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Microsoft has sent out invitations for an even of theirs on 18.06, which has, of course, managed to cause a lot of online speculations about what we’re going to see unveiled. The main reason for this is the fact, that this event is going to be held just a couple of days before another even, at which the software giant is going to reveal the next version of their mobile platform – Windows Phone 8. According to some, at the earlier event Microsoft are going to focus on Windows RT – a version of the OS, which is going to run on devices with ARM chips, and they’re going to use it as a chance to tell us more about the apps and services, which are going to be available for such devices.
Meanwhile, though, another rumors has appeared online, claiming that Microsoft is about to announce a tablet of their own, with which to directly compete with the other manufacturers on the market. The time could actually hardly be more convenient – this is pretty much the best moment to reveal such a device, just before the Google I/O conference, at which Google is also expected to announce a tablet of theirs. It’s also worth mentioning, that Microsoft recently made a deal with Barnes&Noble, around which a lot of Windows Phone cross-references were made and a device was even mentioned, bearing the name Microsoft Reader. B. A.


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The 2011 Jeep Wrangler Call of Duty Black Ops Edition price will be of 30,625 USD for the 2-door model, while the 4-door version will cost 33,500 USD (destination fee included).
The 2011 Jeep Wrangler Call of Duty Black Ops Edition is based on the Rubicon equipment grade, and features Mineral Gray dark alloy wheels wrapped in 32-inch off-road tires, Mopar taillamp guards and fuel filler lid, live axles with front and rear locking differentials plus a two speed transfer case.
Chrysler press release :
October 19, 2010 , Auburn Hills, Mich. -
The Jeep® brand today announced it has been named exclusive automotive partner by Activision Publishing, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI) for Call of Duty®: Black Ops, the year’s most anticipated entertainment launch, which will be released on November 9.
In conjunction with the partnership, the Jeep brand also announced that it will produce a limited-edition 2011 Jeep Wrangler Call of Duty: Black Ops Edition. Available in Jeep showrooms next month, the new limited-edition Jeep Wrangler will be available at a
"The Jeep brand's partnership with Activision marries the world's most capable and iconic vehicle – the Jeep Wrangler – with one of the world's most popular entertainment experiences," said Mike Manley, President and CEO – Jeep Brand, Chrysler Group LLC. "As a result, we are able to expose the Jeep brand and its legendary capability to an entirely new group of consumers."
“This is a dynamic and fully integrated partnership that brings together two iconic brands across a full array of consumer touch-points,” stated Brad Jakeman, Chief Marketing Officer, Activision Publishing, Inc. “From the beginning our teams worked together to make this a truly creative partnership that added to the consumer experience of both the Jeep and Call of Duty: Black Ops brands.”
The 2011 Jeep Wrangler and Wrangler Unlimited Call of Duty: Black Ops Edition is based on the Jeep Wrangler Rubicon model and features dark Rubicon wheels in a high-gloss Mineral Gray. The vehicle’s exterior color is black and features Call of Duty: Black Ops graphics on the roof and front quarter panels. The vehicle also features taillamp guards and a fuel-filler door from Mopar®. Inspired by Call of Duty: Black Ops, the new limited-edition Wrangler delivers legendary Jeep capability, aggressive 32-inch off-road tires, live axles with locking differentials in the front and rear, and a two-speed transfer case.
The partnership delivers a natural fit including an in-game integration into both the epic single player storyline of Call of Duty: Black Ops and the title’s much anticipated multiplayer experience.
“It was important for us to make sure that the Jeep partnership would be authentic and enhance the setting we immerse our fans in with Black Ops,” said Mark Lamia, Studio Head of game developer Treyarch. “Our work with the Jeep team focused around using the Jeep Wrangler in our levels, and gameplay experiences, and translating the style and look of the vehicle in Black Ops to the Jeep on the showroom floor that our fans can own.”
All-new 2011 Jeep Wrangler
Jeep continues to refine the successful Wrangler formula by combining legendary, benchmark capability with an all-new interior that delivers rich styling with significantly upgraded touch surfaces, occupant comfort and versatility, and a premium appearance courtesy of an all-new body color hard top for the popular Sahara model.
New 2011 Jeep Wrangler interior highlights include a redesigned instrument panel and new storage areas with improved ergonomics and upgraded materials. A new lockable console and upgraded door armrest areas boast comfortable touch points, while a redesigned center stack is easier to reach and operate. Heated, power mirrors are now available, and drivers and passengers will enjoy enhanced visibility courtesy of larger rear windows.
All-new steering-wheel controls allow the driver to operate the radio, cruise control, hands-free phone and other vehicle functions while keeping hands on the wheel. A new USB interface connects to storage devices for use with the vehicle’s Media Center, which now includes streaming Bluetooth audio. Twelve-volt accessory outlets have been added and a new 110-volt outlet is available to provide power similar to AC outlets in the home.
In line with traditional Jeep design, hex-head bolts are utilized throughout the interior, and are used to mount a “Jeep, Since 1941” inlay onto the new passenger grab handle.
Jeep engineers increased acoustical treatment in the 2011 Wrangler and Wrangler Unlimited, resulting in significantly reduced interior noise.
To provide a more premium appearance, the 2011 Jeep Wrangler and Wrangler Unlimited Sahara models boast an all-new, premium, body-color hard top.
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Call of Duty: Black Ops will be released worldwide on November 9th for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system, Nintendo Wii™ and Windows PC. Pre-orders for the title are currently available. For additional Call of Duty updates, visit www.callofduty.com/blackops and also via Twitter @JD_2020.
Call of Duty Black Ops Trailer video :
- Christina Crowley : 2 December 2010 22:03:33This Vehicle is the most awesome Jeep I have ever seen... My Husband is so enveloped in the game if I ever win the lottery this is the first car I buy. He would just freak! That way He could have the fun of living his most favorite game that has now taken my time and made it more Quieter! I just wished I was rich to have such a luxury. Just wanted to say even though I can't I hope to be a future Jeep owner!
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Travel inspiration app Epiclist says it plans to close down its service and remove it from the servers on January 10, 2015.
The startup, built up over the past three years and claiming a spot as one of the "Best New Apps" on the App store, has informed users of its closure via an email from founders Olga Reimgen and Stan Bugaev.
A heartfelt blog post (worth reading in its entirety for lessons learned) from Bugaev talks about the many ups and downs along the way:
"...working many long nights through, pitching on dozens of conferences, moving from city to city across the planet, pitching hundreds of investors, being broke, burned out, winning many new friends, losing several old friends, thousands of emotional ups and downs..."
He goes on to describe the time as the "most challenging and rewarding 3 years", before moving to why things have not worked out for the startup.
Like so many travel startups Epiclist was not able to build a sustainable business model, ran out of money and could not obtain additional investment.
On the challenges of getting funding he says the company could not raise a new round because it did "not nail 3 things":
Not enough traction (lack in the product-market fit)
Lack of unique positioning in a highly competitive market
Difficult business model in a difficult market (B2B2C)."
Bugaev also talks about the very competitive travel market and "complicated market dynamics" and says the startup is now talking to companies about merging or potentially acquiring Epiclist.
The post contains much more detail about the startup's journey, building the app and pivots along the way.


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Why didn't Apple's Tim Cook announce a third-party app update to Apple TV in his keynote at WWDC? Despite rumors to the contrary, "Apple TV remains closed, with access to a limited number of
partner apps," writes Janko Roettgers.
One reason: the big gap between number of Apple TVs and iPads recently sold (2.7 million to 40.5 million). "And a smaller device footprint equals less money and opportunities for developers," according to Roettgers.
Also, Apple has not told developers "where it wants to go with Apple TV. Is it an accessory, an Airplay receiver? Or will it evolve into a full-fledged TV platform, complete with its own TV set and access to premium content?"


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A new investment fund is coming to Midwest cities, and it’s lead by names familiar to the local scenes. The aptly-named Midwest Fund targets early-stage startups from Pittsburgh to Chicago, from Detroit to Cincinnati, and everywhere in between. Unlike traditional venture capital funds,
It may be tough to remember, but there was a time long ago when Justworks wasn’t a household name. Though its monthly revenue growth charts were up and to the right, it had not even broken the $100,000 mark. Even then, Bain Capital Venture’s Matt Harris felt confident in betting on the startup.
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here. Ready? Let’s talk money,
“A lot of founders mix up raising money with making money.” This quote, which Career Karma founder Ruben Harris mentioned off-hand on a phone call with me, has been on my mind for months. In fact, raising money can cost you money, in the form of that sweet, sweet ownership and equity.
Storm Ventures, a venture firm that focuses on early stage B2B enterprise startups, announced this week that it has promoted Pascale Diaine and Frederik Groce to partners at the firm. The two new partners have worked their way up over the last several years.
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Gameloft, a popular French mobile video game developer and publisher, has revealed that three new games are set to be released in the near future. Based on an official Gameloft video (embedded below and in French), the company is working on Modern Warfare 5, Captain America The Winter Solder,
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An ongoing collection of branded content across diverse categories.
While we tend to turn to space as a new frontier with excitement, we must not forget that ocean
The best way to change society and the underlying issues is to channelize the power of woman in
The earlier resistance to change has been replaced by a growing eagerness to infuse technology
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India is cruising on the highway of exponential growth revolution propelling fast-paced
Shubham Saraff, a third year student of B.Tech in Computer Science Engineering at Vellore
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The Vice President Shri. M. Venkaiah Naidu along with the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Shri
Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, is taking great pride in initiating the first bullet
Known for its immaculate designs and world-class technology, Frederique Constant now introduces


