594 items for the tag: SF
Dec 22, 2008 5:00 am
HIS has strapped its good looking IceQ4 cooler to the Radeon HD 4850 and we find out what it does for performance today.
Nov 11, 2008 5:00 am
"Get on, Gramps!"
Nov 10, 2008 1:06 am
A true P45 offering on steroids
Nov 5, 2008 5:00 am
Sapphire has strapped two of our much loved HD 4850 cores onto a single PCB. Disaster or genius? - Let's check it out.
Nov 5, 2008 12:11 am
Latest mobile processor roadmap sheds light
Nov 4, 2008 5:00 am
"Autobots: Transform and Roll Out!"
Oct 30, 2008 12:02 pm
Another CPU cooler out, one year in the making
Oct 29, 2008 1:54 pm
Don't throw away your Thermaltake coolers just yet
Oct 29, 2008 4:00 am
Shane checks out a Micro-ATX system that puts machines four times its size to shame. This is one SFF you will want.
Oct 13, 2008 12:10 pm
Improves on design over already successful V1 HSF
Oct 9, 2008 4:00 am
NVIDIA has quite a few chipsets out now, both for AMD and Intel. We test BIOSTARs mid-range nForce 750a for AMD today.
Oct 8, 2008 6:16 am
First cooler looks the goods with quad heatpipe
Oct 6, 2008 10:33 am
Early look at what looks like the final design


text:
Shaw Media’s online network posts growth
The company's SPAN ad network increases its online assets and triples its number of unique monthly visitors.
At the start of summer, Shaw Media launched its Shaw Premium Audience Network (SPAN), its online ad network of 90 broadcast entertainment and lifestyle sites. The mediaco has since been tallying the numbers, and recently announced that it has grown from a unique monthly audience of 2.2 million to 6.2 million.
The jump in visitors is a result of Shaw fastening down partnerships with CBS.com, TV.com and CNBC.com.
Paul Burns, VP digital media, Shaw Communications, tells MiC that SPAN was designed to avoid having its client brands advertise blindly on sites that are not credible, or even relevant to them.
“A brand message being placed on low impact sites with really questionable content is brand suicide,” says Burns. “If it were just about the unique visitors, we would be building relationships with anyone,” he adds. “But the partner selection process is almost surgical. We’re being very specific and targeting what type of audience we want to represent in the territory.”
Brands are also given access to Shaw Media’s own properties, including FoodNetwork.ca, GlobalTV.com and Showcase.ca, says Burns.
Graeme Mackrell, director of digital sales, Shaw Media, says that the mediaco can offer brands standard display ads as well as video ads depending on the website.


text:
financial institutions - News, Features, and Slideshows
- CommBank CEO says Albert 'took longer than we thought it would'
- Mobile payments in Australia: state of the banks
- CBA opens Innovation Lab inside Sydney HQ
Leading on technology is a “life-and-death matter” for Commonwealth Bank, according to CEO Ian Narev.
Security concerns have delayed the release of Commonwealth Bank’s Android-based EFTPOS terminal, CBA executives have revealed.
Eftpos has switched on new centralised payments infrastructure that is meant to speed up the rollout of products including Eftpos online and mobile payments.
Banks can win against the fast-growing PayPal because they are more trusted by customers, according to Bendigo and Adelaide Bank managing director, Mike Hirst.
Westpac’s move to supporting Android and Windows Phone devices “is another nail in the BlackBerry coffin,” according to independent telecom analyst Chris Coughlan.
Whitepapers about financial institutions
Outsourcing has become a critical component of management of financial institution operations. Consequently, the Office of the Controller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) recently issued guidance on how financial institutions should manage third-party risks. • Institutions are outsourcing increasingly complex and sensitive banking and financial operations to third parties • The guidance issued by each agency has particular relevance to outsourcing transactions and provides companies with a roadmap of the key areas of concern to regulators • Many of the suggestions in the OCC and FRB guidance concern provisions of outsourcing agreements where vendors often push back
- Tourism Australia CMO Nick Baker resigns
- Focus on people, not social platforms: Klout CEO
- Why CMOs must embrace software and agility or risk a 'customerpocalypse'
- Aussie satisfaction in big data lags behind global results: Accenture
- Apple Pay hits U.S. stores Monday -- assuming buyers can find anywhere to use it


