Federal regulators on Tuesday [April 23, 2024] enacted a nationwide ban on new noncompete agreements, which keep millions of Americans — from minimum-wage earners to CEOs — from switching jobs within their industries.

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday afternoon voted 3-to-2 to approve the new rule, which will ban noncompetes for all workers when the regulations take effect in 120 days [So, the ban starts in early September, 2024!]. For senior executives, existing noncompetes can remain in force. For all other employees, existing noncompetes are not enforceable.

[That's right: if you're currently under a noncompete agreement, it's completely invalid as of September 2024! You're free!!]

The antitrust and consumer protection agency heard from thousands of people who said they had been harmed by noncompetes, illustrating how the agreements are "robbing people of their economic liberty," FTC Chair Lina Khan said. 

The FTC commissioners voted along party lines, with its two Republicans arguing the agency lacked the jurisdiction to enact the rule and that such moves should be made in Congress...

Why it matters

The new rule could impact tens of millions of workers, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist and president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. 

"For nonunion workers, the only leverage they have is their ability to quit their job," Shierholz told CBS MoneyWatch. "Noncompetes don't just stop you from taking a job — they stop you from starting your own business."

Since proposing the new rule, the FTC has received more than 26,000 public comments on the regulations. The final rule adopted "would generally prevent most employers from using noncompete clauses," the FTC said in a statement.

The agency's action comes more than two years after President Biden directed the agency to "curtail the unfair use" of noncompetes, under which employees effectively sign away future work opportunities in their industry as a condition of keeping their current job. The president's executive order urged the FTC to target such labor restrictions and others that improperly constrain employees from seeking work.

"The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy," Khan said in a statement making the case for axing noncompetes. "Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand."

Real-life consequences

In laying out its rationale for banishing noncompetes from the labor landscape, the FTC offered real-life examples of how the agreements can hurt workers.

In one case, a single father earned about $11 an hour as a security guard for a Florida firm, but resigned a few weeks after taking the job when his child care fell through. Months later, he took a job as a security guard at a bank, making nearly $15 an hour. But the bank terminated his employment after receiving a letter from the man's prior employer stating he had signed a two-year noncompete.

In another example, a factory manager at a textile company saw his paycheck dry up after the 2008 financial crisis. A rival textile company offered him a better job and a big raise, but his noncompete blocked him from taking it, according to the FTC. A subsequent legal battle took three years, wiping out his savings. 

-via CBS Moneywatch, April 24, 2024

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Note:

A lot of people think that noncompete agreements are only a white-collar issue, but they absolutely affect blue-collar workers too, as you can see from the security guard anecdote.

In fact, one in six food and service workers are bound by noncompete agreements. That's right - one in six food workers can't leave Burger King to work for Wendy's [hypothetical example], in the name of "trade secrets." (x, x, x)

Noncompete agreements also restrict workers in industries from tech and video games to neighborhood yoga studios. "The White House estimates that tens of millions of workers are subject to noncompete agreements, even in states like California where they're banned." (x, x, x)

The FTC estimates that the ban will lead to "the creation of 8,500 new businesses annually, an average annual pay increase of $524 for workers, lower health care costs, and as many as 29,000 more patents each year for the next decade." (x)

Clearer explanation of noncompete agreements below the cut.

Noncompete agreements can restrict workers from leaving for a better job or starting their own business.

Noncompetes often effectively coerce workers into staying in jobs they want to leave, and even force them to leave a profession or relocate.

Noncompetes can prevent workers from accepting higher-paying jobs, and even curtail the pay of workers not subject to them directly.

Of the more than 26,000 comments received by the FTC, more than 25,000 supported banning noncompetes. 

2023: A Transformative Year for These Profitable Digital Marketing Niches

 Well, 2023 has come and gone. And what a transformative year it was for digital marketing! I don't know about you, but my head is still spinning from all the changes that shook up major niches this past year. In this article, we’ll explore the biggest 2023 shifts and their implications moving forward. Here’s what we’ll cover: Overview - Thesis: 2023 was a disruptive year that redefined niches through new tech and behaviors. - Purpose: Equip you with insights to future-proof your marketing. Top 5 Niches Impacted - E-Commerce - SaaS - Healthcare - Real Estate - Finance These industries faced new technologies, regulations, and consumer behaviors that changed the game. Trust me, you need to know what went down in these niches this past year. The developments in 2023 set the stage for the future, and gave us a crystal ball into what’s coming down the pipeline. I’ll give you the scoop on the most disruptive changes, how brands adapted, and what you can learn for your own marketing efforts in the years ahead. For each niche, we’ll discuss: - The change that shook things up - How it impacted marketing strategy - What brands did to adapt - What this signals for the future My goal is to help you future-proof your marketing strategy by revealing the biggest digital marketing trends and examples from these major niches in 2023. That way, you can get ahead of what’s next and avoid getting blindsided by the rapid pace of change. Key Takeaways - Summarize the major lessons and trends that emerged in 2023. - Strategic advice for capitalizing on what’s next. By the end, you’ll understand the most disruptive 2023 shifts and how to harness them for the years ahead. Let's start unraveling the moments that redefined marketing in these 5 major niches. Sound good? Let’s dive in! 2023 E-Commerce Technologies and Consumer Behaviors Massive Shifts The e-commerce niche underwent massive shifts in 2023 as new technologies and consumer behaviors took hold. Here are two of the most impactful changes: The Rise of Livestream Shopping Livestream shopping, which allows real-time product demonstrations and sales through live video, exploded in popularity this year. Over 75% of consumers made a purchase through a livestream event in 2023, up from just 25% in 2022 according to Fit Small Business. This impacted e-commerce sites by: - Driving searches for terms like "livestream shopping," "live shopping," and related queries as consumers sought these experiences. - Forcing sites to integrate live video and real-time engagement features to meet this demand. - Developing more engaging and interactive product pages to mimic the dynamic experience of livestreams. E-commerce brands that capitalized on livestream shopping saw revenue gains of 200-500% over their competitors according to Walk The Chat. 🔎 Research firm eMarketer estimates that the global market for livestream shopping will generate a massive $500 billion in revenue in the current year. Voice Commerce Gains Traction Voice search and AI assistants like Alexa became a major new shopping channel this year. 40 million households now use voice assistants to purchase products online, a 100% increase over 2022 . This shift led to: - New voice search optimization tactics like using natural language and commands ("Alexa, buy more paper towels"). - Brands developing "skills" for AI assistants to enable seamless voice transactions. - More focus on audio and video content to engage voice users. Early adopters of voice tech and optimization saw 30% higher conversion rates from voice queries . AI Transforms SaaS Industry in 2023, Reshaping Customer Choices The SaaS niche also saw massive upheaval in 2023 through new technologies like AI and shifting subscriber preferences. Two examples include: AI-Powered Solutions AI adoption boomed in 2023, with over 70% of SaaS companies now using AI in some capacity . This created major impacts such as: - More searches related to AI-enabled features like predictive analytics, sentiment analysis, etc. - Pressures to integrate and promote AI capabilities to meet market demands. - Using AI chatbots and assistants to provide fast, 24/7 customer support. SaaS firms that developed AI solutions saw 60% faster growth than the competition . Subscription Fatigue With the rise of the subscription economy, over 60% of consumers now feel "subscription fatigue" from juggling multiple SaaS memberships . To adapt, SaaS brands had to: - Adjust messaging and positioning to acknowledge and alleviate subscription burnout. - Offer more flexibility like month-to-month plans or discounted annual subscriptions. - Develop additional value-adds and perks to maintain loyalty. Companies that responded to this trend saw churn rates reduced by 75% YOY . Things that Changed in 2023 for the Healthcare Industry Healthcare organizations faced evolving challenges in 2023 with new regulations and technologies disrupting traditional practices. For example: Telehealth Services Use of telehealth services like virtual doctor visits skyrocketed, with over 85% of patients now open to remote healthcare options versus just 22% in 2020 . This drove major impacts like: - Dramatic rise in searches for terms like "telehealth," "virtual healthcare," etc. - Pressures to offer seamless online booking and video visit capabilities. - More focus on developing omni-channel engagement across virtual and in-office care. Orgs that invested heavily in telehealth saw patient satisfaction scores increase by 40% . AI Diagnosis and Treatment Use of AI in areas like medical diagnosis and treatment planning grew exponentially, with over 55% of healthcare organizations now leveraging these technologies . This created shifts such as: - Optimizing for keywords related to AI health services. - Promoting AI capabilities to attract tech-savvy patients. - Re-training staff on integrating AI-driven insights and recommendations. Early AI adopters achieved 30% higher diagnostic accuracy using intelligent algorithms . 2023 Real Estate Two Transformative Changes The real estate niche saw two transformative changes: the Metaverse and evolving consumer journeys. Metaverse Home Tours With the Metaverse going mainstream, over 25% of home searches now involve a Metaverse tour . This is forcing drastic digital experience changes like: - Optimizing for Metaverse-related search terms. - Developing 3D staged home tours and immersive open house events. - Retraining agents on virtual staging best practices. Early adopters have seen home sales improve by over 20% using Metaverse tours . Evolving Journeys The path to homeownership looked completely different in 2023. Today's journeys are 60% digital, with buyers relying on resources like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram to learn and search. This requires shifts like: - Placing video ads and optimizing content across new digital touchpoints. - Developing channels on TikTok, YouTube Shorts and other emerging formats. - Creating engaging social content that informs and nurtures modern buyers. Realtors who embraced these new digital touchpoints saw leads increase by 100% . Final Verdict While this article only scratched the surface, 2023 brought massive change across digital marketing niches. The takeaway is that complacency is no longer an option - to thrive, brands must constantly adapt and evolve. The good news is that by staying on top of trends and technologies, there are always new opportunities to better engage audiences, rank higher, and drive results. Key Takeaways - Major shifts like livestream shopping, telehealth adoption, Metaverse integration, and more upended multiple niches this year. - Search patterns, consumer expectations, and best practices changed dramatically across the board. - Proactively embracing these new trends and realigning strategies will separate the winners from the laggards. - With the pace of change accelerating, no brand can afford to stand still - constant learning and iteration is a must. The question now becomes: How will you take advantage of what’s next in 2024 and beyond? The future favors the bold. Are you ready to seize it? Read the full article

The Impact of Crypto on the Gaming Industry

The Impact of Crypto on the Gaming Industry When people think about gaming, they tend to picture video games or virtual reality (VR). But as it turns out, blockchain and crypto technology are also changing the way gamers play.