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Snow arrives in Switzerland for ski season boost
Snow has finally fallen across the Swiss Alps after one of the warmest and driest autumns on record.
It is a relief for Switzerland's tourism industry, where the rise of the franc against the euro this year is already keeping some holidaymakers away.
Imogen Foulkes reports from Bern.
09 Dec 2011
- From the section Europe


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Canada – Raw Materials Price Index
Tomorrow, at GMT 12:30 p.m., the Statistics Canada will release the month-over-month Raw Materials Price Index (RMPI), which measures the changes in the price of raw materials bought by manufacturers in the country over the past month.
Binary options investors consider the RMPI to be an important leading indicator of consumer inflation in Canada, because if manufacturers pay more to buy raw materials, then ultimately the retail customers end up paying for the higher cost of production.
Over the past several months, the Canadian RMPI has been gradually increasing. But, in August, it fell by 5.9% and if the current trend continues, it would add additional bearishness to the Canadian Dollar.
Australia – Building Approvals
Later on Wednesday, at GMT 1:30 a.m., the Australian Bureau of Statistics will release the national month-over-month building approvals figure, which measures the changes in the number of approvals of new buildings.
Since a build permit indicates new construction work, it suggests that there would be additional positive economic activities. For example, new jobs would be created for construction workers. Therefore, binary options traders consider this data regarding new building approvals to be a leading indicator of the overall economic health of the country.
Last month, the building approvals figure went up by 4.2% and this month the forecast was set at a modest 1.9% decline.
Trade Recommendation for the AUD/CAD
After breaking above the long-term downtrend line in early August, the AUD/CAD appeared bullish. However, over the last two months, the AUD/CAD had been mostly bearish and fell around 590 pips.
Last week, the AUD/CAD found support around the long-term downtrend line, and formed a bullish pin bar. Although the price penetrated above the high of the pin bar, the lack of bullish momentum in the market failed to push the price much higher and soon it retraced below the resistance around 0.9345.
As the Canadian raw material price index fell for last two months, the overall fundamental outlook for the AUD/CAD would be bullish this week.
Under the circumstances, it is recommended that traders consider placing a CALL order for the AUD/CAD with their binary options brokers, once the price closes above the high of September 24, which is at 0.9374.[featured feattitle=’Recommended Broker: HighLow.net’ site=’HighLow’ ] HighLow.net is a popular Australian binary options broker regulated by ASIC. [/featured]
About our Forex and Binary Options Analyst: Asif Imtiaz
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European companies, investors and talent are all vying for a ticket on the metaverse hype train. Even political heavyweights are making strides — or at least making statements.
French President Emmanuel Macron wants to build “a European metaverse” to challenge American and Chinese tech giants. The EU’s digital chief, Margrethe Vestager, is meanwhile considering new antitrust rules. But their ambitions are far from being realized.
“The reality is that there is no European major technology player that is relevant in that whole metaverse future,” said Rolf Illenberger, the co-founder of Munich’s VRdirect, a virtual reality platform for enterprises. “It is determined by American and Asian players. Those are the two regions where this technology will develop.”
Their biggest global challengers are located in Asia. Bytedance, the owner of TikTok and VR hardware giant Pico, is the biggest contender, but more competition is emerging from the likes of Huawei, Tencent and the sandpit virtual world.
European startups are lagging behind their American and Asian counterparts.
Europe, on the other hand, is largely limited to niche operators and startups. These range from Finland’s Varjothat produces high-quality headsets, to Estonia Ready Player Mea cross-game avatar platform that recently raised $56 million in a funding round led by VC giant Andreessen Horowitz.
Jake Stott, CEO of Web3 and metaverse advertising agency hype, is optimistic that Europe’s renowned fintech sector can produce future payment providers in the space. However, he recognizes that they face major challenges.
“Historically, European startups left behind their American and Asian counterparts when it comes to producing unicorns,” he says. “Europe is also lagging behind the US when it comes to attracting venture capital. This is perhaps one of the areas where government support can help the continent’s fledgling metaverse ecosystem – by removing barriers to growth and creating incentives for VCs.”
Europe’s metaverse financing problem
Petri Rajahalme has his own plans to close the financing gap. The Finnish entrepreneur and his business partner, Dave Hayes, recently launched FOV companies, the first VC firm to specialize in metaverse start-ups in Europe. In March, the duo announced a €25 million fund for startups in the pre-seed or seed phase.
“We don’t lack talent, that’s for sure,” says Rajalhlme. “If you look at historic mergers and acquisitions, many of the companies that [businesses] have hooked up talent from Europe… The big question is how do you keep that talent in Europe?”
The talent pipeline often flows to the best financial incentives. Finland, for example, offers free and quality education, but the salaries offered upon graduation are not comparable to those in Silicon Valley.
EU grants can provide some support in scaling up, but applying for them is extremely time consuming and funding is limited. FOV Ventures prefers to keep talent in Europe through early funding and go-to-market expertise.
An important part of the strategy is an ‘edge network’ of metaverse professionals from established players, such as Meta and Decentraland. These experts can provide funding and advice on working with major platforms.
Rajahalme also wants European investors to work together to challenge US resources.
“As VCs, we should work very well here in Europe to share knowledge, deal flows and insights – as well as help at the grassroots level,” he says. “This is a big wave, but it’s a wave that’s just getting started and we need to get more and more people involved.”
Rajahalme has invested in this wave since 2016, but admits that the metaverse only entered the mainstream after Facebook was rebranded as Meta.
That doesn’t mean the metaverse is now widely understood. The vague nature of the concept brings problems as well as opportunities.
Building the unknown
“As a legislator, we now have to think about how we can regulate something [that] is not there, or [that] already exists, but in a smaller dimension,” said MEP Axel Voss at a recent roundtable discussion.
Definitions of the metaverse abound. Neal Stephenson, who coined the term in his 1992 novel snow crash, describes the real version as a “3D Internet”. Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, envisions “a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces” and “an embodied internet that you are in rather than just looking at it.”
Rajahalme prefers the description taught by fellow investor Matthew Ball:
“A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and permanently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence and continuity of data, such as identity, history, rights, objects, communication and payments .”
All of these definitions allow for numerous use cases – and charlatans.
Virtually real or just assorted buzzwords?
if you trust Meta (and who doesn’t?), the metaverse lets us move seamlessly between immersive digital spaces for work, education, leisure, and seemingly every other aspect of our physical world.
Some elements of this grand vision already exist. Virtual worlds are the pillars of online gaming, while VR holidays, immersive workplaces, AR training simulationsand “industrial metavers” are also available to consumers.
This multiplicity of applications can capitalize on the strengths of different European ecosystems. For example, the Scandinavians can leverage their great gaming sector, while Germany’s industrial economy offers promising foundations for B2B services in the metaverse.
Critics argue, however, that many “metaverse” vendors merely repackage existing technologies under an all-encompassing buzzword. Their individual applications are also far from integrated. All attempts to impose interoperability between platforms are: full of design challenges.
Illenberger, the founder of VRdirect, has further doubts about the decentralization of the metaverse. He predicts that Chinese and American major tech companies will remain gatekeepers for the dominant platforms.
“It’s going to be Meta, it’s going to be Apple, it’s going to be Bytedance — they’re going to control the ecosystem,” he says. “If you’re an app developer, you could develop an app for a Varjo, but your target audience will be [tiny]. So what you’re going to do is develop apps for Meta and Apple.”
Not everyone agrees.
Some metaverse companies, developers and investors are concerned that EU regulations are hindering innovation.
FOV Ventures founder Rajahalme shares an anecdote about a panel discussion on developments in artificial intelligence in the US and China. The EU representatives present said their ambition was to become the best regulators of AI.
“It’s like the Europeans said we want to be the best at making stop signs when you started making cars,” he jokes.
It is a nightmare to comply with European data privacy rules.
Illenberger, whose company offers custom VR experiences for businesses, has witnessed the downsides of heavy-handed regulation.
One problem arose from VR headsets that used outward-facing cameras to identify the environment. They can therefore easily violate EU requirements for consent from anyone who may be accidentally filmed in a workplace.
These risks have led large organizations such as Siemens to introduce dedicated VR rooms that reduced the risk of violations. Yet these facilities are inconvenient for some companies and unaffordable for others.
“It’s a nightmare to even use metaverse technologies in compliance with European data privacy laws,” he says. “You have to film your surroundings for the device to work.”
The speed with which such rules are changed can hinder innovation — and push pioneers to Asia or the US.
The reality of a European metaverse
While European companies can play an important role in the metaverse, Macron’s dream of competing with global tech giants is imaginative.
Instead of fighting the incumbents, European companies can be more successful by working with them. For example, VRdirect has built a business on supporting headsets designed by Meta, Pico, and HTC.
Illenberger argues that such interoperability offers opportunities in the fragmented market. He’s also confident his company can take advantage of tight EU regulations, as companies will seek his services over Silicon Valley stalwarts who have little interest in the rules.
“To some extent, this is a competitive advantage for us,” he says. “But in terms of Europe as a region versus the US and Asia, it’s a big roadblock.”
As for Macron’s vision of a European metaverse that competes with the tech titans while protecting the continent’s rules and culture?
“That’s wishful thinking.”