text:
116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
A year ago, craft beer lovers could pick up Coralville-based Backpocket Brewing's Slingshot lager in Davenport or Bettendorf. But across the Mississippi River, on the Illinois side, no Backpocket brews were available.
Thanks to a change last year in state law making it easier for Iowa breweries to sell out of state, Backpocket beers are now for sale in Rock Island and Moline.
Read about the Corridor's newest breweries and what's brewing for 2016: What's brewing in 2016?
And the brewery is exploring options to expand distribution further into Illinois and other surrounding states. In fact, it recently hired a second sales and marketing staff member to focus on those possibilities.
The new law opens untapped markets for the brewery, which produced 8,000 barrels of beer — 248,000 gallons — in 2014 but has capacity to brew more.
'Obviously the more markets you have the better,' said warehouse manager Rob Strutt. 'It definitely does have an impact on how we're operating going into 2016.'
The law is one example of the ways Iowa legislators have been amending rules to help brewers keep pace with consumer's growing thirst for craft beers.
The recent efforts began in 2010, when state law was changed to let Iowa breweries produce beer above 5 percent alcohol by volume for the first time since Prohibition.
Since then, the number of breweries and brewpubs in the state has almost tripled. In 2009, there were 22, while today there are around 60. About a dozen opened in 2015 alone, including four in the Corridor.
All of this is big business.


text:
Alice Marie Johnson defended Kim Kardashian and her “Skims Solutionwear” after an ad featuring the freed prisoner received backlash.
Johnson, whose sentence was commuted by President Trump in June of last year after Kardashian advocated for the 64-year-old, recently appeared in the ad for “SKIMS Solutionwear," saying it makes her “feel free.”
When the ad featuring Johnson came out, it received mixed reactions from users, with some applauding it. Others, however, labeled Johnson’s appearance as “exploitative.”
Johnson spoke out, defending the reality star and calling it “insulting” for people to “assume” she couldn’t think for herself.
“I was very honored to be a part of Kim’s shapewear launch,” Johnson said in a tweet Friday.
In the ad, Johnson spoke about how Kardashian helped advocate for her release from prison.
Johnson had served more than two decades of a life sentence plus 25 years without the possibility of parole related to drug charges and money laundering when Kardashian met with President Trump and Jared Kushner in a bid to convince them to release Johnson. The following week, Johnson’s sentence was commuted by the President.
Johnson has called her release a “miracle,” and said God touched Kardashian to help her.
“She went to war for me, to fight for my freedom. That’s why I call her my war angel, because nothing stood between her and my freedom,” the Memphis, Tenn., native said of Kardashian in the SKIMS video.
“This shapewear makes me feel that I can walk into the store, I can pick up something that I normally wouldn’t even think about wearing and I can put it on and it’s going to look great on me. This shapewear makes me feel free," Johnson said wearing a black bodysuit from SKIMS in a video on social media.
Upon the release of the video, it received a wide range of reactions, with many excited about Johnson appearing in the ad.
“Thank you so much for hiring a #FormerlyIncarceratedPerson, hopefuly, others will follow your lead. Appreciate you,Ma’am!!!" twitter user @Wardanncheryl tweeted at Kardashian when the ad was released.
“@KimKardashian using Alice Johnson for her SKIMS advertising is one of the sweetest and most empowering things I’ve ever seen. I almost cried when I saw her in Kim’s stories. I’m so proud of them,” user @_dracarys96 tweeted.
While some users were supportive of Kardashian including Johnson in the campaign, others saw it as exploitation.
“Alice Marie Johnson,” @ados2020voter tweeted, “Her white savior exploits her."
“Waking up in the morning and not having a bunk bed over my head... Being able to open the door whenever I want to and just walk outside and breathe in fresh air to breathe in freedom, that is precious to me,” Johnson continues in the SKIMS video.
While now named “SKIMS Solutionwear,” Kardashian received backlash when it was previously announced that her shapewear brand would be named “KIMONO,” with users claiming she committed cultural appropriation when she tried to trademark the name. Kardashian announced last Monday that the new name would be “SKIMS Solutionwear.”
According to a press release from the company, SKIMS will feature 25 other “real women” who will tell “real and intimate stories” related to “why they love their bodies and how SKIMS empowers them to feel the best version of themselves.” The line, which launches on Sept. 10, will be available in sizes XXS to 5XL.