This change is being attributed to the growing popularity of cryptocurrency and the crypto economy, which is based on blockchain technology. The blockchain is a decentralized ledger that stores data on a public blockchain and allows for instantaneous transactions, as well as ensuring security and trust.

The impact of crypto on the gaming industry is huge, as it has the potential to completely disrupt and reshape how gamers interact with their favorite games. In addition, it will make games more immersive and boundary-blurring than ever before.

Initially, the gaming industry was built around a centralized format, where developers controlled all the currency and value within games. But blockchain gaming techogle has changed that, as it works in a decentralized manner, with players earning non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, for playing online games.

NFTs can be used in a variety of ways, including selling items in-game for real money and trading them for other assets outside of games. This means that gaming has the potential to create new micro transaction-based business models, which could lead to a massive increase in revenue for games and even game developers.

One of the best examples of this is DMarket, an online marketplace where players can buy and sell NFTs for real money, as they did with RuneScape’s digital Party Hats in 2001. These items have since sold for billions of in-game gold pieces, making them a major asset.

There are a few issues that need to be addressed when introducing crypto gaming, including how to present terms and conditions and user agreements for games based on these digital tokens. Other challenges include a lack of player participation and an increase in fraudulent activity.

However, the emergence of non-fungible tokens is revolutionizing the gaming industry, creating a new model centered on real asset ownership and a “play-to-earn” structure. This is being called “GameFi,” and it focuses on the idea that gamers should invest their resources in assets that tech website templates can appreciate in value, so they can trade them for other valuable items in-game or on secondary markets.

The gaming industry is a great fit for the use of cryptocurrency, as it already has a large user base and a lot of experience with tokenization. Adding in the decentralized nature of blockchain, it has the potential to make games more secure and less expensive for both developers and players alike.

Although the impact of crypto on the gaming industry is significant, it’s still a fairly new phenomenon and is likely to continue to grow in the future. Nevertheless, it is important for everyone to keep an eye out for this new technology so that they can take advantage of it as soon as possible.

As of October 2018, fewer than 2,000 gaming applications are using the blockchain, according to DappRadar, which shows that mainstream adoption is some time away. However, if the underlying infrastructure and development tools improve over the next few years, we can expect to see an explosion in blockchain gaming growth, as more and more gamers adopt this new form of payment.

Convenience and Accessibility Above High-Tech Features

Wired Magazine recently published a peice that describes the latest 'low-tech' revolution which is reshaping the technologies sector. The content highlights several latest examples of how the particular 'quality' of technology is being expanded to favor availability over high-tech characteristics. Wired describes typically the MP3 as typically the classic example: the particular music format very first broke ground since an accessible in addition to portable file that will users could discuss and publish online. Music aficionados plus record companies denounced the MP3, saying it provided second-rate sound quality in order to the CD. Just what the music business didn't understand is that 'quality' was in a persons vision of the particular beholder; Internet surfers around the world applied MP3s because of their accessibility, which was more important to be able to them than an apparent reduction in noise fidelity. Today, the MP3 has exceeded the CD since of its convenience. The Wired Magazine article goes on to point out and about several other products and sectors that are riding the 'low tech' wave, from compact Flip Video Cams to the easily accessible Google Documents. Each and every of these goods may be considered poor for their competitors inside a side-by-side characteristic comparison, nevertheless , that they have proven successful due to their lack of features. I'd like in order to take this opportunity to share several other unmentioned products plus industries which are reaping helpful benefits from convenience above features. Feel free to improve the listing if you think of anything else. 1. Documentary Movie The documentary is the polar opposing of the special effects-laden blockbuster videos that we became used to within the 90s. In the location of A-listers and huge explosions, documentary film utilizes real persons and relatively basic editing to notify a convincing account. In the current decade, documentary features proved not simply to be considered a tough art form but also a cost-effective field office draw. Films like 'An Undesirable Truth' and 'Fahrenheit 9/11' grossed massive numbers and expense a fraction of what a typical blockbuster takes to create. Documentary film is usually on the rise and represents the low-tech and successful way to connect the group with related stories. Off-shoots regarding documentary, like reality TV, have proven to be amazingly successful despite the particular cliche formatting in addition to relatively low production value. second . 'Back to the Basics' Sports Philosophy In past times decade we've seen championship teams arise not based in their huge star power but on teamwork and a new philosophy in doing well at 'the basics. ' Whether it be buying that extra basic on a sac-fly or finding four different receivers having an array of monitor passes; the tiny things are just what have been winning games. The Brand new York Yankees, along with an all-star-studded group and astronomical pay out grade, have been unsuccessful in many areas to live up to their ten 12 months potential due in order to a lack of concentration on the details. The particular Yankees are akin to a high-def. video camera that touts several features, but lacks the basics in order to make it hassle-free and usable. three or more. Applicant Tracking In the wonderful world of corporate recruiting, there exists a complex maze involving collaboration and candidate tracking steps that proceed an employ. Many software remedies in this in-depth method offer a wealth of features to improve a new company's capability to monitor potential job applicants. click here of many features generally only slow the particular process though. Some software developers took some other route and chosen to cut out the particular extra features and even instead concentrate upon accessibility and cooperation: the fundamentals for a more efficient applicant tracking solution. These simple but convenient solutions are quickly making headway due to their 'get-to-the-point' nature and 'anytime, anywhere' on the internet accessibility. 4. Myspace In a world where we include social networks for each possible niche, numerous laden with good tech features to 'increase social communication, ' Twitter has proven again that simplicity is king. Basically, you can adhere to, be followed and even tweet. Twitter will be successful because it offers latched onto our own basic need in order to 'publicize' even the particular most menial occasions of the lives. candidate tracking

Convenience and Accessibility More than High-Tech Features

Wired Publication recently published an article that describes the latest 'low-tech' revolution which is reshaping the technology sector. The content highlights several latest examples of how the particular 'quality' of technologies is being expanded to favor convenience over high-tech capabilities. Wired describes typically the MP3 as typically the classic example: the music format initial broke ground because an accessible and portable file that will users could talk about and publish on-line. Music aficionados plus record companies denounced the MP3, saying it provided second-rate sound quality to be able to the CD. Precisely what the music sector didn't understand is that 'quality' was within the attention of the particular beholder; Internet surfers about the world utilized MP3s because regarding their accessibility, that has been more important in order to them than a great apparent decrease in sound fidelity. Today, typically the MP3 has outdone the CD because of its ease. The Wired Journal article goes in to point out there several other products and even sectors that are operating the 'low tech' wave, from point-and-shoot Flip Video Cameras for the easily accessible Google Documents. Each and every of these goods could possibly be considered second-rate with their competitors within a side-by-side function comparison, yet , these people have proven productive due to their very own lack of special features. I'd like to be able to take this possibility to share several additional unmentioned products and even industries which are reaping helpful benefits from convenience more than features. Feel free of charge to enhance the list if you think of anything more. 1. Documentary Motion picture The documentary is usually the polar reverse of the unique effects-laden blockbuster movies that people became accustomed to in the 90s. In the place of A-listers and huge explosions, skin flick film utilizes real persons and relatively basic editing to explain to a convincing account. In get more info , documentary features proved not simply to be considered a tough art form and also a cost-effective field office draw. Motion pictures like 'An Inconvenient Truth' and 'Fahrenheit 9/11' grossed massive numbers and price a fraction involving what a typical blockbuster takes to make. Documentary film will be on the increase and represents a new low-tech and efficient way to link the group with appropriate stories. Off-shoots regarding documentary, like truth TV, also have verified to be amazingly successful despite the cliche formatting plus relatively low creation value. 2 . 'Back to the Basics' Sports Philosophy In the past decade we've viewed championship teams come up not based in their huge celebrity power but upon teamwork and a new philosophy in doing well at 'the fundamentals. ' Whether it be finding that extra base on a sac-fly or finding several different receivers having an array of monitor passes; the very little things are exactly what have been winning games. The New York Yankees, using an all-star-studded lineup and astronomical spend grade, have unsuccessful in many respects to live around their ten season potential due to be able to an insufficient concentration in the details. The Yankees are similar to a high-def. camcorder that touts quite a few features, but lacks the basics to make it easy and usable. 3. Applicant Tracking In the wonderful world of corporate recruiting, you will find a complex maze involving collaboration and candidate tracking steps that will proceed an employ. Many software options for this in-depth procedure offer a wealth associated with features to enhance the company's capacity to track potential job applicants. These kinds of many special features usually only slow the particular process though. Some of the software developers took an alternative route and chose to cut out the particular extra features plus instead concentrate about accessibility and collaboration: basic principles for a more efficient consumer tracking solution. These types of simple but practical solutions are quickly making headway due to their 'get-to-the-point' nature plus 'anytime, anywhere' on-line accessibility. 4. Twitter In a world where we have internet sites for just about every possible niche, numerous laden with high technical features to 'increase social communication, ' Twitter has proven again that simplicity is king. Basically, you can follow, be followed plus tweet. Twitter is usually successful since it has latched onto each of our basic need to 'publicize' even the most menial activities of the lives.

What's The Largest Tech Mergers And Acquisitions Advisory In History?

New blockbuster tech deals reshape the landscape so typically that we determined to start out preserving track of essentially the most profitable ones. The list starts with offers of only a couple billion and works its method as much as the largest tech mergers and acquisitions we've seen so far. This merger, which took place in 2000, was price over $180 billion and is the biggest merger and acquisition deal in historical past. As mergers and acquisitions advisory, Vodafone turned the largest cell operator on the earth whereas setting the stage for future offers within the telecom industry. Many Germans were towards this deal as a result of they wanted German businesses to stay key players in the world marketplace. The deal is the second largest of all time for a software company (the most important being IBM’s 2019 acquisition of RedHat) but already looks prefer it has the potential to generate massive synergies for each corporations.

So just two years later, Google flipped Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, while holding on to these patents. As for why Google offered Motorola and why Lenovo purchased it, try this 2014 evaluation from PCMag's Lead Analyst Sascha Segan. The proper expertise and tools can even work to make deals extra profitable. DealRoom’s M&A project management software program and tools goals to assist groups manage their complicated M&A transactions. Overall, it’s onerous to argue which deal in US history is probably the most profitable merger or acquisition because of the truth that generally the total worth and potential of a deal takes years to formulate. If you need to discover the latest listing of mergered firms read this blog post about the place to verify M&A information. The acquisition created the second largest drug company, took three months, and Pfizer obtained control of Lipitor’s earnings, which amounted to over $13 billion.