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India’s flagship motor show Auto Expo 2023 kicked off on Wednesday with the global unveiling of Suzuki’s concept electric SUV called ‘eVX’ which is slated to hit the market by 2025. The company’s Indian arm Maruti Suzuki is among the major manufacturers participating in the show that has returned after 3 years.
Said to be built on a dedicated electric car platform that will also be shared with Toyota (Suzuki & Toyota enjoys a collaborative partnership in India), Maruti will reportedly be sourcing battery packs from BYD. The eVX concept features a 60 kWh pack which is good to deliver a range of up to 550 km, but a smaller battery around the 48 kWh size with a shorter range is expected to be available as well when it goes into production eventually.
The compact SUV has short overhangs typical of an electric car and measures 4,300 mm long, 1,800 mm wide, and 1,600 mm tall, while having a 2,700 mm wheelbase. According to information, Maruti Suzuki will price it in the range of INR 15 lac to INR 20 lac domain.
A historic moment that we will surely look back to in the future.
To know more, visit: https://t.co/FY2fUpoo3w#AutoExpo2023 #ImagineXt #ExpoVerse #ElectricCars #EV #EVX #MarutiSuzukiAtAutoExpo #MarutiSuzuki #FutureOfMobility #Sustanability #Technology pic.twitter.com/uobON2CC4G
— Maruti Suzuki (@Maruti_Corp) January 11, 2023
The eVX concept is scheduled to go into production in early 2025. While unveiling the product, the Representative Director and President Toshihiro Suzuki said:
“At the Suzuki Group, addressing global warming is a top priority. We plan to bring it (eVX) to market by 2025. We are promoting a range of global measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated by our business. One key measure is reducing CO2 emitted by using our products. Here in India, as announced in March last year, we will invest 100 billion rupees in the production of BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicles) and their batteries.”
Hisashi Takeuchi, the Managing Director & CEO of Maruti Suzuki said that the approach towards electric vehicles is holistic with scale and localization. He said:
“Concept eVX is Suzuki’s first global strategic electric vehicle and is making its debut here in India. It brings exciting urban SUV styling through its sharp design language and as a battery electric vehicle it purposefully reinforces our commitment to environmental friendliness and sustainability.”
In all, Maruti Suzuki is showcasing 16 vehicles at the 2023 Auto Expo, including the Grand Vitara, XL6, Ciaz, Ertiga, Brezza, WagonR Flex Fuel, Baleno, and Swift, among others.
A computer animation professional with over 23 years of industry experience having served in leading organizations, TV channels & production facilities in Pakistan. An avid car enthusiast and petrolhead with an affection to deliver quality content to help shape opinions. Formerly written for PakWheels as well as major publications including Dawn. Founder of CarSpiritPK.com


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CRN Editors Chad Berndtson and Scott Campbell examine the causes and consequences of Cisco’s recent supply chain problems, which had partners scrambling to satisfy customer demand.
The telecommunications industry is experiencing rapid transformation through the emergence of SD-WAN. It’s allowing solution providers to re-examine how they design customers’ networks, while also helping them deploy solutions more easily.
In this week's "Two Minutes" segment, Logicalis CEO Vince DeLuca weigh in on the latest tech trends and innovations. Published July 16, 2018.


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BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — The spring/summer concert calendar is filling-up quickly in Western New York.
On Monday, TOOL announced it will be taking the stage at Buffalo's KeyBank Center on Saturday, May 2.
Tickets will go on sale to the general public Friday, February 28. A limited number of VIP packages will be available exclusively to TOOL Army members via Toolband.com/VIP-package this Wednesday, Feb. 26 at 10 am local time. Ticket prices range from $55 to $125. If tickets remain, they will be available at the KeyBank Center Box Office beginning Saturday, February 29.


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Dance record label Ministry of Sound has launched proceedings in the High Court against music streaming service Spotify claiming that Spotify’s user playlists copy its own compilation albums. Ministry of Sound is seeking an injunction requiring Spotify to remove the playlists in question and to permanently block playlists that copy its own compilations. It is also seeking damages and costs.
Ministry of Sound’s chief executive, Lohan Presencer, claims that they have been asking Spotify to remove the playlists – some of which include “Ministry of Sound” in their titles – since 2012. He said that “a lot of research goes into” creating the compilations and “what we do is a lot more than putting playlists together. The value and creativity in our compilations are self-evident. It’s not appropriate for someone to just cut and paste them.”
Spotify, which has sought to negotiate a licensing deal with Ministry of Sound for four years, declined to comment on the action.
This case will be determined on whether compilation albums qualify for copyright protection due to the selection and arrangement involved in compiling them together. Spotify has the rights to stream all the tracks on the playlists in question, but the issue here is whether the compilation itself can be copyrighted.
Intellectual Property lawyers will be watching this case with a keen eye in what promises to be a landmark decision.
For further enquiries on copyright or other intellectual property matters please contact Antony Cotton.


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The CLC represents around 11,000 companies in the retail, transport and services sectors, making up around 22% of GPD and 100,000 jobs, according to the group.
Henckes gives an outlook on the challenges ahead.
How has the CLC transformed in the face of the crisis and new demands from your members?
Nicolas Henckes: We had already planned to complement our services, which is why we developed a legal department, training, and awareness-raising conferences. One of the missions given to me by Fernand Ernster [president of the CLC, editor's note] when we decided to collaborate in 2017 was to increase the value attributed to a CLC fee [it currently ranges from €250 to €17,000 depending on the size of the company, editor's note]. This reorganisation was carried out successfully three or four months before the arrival of covid. In the end, we had to use these new capacities for the emergency service linked to covid.
How do you see the situation today and how will the CLC readjust?
We are in a gradual restart of what we hope is more normal activity. We will clearly continue to develop our service offering for our members. The choices we have made, and which are starting to be visible, are collaborations with different members to offer services at reduced prices, member benefits, and club mode operation. The goal is to have a kind of marketplace that will allow each member of the CLC to develop their business, to find partners, whether they are suppliers, clients, consultants or lawyers. So that there is this dynamic that is created within this employers' federation.
Obviously, we will continue our lobbying role in favour of trade interests in Luxembourg. The main course of action, at present, concerns the continuation of support for the retail trade, especially in the city centre. It was already suffering before and was hit hard by the closures and restrictions related to the crisis. We are currently negotiating for a renewal of the pro-trade pact with the ministry of small and medium-sized enterprises. We hope to be able to find an agreement quickly.
What does this pro-trade pact foresee?
A whole series of actions. In recent years, it has notably provided for the creation of the commercial cadastre, which is now carried out and transferred to an economic interest group (GIE). Details will be announced by the minister when the last finishing touches have been made. We have organised conferences in different cities on how to run retail businesses, promote their development…
What would you like to put in place via this renewed pact?
We have always tried to develop statistical data. This will be one of the major axes for the years to come--no longer having a situation where each city does as it feels without having objective data on customer traffic, but to allow coordination, to compare what does or doesn’t work, so that all cities can do well, as well as the traders who reside there.
Next, we want to develop the diversity of shops in city centres. To avoid having homogeneous city centres with the same brands all over the place, we are considering looking for them abroad, bring them to Luxembourg, show them around, show them the opportunities. Brands that are not represented at all here, in order to create a dynamic that will be beneficial for all.
Last year, the budget for the pro-trade pact was €100,000. What do you hope for this year?
It will depend on the actions the ministry wishes to take with us. We provided a list of projects, including those cited. If it says yes to everything, it could be a little more, if it makes a selection, then less. This will depend on the budget that will be made available to the ministry of small and medium-sized enterprises, on the existing political will, or lack thereof, to make an effort on this. A priori, we are in a positive exchange. Lex Delles (DP) is well aware that he must act and that the CLC is the essential partner to support him.
232 new companies joined the CLC in 2020, 110 more than in 2019. How many do you hope to recruit in 2021?
If we could re-do that score, over 200 new members, that would be great. We have more than 80 new members in 2021 so far. As the crisis ends, we hope to recover the companies which again have financial returns, can work normally and will need our assistance, because while they take care of their business, we can take care of their little daily problems.
80 new members, but how many departures?
We had about sixty terminations.
Recruiting as many companies as possible is a strategic objective...
It is about being able to help them, to better understand the terrain and to see the different issues. The aim will be for the CLC, which is already the national representative of trade, transport and services, to be further strengthened and that we increase our political impact.
Does the end of government aid make you fear a drop in the number of members?
We lost members last year due to closures, bankruptcies or hardship. We also lost some at the start of the year. Companies that have had to restructure will reduce costs as much as possible. But we can see that our membership campaign at the start of the year has worked quite well.
Trade has been affected by covid and its restrictions. How good is the recovery in mid-2021?
The last I heard--although there may be exceptions--everything that is business is restarting. The silence of our members is a good sign. They are all back to work. There are issues different from those related to covid for some of our sectors--regulatory issues, training, finding staff... These are the current challenges that are coming back.
Are customers coming back to shops as much as they did before the crisis?
It's a gradual restart. Apparently, each day is a little better than the last. I'm not sure we've returned to pre-crisis levels. But there is good hope that a balance can be found. There will still be a lot of telecommuting until at least the end of June. This is a factor that slows down traffic in city centres and shopping centres. The end goal would be a return to normality by December, which is the month when most businesses make the most of their sales.
This interview was first published in French on Paperjam. It has been translated and edited for Delano.


