By BY ASHLEY WONG from NYT New York https://ift.tt/38t4EAh
Tuesday, 31 August 2021
Teenage Lifeguard Killed in Lightning Strike: ‘It Was Like a Bomb’
By BY ASHLEY WONG from NYT New York https://ift.tt/38t4EAh
Huracanes y cambio climático: esto es lo que sabemos
By BY VERONICA PENNEY from NYT en Español https://ift.tt/2WHlLfh
Reflections on Our Summer Reading Contest and Our Final Week of Winners
By BY NATALIE PROULX from NYT The Learning Network https://ift.tt/3ywJsnD
College Football Changes: More 2-Point Tries and a Crackdown on Stadium Gamesmanship
By BY ALAN BLINDER from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/3mOFiFx
This Is the Moment the Anti-Vaccine Movement Has Been Waiting for
By BY TARA HAELLE from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/3jxvtcV
Bangladeshi manufacturers criticize the expansion of a deal to protect workers.
By BY ELIZABETH PATON from NYT Business https://ift.tt/3kIOkkr
There’s a Better Way to Stop Ransomware Attacks
By BY PAUL ROSENZWEIG from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/3BvP17Q
Revocatoria a Gavin Newsom: una guía para los votantes
By BY JILL COWAN AND SHAWN HUBLER from NYT en Español https://ift.tt/3jz4k9D
Governors DeSantis and Abbott, ‘Undermining Public Health’
By Unknown Author from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/3kJnyIG
LinkedIn is scrapping its Stories feature to work on short-form video
What do LinkedIn and Twitter have in common? They both introduced ephemeral story features that were pretty fleeting. LinkedIn announced today that it will suspend its Stories feature on September 30 and begin working on a different way to add short-form videos to the platform.
LinkedIn announced the upcoming change to warn advertisers who might have already purchased ads that would run in between Stories. Those will instead be shared on the LinkedIn feed, but users who promoted or sponsored Stores directly from their page will need to remake them.
LinkedIn introduced Stories in September, around the same time that Twitter rolled out Fleets to all users before doing away with the feature. This was part of a larger web and mobile redesign, which also added integrations with Zoom, BlueJeans and Teams to help professionals stay connected while working from home. But according to LinkedIn, these temporary posts didn’t quite work on the platform.
“In developing Stories, we assumed people wouldn’t want informal videos attached to their profile, and that ephemerality would reduce barriers that people feel about posting,” wrote LinkedIn’s Senior Director of Product Liz Li in a blog post today. “Turns out, you want to create lasting videos that tell your professional story in a more personal way and that showcase both your personality and expertise.”
Li also noted that users want “more creative tools to make engaging videos.” While Stories included stickers and prompts, users wanted more creative functionality.
If LinkedIn is successful in its plans to create a short-form video feature, it would join platforms like Snapchat and Instagram that have built their own TikTok-like feeds. Sure, most users probably don’t post the same content on LinkedIn and their personal social media accounts, but there actually are some prominent TikTokers sharing career advice, interview tips, and resume guidance, so LinkedIn’s pivot to video might not be as weird as it seems.
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Cheeterz Club wants to make reading glasses hip
Can reading glasses actually be cool? A new eyewear company called Cheeterz Club thinks so. The startup is working to change the perception of reading glasses from being just cheap, disposable items you pick up from a rotating display rack at your local drug store to being something you’d actually be proud to wear. To do so, the company is designing its glasses with quality lenses and frames in range of styles, while still keeping the pricing affordable.
The startup — whose name is a reference to the slang term for glasses, “cheaters,” — was founded by Jennifer Farrelly, whose background includes work in advertising and sales at companies like Uber and Virool.
She said the idea to make a better set of readers came to her because she found herself frustrated by the current options on the market.
“It all started a few years ago. My friends were posting on social media these really depressing comments and posts like: ‘I’m old and turning into my parents, this is awful.’ And I [thought to myself] why does it have to be like that? I feel just as young today as I did ten years ago,” Farrelly explains. “Why are my friends and I feeling forced to feel old because of something that happens overnight?,” she says, of what felt like the sudden onset of middle age and the hardships it brings.