text:
Kreayshawn has announced the release date for her debut album Somethin ‘Bout Kreay, which is now scheduled to hit stores on September 18. In addition, the Bay Area native also unveils the official artwork to the upcoming long-player, and this one is sure to generate some discussion. What can we say, all eyes on Kreay.
Kreayshawn – Somethin ‘Bout Kreay (Release Date & Artwork)
News / August 4, 2012 / 1485 Views/


text:
Enough is enough. That was the reaction among bookstores when Amazon offered a discount to customers willing to use its Price Check app to browse at a brick-and-mortar store but buy the goods from its website.
Jasmine Johnson, whose grandparents founded Marcus Books in San Francisco’s Fillmore district more than half a century ago, has started an online petition determined to put a stop to the app and Amazon’s tactics.
“Amazon’s Price Checker app goes beyond simple competition in a free marketplace,” she wrote in the petition. “It represents an ugly race to the bottom that might provide short-term benefit for bargain hunters, but will lead to long-term pain for communities in the form of lost jobs and tax revenues.”
She hit a nerve among supporters who logged complaints about Amazon on Change.org, which is hosting the petition.
It was quite a reaction considering that the Dec. 10 Price Check promotion lasted one day and did not actually apply to Marcus Books or any other bookstores, a few of which have tried to adjust by using Amazon.com to sell their inventory online. Marcus workers have not seen anyone using the app. Few nonbook retailers seemed to notice the promotion.
But after years of pressure from Amazon and e-readers, Price Check may be the proverbial straw that breaks the bookstore’s back, especially coming on top of a recession that makes shoppers eager to save money even if it’s just a few dollars.
Johnson, for one, decided to up the ante by launching the “Amazon, huh?” Google Chrome browser pop-up. It tries to persuade book shoppers who click on Amazon.com to switch to Marcus instead.
Meanwhile, Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, wrote an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, complaining about his spending on lobbyists and efforts to skirt sales tax. The letter appears on an Occupy Amazon Facebook page.
The Amazon app went too far by using brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom then offering people a discount to buy on its website, said Cherysse Calhoun, who also is related to the Marcus Books founders.
“We’re having a hard enough time without Amazon snatching our customers from inside our stores,” she said Monday afternoon at the Oakland store on Martin Luther King Jr. Way.
“If that continues to happen, we’ll no longer exist.”
That said, comparison-shopping is nothing new. Smartphones just make it easier and faster than ever before through bar code scanning and voice recognition technology. But shoppers can choose whether or not to use Price Check.
“I come here because it’s local,” said Amy Ichnowski, who was browsing the shelves of Books Inc. in Alameda. The California chain has 13 locations, mostly in the Bay Area.
Books Inc. does cost more than Amazon, she said. But it’s worth it to support the store and Alameda’s economy. “If I’m here, I am here to spend locally,” she said.
Even a national book chain like Borders, which declared bankruptcy in 2010, suffered from Amazon’s discounts and sales tax exemptions.
“Amazon has been doing shifty things to us for a while,” said Jon Stich, a manager at Diesel bookstore. Workers at the small store on College Avenue in Oakland joined the backlash campaign by donning buttons that read “Occupy Amazon” and offered them to shoppers.
Price Check was “just another cog in their arsenal,” Stich said.
Amazon makes money even when shoppers browse its site looking for everything from toasters to ballet slippers and the latest bestseller for its e-reader Kindle.
Bookstores have no such advantage, said Judy Wheeler, the owner of Towne Center Books in Pleasanton. Amazon has not affected her business, said Wheele, who compared Price Check to walking into a restaurant and asking for a bite of dishes offered on the menu then going somewhere else. “It’s rude,” she said.


text:
When tiny Fisker Automotive Inc. hit a financing glitch last year, threatening its plan to build a fancy gasoline-electric hybrid car in Finland, it turned to the U.S. Department of Energy.
The DOE had a bolder idea. Why not also step up the company's plans to develop a less-expensive model, and assemble it in a closed U.S. auto plant?
Within months, Vice President Joe Biden, the former senator from Delaware, was helping lure the embryonic car company to a shuttered General Motors Co. factory four miles from his house in Wilmington, right across the tracks from Biden Park. Soon, Fisker Automotive, a two-year-old business that has yet to sell a car, won loans from the federal government totaling $528 million.
Original Article: Venture Capitol: New VC Force - WSJ.com