The deal is supposed to stop the downward spiral and the planning was in place to purchase out the shares however obtained delayed because of regulatory elements. This was the largest purchase out within the historical past of the entertainment industry. Walt Disney Co. acquired well-known 21st Century Fox with $eighty five billion. The intention behind the deal is to turn out to be a significant player in video entertainment on the internet. Disney over the yr centered on an even bigger display to distribute its product, however millennials are watching much less TV and consuming more content from the internet. This noticed the rise of video streaming providers similar to Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu.

2004 Parcel Direct FedEx Corp. broadens its residential delivery portfolio with the acquisition of Parcel Direct, a leading parcel consolidator. Parcel Direct becomes a subsidiary of FedEx Ground and is renamed FedEx SmartPost. The company offers a proven answer to customers within the quick-growing e-tail and catalog industries looking for a cheap means of transport low-weight, less time-delicate goods to residential prospects. FedEx Corp. expands its retail entry to all the 1,200 Kinko's stores. With the backing of a FORTUNE 100 corporation, Kinko's gains the sources and experience needed to proceed growth of its corporate doc outsourcing business and international operations. FedEx Corp. acquires this less-than-truckload carrier serving the central and japanese U.S. to complement Viking Freight. Rebranded as FedEx Freight in 2002, these firms mix to make FedEx Freight a pacesetter in the regional less-than-truckload delivery business.

This consists of the purchase of Whole Foods, which Amazon bought for $thirteen.7 billion, and is the company’s largest acquisition to date. In order to count for our listing, acquisitions should be no less than a majority stake in the target company (in any other case it’s simply an funding). Naspers’ investment in Tencent and Softbank/Yahoo’s investment in Alibaba are disqualified for this reason. This purchase may need ranked even higher if Booking Holdings’ stock (Priceline even renamed the whole company after this acquisition!) weren’t down ~20% due to COVID-19 fears after we did the analysis. Who would have thought facilitating funds for Beanie Baby trades could possibly be so profitable? The solely acquisition on our record whose value we will precisely measure, eBay spun off PayPal into a stand-alone public company in July 2015.

Salesforce Is Shopping For Office Messaging App Slack For $27 7 Billion In Its Biggest Deal Ever

2012 TATEX FedEx Corp. acquires TATEX, a leading French enterprise-to-business express transportation company, for $55 million. This acquisition offers its FedEx Express enterprise unit access to a nationwide domestic floor community which carries 19 million shipments and produces roughly €150 million in revenues yearly. This acquisition offers its FedEx Express business unit entry to a nationwide domestic ground community with an estimated $70 million in annual revenue and 12.5 million shipments annually.

Furthermore, Coinbase appointed Earn.com co-founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan as its first CTO and absorbed the Earn.com group. A 12 months after the acquisition, Coinbase closed down Earn.com to focus completely on Coinbase Earn.

I guess the macro point right here is I assume it is always worth evaluating two related corporations like this, YouTube and Instagram. I suppose in all probability considerably greater hosting and bandwidth prices. Now, DoubleClick is attention-grabbing in that Google bought that in 2008.

Facebook’s largest acquisition has been WhatsApp Messenger, which it bought for $22 billion in 2014. The WhatsApp acquisition is the second largest of the Big Five, following Microsoft’s LinkedIn buy. In an intriguing current flip of events, Apple recently introduced it will acquire the majority of Intel’s smartphone modem enterprise. This $1 billion deal will allow Apple to construct all of its devices in-house, and higher put together the iPhone for the upcoming 5G push. While these tech giants may have had massive aspirations for these exceedingly giant deals, they have mixed success charges. The Big Five tech giants, or “FAAMG”—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google —have a combined market capitalization of over $four trillion.

But the forecast for the total yr of 21% to 22% growth would characterize the corporate's slowest fee of expansion since 2010. Slack is projected to develop 39% this fiscal year, which ends Jan. 31, to $876.three million, according to analysts surveyed by Refinitiv. By buying Slack, a business chat service with over one hundred thirty,000 paid customers, Salesforce is bolstering its portfolio of enterprise functions and filling out its broader software program suite because it seeks new areas of progress. The income streams for esports corporations are additionally extraordinarily varied. Companies like TSM, a hundred Thieves, FaZe Clan and Enthusiast Gaming made 50% or extra of their revenue from outside of esports, having as a substitute expanded into diverse corporations with an equal focus on content material creation and apps. TSM, the world’s most precious esports firm in 2020, has a better valuation than 5 NHL franchises.

Ibm's Blockbuster $34 Billion Deal For Purple Hat

According to company management, Latin America and Africa provide the brewing conglomerate alternatives to increase into quickly-rising regions that should end in increased income and market share. A business taking up another promising business is a typical incidence in the company world. Such acquisitions, also referred to as takeovers, are often executed as part of a company’s development strategy and are made for any number of causes. Martha approached Medtronic’s board and commenced laying out the probabilities of creating an acquisition of a giant medical company that would provide the needed breadth. “The board had began to heat to the thought, but we hadn’t settled on something.” Covidien, he noted, was on the highest of the listing. Salesforce mentioned the Slack buy involves an enterprise value of $27.7 billion, which takes into account shares excellent along with debt and money. The deal values Slack at over 24 occasions estimated revenue for subsequent yr.

Amazon ultimately shut down Quidsi in 2017, citing profitability issues. We have seen a number of the biggest mergers and acquisitions within the last decade within the above record. The yr 2020 has also witnessed a number of adjustments including numerous mergers and acquisitions. The world-renowned company, Unilever has announced mergers and acquisitions advisory its merger from Unilever N.V into Unilever PLC. This will make it one holding company based mostly within the UK. The transaction value of the merger was recorded to be $eighty one billion which has positioned it in our record of Biggest Mergers and Acquisitions of the Decade. Further, the wake of COVID-19 has triggered a lot of disturbance all over the world.

As per the agreement, Heinz will hold 51% of the stake within the freshly shaped company and the rest will go to Kraft. The agreement to form the brand new firm was adopted unanimously by each of them.

Eight of Amazon’s top acquisitions were valued at $500M+, including four deals value $1B+. Annapurna Labs ($370M, 2015), an Israel-primarily based semiconductor startup, was reportedly acquired with cloud computing in mind. Annapurna’s chip expertise was subsequently used to make Amazon’s cloud enterprise, AWS, more cost-effective to run. Kiva Systems ($775M, 2012), a robotic achievement system producer, was the certainly one of Amazon’s most impactful acquisitions to its lengthy-term enterprise — no e-commerce competitor has but been capable of rival Amazon’s warehouse automation. This contract was signed between two Saudi firms within the year 2019. In which Saudi Aramco obtained 70% of the stakes in Saudi Basic Industries Corporation . The remaining shares will stay within the public area to be traded out there.

Walmart's efforts to keep with with Amazon didn't cease at Jet.com. In May 2018, the corporate announced a $sixteen billion deal to take a seventy seven p.c stake in Indian e-commerce company Flipkart. The deal closed in August 2018 to expand Walmart's fight with Amazon to a different one of the world's greatest markets.

Prior to Slack, Salesforce's largest offers had been the $15.three billion purchase of Tableau last 12 months and the $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft in 2018. Alphabet has made a number of daring strikes into the hardware and knowledge science sectors.

The 10 Leaders Reworking Franchise Business 2020

Then IBM blew it out of the water with its $34 billion all-money acquisition of open-source powerhouse Red Hat, taking the title of largest software program M&A deal of all-time within the process. The deal has formally closed as of July 9, 2019, with Red Hat turning into its own unit of the company operating beneath IBM Cloud. Cisco has spent the last a number of years shifting from hardware to software and companies. The enterprise tech big's $3.7 billion acquisition of AppDynamics in 2017 bought the corporate a market-leading stake in the software performance administration and infrastructure monitoring house. Adding some drama to the deal, Cisco scooped up AppDynamics only a day earlier than the corporate was set to go public for round $a hundred million. Apple's 2014 deal to buy Beats is the most costly acquisition within the company's historical past, however it's the most affordable deal on this list. The tech big has made dozens of acquisitions since the late '80s, but just one deal valued at greater than a billion.

My other sub-bullet is, should you're big-sport searching, when you're massive elephant searching, price would not matter, convey a giant gun. You can spend $1.sixty five billion for YouTube and still end up quantity three on the listing.

Technology

Amazon's blockbuster $thirteen.7 billion deal to purchase the nationwide chain of Whole Foods supermarkets gave the corporate an existing brick-and-mortar retail infrastructure to broaden its online purchasing operations. Amazon has since introduced issues like Amazon Prime perks, 30-minute grocery pickups, and a slew of other cross-promotional efforts to turn Whole Foods places into yet another extension of Amazon's e-commerce empire. The tech large closed its $eight.5 billion acquisition of Skype in 2011, and has since integrated the video chat service throughout its enterprise and shopper app portfolio. Microsoft's second-largest deal of the Nadella period solidified the corporate's about-face on open source with a $7.5 billion acquisition of the biggest host of open-supply code on the planet. Microsoft has huge plans for the way to combine the popular code-sharing platform and developer group into its cloud ecosystem, and after closing the deal final 12 months is beginning to make them a reality.

The shares debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2019, by way of a direct itemizing. The stock, which opened at $38.50, has been on a curler coaster since, trading near $17 in March of this yr, before climbing back near $forty in June after which dropping again below $25 in mid-November. The company was initially founded in 2009 as an internet gaming firm call Tiny Speck. It was created by Stewart Butterfield, famous in the tech world for beginning photograph-sharing website Flickr and promoting it to Yahoo. Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners and Social Capital had been among Tiny Speck's early backers.