What’s worse, Farrelly says, is that when you finally make your way to the drugstore to pick out some reading glasses, all you’ll find are bad, plastic pairs that both look and feel cheap.
“That’s even more demoralizing,” she adds.
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So Farrelly teamed up with a former Warby Parker and Pair Eyewear Head of Product, Lee Zaro, to design a new line of more fashion-forward eyewear.
Zaro, who’s based in the L.A. area, immediately saw the opportunity.
“Drugstore reading glasses are typically poor in quality, and can feel like they are designed with our parents in mind, leaving a huge unmet need for sophisticated eyewear options,” he said. “When Jennifer approached me to help design her first line of eyewear, I knew it was a brilliant idea.”
To differentiate itself from lower-end readers, Cheeterz Club glasses are made with 100% acetate and feature spring hinges and stainless steel. The lenses, meanwhile, offer more clarity than is often found in reading glasses.
Image Credits: Cheeterz Club
Typically, ophthalmic plastic lens materials have an Abbe value — a measure of the degree at which light is dispersed or separated — between 30 and 58. The higher number offers better optical performance. Crown glass can have an Abbe value as high as 59, but polycarbonate readers (like those from Warby Parker, Farrelly notes) would have an Abbe value of 30. Cheeterz Club lenses, which are CR-39 lenses, are at at 58. This is a difference you can tell when trying the glasses on alongside your drugstore readers.
Cheeterz’ lenses also offer 100% UVA/UVB protection, and are oil and water repellent. They can optionally be bought in one of eight fashion tints, from pink to blue, or in two sun shades. Consumers can also opt to add Blue Light coating to help with screen-induced eye fatigue or they can choose Progressive lenses, which combine distance vision with a reading lens.
Tints are an extra $10, Blue Light protection is $25, and Progressive lenses are $40.99 — lower than market rates.
At launch, Cheeterz Club offers 14 different styles ranging from traditional to the more modern, starting at $28.99.
Farrelly says finding the right price was key, because unlike regular glasses, consumers often buy multiple pairs of readers to leave around the house or car, pack in purses and bags, and so on.
“If I break something that costs me a couple $100, I’d be really upset about it,” she says. “But at a drugstore price of under $30, I can have them in all sorts of colors and different tints.”
For Farrelly, making the startup a success goes beyond brining higher-quality reading glasses to market. It’s also about serving a demographic that often gets overlooked.
“Founders in their forties do not get representation, and it’s unfortunate. And there are also people in their forties and fifties that have disposable income and are looking for cute things. They’re spending so much money on facial creams and Botox,” she says, “but then you’re forced to put this really ugly pair of glasses on your face that make you feel bad about yourself.”
While Cheeterz Club today is selling direct to the consumer, the company is talking to eye doctors, boutiques and others who may eventually resell for them, as more of a B2B model. It’s also testing selling on Amazon with one pair of Blue Light glasses.
Cheeterz Club plans to start discussing fundraising with seed investors later this fall.
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A popular smart home security system can be remotely disarmed, researchers say
A cybersecurity company says a popular smart home security system has a pair of vulnerabilities that can be exploited to disarm the system altogether.
Rapid7 found the vulnerabilities in the Fortress S03, a home security system that relies on Wi-Fi to connect cameras, motion sensors, and sirens to the internet, allowing owners to remotely monitor their home anywhere with a mobile app. The security system also uses a radio-controlled key fob to let homeowners arm or disarm their house from outside their front door.
But the cybersecurity company said the vulnerabilities include an unauthenticated API and an unencrypted radio signal that can be easily intercepted.
Rapid7 revealed details of the two vulnerabilities on Tuesday after not hearing from Fortress in three months, the standard window of time that security researchers give to companies to fix bugs before details are made public. Rapid7 said its only acknowledgment of its email was when Fortress closed its support ticket a week later without commenting.