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Thu 07-01-2021 16:52 PM
DUBAI, 7th January, 2021 (WAM) -- The real estate and properties transactions valued at AED4.3 billion in total during the week ending 7th January 2021. The sum of transactions was 1,546.
According to the Department of Land and Property in Dubai, 109 plots were sold for AED438.22 million, 1,035 apartments and villas were sold for AED1.66 billion.
The top three transactions were a land in Palm Jumeirah sold for AED38 million, followed by a land that was sold for AED35 million in Island 2, and a land sold for AED38 million in Palm Jumeirah in third place.
Nad Al Shiba Third recorded the most transactions for this week by 27 sales transactions worth AED66.29 million, followed by Al Hebiah Fourth with 20 sales transactions worth AED45.5 million, and Nad Al Shiba First with 18 sales transactions worth AED36 million in third place.
The top three transfers for apartments and villas were an apartment was sold for AED152 million in Marsa Dubai, an apartment was second in the list sold for AED139 million in Business Bay, and thirdly it was a villa sold for AED134 million in Nad Al Shiba First.
The sum of the amount of mortgaged properties for the week was AED2 billion, with the highest being a land in Madinat Dubai Almelaheyah, mortgaged for AED 300 million.
98 properties were granted between first-degree relatives worth AED428 million.


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Apache Hadoop has moved from a fledgling technology championed by open source advocates to a platform that has increasingly become mainstream in enterprise IT shops over the last 10 years since it was initially created.
In a keynote address on March 30 at the Strata + Hadoop conference in San Jose, Doug Cutting, Hadoop creator and chief architect at Hadoop distributor Cloudera, provided an informal State of Hadoop and Big Data address, looking back at the last 10 years and forward to what the future may hold for big data.
"It used to be different between open source and enterprise," Cutting told attendees during an address that led off the morning keynotes -- with open source "hippies" attending O'Reilly conferences while enterprise IT focused their attention and budgets elsewhere. "Now we've seen a merger of these communities -- enterprise and hacker."
Several factors combined to bring big data and Hadoop to this moment, he said, including the inexpensive hardware driven by the PC revolution and the open source community that created standards and turned these platforms into something that people could use at a very low cost.
"We had all the ingredients to really begin this change to ignite this revolution," he said. "Hadoop was the first to combine this into a single system."
The elements of that system have essentially remained the same over the past 10 years -- the HDSF storage system, YARN scheduler, and MapReduce execution engine. But over those 10 years more technologies have been introduced to improve Hadoop, including Apache Spark, which many organizations are now using instead of MapReduce.
"Technologies have developed around the [Hadoop] kernel," Cutting said. "And that's what will survive longer than the Hadoop project itself. A new family of technology has arrived, and a great example of that is Spark… Spark came out of the University at Berkeley. It didn't come out of a business. It came about because folks found it useful. We are seeing this again and again."
Cutting said that the Hadoop ecosystem will see this again and again. There's competition for the best technologies at the storage level and at the query level and in other areas, too. As these new technologies arrive, they will improve the whole.
"Hadoop's legacy is creating a new way of developing an ecosystem with collaboration," he said.
Today the hardware and software needed to run Hadoop is available at a much lower cost, and the system itself is much more scalable, Cutting said, with systems regularly scaling to tens of petabytes.
The technology is part of what is driving changes across all industries as they move to digital operations and customer service.
"Banks, insurance companies, manufacturers, retailers, and healthcare providers are adopting data technologies not at the periphery, but at the center of the business," Cutting said. "Data is becoming the fundamental driver of economic growth for the century."
Cutting provided a few predictions for Hadoop and big data in the next 10 years, too. Beyond the software stack, he said that he believes big data will get a boost from improvements to computer hardware. For instance, he said, Intel has created a new memory technology called 3D XPoint that improves memory speed.
"We've grown up with systems where the primary bottleneck was I/O," he said. "We are going to have the majority of data sets stored in memory, and that's going to change the applications that we can build."
Cutting also said that cloud computing has reached maturity, noting that Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched at around the same time as Hadoop and has gone through a similar adoption curve. More companies are now storing data in the cloud, he said.
"But the biggest change in the next 10 years is not going to be something I can predict, but will be things that you are involved in," he told attendees. "We now have a system that is in your hands. It is being created with your input. You can make a difference here. More so than ever before."


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Saratoga City Center not concerned about competition from Albany
Will the Saratoga Springs City Center lose business when a new convention center opens a 40-minute drive away in downtown Albany, NY?
City Center President Mark Baker isn’t too concerned.
“Although Albany will be competitive, as is Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, we are a little unique and different from the standard convention center,” Baker said.
The new, $66.5 million Albany convention center, expected to open in summer 2016, will total 85,000 square feet. The Albany Capital Center, as it will be called, will have 44,000 square feet of leasable space for exhibits, banquets and meetings.
The Saratoga Springs venue has 31,000 leasable square feet, but an additional 20,000 square feet in the adjacent 242-room Saratoga Hilton, Baker said.
Although meeting space in the Albany Capital Center will be smaller than the Saratoga convention center and hotel combined, officials are going to market the space in Albany jointly with the nearby Times Union Center and Empire State Plaza.
Together, all three offer 159,000 square feet of exhibit, banquet and meeting room space, officials say.
That’s larger than any single facility in upstate New York, and more than twice the size of the closest comparable venue, MassMutual Center in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Albany is expected to be a draw for organizations and groups that want to be in the state capital.
Baker said Saratoga Springs offers meeting planners a destination with a variety of things to do and see throughout the year, in a downtown setting that has many restaurants, bars, hotels, stores and luxury condos.
“We have a viable downtown that no other Northeastern city has of our size,” Baker said.
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Microsoft has released a set of privacy guidelines for developers.
Failing to protect customer privacy can lead to an erosion of trust. Over the last several years, Microsoft has established extensive internal guidelines for developers that help them protect customer privacy, give them a view into customer expectations and global privacy laws, and document the hard lessons we’ve learned. These guidelines have been engrained in our development process and are now incorporated into the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). The impact has been felt across Microsoft’s products and services.
In response to requests from customers, partners, ISVs, educators, advocates, and regulators, we created a public set of privacy guidelines for developing software products and services. These guidelines are based on our internal guidelines and our experience incorporating privacy into the development process. By documenting our principles, we hope to help anyone building products and services to meet customer expectations and deliver a more trustworthy experience.
As the threat landscape escalates, customers are feeling less able to control access to their personal information, so consumer trust is waning. As an industry, we need to set a high bar for respecting customer privacy, to help build greater trust in the Internet and e-commerce. We want to foster an open dialogue with others in the industry so we can build a common set of privacy best practices to help meet our privacy obligations and increase customer trust. We are pleased to offer our guidelines as a starting point to accelerate this effort.


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Work is continuing on the reissue of “Odes”. There has been a great deal of work and effort on this re-issue to make it a special and worthy release. This will definitely be worth the wait and is currently planned for release to co-incide with the 30th anniversary of the band and the first release under the name of Mordor.
We can announce that the digibook CD version will be a joint release between the labels Aesthetic Death and Possession Productions, and the LP version, which will be released shortly afterwards, as a joint collaboration between Aesthetic Death and Nuclear War Now!
The 1995 Wild Rags Records CD version of “Odes” is still digitally available on Bandcamp.


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Southern US east coast ports building new cold store facilities to grow market share
Investment in refrigerated goods handling facilities at US east coast ports is building up to ...
- 1. Moschops on DHL Supply Chain and QSL take away KFC's UK supply chain contract
- 2. Reefer Refrigeration on Smarter reefer boxes mean shipping lines can woo more perishable cargo from airfreight
- 3. Prem on The $50bn food fraud scam putting Australia’s iconic brands at risk
- 4. firstname.lastname@example.org on Forwarders hit out at airlines putting the squeeze on cool chain ground handlers
- 5. Gary D. Ogden (C.E.O. GTA dnata) on Forwarders hit out at airlines putting the squeeze on cool chain ground handlers


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A high school science teacher asked her students to make her laugh for extra credit on a recent assignment, and her class certainly delivered.
In honor of Latinx Heritage Month, In The Know by Yahoo brought together a group of entrepreneurs to discuss building their brands with ties back to their culture and community.
A TikToker says she hasn’t been to Taco Bell again, following a disastrous first date that even Tinder deemed one of the “top 10” worst dates it has ever heard.
Nothing ruins the ambiance of a wedding photo like two dozen iPhones in the air, all vying for their best video of the bride and groom.
Chelsea Henriquez, a New York City-based content creator, encourages women to build their wardrobes creatively and sustainably.
Laura Fragoso Hiller shared a cost-cutting tip that she used for her own big day — getting a wedding cake from Sam’s Club for under $70.
Raised by her hard-working Puerto Rican parents, Amanda Enid Rodríguez-Davis was influenced to found the jewelry company ENID&CO.
Gipsy and Gelssy Rodriguez are the two sisters who catapulted Moda2000, their family’s quinceañera dress store, into social media fame.
Mariel A. Mejia, the CEO & Founder of Pink Root Products LLC, is a Dominican-American NYC native born and raised in The Bronx.
Nikki Garza is a Latina actor, content creator, and fat liberation activist who has over 911K followers on TikTok.