Quantity & Worth Of M&A Worldwide

In what has now turn out to be the largest tech acquisition of all time, and one of the largest in any industry, hardware maker Dell purchased storage giant EMC for a whopping $sixty seven billion in 2016. But even the Broadcom acquisition appeared paltry in comparison with the daring provide for Qualcomm Inc. Soon after altering its name, Avago (now Broadcom Ltd.) tried to snag Qualcomm with a $121 billion supply — double what Dell paid for EMC and the one largest provide within the tech business, ever. The new entry to the top 10 tech acquisitions list reached a formidable No. 3 spot. With the acquisition, Slack becomes the brand new interface for Salesforce Customer 360. During the time of the acquisition, salesforce stated it’s seeking to “give firms a single supply of fact for his or her enterprise,” by unifying the platforms they use within their present workflows. Saleforce’s desire for Tableau was realized to the tune of a $15.7 billion all-stock acquisition in June 2019, making it the largest purchase in Saleforce’s history and the eighth largest acquisition on our listing.

We estimated the current market cap contribution of that $30 million Bungie Halo pickup in 2000 to be about $eight billion at present. The way we considered that is Pixar is basically good for a film a year. Super, super attention-grabbing though, the one reason that is thus far down on the record is because of all of the complicated EMC Dell stuff (we'll get into once we do this episode sometime). Dell is definitely trading in the public markets at a significantly decrease worth than what their stake in VMware is worth. This rating represents a cut-off date in history, March 2, 2020. It is clearly topic to alter going ahead from each future and previous acquisition performance, as well as fluctuating stock prices.

Eclipsing Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, this is the most important software program acquisition in history. It’s not the largest tech acquisition ever, although, as that title belongs to Dell’s $sixty seven billion buyout of data storage enterprise EMC. We have not talked about that in this episode, this isn't the time and place for it, but the entire prime corporations on this record were able to try this. It's the expansion part of a market, that's when you can create power. If you wait too long, you can enter markets later however you're by no means going to dominate a market until should you until later. Binance has definitely been busy with acquisitions these days with 9 up to now 12 months alone and no less than one more in retailer this yr.

Gaz De France And Suez Merger

We also calculated the annualized return to simply try to adjust for time here slightly bit. Fifteen p.c annualized returns since 1984 is simply unbelievable. That is like Berkshire Hathaway levels of return by an acquisition inside an organization. That same year, the firm suggested Vodafone on the US$130 billion sale of its US group — whose principal asset was its forty five percent stake in Verizon Wireless — to Verizon Communications. The transaction, together with a report US$fifty eight.8 billion in cash, was the biggest M&A deal in more than a decade, and the third-largest in historical past.

These embrace inside issues like cultural integration between the 2 companies or macro-level issues like total financial circumstances and geopolitical points. The $a hundred sixty five billion merger between America Online and Time Warner Inc. is available in at quantity two in our record of greatest acquisitions in history. The merger occurred on the peak of the dotcom era in 2000 when profitable Internet supplier, AOL, made a bid to accumulate mass media conglomerate, Time Warner. At the time, AOL had a massive market share and was seeking to broaden even additional by tapping into Time Warner's dominance in publishing, entertainment, and news. However, not all of Microsoft’s acquisitions have been as successful, similar to its 2014 buy of Nokia’s Devices & Services enterprise for $7.2 billion.

From IPOs to trading cards, market euphoria is everywhere

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/from-ipos-to-trading-cards-market-euphoria-is-everywhere/

From IPOs to trading cards, market euphoria is everywhere

What’s happening: The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite finished Thursday at new record highs. Bitcoin prices hit an all-time high of $48,975, while more tech founders and athletes are looking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars via special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs.

More traditional fundraising methods also continue to generate huge interest from investors looking for places to park their money. Dating app Bumble, which started trading on Thursday, priced shares at $43 apiece, above its expected range. Its stock surged immediately upon opening and closed at $70.31, a 64% increase.

In a piece just published, I report on how Wall Street, flush with cash, is piling into an even more obscure corner of markets: sports trading cards.

Industry insiders told me that the price of popular cards is soaring as sophisticated investors as well as small traders transform the world of sports collectibles from a fusty hobby into a major investment market.

One example: Earlier this month, a Michael Jordan rookie basketball card in pristine condition sold for a record $738,000 at an auction. It went for nearly $215,000 just weeks before.

“There’s never been a time like this in the history of the business,” Ken Goldin, whose company ran the auction, told Appradab Business. “I would bet that for every person who wanted a Michael Jordan rookie card in 2019, there’s 100 [now].”

Professionals like Goldin — who’s fielding calls from interested hedge funds — acknowledge that factors such as rock-bottom interest rates, which have encouraged investors to hunt for returns in creative places, are benefiting their business. But they think the enthusiasm will hold.

“This is now part of our culture,” Goldin said. “I wouldn’t go anywhere near the word bubble.”

Watch this space: It’s not just big money getting into the game. Fractional trading has also reshaped the trading card industry, allowing everyday buyers to purchase a small stake in a LeBron James or Patrick Mahomes card that would have otherwise been too costly.

“We realized the potential fractional ownership could have to break down a massive barrier to entry,” said Ezra Levine, the CEO of Collectable, which buys sports cards and converts them into tradable assets registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Other hobbyists are gathering on social media as they rip open new packs of cards, hoping they’ll contain younger talent that can later be sold for a huge profit on eBay. Some are making even bigger bets and bragging about their gains on TikTok. Read the full story here.

Disney is still getting hammered by the pandemic

The pandemic continues to slam Disney’s theme parks and movie business. But its streaming service, Disney+, is shining.

The latest: Disney’s revenue came in at $16.2 billion during its most recent quarter, down 22% compared to the previous year, the company said Thursday. Yet Disney+ is growing, and Wall Street is still loving it.

The streaming service now has nearly 95 million subscribers, up from the 86 million it had in December. The news sent shares up 1% in premarket trading. They closed Thursday at a record high, despite the massive hit from Covid-19.

Disney (DIS) is banking that huge investments in content like its Marvel “WandaVision” series will pay off in an increasingly crowded space, as it faces off against competitors including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Appradab parent WarnerMedia’s HBO Max.

Still, CEO Bob Chapek made clear on a call with analysts that Disney doesn’t plan to abandon movie theaters altogether, my Appradab Business colleague Frank Pallotta reports.

The company faces questions about what it will do with “Black Widow,” its latest Marvel film due to open in theaters on May 7. Could Disney put a film from the biggest blockbuster brand in the industry on Disney+, as it did with “Mulan” last year?

Doesn’t look like it. At least, not yet, per Chapek.

“We are still intending it to be a theatrical release,” he said Thursday.

Bumble’s IPO is a milestone for female founders

Bumble’s Wall Street debut isn’t just a win for its investors. It’s also a milestone for female founders.

See here: At 31, Bumble chief Whitney Wolfe Herd has become one of the youngest female CEOs in tech to take her company public, my Appradab Business colleague Sara Ashley O’Brien reports.

“You don’t have to be one type of person to find success in the business world or in the tech industry,” Wolfe Herd told Appradab Business in an interview Thursday. “I’ve truly just always tried to build what I wish existed, what I wish could help make lives better for the women I care about and the people I love, and I think it doesn’t always have to follow the same path.”

Wolfe Herd, who is based in Austin, Texas, started her career at another dating service, Tinder. She initially set out to create a women-focused social network before landing on the concept of a female-focused dating app. Bumble requires women searching for heterosexual matches to make the first move, a feature meant to boost women’s empowerment.

Sarah Kunst, managing director of early-stage venture capital firm Cleo Capital and a former senior adviser to Bumble, told Appradab Business that Wolfe Herd’s IPO sets a meaningful example to other founders who don’t fit the mold of what a “tech entrepreneur” typically looks like.

Wolfe Herd’s success story bucks the notion that “you can only start a company credibly if you have multiple prestigious degrees [and] all the right experience,” Kunst said. “She played this game on her own terms.”

Up next

MSG Entertainment (MSG) and Newell Brands (NWL) report results before US markets open. The University of Michigan releases its consumer sentiment survey for February at 10 a.m. ET.

Coming next week: The House Financial Services Committee holds a hearing on the GameStop (GME) frenzy. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is expected to testify.

Our love of the cloud is making a green energy future impossible

Mark Mills Contributor

Share on Twitter

Mark Mills is the author of the book, “Digital Cathedrals: The Information Infrastructure Era,” and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, and a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund.

An epic number of citizens are video-conferencing to work in these lockdown times. But as they trade in a gas-burning commute for digital connectivity, their personal energy use for each two hours of video is greater than the share of fuel they would have consumed on a four-mile train ride. Add to this, millions of students ‘driving’ to class on the internet instead of walking.

Meanwhile in other corners of the digital universe, scientists furiously deploy algorithms to accelerate research. Yet, the pattern-learning phase for a single artificial intelligence application can consume more compute energy than 10,000 cars do in a day.

This grand ‘experiment’ in shifting societal energy use is visible, at least indirectly, in one high-level fact set. By the first week of April, U.S. gasoline use had collapsed by 30 percent, but overall electric demand was down less than seven percent. That dynamic is in fact indicative of an underlying trend for the future. While transportation fuel use will eventually rebound, real economic growth is tied to our electrically fueled digital future.

The COVID-19 crisis highlights just how much more sophisticated and robust the 2020 internet is from what existed as recently as 2008 when the economy last collapsed, an internet ‘century’ ago. If a national lockdown had occurred back then, most of the tens of millions who now telecommute would have joined the nearly 20 million who got laid off. Nor would it have been nearly as practical for universities and schools to have tens of millions of students learning from home.

Analysts have widely documented massive increases in internet traffic from all manner of stay-at-home activities. Digital traffic measures have spiked for everything from online groceries to video games and movie streaming. So far, the system has ably handled it all, and the cloud has been continuously available, minus the occasional hiccup.

There’s more to the cloud’s role during the COVID-19 crisis than one-click teleconferencing and video chatting. Telemedicine has finally been unleashed. And we’ve seen, for example, apps quickly emerge to help self-evaluate symptoms and AI tools put to work to enhance X-ray diagnoses and to help with contact tracing. The cloud has also allowed researchers to rapidly create “data lakes” of clinical information to fuel the astronomical capacities of today’s supercomputers deployed in pursuit of therapeutics and vaccines. 

The future of AI and the cloud will bring us a lot more of the above, along with practical home diagnostics and useful VR-based telemedicine, not to mention hyper-accelerated clinical trials for new therapies. And this says nothing about what the cloud will yet enable in the 80 percent of the economy that’s not part of healthcare.