Fortress owner Michael Hofeditz opened but did not respond to several emails sent by TechCrunch with an email open tracker. An email from Bottone Riling, a Massachusetts law firm representing Fortress, called the claims “false, purposely misleading and defamatory,” but did not provide specifics that it claims are false, or if Fortress has mitigated the vulnerabilities.
Rapid7 said that Fortress’ unauthenticated API can be remotely queried over the internet without the server checking if the request is legitimate. The researchers said by knowing a homeowner’s email address, the server would return the device’s unique IMEI, which in turn could be used to remotely disarm the system.
The other flaw takes advantage of the unencrypted radio signals sent between the security system and the homeowner’s key fob. That allowed Rapid7 to capture and replay the signals for “arm” and “disarm” because the radio waves weren’t scrambled properly.
Vishwakarma said homeowners could add a plus-tagged email address with a long, unique string of letters and numbers in place of a password as a stand-in for a password. But there was little for homeowners to do for the radio signal bug until Fortress addresses it.
Fortress has not said if it has fixed or plans to fix the vulnerabilities. It’s not clear if Fortress is able to fix the vulnerabilities without replacing the hardware. It’s not known if Fortress builds the device itself or buys the hardware from another manufacturer.
Read more:
- Many smart home device makers still won’t say if they give your data to the government
- Window Snyder’s new startup Thistle Technologies raises $2.5M seed to secure IoT devices
- Peloton’s leaky API let anyone grab riders’ private account data
- Amazon says government demands for user data spiked by 800% in 2020
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Downed lines are making it hard for Entergy to restore power in Louisiana.
By BY IVAN PENN AND PETER EAVIS from NYT Business https://ift.tt/3kCTUFf
Transcript: Ezra Klein Answers Listener Questions
By Unknown Author from NYT Podcasts https://ift.tt/3DIDh3N
New Jersey Woman Charged With Selling Fake Vaccine Cards on Instagram
By BY JONAH E. BROMWICH from NYT New York https://ift.tt/3mSTAVt
Players Apologize as Mets Try to Move On From Thumbs Down
By BY DAVID WALDSTEIN from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/3kJh4tk
Colm Toibin’s ‘The Magician’ Intimately Recaptures a Literary Giant
By BY DWIGHT GARNER from NYT Books https://ift.tt/3Bxk2Z1
A New Jersey woman is charged with selling hundreds of fake vaccine cards.
By BY JONAH E. BROMWICH from NYT New York https://ift.tt/3DBEf1p
Covid-related disruptions push the Patriots to release Cam Newton.
By BY BEN SHPIGEL AND KEN BELSON from NYT World https://ift.tt/2V5fbi4
Monday, 30 August 2021
Zoom announces first startups receiving funding from $100M investment fund
For more than year now, Zoom has been on a mission to transform from an application into a platform. To that end it made three announcements last year: Zoom Apps development tools, the Zoom Apps marketplace and a $100 million development fund to invest in some of the more promising startups building tools on top of their platform. Today, at the closing bell, the company announced it has made its first round of investments.
Ross Mayfield, product lead for Zoom Apps and integrations spoke to TechCrunch about the round of investments. “We’re in the process of creating this ecosystem. We felt it important, particularly to focus on the seed stage and A stage of partnering with entrepreneurs to create great things on this platform. And I think what you see in the first batch of more than a dozen investments is representative of something that’s going to be a significant ongoing undertaking,” he explained.
He said while they aren’t announcing exact investment amounts, they are writing checks for between $250,000 and $2.5 million. They are teaming with other investment partners, rather than leading the rounds, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t working with these startups using internal resources for advice and executive backing, beyond the money.
“Every one of these investments has an executive or senior sponsor within the company. So there’s another person inside that knows the lay of the land, can help them advance and spend more personal time with them,” Mayfield said.
The company is also running several Zoom chat channels for the startups receiving investments to learn from one another and the Zoom Apps team. “We have a shared chat channel between the startup and my team. We have a channel called Announcements and a channel called Help, and another one that the startups created called Community,” he said.