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Dutch retailer Ahold Delhaize has announced the postponement of its planned IPO of e-tailer Bol.com.
The company had originally planned for an IPO in the second half of the current fiscal year, but has now said it will “revisit” the plan “when equity market conditions are more conducive”.
The news came as Ahold reported net sales of 21.4 billion euros in the second quarter, up 15 percent, or up 6.4 percent at constant exchange rates.
The company said sales accelerated in both regions compared to Q1, up 7.7 percent in the US and up 4.2 percent in Europe at constant rates.
Net income came in at 603 million euros, up from 540 million euros a year earlier.
Based on its results, Ahold raised its full-year outlook, and now expects underlying earnings per share to grow year-on-year at a mid-single-digit rate, versus its original outlook of a low- to mid-single-digit decline.


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In what will mark a major tech milestone for India’s rapidly expanding food delivery industry, Zomato has announced a successful test for its proprietary food delivery drone. This test is a result of the TechEagle acquisition that the company concluded recently.
The drone used in this non commercial test was a hybrid drone – fusion of rotary wing and fixed wings on a single drone. The company announced that all of its set parameters were met. The drone was able to cover a distance of 5kms, in about 10 minutes, with a peak speed of 80 kmph, carrying a payload of 5 kgs.
Zomato’s plans to power its deliveries via drones haven’t been a secret. The company has been one of the early movers in the space, not just within India, but globally. Speculations, which were doing the rounds for a couple of years, proved true when Zomato announced acquisition of a rather young drone building startup – TechEagle.
The Drone Delivery Process
Its fairly simple. A drone will pick up the food package from a restaurant hub (a dispatch station around a cluster of restaurants), and drop the package at a customer hub (a landing station close to dense communities), and come back to the dispatch site using a mix of different and appropriate flight modes.
In terms of safety, Zomato claims that it has been the company’s “top priority” and its drone is loaded with multitude of sensors to take care of the same. This assumes great significance, since India is one of the very few countries globally, looking to come up with a commercial drone policy. Zomato needs to ensure it does not face a roadblock, specially since safety is Government’s top priority.
In terms of compliance with India’s civil aviation watch dog, Zomato has mentioned that is already in touch with the concerned. As per the notification issued by Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on 13 May 2019, interested organisations have been asked to submit an Expression of Interest (EOI) to the DGCA for conducting experimental Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations (BVLOS) of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS)/Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). In response to the notification, Zomato is forming a consortium as per DGCA’s guidelines to carry out experimental BVLOS operations.


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Trustwave's 2013 Global Security Report -- based on its incident response investigations, penetration tests, events logged on millions of websites, and Web application attacks -- says that for the first time in three years, retailers were the bulk of its 450 breach investigations, with 45 percent of the cases, followed by food and beverage (24 percent), hospitality (9 percent), financial services (7 percent), and others.
"Retail and food and beverage merchants have vied for the No. 1 cybercrime target for the past several years. So I don't see it as a shift as much as I do simply there were more targets of opportunity in the retail space last year," says Christopher Pogue, director of digital forensics and incident response for Trustwave's SpiderLabs. "The reason both are so popular is that they have an abundance of valuable, easily monetized data to steal in credit card numbers."
Web security is also topping the list of threats, with an increase of 600 percent worldwide in malicious websites, according to Websense's new 2013 Threat Report. That number jumped 720 percent in North America alone, and legitimate Web hosts housed some 85 percent of the malicious URLs.
Chris Astacio, manager of security research for Websense, says this jump has a lot to do with attackers using URLs more than email attachments, since users have become more wary of opening attachments than clicking on links. "People have become more savvy about generic emails with attachments. But in targeted attacks, they are usually socially engineered so they are personalized [and convincing] to the victim," Astacio says.
"Malicious URLs are also exploding because of exploit kids that are more successful and easier for an attacker to use ... for drive-by download [attacks]," he says. The attacks are very efficient, too: Half of Web-connected malware downloads executable files in the first 60 seconds of the infection, according to the report.
The top three malware-hosting countries are, in order, the U.S., Russia, and Germany, while the top three command-and-control hosters are, in order, China, the U.S., and Russia, according to Websense.
Passwords, meanwhile, remain a major weak link. Half of users use easily guessed ones, according to Trustwave's report, with the most popular one being Password1. Welcome1 is the most widely used password among the penetration tests conducted by Trustwave.
"It's human nature to do the bare minimum to be functional. How many people still open up their new wireless router and don't bother to change the SSID or set a password? How many people still use the same password for each and every site they have an account on? How many people still click on email attachments from people they don't know?" Trustwave's Pogue says. "Security is an afterthought. It always has been -- until something bad happens, [and] then it's suddenly 'our top priority.'"
Mobile devices increasingly are becoming a danger zone for organizations: Mobile malware grew by 400 percent last year, mostly for the Android, according to Trustwave's findings. And according to Websense, one in 10 malicious mobile apps asked for permission to install other apps as well.
"You need to look at desktop attacks to understand mobile," Websense's Astacio says. "Mobile is starting to follow the paradigm of a desktop type of infection."
Meanwhile, Trustwave's Pogue says the bottom line is that some of the same attack vectors that plagued security 10 years ago remain problematic. "What surprised me most [about the findings in our report] was that things really aren't changing," he says. "Security weaknesses, like open remote administration, bad passwords, lack of a properly configured firewall, SQL injection, remote file inclusion -- all are easily preventable with a modest investment. There have been such great advances in security technologies and a strong understanding of threat vectors. Businesses just have use them. This is the cost of doing business in today’s world."
The Websense report is available here for download, and the Trustwave report is available here.
Have a comment on this story? Please click "Add Your Comment" below. If you'd like to contact Dark Reading's editors directly, send us a message.


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A year after rebranding as a store "for women by women," retail startup Bulletin is expanding with its third location. Next month, the four-year-old company plans to open in New York City's Union Square neighborhood.
Bulletin, which was originally founded in 2014 as a shoppable digital magazine and Etsy alternative, will feature around 60 female-led retail brands. Each label pays a monthly membership fee to showcase their wares. The company already operates stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
"It was important to create this space for women-owned businesses to learn about their brands," says Chief Operating Officer Ali Kriegsman and co-founder of the company. She notes that all of Bulletin's brands are female-founded, female-led or run by LGBTQ-identifying entrepreneurs. "If we were going to invest all of our eggs in a retail store, we wanted it to matter and to have a larger mission." Bulletin donates 10 percent of all proceeds to Planned Parenthood.
Kriegsman says that Bulletin is not just a "flash in the pan" reaction to the current climate—a result of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. She does note that there is more interest in the company, possibly because of such movements, and sales are increasing.
To continue momentum, Bulletin, which employs eight women on its corporate team and some 17 part-timers in its stores, is running digital ads under a "New Broads on the Block" campaign. The work was developed in-house and with freelancers.
While there might be more interest in female brands of late, women are still in the minority when it comes to running companies. According to recent analysis by the Pew Research Center, women only held 10 percent of the top executive roles at U.S. companies in 2016 and 2017. Yet there were more women in retail leadership positions. Of the 77 female CEOs, eight were in specialty retail, Pew found.


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Malaysia’s Bank Negara Plans Standards for Mobile Payments
It’s easy to forget, sometimes, that mobile payments are still a comparatively new technology. Even Apple Pay, which basically kicked the whole process off—though it wasn’t really the first mobile payments system—only got started in late 2014. Mobile payments’ arrival in some countries, therefore, has been a bit limited. Malaysia is one place where the rollout has been a mite limited, and that may be about to change with a new move from Bank Negara.
Bank Negara Malaysia is set to introduce a set of minimum standards for mobile payments, a move that’s designed to make for much greater transparency in the market. It’s also likely to provide an extra note of legitimacy, as customers know that the payments systems available have achieved some certain minimum standard as established by regulatory bodies.
Those looking to provide mobile payments services in Malaysia will be required to provide information on key security features to users, whether these be related to unauthorized transactions or preventing malware. It’s part of a larger program announced by the bank’s governor, Tan Sri Muhammad, to help fuel the country’s overall move to mobile payments.
Muhammad also cited the value of good customer engagement in mobile payments, which would be fueled by the proper use of disclosures, as well as the importance of protecting customers against fraud. He actually pointed out that security practices and their disclosures are a great way to differentiate in the market, with better security practices drawing more users who believe themselves better protected by those measures.
Security has been the biggest hurdle mobile payments firms have had to cross anywhere, and Muhammad is doing the entire industry in Malaysia a favor by pointing this out. In fact, in this case, regulatory protections might actually be good for mobile payments. Leave aside issues of legitimacy for a minute; the fact that there’s a certain standard that’s publicly promoted might draw users’ interest, believing that there’s actual government protection involved.
Mobile payments security is a major problem, and Malaysia’s efforts might well mollify a lot of concerned consumers worried about getting in. It’s not a bad idea, but only time will tell if it works.