For all of the excitement that these new capabilities offer us though, the bedrock behind all of that cloud computing will remain consistent — and consistently increasing — demand for energy. Far from saving energy, our AI-enabled workplace future uses more energy than ever before, a challenge the tech industry rapidly needs to assess and consider in the years ahead.

The new information infrastructure

The cloud is vital infrastructure. That will and should reshape many priorities. Only a couple of months ago, tech titans were elbowing each other aside to issue pledges about reducing energy usage and promoting ‘green’ energy for their operations. Doubtlessly, such issues will remain important. But reliability and resilience — in short, availability — will now move to the top priority.

As Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) last month reminded his constituency, in a diplomatic understatement, about the future of wind and solar: “Today, we’re witnessing a society that has an even greater reliance on digital technology” which “highlights the need for policy makers to carefully assess the potential availability of flexibility resources under extreme conditions.” In the economically stressed times that will follow the COVID-19 crisis, the price society must pay to ensure “availability” will matter far more.

It is still prohibitively expensive to provide high reliability electricity with solar and wind technologies. Those that claim solar/wind are at “grid parity” aren’t looking at reality. The data show that overall costs of grid kilowatt-hours are roughly 200 to 300 percent higher in Europe where the share of power from wind/solar is far greater than in the U.S. It bears noting that big industrial electricity users, including tech companies, generally enjoy deep discounts from the grid average, which leaves consumers burdened with higher costs.

Put in somewhat simplistic terms: this means that consumers are paying more to power their homes so that big tech companies can pay less for power to keep smartphones lit with data. (We will see how tolerant citizens are of this asymmetry in the post-crisis climate.)

Many such realities are, in effect, hidden by the fact that the cloud’s energy dynamic is the inverse of that for personal transportation. For the latter, consumers literally see where 90 percent of energy is spent when filling up their car’s gas tank. When it comes to a “connected” smartphone though, 99 percent of energy dependencies are remote and hidden in the cloud’s sprawling but largely invisible infrastructure. 

For the uninitiated, the voracious digital engines that power the cloud are located in the thousands of out-of-sight, nondescript warehouse-scale data centers where thousands of refrigerator-sized racks of silicon machines power our applications and where the exploding volumes of data are stored. Even many of the digital cognoscenti are surprised to learn that each such rack burns more electricity annually than 50 Teslas. On top of that, these data centers are connected to markets with even more power-burning hardware that propel bytes along roughly one billion miles of information highways comprised of glass cables and through 4 million cell towers forging an even vaster invisible virtual highway system.

Thus the global information infrastructure — counting all its constituent features from networks and data centers to the astonishingly energy-intensive fabrication processes — has grown from a non-existent system several decades ago to one that now uses roughly 2,000 terawatt-hours of electricity a year. That’s over 100 times more electricity than all the world’s five million electric cars use each year.

Put in individual terms: this means the pro rata, average electricity used by each smartphone is greater than the annual energy used by a typical home refrigerator. And all such estimates are based on the state of affairs of a few years ago.

A more digital future will inevitable use more energy

Some analysts now claim that even as digital traffic has soared in recent years, efficiency gains have now muted or even flattened growth in data-centric energy use. Such claims face recent countervailing factual trends. Since 2016, there’s been a dramatic acceleration in data center spending on hardware and buildings along with a huge jump in the power density of that hardware.

Regardless of whether digital energy demand growth may or may not have slowed in recent years, a far faster expansion of the cloud is coming. Whether cloud energy demand grows commensurately will depend in large measure in just how fast data use rises, and in particular what the cloud is used for. Any significant increases in energy demand will make far more difficult the engineering and economic challenges of meeting the cloud’s central operational metric: always available.

More square feet of data centers have been built in the past five years than during the entire prior decade. There is even a new category of “hyperscale” data centers: silicon-filled buildings each of which covers over one million square feet. Think of these in real-estate terms as the equivalent to the dawn of skyscrapers a century ago. But while there are fewer than 50 hyper-tall buildings the size of the Empire State Building in the world today, there are already some 500 hyperscale data centers across the planet. And the latter have a collective energy appetite greater than 6,000 skyscrapers.

We don’t have to guess what’s propelling growth in cloud traffic. The big drivers at the top of the list are AI, more video and especially data-intense virtual reality, as well as the expansion of micro data centers on the “edge” of networks.

Until recently, most news about AI has focused on its potential as a job-killer. The truth is that AI is the latest in a long line of productivity-driving tools that will replicate what productivity growth has always done over the course of history: create net growth in employment and more wealth for more people. We will need a lot more of both for the COVID-19 recovery. But that’s a story for another time. For now, it’s already clear that AI has a role to play in everything from personal health analysis and drug delivery to medical research and job hunting. The odds are that AI will ultimately be seen as a net “good.”

In energy terms though, AI is the most data hungry and power intensive use of silicon yet created — and the world wants to use billions of such AI chips. In general, the compute power devoted to machine learning has been doubling every several months, a kind of hyper version of Moore’s Law. Last year, Facebook, for example, pointed to AI as a key reason for its data center power use doubling annually.

In our near future we should also expect that, after weeks of lockdowns experiencing the deficiencies of video conferencing on small planar screens, consumers are ready for the age of VR-based video. VR entails as much as a 1000x increase in image density and will drive data traffic up roughly 20-fold. Despite fits and starts, the technology is ready, and the coming wave of high-speed 5G networks have the capacity to handle all those extra pixels. It requires repeating though: since all bits are electrons, this means more virtual reality leads to more power demands than are in today’s forecasts.

Add to all this the recent trend of building micro-data centers closer to customers on “the edge.” Light speed is too slow to deliver AI-driven intelligence from remote data centers to real-time applications such as VR for conferences and games, autonomous vehicles, automated manufacturing, or “smart” physical infrastructures, including smart hospitals and diagnostic systems. (The digital and energy intensity of healthcare is itself already high and rising: a square foot of a hospital already uses some five-fold more energy than a square foot in other commercial buildings.)

Edge data centers are now forecast to add 100,000 MW of power demand before a decade is out. For perspective, that’s far more than the power capacity of the entire California electric grid. Again, none of this was on any energy forecaster’s roadmap in recent years.

Will digital energy priorities shift?

Which brings us to a related question: Will cloud companies in the post-coronavirus era continue to focus spending on energy indulgences or on availability? By indulgences, I mean those corporate investments made in wind/solar generation somewhere else (including overseas) other than to directly power one’s own facility. Those remote investments are ‘credited’ to a local facility to claim it is green powered, even though it doesn’t actually power the facility.

Nothing prevents any green-seeking firm from physically disconnecting from the conventional grid and building their own local wind/solar generation – except that to do so and ensure 24/7 availability would result in a roughly 400 percent increase in that facility’s electricity costs.

As it stands today regarding the prospects for purchased indulgences, it’s useful to know that the global information infrastructure already consumes more electricity than is produced by all of the world’s solar and wind farms combined. Thus there isn’t enough wind/solar power on the planet for tech companies — much less anyone else — to buy as ‘credits’ to offset all digital energy use.

The handful of researchers who are studying digital energy trends expect that cloud fuel use could rise at least 300 percent in the coming decade, and that was before our global pandemic. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency forecasts a ‘mere’ doubling in global renewable electricity over that timeframe. That forecast was also made in the pre-coronavirus economy. The IEA now worries that the recession will drain fiscal enthusiasm for expensive green plans.

Regardless of the issues and debates around the technologies used to make electricity, the priority for operators of the information infrastructure will increasingly, and necessarily, shift to its availability. That’s because the cloud is rapidly becoming even more inextricably linked to our economic health, as well as our mental and physical health.

All this should make us optimistic about what comes on the other side of the recovery from the pandemic and unprecedented shutdown of our economy. Credit Microsoft, in its pre-COVID 19 energy manifesto, for observing that “advances in human prosperity … are inextricably tied to the use of energy.” Our cloud-centric 21st century infrastructure will be no different. And that will turn out to be a good thing.

Our love of the cloud is making a green energy future impossible

Mark Mills Contributor

Share on Twitter

Mark Mills is the author of the book, “Digital Cathedrals: The Information Infrastructure Era,” and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, and a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund.

An epic number of citizens are video-conferencing to work in these lockdown times. But as they trade in a gas-burning commute for digital connectivity, their personal energy use for each two hours of video is greater than the share of fuel they would have consumed on a four-mile train ride. Add to this, millions of students ‘driving’ to class on the internet instead of walking.

Meanwhile in other corners of the digital universe, scientists furiously deploy algorithms to accelerate research. Yet, the pattern-learning phase for a single artificial intelligence application can consume more compute energy than 10,000 cars do in a day.

This grand ‘experiment’ in shifting societal energy use is visible, at least indirectly, in one high-level fact set. By the first week of April, U.S. gasoline use had collapsed by 30 percent, but overall electric demand was down less than seven percent. That dynamic is in fact indicative of an underlying trend for the future. While transportation fuel use will eventually rebound, real economic growth is tied to our electrically fueled digital future.

The COVID-19 crisis highlights just how much more sophisticated and robust the 2020 internet is from what existed as recently as 2008 when the economy last collapsed, an internet ‘century’ ago. If a national lockdown had occurred back then, most of the tens of millions who now telecommute would have joined the nearly 20 million who got laid off. Nor would it have been nearly as practical for universities and schools to have tens of millions of students learning from home.

Analysts have widely documented massive increases in internet traffic from all manner of stay-at-home activities. Digital traffic measures have spiked for everything from online groceries to video games and movie streaming. So far, the system has ably handled it all, and the cloud has been continuously available, minus the occasional hiccup.

There’s more to the cloud’s role during the COVID-19 crisis than one-click teleconferencing and video chatting. Telemedicine has finally been unleashed. And we’ve seen, for example, apps quickly emerge to help self-evaluate symptoms and AI tools put to work to enhance X-ray diagnoses and to help with contact tracing. The cloud has also allowed researchers to rapidly create “data lakes” of clinical information to fuel the astronomical capacities of today’s supercomputers deployed in pursuit of therapeutics and vaccines. 

The future of AI and the cloud will bring us a lot more of the above, along with practical home diagnostics and useful VR-based telemedicine, not to mention hyper-accelerated clinical trials for new therapies. And this says nothing about what the cloud will yet enable in the 80 percent of the economy that’s not part of healthcare.

For all of the excitement that these new capabilities offer us though, the bedrock behind all of that cloud computing will remain consistent — and consistently increasing — demand for energy. Far from saving energy, our AI-enabled workplace future uses more energy than ever before, a challenge the tech industry rapidly needs to assess and consider in the years ahead.