Every week they use these channels to hold a developer office hour, business office hour which Mayfield runs, and then there’s a community hour where the startups can gather and talk amongst themselves about whatever they want.
Among the specific categories receiving funding are collaboration and productivity, community and charity, DE&I and PeopleOps, and gaming and entertainment. In the collaboration and productivity category, Warmly is a sales tool that provides background and information about each person participating in the meeting ahead of time, while allowing the meeting organizer to create customized Zoom backgrounds for each event.
Another is Fathom, which alleviates the need to take notes during a meeting, but it’s more than recording and transcription. “It gives you this really simple interface where you can just tag moments. And then, as a result you have this transcript of the video recording, and you can click on those tagged moments as highlights, and then share a clip of the meeting highlights to Salesforce, Slack and other tools,” Mayfield said.
Pledge enables individuals or organizations to request and collect donations inside a Zoom meeting instantly, and Canvas is a hiring and interview tool that helps companies build diverse teams with data that helps them set and meet DEI goals.
These and the other companies represent the first tranche of investments from this fund, and Mayfield says the company intends to continue looking for startups using the Zoom platform to build their startup or integrate with Zoom.
He says that every company starts as a feature, then becomes a product and then aspires to be a line of products. The trick is getting there. The goal of the investment program and the entire set of Zoom Apps tools is about helping these companies take the first step.
“The art of being an entrepreneur is working with that risk in the absence of resources and pushing at the frontier of what you know.” Zoom is trying to be a role model, a mentor and an investor on that journey.
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With a Tuesday withdrawal deadline for U.S. troops, hope dwindles for Afghans to flee via the airport.
By BY JIM HUYLEBROEK from NYT World https://ift.tt/3mMuTtG
White House Weighs Clemency to Keep Some Drug Offenders Confined at Home
By BY ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS AND CHARLIE SAVAGE from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3sXhQH0
The world is still short of everything. Get used to it.
By BY PETER S. GOODMAN AND KEITH BRADSHER from NYT World https://ift.tt/3yoUmvy
A university in Bangladesh evacuates almost 150 young women from Kabul.
By BY ISABELLA KWAI from NYT World https://ift.tt/2WGltoU
New York’s Brief Hot Restaurant Summer: Bread Binges and Tabletop Coke
By BY BECKY HUGHES from NYT Food https://ift.tt/3ytNY6q
E. U. Proposes New Travel Restrictions on Unvaccinated U.S. Visitors
By BY ELIAN PELTIER from NYT World https://ift.tt/38mT8qa
La variante delta se infiltró en un aula de primaria. Así sucedió
By BY SABRINA IMBLER AND EMILY ANTHES from NYT en Español https://ift.tt/3kJ4L0u
What Voters in a California Swing District Say About Afghanistan
By BY JENNIFER MEDINA from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/38pAOfV
When the ‘Silent Majority’ Isn’t White
By BY JAY CASPIAN KANG from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/3gJ3GnS
New data confirm Pfizer and Moderna vaccines bring a small risk of heart problems, especially for boys and younger men.
By BY EMILY ANTHES from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3gIgz1O
Prive has raised $1.7 million to build a more configurable e-commerce subscription platform
Prive, a months-old, San Francisco-based startup founded by two former Uber product managers, just raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding to create what it describes as a far more customizable e-commerce subscriptions platform for D2C brands.
The round was co-led by Patrick Chung and Brandon Farwell at XFund and Ben Ling from Bling Capital, with participation from Defy Partners, Halogen Ventures, and Uber executives.
Founded by Claudia Laurie and Alex Craciun — who both spent two-and-a-half years at Uber and decided, based on their learnings about pricing and incentives, to leave the company earlier this year — Prive aims to better enable small retailers to compete with behemoths like Amazon.