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Electric car grant extended
Government has today announced that the current Plug-in Car Grant scheme would continue to offer motorists up to £5,000 off the price of an electric car until at least February 2016.
Covering all categories of vehicle, the move aims to further boost the rapidly-growing plug-in car market. The Government’s commitment to maintaining the established Plug-in Car Grant will see the contribution for ultra-low emission vehicles continue at current levels into 2016. Previously the Government had announced that grant levels would be reviewed once 50,000 vehicles had been sold, a milestone expected to be reached in November this year. As a result, all plug-in cars with CO2 emissions of 75g/km or less will remain eligible for a grant.
Given its ambition to make the UK a world leader in ultra-low emission technology, the Government recently announced that a minimum of £200 million has been made available to continue the Plug-in Car Grant and this latest news will add extra incentive to private buyers and fleets who were looking to ‘go electric’ in 2015 and 2016. Further details about how the plug-in car grant will be structured beyond February are expected following the Government Spending Review in November.
Hetal Shah, Head of Go Ultra Low, said, ‘Continuing the Plug-in Car Grant at current levels is positive news for everyone, as it encourages zero-emission motoring and secures more funding for a greater number of ULEV buyers. This announcement demonstrates the government’s commitment to supporting the growth of the ULEV market. If we are to meet ambitious targets for ULEV uptake, continued investment is paramount.’
Mike Hawes, SMMT chief executive, said, ‘With British buyers taking to ultra-low emission vehicles faster than anyone else in Europe, the extension of the Plug-in Car Grant is good news. The market for these vehicles remains small, however, so it is essential that government continues to provide effective incentives for their uptake – including the Plug-in Car Grant and other measures.’


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Recently, Dong Mingzhu is still busy.
As a leader in the field of home appliances, Gree has never been satisfied with only making home appliances. Starting from home appliances, it has successively set foot in different fields such as mobile phones, chips, automobiles, and robots. Even during the epidemic, Gree also switched to masks. And recently, Dong Mingzhu also revealed that Gree will enter the medical industry, and it will also deploy a “new infrastructure”! “We have made a lot of preliminary preparations now. In the smart home, we have made the layout of the whole industry chain from household appliances, kitchen appliances, air demand, etc.” On the evening of March 29, Dong Mingzhu was in the cloud live broadcast of CCTV Finance and Economics. said.
“Cross-boundary Veteran” Transformation As a “veteran” in the manufacturing industry, Gree is on the road of transformation and strides forward under the impact of the new era of intelligence. In 2016, Gree officially announced that it will transform from an air-conditioning company to an intelligent equipment company. Through continuous upgrading of intelligent technology, it has realized the integration of all links from the field of intelligent equipment to the field of robots, from hardware to CNC systems. At the same time, Gree has also set foot in many fields through investment and production, from air conditioners, washing machines to mobile phones, chips, new energy vehicles, medical care, etc., exploring new ways one by one. For example, in 2016, Gree Electric purchased Yinlong with a valuation of 13 billion yuan, and obtained 100% equity of Zhuhai Yinlong. With the help of Yinlong’s core technology of lithium titanate battery, it quickly entered the field of new energy electric vehicles and officially entered the new energy industry. In 2017, Gree once again added more weight to the diversification strategy, clearly starting from the three fields of intelligent manufacturing, smart home and new energy industry, and gradually transforming into a service enterprise of the whole industry chain.
Today, although Gree has repeatedly “hit the wall” in the field of mobile phones and new energy, Gree’s road to intelligent transformation in the field of home appliances has been quite effective, and it has already established an extensive layout in the field of smart home appliances. In terms of intelligence, Gree manufactures intelligent home appliances, such as the Gree Yunjin 1-horse inverter air conditioner, which can not only be controlled remotely, but also can judge the size of the room according to the flow rate of the room, and then perform reasonable frequency conversion to save electricity. At the same time, the self-cleaning technology of the evaporator can remove dust and so on through the four steps of condensation-frost-defrosting-drying, so as to ensure healthy air quality; in terms of new energy, Gree achieves technological breakthroughs in the integration of optical storage and storage. So as to realize the development of furniture energy system. On March 14, 2019, Gree released a zero-carbon healthy home smart system at the China Home Appliances and Consumer Electronics Expo. Relying on photovoltaic DC-driven smart products, it can realize the ecological intelligent management of the whole house and create an energy-saving, environmentally friendly, comfortable and healthy system. The brand-new smart home, together with the three intelligent entrances of Gree AI voice air conditioner, Gree IoT mobile phone and Gree finger vein smart door lock, together constitute the world’s unique system solution for photovoltaic DC driven smart home.
Today, Gree has fully transformed to intelligent, and has deployed the entire industrial chain through smart home, new energy, etc.
As one of the important scenarios for the application of high-end technology, medical equipment has always been the focus of technology companies, ranging from small consumer sports bracelets to professional telemedicine, medical imaging, etc. , which has attracted many technology companies. Under the pressure of the epidemic, the medical field has already become a “sweet pastry”, attracting many enterprises and investment institutions to enter the market one after another, and Gree is no exception.
On February 18, Gree established a “Zhuhai Gejian Medical Technology Co., Ltd.”, which mainly produces masks and other anti-epidemic materials. At the same time, Gree announced that it will use 1 billion to enter the medical field and develop medical equipment. Dong Mingzhu said, “In the fight against the epidemic, we found our shortcomings. Many of us are related to machinery, and many medical treatments also need machinery to support.”
In essence, home appliances and medical equipment have “commonality”, that is, they belong to Electronic products. Although there are great differences in product principles and functions, they are both composed of “mechanics + electronics” and belong to the electronics manufacturing industry. In addition, in addition to opening up its own development space, entering the medical field can also get involved in cutting-edge technology fields such as 5G, Internet of Things, and AI. These technologies are closely related to the medical field and are applied to high-end medical imaging equipment, intelligent portable medical equipment, etc. It is believed that these are likely to be within the target scope of Gree Medical’s layout.
At present, the market for high-end medical equipment is still occupied by foreign companies, and foreign capital has a dominant position. Although medical equipment and home appliances have similarities in theory, they are very different in practice. Previously, domestic brands such as TCL, Haier, and Hisense have all tried to enter the medical field, but it is difficult for them to compete with foreign brands. It can be seen that the successful experience in the field of home appliances cannot be completely replicated in the medical field, and the advantages of foreign companies in terms of technical barriers and brand trust are obviously not easily broken. However, from Gree’s previous “cross-border” experience, maybe this is another time of Dong Mingzhu’s “drunkard’s intention not to drink”. Its purpose is still not the medical equipment itself, but “smart manufacturing”.
Whether it is home appliances, mobile phones, chips, cars, robots and medical equipment, “manufacturing” is inseparable, especially the transformation and upgrading brought by “smart manufacturing”. For medical equipment, it is even more inseparable from the help of intelligent manufacturing. After gaining “cross-border” experience in multiple industries, despite repeated setbacks, Gree’s accumulated manufacturing experience and problem-solving concepts are bound to be used in any of its “smart manufacturing” practices. In the special period of the epidemic, the country has proposed a “new infrastructure” strategy, and the manufacturing industry at the bottom of the industrial chain bears the brunt of it. Among them, intelligent manufacturing has become the only way for the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries in the future.
As the leader of traditional home appliances, Gree has already passed many “cross-border” attempts, knows the importance of intelligent manufacturing, and has rich experience and precipitation. Medical treatment is just another attempt by Dong Mingzhu, but it will not be the end. Gree has always been on the road of intelligent manufacturing.
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Bud Light is celebrating the LGBTQ community with the release of its first-ever rainbow bottle.
The company said it has partnered with GLAAD to launch rainbow bottles for Pride. For every case sold from May 27 to June 30, “Bud Light will donate $1 to GLAAD, up to $150,000 to assist in their efforts of creating a world where everyone can live the life they love.”
“Bud Light has been a supporter of the LGBTQ+ community since the 80s and we are excited to continue our long-standing partnership with GLAAD by collaborating with them on this new commemorative bottle that celebrates the LGBTQ+ community and everything GLAAD does to support it,” said Andy Goeler, Vice President of Marketing for Bud Light. “The way we see it, our beer is for everyone to enjoy, so we are looking forward to seeing Pride bottles at bars throughout the month of June and beyond.”
The colorful bottles will not be sold in stores but can be found in bars nationwide throughout the month of June.
The beers made their debut at the 30th Annual GLAAD Media Awards on May 4.