The new information infrastructure

The cloud is vital infrastructure. That will and should reshape many priorities. Only a couple of months ago, tech titans were elbowing each other aside to issue pledges about reducing energy usage and promoting ‘green’ energy for their operations. Doubtlessly, such issues will remain important. But reliability and resilience — in short, availability — will now move to the top priority.

As Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) last month reminded his constituency, in a diplomatic understatement, about the future of wind and solar: “Today, we’re witnessing a society that has an even greater reliance on digital technology” which “highlights the need for policy makers to carefully assess the potential availability of flexibility resources under extreme conditions.” In the economically stressed times that will follow the COVID-19 crisis, the price society must pay to ensure “availability” will matter far more.

It is still prohibitively expensive to provide high reliability electricity with solar and wind technologies. Those that claim solar/wind are at “grid parity” aren’t looking at reality. The data show that overall costs of grid kilowatt-hours are roughly 200 to 300 percent higher in Europe where the share of power from wind/solar is far greater than in the U.S. It bears noting that big industrial electricity users, including tech companies, generally enjoy deep discounts from the grid average, which leaves consumers burdened with higher costs.

Put in somewhat simplistic terms: this means that consumers are paying more to power their homes so that big tech companies can pay less for power to keep smartphones lit with data. (We will see how tolerant citizens are of this asymmetry in the post-crisis climate.)

Many such realities are, in effect, hidden by the fact that the cloud’s energy dynamic is the inverse of that for personal transportation. For the latter, consumers literally see where 90 percent of energy is spent when filling up their car’s gas tank. When it comes to a “connected” smartphone though, 99 percent of energy dependencies are remote and hidden in the cloud’s sprawling but largely invisible infrastructure. 

For the uninitiated, the voracious digital engines that power the cloud are located in the thousands of out-of-sight, nondescript warehouse-scale data centers where thousands of refrigerator-sized racks of silicon machines power our applications and where the exploding volumes of data are stored. Even many of the digital cognoscenti are surprised to learn that each such rack burns more electricity annually than 50 Teslas. On top of that, these data centers are connected to markets with even more power-burning hardware that propel bytes along roughly one billion miles of information highways comprised of glass cables and through 4 million cell towers forging an even vaster invisible virtual highway system.

Thus the global information infrastructure — counting all its constituent features from networks and data centers to the astonishingly energy-intensive fabrication processes — has grown from a non-existent system several decades ago to one that now uses roughly 2,000 terawatt-hours of electricity a year. That’s over 100 times more electricity than all the world’s five million electric cars use each year.

Put in individual terms: this means the pro rata, average electricity used by each smartphone is greater than the annual energy used by a typical home refrigerator. And all such estimates are based on the state of affairs of a few years ago.

A more digital future will inevitable use more energy

Some analysts now claim that even as digital traffic has soared in recent years, efficiency gains have now muted or even flattened growth in data-centric energy use. Such claims face recent countervailing factual trends. Since 2016, there’s been a dramatic acceleration in data center spending on hardware and buildings along with a huge jump in the power density of that hardware.

Regardless of whether digital energy demand growth may or may not have slowed in recent years, a far faster expansion of the cloud is coming. Whether cloud energy demand grows commensurately will depend in large measure in just how fast data use rises, and in particular what the cloud is used for. Any significant increases in energy demand will make far more difficult the engineering and economic challenges of meeting the cloud’s central operational metric: always available.

More square feet of data centers have been built in the past five years than during the entire prior decade. There is even a new category of “hyperscale” data centers: silicon-filled buildings each of which covers over one million square feet. Think of these in real-estate terms as the equivalent to the dawn of skyscrapers a century ago. But while there are fewer than 50 hyper-tall buildings the size of the Empire State Building in the world today, there are already some 500 hyperscale data centers across the planet. And the latter have a collective energy appetite greater than 6,000 skyscrapers.

We don’t have to guess what’s propelling growth in cloud traffic. The big drivers at the top of the list are AI, more video and especially data-intense virtual reality, as well as the expansion of micro data centers on the “edge” of networks.

Until recently, most news about AI has focused on its potential as a job-killer. The truth is that AI is the latest in a long line of productivity-driving tools that will replicate what productivity growth has always done over the course of history: create net growth in employment and more wealth for more people. We will need a lot more of both for the COVID-19 recovery. But that’s a story for another time. For now, it’s already clear that AI has a role to play in everything from personal health analysis and drug delivery to medical research and job hunting. The odds are that AI will ultimately be seen as a net “good.”

In energy terms though, AI is the most data hungry and power intensive use of silicon yet created — and the world wants to use billions of such AI chips. In general, the compute power devoted to machine learning has been doubling every several months, a kind of hyper version of Moore’s Law. Last year, Facebook, for example, pointed to AI as a key reason for its data center power use doubling annually.

In our near future we should also expect that, after weeks of lockdowns experiencing the deficiencies of video conferencing on small planar screens, consumers are ready for the age of VR-based video. VR entails as much as a 1000x increase in image density and will drive data traffic up roughly 20-fold. Despite fits and starts, the technology is ready, and the coming wave of high-speed 5G networks have the capacity to handle all those extra pixels. It requires repeating though: since all bits are electrons, this means more virtual reality leads to more power demands than are in today’s forecasts.

Add to all this the recent trend of building micro-data centers closer to customers on “the edge.” Light speed is too slow to deliver AI-driven intelligence from remote data centers to real-time applications such as VR for conferences and games, autonomous vehicles, automated manufacturing, or “smart” physical infrastructures, including smart hospitals and diagnostic systems. (The digital and energy intensity of healthcare is itself already high and rising: a square foot of a hospital already uses some five-fold more energy than a square foot in other commercial buildings.)

Edge data centers are now forecast to add 100,000 MW of power demand before a decade is out. For perspective, that’s far more than the power capacity of the entire California electric grid. Again, none of this was on any energy forecaster’s roadmap in recent years.

Will digital energy priorities shift?

Which brings us to a related question: Will cloud companies in the post-coronavirus era continue to focus spending on energy indulgences or on availability? By indulgences, I mean those corporate investments made in wind/solar generation somewhere else (including overseas) other than to directly power one’s own facility. Those remote investments are ‘credited’ to a local facility to claim it is green powered, even though it doesn’t actually power the facility.

Nothing prevents any green-seeking firm from physically disconnecting from the conventional grid and building their own local wind/solar generation – except that to do so and ensure 24/7 availability would result in a roughly 400 percent increase in that facility’s electricity costs.

As it stands today regarding the prospects for purchased indulgences, it’s useful to know that the global information infrastructure already consumes more electricity than is produced by all of the world’s solar and wind farms combined. Thus there isn’t enough wind/solar power on the planet for tech companies — much less anyone else — to buy as ‘credits’ to offset all digital energy use.

The handful of researchers who are studying digital energy trends expect that cloud fuel use could rise at least 300 percent in the coming decade, and that was before our global pandemic. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency forecasts a ‘mere’ doubling in global renewable electricity over that timeframe. That forecast was also made in the pre-coronavirus economy. The IEA now worries that the recession will drain fiscal enthusiasm for expensive green plans.

Regardless of the issues and debates around the technologies used to make electricity, the priority for operators of the information infrastructure will increasingly, and necessarily, shift to its availability. That’s because the cloud is rapidly becoming even more inextricably linked to our economic health, as well as our mental and physical health.

All this should make us optimistic about what comes on the other side of the recovery from the pandemic and unprecedented shutdown of our economy. Credit Microsoft, in its pre-COVID 19 energy manifesto, for observing that “advances in human prosperity … are inextricably tied to the use of energy.” Our cloud-centric 21st century infrastructure will be no different. And that will turn out to be a good thing.