The broad idea is that by plugging into existing APIs from Shopify and other e-commerce platforms, Prive can form an opinion that it sells to merchants about what customers tend to buy on a recurrent basis. Maybe it sees that people who buy razors also tend to buy toothbrushes on a similar cadence, for example. It passes that information along, then helps the brand create more customized, and flexible, offerings so that their shoppers are presented with items they might, as well as can more easily cancel items
“The market opportunity is huge, and the existing [e-commerce subscription] tools are just scratching the surface,” notes Laurie. Indeed, according to the group eMarketer, subscription e-commerce sales have grown 41% from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and it foresees that 3% of US retail e-commerce sales will come from subscriptions this year, totaling $27.67 billion. That’s up from $10 billion in just two years’ time.
Of course, a lot has yet to be built, which is where the pre-seed funding comes in. Right now, Prive is a seven-person team with some serious competition, namely from Recharge, a seven-year-old, Santa Monica, Calif.-based subscription e-commerce company that in May raised $277 million in growth capital at a post-money valuation of $2.1 billion. As of that announcement, Recharge had roughly 330 employees and was fueling the subscription service for what it said was 15,000 merchants and 20 million subscribers worldwide.
Other rivals include nine-year-old, Bold Commerce (it has raised $44 million altogether), and 10-year-old, Chargebee, which has raised around $220 million over the years, according to Crunchbase data.
“E-commerce ‘subscription’ is an incredibly hot buzzword,” acknowledges Craciun, but he also thinks the today’s current product offerings are just scratching the service.
Clearly, investors are willing to gamble that he’s right — and that Prive could be the team to prove it.
“Current tools can create more headaches than they actually solve,” says Craciun. “There is a lot of rigidity in today’s subscriptions that makes it very difficult to identify the right recurring mix of offerings. We’re here to break down that mental model.”
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Lessons from COVID: Flexible funding is a must for alternative lenders
Rachael runs a bakery in New York. She set up shop in 2010 with her personal savings and contributions from family and friends, and the business has grown. But Rachael now needs additional financing to open another store. So how does she finance her expansion plans?
Because of stringent requirements, extensive application processes and long turnaround times, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) like Rachael’s bakery seldom qualify for traditional bank loans. That’s when alternative lenders — who offer short and easy applications, flexible underwriting and quick turnaround times — come to the rescue.
Alternative lending is any lending that occurs outside of a conventional financial institution. These kinds of lenders offer different types of loans such as lines of credit, microloans and equipment financing, and they use technology to process and underwrite applications quickly. However, given their flexible requirements, they usually charge higher interest rates than traditional lenders.
Securitization is another cost-effective option for raising debt. Lenders can pool the loans they have extended and segregate them into tranches based on credit risk, principal amount and time period.
But how do these lenders raise funds to bridge the financing gap for SMBs?
As with all businesses, these firms have two major sources of capital: equity and debt. Alternative lenders typically raise equity funding from venture capital, private equity firms or IPOs, and their debt capital is typically raised from sources such as traditional asset-based bank lending, corporate debt and securitizations.
According to Naren Nayak, SVP and treasurer of Credibly, equity generally constitutes 5% to 25% of capital for alternative lenders, while debt can be between 75% and 95%. “A third source of capital or funding is also available to alternative lenders — whole loan sales — whereby the loans (or merchant cash advance receivables) are sold to institutions on a forward flow basis. This is a “balance-sheet light” funding solution and an efficient way to transfer credit risk for lenders,” he said.
Let’s take a look at each of these options in detail.
Image Credits: FischerJordan
Equity capital
Venture capital or private equity funding is one of the major sources of financing for alternative lenders. The alternative lending industry is said to be a “gold mine” for venture capital investments. While it is difficult for such companies to receive credit from traditional banks because of their stringent requirements in the initial stages, once the founders have shown a commitment by investing their own money, VC and PE firms usually step in.
However, VC and PE firms can be expensive sources of capital — their investment dilutes the ownership and control in the company. Plus, obtaining venture capital is a long, involved and competitive process.
Alternative lenders that have achieved good growth rates and scaled their operations have another option: An IPO lets them quickly raise large amounts of money while providing a lucrative exit for early investors.