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SAN FRANCISCO >> Fry’s Electronics, the go-to chain for tech tinkerers looking for an obscure part, is closing for good.
The company, perhaps even more well known for outlandish themes at some of its stores, from Aztec to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” said today in an online posting that the COVID-19 pandemic had made it impossible to continue.
Fans immediately took to Twitter to post images and memories (good and bad).
The chain was concentrated on the West Coast, but had 31 stores in nine states. It was founded 36 years ago.
Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData, called it “the end of an era, and a sad day” for an army of loyal customers.
The pandemic has done heavy damage to retailers, but Fry’s was already getting hammered by online competition and a battle between heavy-hitters Best Buy and Amazon.com.
The wild themes became more of a burden than an experience, Saunders said, and when the chain began to struggle, gaps began to appear on shelves in the cavernous stores, making them a shell of what they once were.
“Fry’s was really a business build for the 1980s electronics boom. During that era, it was a gathering place for enthusiasts of an industry that was on fire,” Saunders said. “However, those days have long since gone and now too has an icon that represented them.”
Fry’s Electronics Inc. said its operations have ceased and the wind-down of locations will begin immediately. Customers with electronics being repaired in-store store are being asked to pick them up.
The chain’s online presence appears largely to have been shut down.


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Earlier this 7 days, multinational banking big Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) released its most recent digital investment account, showcasing an built-in cryptocurrency wallet. The move to incorporate a electronic crypto wallet is an extension of the custody and buying and selling companies the bank started experimenting with previously in June.
To entry the so-known as “New Gen” account assistance, folks have to be 18 many years of age, and be residents in a state of the European Union, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, or Chile.
In accordance to the press release, customers have to deposit a least of $10,000 in USD, Euros, or Swiss francs. Immediately after the completion of an on line KYC form and online video verification, people can use their BBVA crypto wallet to store, acquire and provide Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two premier cryptocurrencies by sector capitalization.
“With New Gen we want to reach a new form of trader, attracted by new sectors that have terrific prospective to transform the potential,” claimed Javier Rubio, Director of Consumer Answers at BBVA Switzerland.
BBVA Bolsters Choices with Bitcoin, and Ethereum, Along with Catalogs of Investing Themes
In addition to cryptocurrencies, BBVA’s New Gen account will supply access to catalogs of organizations and money organized into 11 diverse themes, including climate alter, disruptive technologies, and autonomous automobiles, amongst many others.
“The new account features a multitude of tips that every single customer can devote in what is of interest to them and in line with their ideas, without the need of road blocks or barriers, with just one of the most aggressive charges in Swiss banking and with all the ensure and stability of BBVA.”
A lot before this year, the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, and other money establishments commenced featuring crypto-centered by-product and futures products and solutions. Even so, almost all of these services could only be accessed by accredited traders.
Related Examining | Goldman Sachs to Start off Supplying Bitcoin Derivatives to Its Investors
BBVA Switzerland unquestionably isn’t the initially big financial institution to offer you cryptocurrencies to its clients, but it is the initial financial institution to take non-accredited traders.
Inspite of its confined region availability, the strategy of financial establishments presenting direct crypto publicity to retail buyers might have major implications. The choices are without doubt confined, but with competitive service fees, guarantees of prime-notch security banking companies could unquestionably siphon buyers from main exchanges in the in the vicinity of foreseeable future.
It is also critical to observe the latest regulatory crackdown of exchanges this sort of as Binance — which may well engage in a key role in money establishments expanding their offerings to each day traders.
Connected Looking through | Crypto Exchange Binance Less than Investigation by IRS and DOJ
Featured graphic from UnSplash


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Diversified agriculture and forestry company TWK Investments achieved a 30.6% increase in revenue to R4.88-billion for the six months ended February 28, compared with revenue of R3.74-billion achieved in the six months ended February 28, 2021.
Profit after tax increased by 175.5% to R246.65-million, compared with R89.53-million in the prior comparable period.
“TWK’s overall results for the first six months are reflective of the quality of the underlying business and the group’s ability to adapt to an ever-changing environment. General trading conditions improved, which resulted in an increase of sales and net profit in especially the timber, retail and mechanisation segments,” it said on April 12.
Further, even though there was a decrease in mining timber sales, the export market for woodchips increased dramatically, resulting in an increase of 47% in total timber sales volumes, the company said.
“The diversity of TWK’s income streams provides resilience amid the economic uncertainty, disruptions in trade networks and infrastructure challenges, as well as the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said TWK MD André Myburgh.
“Significant contributors to these excellent results came from an increased demand and sales to key timber markets, especially an increase of 223% in woodchip export sales which was supported by the inclusion of the Peak Timber assets in the latter part of the previous financial year,” he said.
The group’s results were further strengthened by the increase in retail and mechanisation sales, with increased market share gains and the steep increase in fertiliser product prices owing to global shortages, he added.
Basic earnings a share increased by 127% to 565.77c, up from 249.27c in the prior comparable period, while the net asset value a share increased by 18.4% to R50.24, up from R42.42.
The purposeful effort to gain market share, strategic acquisitions and improvement in TWK’s markets resulted in an increase of 111.84% in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation to R428.9-million, up from the R202.5-million achieved during the interim period to the end of February 2021, the company said.
“The group’s financial position is solid, with [the value of] total assets having increased by 28.9% from R4.91-billion to R6.32-billion. Net cash is lower owing to an increase in Trade and Other Receivables, especially production accounts,” TWK FD Eddie Fivaz said.
“The group’s gearing was 156.09% at February 28, which is higher than the corresponding period owing to the increased on-lending production accounts, but still comfortably within the group’s norms,” he said.
The overall strong demand for woodchips from some of the largest pulp and paper producers in Japan, China and Spain is expected to be expanded to other European countries as a direct result of the Ukraine and Russia crisis.
International pulp is currently trading at high prices which is expected to continue for several months into this year. The Peak Plantations’ operations are in the process of being modernised, which in turn will result in increased profitability and cash generation, TWK said.
Further, the retail trading conditions are expected to be uncertain given the Ukraine crisis.
“The agricultural sector could experience margin pressures, with rising fuel and crop input costs, which will negatively impact the Retail and Mechanisation segment. However, these negative cost pressures could be countered by higher grain prices and the strengthening of the rand against the US dollar,” the company said.
“Management holds the view that the second half of the year will outperform the corresponding period during 2021 and, therefore, will substantially outperform the previous financial year’s results which ended on August 31, 2021,” said Myburgh.
The TWK Grain Storage and Grain Marketing divisions will also perform well on the back of good grain yield. However, the profitability of the maize meal division will remain under pressure owing to high grain prices.
“The growth in grain storage volumes was owing to strong crop yields which resulted in an increase in more tonnage grain stored contributing to the increase in profitability in the grain segment.”
The production credit book grew strongly by 48.8% mainly owing to higher grain plantings, higher input costs for farmers, as well as increased market penetration. This resulted in an increase in earnings in the financial services segment, the company said.
“It is expected that the financial services segment will perform better during the second half of the financial year mainly because of better trading conditions, inflation and gaining new clients on the back of the effective syndicate lending agreement with Standard Bank, ABSA and FNB,” TWK said.
Meanwhile, the sale of the loss-making fuel sites in the coming months will support the profitability of the motor and tyres segment, TWK said.
The motors and tyres segment reported an increase in revenue of 15.4% mainly as a result of increased vehicle sales and better profit margins as a result of having fewer units available to sell. The solid performance of the dealerships was offset by the poor performance of the tyres business and the filling stations.
Additionally, TWK’s Roofspace has signed lease contracts with another eight shopping centres during the period under review, totalling 12 malls at the end of February 2022. The growth from the renewable energy segment will increase exponentially as more solar projects are developed, the company added.


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Apple has fired a legal volley at Ericsson amid its ongoing dispute over pricing for patent licensing of “critical” mobile telecommunications technology. Ericsson had earlier sued Apple in the same court, saying the Cupertino firm of negotiating in “bad faith.”
Bloomberg Law reports that Apple filed its lawsuit in a federal court in Texas on Friday. The iPhone maker accuses Ericsson of “violating its obligations to license patents essential to industry standards on fair rates and is making unreasonable demands.”
Apple and Ericsson have waged an ongoing legal battle for years. when negotiating a licensing deal in 2015, the companies sued each other. This ultimately led to Ericsson asking to have the iPhone banned from US sale.
An agreement reached in 2015 is basically the deal the two companies are attempting to renew now, leading to a new round of lawsuits.
Apple is accusing Ericsson of “strong-arm tactics” in negotiations for this patented communication technology. The original agreement covered networking technologies for 2G, 3G, and 4G. The new deal must also include 5G technology as well.
Apple Inc. filed a lawsuit accusing Ericsson AB of using “strong-arm tactics” in negotiations to renew a 2015 license for technology critical to industrywide telecommunications standards, particularly for 5G mobile networks.
The lawsuit, filed late Friday in federal court in Texas, alleges Ericsson is violating its obligations to license patents essential to industry standards on fair rates and is making unreasonable demands. Ericsson sued in the same court in October accusing Apple of negotiating in “bad faith.”
The 2015 agreement, which covered 2G, 3G and 4G technology and expires this month, was signed only after protracted litigation, and the dueling.