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DEFENSE TECH STARTUP FOUNDED BY TRUMP’S MOST PROMINENT SILICON VALLEY SUPPORTERS WINS SECRETIVE MILITARY AI CONTRACT Lee Fang March 9 2019, 5:00 a.m. In partnership with A STARTUP FOUNDED by a young and outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump is among the latest tech companies to quietly win a contract with the Pentagon as part of Project Maven, the secretive initiative to rapidly leverage artificial intelligence technology from the private sector for military purposes. Anduril Industries is the latest venture of Palmer Luckey, the 26-year-old entrepreneur best known for having founded the virtual reality firm Oculus Rift. Luckey began work on Project Maven last year, along with efforts to support the Defense Department’s newly formed Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, according to documents viewed by The Intercept. The previously unreported Project Maven contract could be a boon for Anduril’s bottom line. Founded in 2017, the company has said it seeks to remake the defense contracting industry by incorporating the latest innovations of Silicon Valley into warfighting technology. Last year, Google’s involvement with Project Maven stirred a controversy inside the tech giant. The company had signed a contract with the Defense Department to develop artificial intelligence that could interpret video images in order to improve drone targeting. But after the contract’s disclosure sparked an internal rebellion among employees, Google allowed its contract to expire. The Google flap and the wider military drive to adopt commercial artificial intelligence technology unleashed a fierce debate among tech companies about their role in society and ethics around advanced computing. Anduril Industries is developing virtual reality technology using Lattice, a product the firm offers that uses ground- and autonomous helicopter drone-based sensors to provide a three-dimensional view of terrain. The technology is designed to provide a virtual view of the front lines to soldiers, including the ability to identify potential targets and direct unmanned military vehicles into combat. The first phase of the research has been completed, according to the documents reviewed by The Intercept, with initial plans to deploy virtual reality battlefield-management systems for the war in Afghanistan. (Anduril and the Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment.) “We’re deployed at several military bases. We’re deployed in multiple spots along the U.S. border. We’re deployed around some other infrastructure I can’t talk about.” Luckey dropped hints about Anduril’s involvement in the project last November in Lisbon, Portugal, at the Web Summit, a technology conference. “We’re deployed at several military bases. We’re deployed in multiple spots along the U.S. border,” Luckey said, cryptically adding: “We’re deployed around some other infrastructure I can’t talk about.” He also discussed how he hoped the military would apply Anduril’s technology. “What we’re working on is taking data from lots of different sensors, putting it into an AI-powered sensor fusion platform so that you can build a perfect 3D model of everything that’s going on in a large area,” Luckey said. “Then we take that data and run predictive analytics on it, and tag everything with metadata, find what’s relevant, then push it to people who are out in the field.” “Practically speaking, in the future, I think soldiers are going to be superheroes who have the power of perfect omniscience over their area of operations, where they know where every enemy is, every friend is, every asset is,” he said. Luckey said he thinks it is “unlikely” that soldiers of the future will directly carry weapons in the field; instead, they would remotely operate machines and weapons from far away. Anduril previously garnered attention for its efforts to help U.S. Customs and Border Protection create a “virtual wall” at the U.S.-Mexico border. The initial 10-week demonstration used Anduril’s Lattice technology to monitor a stretch of land along the Rio Grande Valley. The system reportedly helped the government identify and apprehend 55 unauthorized individuals crossing the border. The company has also publicly acknowledged work to develop perimeter defense monitoring around two U.S. Marine bases. Anduril’s pitch deck, the presentation it provided to solicit investors, imagines a future of warfighting by means that might look like science fiction to the average observer. The company is pushing battlefield management technology capable of utilizing long-range bombers and swarms of military attack drones. The firm has reportedly rented a warehouse in Oakland, California, to develop at least one remote-control tank, designed for fighting California wildfires. Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, smiles during the Wall Street Journal D.Live global technology conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., on Nov. 12, 2018. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images A Defense Contractor in Flip Flops Palmer Luckey stands out among other defense industry executives. In contrast to the buttoned-down image of executives at Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, he typically appears in public wearing flip-flops and a partially unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. And he stands out in other ways: Unlike other tech industry leaders, Luckey is unabashedly partisan. Being an avowed supporter of the Republican Party has made him a lightning rod in Silicon Valley. In contrast to the buttoned-down image of executives at Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, Palmer Luckey typically appears in public wearing flip-flops and a partially unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. The son of car salesman, Luckey was homeschooled by his mother in Long Beach, California. He got his start by parlaying his passion for tinkering with video game-optimized home computers into a virtual reality business. Using funds raised on Kickstarter, Luckey developed a new model for virtual reality headsets at age 17. Four years later, he sold Oculus Rift to Facebook for over $2 billion, earning him an estimated fortune of around $700 million. During the 2016 election, Luckey posted on pro-Trump forums on Reddit, encouraging community members to develop memes critical of Hillary Clinton. He donated $10,000 to a group called Nimble America, which paid for a billboard stating that Clinton was “Too Big to Jail.” Amid the ensuing controversy, Palmer lost his job at Facebook, which has adamantly denied that he was let go over his political views. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, Palmer retained an employment lawyer and negotiated a $100 million payout corresponding to bonuses and stock options that he would have had if he had stayed on at Facebook. In a detailed profile of Anduril, Wired magazine reported that Luckey was first inspired to develop a military technology company through an event hosted by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, another Silicon Valley conservative. At a 2016 retreat in Canada, Luckey met Trae Stephens, a former intelligence official who works at Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund. The pair bonded over an interest in reshaping defense contracting using the incentives and structures of the tech startup scene. Stephens had previously worked at Palantir, the secretive data-crunching company backed by Thiel, which is known for its work on behalf of spy agencies and the military. (Both Palantir and Anduril are references to the classic fantasy trilogy “Lord of the Rings”; Anduril is the unbreakable sword used by one of the series’s protagonists.) Thiel’s high-profile support for Trump during the 2016 election gave him influence with the new administration. Stephens, the Thiel deputy, was appointed to the group on Trump’s transition team that dealt with the new administration’s move into the Defense Department. By March 2017, Luckey had left Facebook and was ready to work with Stephens on launching a new company focused on weapons systems. The Military-Tech Complex Anduril needed talent, political connections, and an injection of capital. Enter the Founders Fund, Thiel’s venture capital firm. Several Palantir alumni quickly joined up. Stephens came on as Anduril’s chair and another Founders Fund partner provided seed funding. Other executives followed suit, including Brian Schimpf, the former director of engineering at Palantir, who now serves as chief executive at Anduril. The timing of Anduril’s founding was fortuitous in many ways. Under the Obama administration, the government had begun massive efforts to swiftly incorporate commercial technology into its security efforts. In 2015, both the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department opened satellite offices in Silicon Valley as beachheads to coordinate partnerships with the private sector. The Defense Department opened a Defense Innovation Unit office in Mountain View, California, where Google is based. And the Homeland Security opened its Silicon Valley Innovation Program in Menlo Park, California. In 2017, as part of an initiative that had begun the previous year, the Defense Department also unveiled the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, known as Project Maven, to harness the latest artificial intelligence research into battlefield technology, starting with a project to improve image recognition for drones operating in the Middle East. This wave of outreach from the government provided a unique entry point for Anduril, which partnered with the Department of Homeland Security’s satellite office to successfully pitch its test project for the virtual wall. As Luckey recently explained to Defense and Aerospace Report, a trade publication, he also worked closely with the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, crediting its former director, Raj Shah, with making his company possible. The Defense Innovation Unit, said Luckey, proved “that people in Silicon Valley could actually get stuff into production, actually do work with the government.” He added, “I don’t think that I would have started this company if it wasn’t for the work of people like Raj Shah doing great work and proving that you actually could get into it.” Lobbying and Political Donations Building out major government contracts is an inherently political endeavor — something that appears not to be lost on Luckey. Publicly filed lobbying disclosures show that Anduril paid $290,000 last year to Invariant, a lobbying firm founded by Heather Podesta, a Democratic fundraiser known for her extensive relationships in Washington, D.C., including with Hillary Clinton. The lobbying effort focused on shaping the border security appropriations issued by Congress, as well as on educating lawmakers on “artificial intelligence and autonomous systems and their application to military force protection,” according to the filings. Luckey donated $100,000 to Trump’s inauguration through a company he founded and gave over $670,000 to congressional Republican campaign funds over the last two years. Luckey also opened his wallet to the powers that be in Congress and the White House. He donated $100,000 to Trump’s inauguration through a company he founded and gave over $670,000 to congressional Republican campaign funds over the last two years. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, a former CIA agent turned moderate border-district lawmaker, received a $2,700 donation. Hurd worked to help Anduril find a volunteer land owner to test its sensor technology along the border, according to Wired. Hurd later sponsored legislation to finance a virtual border wall likely using Anduril’s technology. Among his political largesse, Luckey donated to political action committees supporting Trump, the senior lawmakers on the defense and appropriations committees, and a number of controversial conservative lawmakers, including Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who has defended white supremacy and questioned the contributions of nonwhite people to society. In previous interviews, Luckey has sharply criticized traditional defense contracting, noting that the iPhone and other commercial technology innovations were developed with massive incentives, rather than the “cost-plus” model preferred by the Pentagon. That approach has seen the Defense Department negotiate with contractors to provide a fixed price for expenses and profits, one that, in Luckey’s telling, has limited the military’s ability to encourage the kind of breakthrough technologies needed for the future of war. In a white paper filed with the Defense Department’s National AI Strategic Plan last year, Anduril urged officials to consider the ambitious approach by the government in China with regard to AI technology. China, an Anduril employee wrote in the paper, has provided a “multibillion-dollar national investment initiative to support ‘moonshot’ projects, start-ups and academic research in A.I.” Even as it seeks to shake up the model for contracts, though, Anduril is also embracing the traditional approach. In November, the company announced its first major revolving-door hire. Anduril brought on Christian Brose, a former top staffer with the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversees defense spending, as its head of strategy. Brose formerly worked under the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and served as a speechwriter to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Two months later, Anduril formally joined the National Armaments Consortium, a nonprofit that facilitates bids by traditional defense contracting firms for business with the military. Scott Sanders, head of operations for Anduril Industries, prepares a Lattice Modular Heli-Drone for a test flight at the Red Beach training area, Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif., on Nov. 8, 2018. Photo: Cpl. Dylan Chagnon/U.S. Marine Corps No “Digital Geneva Convention” As the military worked to bring in leading Silicon Valley firms as contractors, the resulting relationships have sparked massive resistance from workers, many of whom have argued that they became engineers to make the world a better place, not a more violent one. After the The Intercept and other media outlets revealed that Google had been quietly tapped to work on Project Maven, applying its AI technology to help analysts identify drone targets on the battlefield, thousands of workers protested the contract. The uprising led Google to announce that it would not renew its contract with the military on the initiative. Microsoft, too, faced internal opposition as the company prepared work on a $480 million contract with the Army to develop augmented reality headsets for soldiers. The ethical debates that have rocked large technology companies — Amazon, Salesforce, and others have similarly faced worker protests over contracts on immigration enforcement — have presented Anduril with an opportunity. Despite the various protests around Silicon Valley, Anduril’s brash attitude has not prevented it from recruiting top engineering talent. In its white paper filed with the Defense Department’s National AI Strategic Plan last year, Anduril boasted that it has recruited engineers from top tech firms like General Atomics, SpaceX, Tesla, and Google. In an opinion column for the Washington Post, Luckey and Stephens sharply criticized Google for abandoning the U.S. government by rejecting Project Maven. “We understand that tech workers want to build things used to help, not harm,” the pair wrote. “We feel the same way. But ostracizing the U.S. military could have the opposite effect of what these protesters intend: If tech companies want to promote peace, they should stand with, not against, the United States’ defense community.” What was left out of the column, however, was that, as the piece went to print, Anduril was beginning its own work on Project Maven. In Anduril, Luckey is presenting a company that is unapologetic about its work capturing immigrants or killing people on the battlefield. In interviews and public appearances, Luckey slammed engineers for protesting government work, arguing that those claiming conscious opposition to military work are among a “vocal minority” that empowers American adversaries abroad. Moreover, he said that the Defense Department has failed to connect with top tech talent because many engineers are “stuck in Silicon Valley at companies that don’t want to work on national security.” In Anduril, Luckey is presenting a company that is unapologetic about its work capturing immigrants or killing people on the battlefield. The U.S., Luckey argued in a previous interviews, “has a really strong record of protecting human rights” and should be trusted to use AI without any ethical constraints. “The biggest threats are not going to be Western democracies abusing these technologies,” he told the audience at the Web Summit in Lisbon. The real enemies are China and Russia, both of which have invested in AI military technology. China is not only investing in AI, but has unfair advantages to develop the technology using its entire population as a data training set through use of mass surveillance to run experiments. In contrast, Luckey told Defense and Aerospace Report, the U.S. can train its AI software “in industry, in enterprise, in national security.” The U.S., Luckey went on, could test AI “using our current military advantage to train future AI developments and we need to start using our current military advantage.” He called for employing these technologies in ongoing “large-scale conflicts” around the world. Asked in Lisbon about a digital Geneva Convention or another ethical rulebook to govern the use of AI weaponry, Luckey was forthright in his rejection of the idea. “That’s not really going to solve the problem,” he said. “I have no hopes that a digital Geneva Convention, whatever it will be, will prevent China from using surveillance tools to watch every citizen in their country. I have very little confidence that it will prevent Russia from building autonomous systems that can acquire and fire on targets without any kind of human intervention whatsoever.” Join Our Newsletter Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. I’m in Ethics experts have criticized the development of AI-based weapons, noting that the lethal autonomous weapons could be hijacked by hackers, kill without clear explanation, or lead to catastrophic accidental conflict if weapons are used as escalation in response to an incident that appears to be an act of war. Moreover, as humans are removed from face-to-face combat, the dehumanization of lethal decisions could lead to more killing. Luckey hasn’t proffered any direct answers to the questions being raised over the use of artificial intelligence in warfighting. Anduril, however, has stated that it will not sell to Russia or China, but would be willing to sell its products to U.S. allies. A request for comment about whether the company would sell to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or other undemocratic U.S. allies was not returned. Among the many Palantir alumni who joined Anduril, one name sticks out to those concerned with abuse of civil liberties and human rights. In May of last year, the firm hired former Palantir executive Matthew Steckman. Steckman took a lead role in the HBGary Federal scandal in 2011. In the scandal, a cache of hacked emails showed that Palantir and two other defense contractors had cooked up a plot to spy on journalists, trade unions, and activists on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest pro-business lobby in America. The plot included hacking target computers and using social media analysis to monitor the behaviors of a large set of left-leaning figures and journalists viewed as sympathetic to Wikileaks, including The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald. In negotiations with the Chamber’s law firm, Steckman wrote at the time that he and another Palantir executive were “spearheading this from the Palantir side.” After the plan was revealed, Palantir briefly placed Steckman on leave. He is now at work as head of corporate and government affairs at Anduril. One thing is clear: Luckey wants to win — in every way imaginable. The U.S.’s goal, Luckey said at the Web Summit, should be dominance and beating other foreign adversaries to control the best artificial intelligence technology. “You have to be the leader,” he said. “Technological superiority is a prerequisite for ethical superiority.” Nick Surgey contributed research.