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It Took A Terror Bombing To Get Media To Stop Creating Drama
On Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter asked PressRun's Eric Boehlert about the media coverage of Afghanistan after the airport bombing. "Have you seen a change the last two days?" Stelter asked.
"Yeah, after the bombing, there was less need for the press to inject drama," Boehlert said.
"I think the press got kind of married to the storyline. Very 'doomsday, Biden teetering on collapse." The media consensus was we probably will evacuate 20,000 to 30,000 people. we're up to 110,000.
Biden's approval rate is down 2.5 points in the last two weeks. This is due to a drumbeat of relentless 24/7 Kabul coverage. Before the bombing, the story kind of pivoted but the press didn't pivot.
"I think with that horrendous attack, we saw more straightforward news coverage rather than 'Let's inject drama into this.' Just a quick data point on the lack of coverage prior to this year. ABC, CBS, NBC evening news, "20/20," five minutes of Afghanistan coverage for the entire year."
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'Make Men Great Again!' PA Candidate Wants To Muscle Out Local School Boards
The John Birch/Tea Party/right wing extremist playbook is always the same: Start with local offices like school boards, take them over and use that as the launch point for higher office. Pennsylvania right-wing extremist Steve Lynch is a perfect example of that.
Lynch, a suspected domestic terrorist, is running for Northampton County executive. Over the weekend, he called for a brute takeover of school boards, not by electoral means, but simply by brute force.
After opening with a call to "make men great again, make men men again," Lynch got down to business, using the requirement to mask children as the pretext to muscle his way into removing existing school boards and replacing them with Koch-friendly puppets.
"When we walk into those school boards, we’re gonna have everything we need to do to go in there with those 9-0 school boards that voted to put these masks back on children with no scientific — it’s done! Giving them the research and the data. Do you understand that?" he yelled. "Forget going into these school boards with frigging data. You go into school boards to remove ’em! That’s what you do! They don’t follow the law! You go in and you remove ’em."
Having worked the crowd into a froth, he put an exclamation point on it. "I’m going in there with 20 strong men, I’m going to speak to the school board and I’m going to give them an option. They can leave or they can be removed."
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Human Most of All: In Moscow, a Theater Stages ‘Gorbachev’
By BY IVAN NECHEPURENKO from NYT Theater https://ift.tt/2WwCqls
A new plant was supposed to help keep New Orleans’s lights on after storms. It didn’t.
By BY IVAN PENN from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/38nAC0K
N.J. will end pandemic unemployment benefits this weekend.
By BY PRECIOUS FONDREN from NYT New York https://ift.tt/3zwA0lx
Here are some ways to help victims of the storm.
By BY CHRISTINE HAUSER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3mM9mRW
Starbucks Faces Rare Union Challenge as Buffalo Workers Seek Vote
By BY NOAM SCHEIBER from NYT Business https://ift.tt/3Bu8RjN
Sunday, 29 August 2021
The U.S. carried out another strike in Kabul.
By Unknown Author from NYT World https://ift.tt/3Bp8lmS
U.S. Conducts Drone Strike in Kabul and Winds Down Airlift as Deadline Nears
By BY DAVID ZUCCHINO from NYT World https://ift.tt/3t0pQaq
Ida leaves behind flooding and dangerous storm surge.
By BY MELINA DELKIC from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3sXz5rM
At Least One Dead as Tropical Storm Nora Lashes Mexico With Heavy Rain
By BY ALYSSA LUKPAT from NYT World https://ift.tt/3jrpJkN
When Will Biden Join the Fight for Voting Rights?
By BY ADAM JENTLESON from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/2Y2TvEh
Two of the U.S. service members killed in the Kabul attack were women.
By BY DAVE PHILIPPS from NYT World https://ift.tt/3mKxrsq
American University of Kabul students and alumni trying to flee were sent home.
By BY FARNAZ FASSIHI from NYT World https://ift.tt/3sUvJG2
When Will Biden Join the Fight for Voting Rights?
By BY ADAM JENTLESON from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/3yCACVz
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