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Dell India on Friday launched two new Inspiron 5000 series laptops with 8th generation Intel chips and Dell Cinema software for an immersive experience. The 14-inch Dell Inspiron 5480 laptop starts at Rs. 36,990 while the 15-inch Dell Inspiron 5580 will begin from Rs. 37,990, the company said in a statement. They will be available in three colour options, Platinum Silver, Burgundy, and Ink, exclusively from the Dell India website.
“Tech-savvy users who know how to get the maximum from their notebook and are looking for style statements when it comes to personal technology will surely appreciate these machines,” said Alen Joe Jose, Director-Product Marketing, Consumer and Small Business, Dell India.
The laptops has Whiskey Lake 8th Generation Intel Core i3, Core i5 & Core i7 processor variants, with up to 32GB of DDR4 memory, full-HD anti-glare IPS display and the Dell Cinema software for personal theatre experience. Intel Optane Memory is also offered.


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Eugenia Tachie-Menson, Vlisco Ambassador 2014
VLISCO, a leader in the textile manufacturing industry in Ghana, recently launched its ‘Connoisseurs of Style’ campaign to help clamp down on the activities of people who are engaged in the production and sale of fake wax prints to unsuspecting Ghanaian consumers.
As part of the campaign, Vlisco is embarking on sensitization workshops to educate identifiable women groups in the country.
The textile manufacturer has also engaged the Zonta Club of Accra as well as the Old Students Union of Saint Mary’s and Wesley Girls High School.
Interacting with the groups, Salomey Gyamfi, Marketing Manager of the Vlisco Group, emphasized the importance of ensuring that Vlisco customers purchase the true and original Vlisco Hollandais print.
The Vlisco’s ‘Connoisseurs of Style’ campaign is to educate and sensitize consumers of the presence of counterfeit Vlisco prints on the market and how to identify them would be useful in helping guide consumers in their purchases.
Addressing the gathering, Eugenia Tachie-Menson, the 2014 Vlisco Ambassador, took the women through a number of markers to help them differentiate between original Vlisco prints and the imitated ones that keep flooding the market.
Such markers as the Sun, the label on the fabric, the design number, and the selvedge, she reiterated, are crucial in identifying the original Vlisco wax print.
Commenting on the relevance of the campaign, Eugenia stated that beside the negative impacts that the activities of counterfeiters have on Vlisco’s business, the company was also concerned about the economic impacts on its consumers, as purchasing fake prints would offer them less value for their money. Again, customers would have to spend more on purchasing wax prints as fake prints lose their shine and deteriorates easily, she added.
Besides the education and sensitization, Vlisco is also working with local government authorities, as well as the customs and police services to take swift action against counterfeit producers and limit the entry of such products onto the Ghanaian market.
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Global demand for palm oil, used as the main ingredient in processed foods, soaps and cosmetics, has resulted in the clearing of many ancient rainforests to make way for palm oil plantations. As a result, indigenous people are being displaced, the native orangutan population is heading for extinction and the area’s fragile ecosystem is being jeopardized.
While some companies such as Cadbury are paying no attention and are actually increasing their use of palm oil, others such as LUSH Cosmetics are very concerned and plan on finding ways to stop using this destructive ingredient altogether.
This week, LUSH cosmetics launched an innovative campaign to make the public aware of what the increased demand for palm oil is doing to rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia.
It’s a multifaceted campaign:
First, LUSH Cosmetics announced plans to become a palm oil-free company, selling a newly-formulated soap made with groundbreaking palm-free soap base. This palm oil-free soap, three years in the making, will result in LUSH being able to reduce the amount of palm oil they use by 133,000 pounds or 60.5 tons per year – the equivalent of saving 36.3 acres of primary rainforest from destruction.
Secondly, LUSH is writing to the top 300 known palm oil user companies (such as Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Nestle) and asking them to follow LUSH’s lead and reformulate their products so that they, too, are palm oil-free. As an incentive, LUSH is offering to supply each company who does this with a year’s supply of soap.
Thirdly, LUSH has launched an interactive window display at 48 shops across the United States during August. At each display, which features a giant palm tree, orangutans and the slogan “Wash Your Hands of Palm,” people are invited to dip their hands in green paint and add their palm prints into leaves on the palm tree. The paint is then washed off with LUSH’s new palm-oil free soap. Plus, they will be given a free sample soap to take home with them.
LUSH is also selling a limited-edition tree shaped soap called Jungle with 100 percent of proceeds from its sales donated to the Rainforest Foundation, a nonprofit that works with indigenous people to protect their forest homes from expanding palm oil plantations.


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Norway’s well being authority has needed to delete all information gathered through its Covid-19 contact-tracing app and droop further use of the device.
The Norwegian Data Protection Authority dominated the Smittestopp app represented a disproportionate intrusion into customers’ privateness.
A swap to a rival design backed by Apple and Google is being thought of.
Elsewhere, researchers say a bug within the newest model of Australia’s app means many iPhones fail to log matches.
In mid-April, Norway turned one of many first locations to introduce a contact-tracing app, when the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and software program firm Simula rolled out their device to a few of the nation’s municipalities.
Such apps work by logging when two telephones are shut collectively for longer than a set time frame.
If one person is later recognized with the coronavirus, an alert could be despatched to the opposite.
In the case of Smittestopp, at-risk users were asked to self-isolate to keep away from spreading the an infection further.
The builders determined one of the simplest ways to do that was to collect each Bluetooth and GPS (world positioning system)location information and perform contact-matches remotely on a centralised pc server.
But the Norwegian Data Protection Authority stated health chiefs had not demonstrated it was “strictly necessary” to gather location information.
Most different contact-tracing apps rely solely on Bluetooth alerts – though, there are problems with this approach.
The regulator additionally famous a bunch of specialists requested to assessment the app had prompt a swap to Apple and Google’s decentralised mannequin, the place the contact-matching course of is on smartphones inside this method, giving customers a better diploma of anonymity.
While the centralised mannequin affords epidemiologists extra information to mannequin the illness’s unfold, the watchdog stated this was separate to contact tracing and customers had to have the ability to consent to 1 however not the opposite.
The heath authority stated it did not agree with the watchdog’s assessment, warning of “poorer control of the spread of the disease” on account of the intervention.
But it’s advising customers to disable the app on their telephones, to save lots of battery life, whereas it decides whether or not to attraction.
The Norwegian well being authority had been suggested by Oxford University’s Big Data Institute, which additionally suggested the NHS to undertake its personal “centralised” strategy.
Australia rolled out its CovidSecure app nationwide on the finish of April.
But now, a workforce of cyber-security researchers says model 1.5 of the iOS launch comprises a flaw which means iPhones fail to be detected when locked.
“One could imagine Alice packing her bag, putting her iPhone in and going out for the day to a football game,” said one of the team.
“With her device in this state, nobody else will record her presence and if anyone around her tested positive she would not be contacted.”
Because customers can not see their very own histories of logged matches, this is able to not have been instantly apparent to these utilizing the software program.
Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency told news site Zdnet it welcomed the feedback.
“The DTA will continue to release updates to the CovidSafe app to deliver a range of performance, security, and accessibility improvements as required,” it stated.
Last week, Singapore introduced it had awarded a $4.3m (£3.4m) contract to an area electronics-maker to construct 300,000 wearable dongles that customers bodily hand over in the event that they check constructive, relatively than importing the data through the web.
Nevertheless, ministers are expected to confirm the release of Germany’s mobile phone app on Tuesday.
And a Department of Health spokeswoman stated it was nonetheless dedicated to a wider rollout of the NHS Covid-19 app throughout England, regardless of final week’s postponement of the trial’s second section.
“There has been a hugely positive reception to the app on the Isle of Wight, with more than 54,000 people downloading the app,” she instructed BBC News
“Their feedback has been invaluable ahead of rolling out the app nationally soon.”


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Misty’s is out of the beer brewing business.
The steakhouse discontinued brewing operations at its downtown restaurant about three months ago and expects to run out of the last of its Modern Monks beers in mid-February, according to co-owner Chad Carlson.
He said expensive equipment upgrades, including the need for a new boiler, and diners’ preferences for more variety led to the decision.
“It was one of the hardest decisions to make to close it,” he said. “We have some of the best brewers around. But it’s always been an amenity. We never made money at it.”
David Oenbring, Misty’s co-head brewer, said he was "obviously, sad to see it go,” but “understands the reasons.”
“We had a lot of fun there,” said Oenbring, who’s brewed Modern Monks beer at Misty’s with Josh Ames for the last 3½ years. Modern Monks, as a group, had been brewing at the steakhouse since May 2010.
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“We made a lot of great beers, made a lot of friends and really enjoyed being a part of the beer community in Nebraska,” Oenbring said.
Misty’s inherited the beer operation from Crane River when it took over the space at 11th and P streets in 2003. Crane River opened as the city’s second brew pub in 1992. Lazlo’s Brewery & Grill is the city’s (and state’s) oldest brew pub, opening in the Haymarket in 1991.
Carlson said making beer added a “nice feature,” but “there are so many brewers now.”
“It got to the point business-wise that we should carry all kinds of local beers,” he said, noting the current menu is a mix of Modern Monks and other craft beers.
“Misty’s is first and foremost a steakhouse," he said. “The beer thing was sort of peripheral.”
Carlson said he’s not sure what he will do with the equipment. Ideally, he would like to sell it all together. Selling the upstairs tanks, displayed behind glass windows, would give him the option of turning that area into a private dining space, he said.
Reach the writer at 402-473-7213 or email@example.com.
On Twitter @LJSjeffkorbelik.