16 Entrepreneurs Share Their Personal Branding Idols

What public figure is your personal branding idol, and what about their branding strategy inspires you the most?

These answers are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. YEC has also launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

1. Richard Branson

Richard Branson is one of my personal branding icons. From Virgin Records to Virgin Atlantic, he’s built a strong brand and following through interesting storytelling, innovative initiatives, and world-class design. – Arry Yu, StormX

2. Marcus Lemonis

The more I watch him, the more Marcus Lemonis has climbed my list of favorite entrepreneurs and branding experts. His branding strategy always involves the people who have started the business and staying true to the original concept the business was founded on. The best part about the way he approaches the reshaping/rebranding of the businesses he invests in is how he cares about his partners along with how he wants both employee and employer to be in a win/win situation. Just because he’s a highly successful entrepreneur, it doesn’t mean he’s abandoned his humility. In fact, his humility and honesty are his most valuable assets. As a business owner, seeing someone with that kind of business portfolio and net worth treating other people with such respect is very inspiring. – Jared Ross Weitz, United Capital Source Inc.

3. Cody Wilson

This is going to be a controversial pick, but Cody Wilson is one of the people I see as a branding genius. He’s the founder of Defense Distributed, a nonprofit organization centered around firearm production and distribution. They’re so controversial because of their products centered around 3D-printing guns, which has placed them at the forefront of the American gun control debate. Wilson has managed to turn a concept as terrifying as creating unlicensed garage guns into a sleek and modern business serving as a reflection of the IoT paradigm. He’s successfully sold his company as a bulwark for the second amendment and weathered some of the most intense press scrutiny unscathed. His brand is an example of how to be controversial and successful. – Bryce Welker, Crush The PM Exam

4. Elon Musk

Elon Musk is on top of his game when it comes to branding. He strategically posts about current events on Twitter, sharing both the good and the bad, and still manages to keep an unbiased opinion. He stays true to his own beliefs and consistently puts out the same message across everything that he does. His entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to change the world through tech inspire me and so many others across the world. – Samuel Thimothy, OneIMS – Integrated Marketing Solutions

5. Barbara Corcoran

Barbara Corcoran sold her business in 2001 and hasn’t had a specific business venture since. Yet, somehow, she has been able to stay relevant by building her personal brand. From Shark Tank to Dancing with the Stars, she finds ways to make herself stay relevant. Rather than building a new business, she monetizes her brand with media engagements and inbound business investment opportunities. – Fan Bi, Menswear Reviewed

6. Darren Rowse

I admire the community that Darren Rowse has managed to create around his ProBlogger brand. His website is full of great advice for bloggers and his Facebook group is very active with writers helping each other out. He’s been able to successfully turn his brand into a fully engaged community which is hard to do. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

7. Tony Hsieh

I love how Tony has leveraged his personal beliefs to build his company’s reputation. He is known as the architect who builds strong company cultures that deliver great customer experiences. I believe that in the long term the companies that operate with honesty and transparency will be those that flourish. He has created both a personal and company brand that is often referenced as the quintessential customer-centric model. Customers want to do business with him and his company is a sought-after place to work.  – Brian Greenberg, Life Insurance Quotes

8. Marie Forleo

Marie has done an incredible job branding herself, her most notable program “B-School” and her overall business. Every external brand touch point is consistent. The topics and advice she discusses on MarieTV resonate with just about any entrepreneur. The real deal, Marie is one of the few marketing experts that has been able to reach millions and teach thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs how to plan, launch and grow successful businesses. – Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Creative Development Agency, LLC

9. Neil Patel

Neil Patel has created a great personal brand for himself. He has a well-optimized website, strong social media presence, a podcast and most recently has shifted over to video. I like that his brand is about experimenting with different marketing techniques and he then spills his secrets as to what worked for him and what didn’t work so well. Learning from him has saved me time and money by implementing processes right the first time. – Jared Atchison, WPForms

10. Gary Vaynerchuk

I’ve actually had the opportunity to meet Gary at his office in Hudson Yards. The eeriest thing was the conversation felt oddly normal because I had watched literally every video available on his YouTube well before ever meeting him. It was like we had been having the conversation every week for years. I start with that because of what he has helped me most with — authenticity. He is the exact same person you see plastered on social when you see him in person, very thankful and genuine. He has also helped me to learn to give without the expectation of anything in return. Those two things have helped me learn to be a better version of myself. – Frank B. Mengert, ebenefit Marketplace (ebm)

11. Grant Cardone 

Grant Cardone’s content is always on. From social to podcasts to events and everything in between, he really is an inspiration. Love him or hate him, he has mastered his own authenticity and has been able to create a massive following and move his audience to action. In a climate of conformity, he has securely gone against conventional wisdom on delivery and public relations, and this mastery of content has secured him solid conversion rates for his products, books, and brand. – Matthew Capala, Alphametic

12. Gabby Bernstein

Gabby Bernstein is my personal branding idol because she has uplifting content that is authentic and real. She is consistent with her videos, email newsletter, and social media presence. I have followed her for about six years, and she has always adapted to whatever the new virtual platforms are and she has dominated them. Her brand is consistent and clean yet has allowed her space to grow, mature and change as a woman and teacher in ways that are easily communicated with her audience. – Ally Lozano, Ally Lozano LLC

13. Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins has built an empire helping others become the best versions of themselves. He’s an inspiring teacher and mentor to those who may not otherwise have a good role model or mentor in their lives. Tony’s communication skills are phenomenal. He’s able to talk to a room of people but connect to people individually. He can relate to a lot of different people which I think is one of the main reasons people like to listen to him speak and take his advice to heart. – Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights

14. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

With around 12.8 million followers on Twitter, Dwayne’s messages tend to speak mostly of hard work, love and making the most of one’s life. I feel his overall appreciation for life that shines through his posts works brilliantly in building a brand based on his core beliefs. His posts come with an element of charisma and intimacy. It appears that he’s tailored his page to suit the needs of his fans, often highlighting people with whom he has memorable encounters. This has more than the desired effect in breathing life into his brand because the appreciation he showers on others is always well-received. The inspirational stories he shares help build the emotional connection. Besides, his consistency, with around three to five tweets every day, tells his fans that he’s always around. – Derek Robinson, Top Notch Dezigns

15. Sara Blakely

Sarah Blakely has always been a personal idol, both when it comes to her business acumen and her personal branding. Even though she is now a billionaire, she frequently discusses her humble beginnings, discussing how she gave everything she had into starting Spanx. These stories are not glamorous, and are incongruent with her current status, yet she keeps telling them. This consistent message of determination against the odds positions her as a relatable leader and makes her an immediate inspiration for young entrepreneurs. As a woman, she knew the potential for her product, and she used her personal experience to find a consumer insight that changed the industry. Her personal branding is all about being herself and empowering others. – Kate Edwards, Heartbeat

16. Jay Shetty 

I have seen how Jay Shetty has built his brand around “Wisdom Goes Viral” from the get-go and there are so many motivational people who are similar to who he is and does what he does. To stand out among his peers, he created video content that touched people’s feelings. I’ve watched him grow his brand from the ground up and I can see how he has generated such a loyal fanbase through his small snacks of wisdom. Everyone can use a little wisdom now and then, even though it may feel like common sense. He has touched people in ways that are making the world a better place, a single individual at a time. He provides a great model and platform for me to then build my brand with my domain expertise. I haven’t been as successful as he has, but I know what is possible as well. – Sweta Patel, Silicon Valley Startup Marketing

The post 16 Entrepreneurs Share Their Personal Branding Idols appeared first on Personal Branding Blog – Stand Out In Your Career.

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16 Entrepreneurs Share Their Personal Branding Idols

What public figure is your personal branding idol, and what about their branding strategy inspires you the most?

These answers are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. YEC has also launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

1. Richard Branson

Richard Branson is one of my personal branding icons. From Virgin Records to Virgin Atlantic, he’s built a strong brand and following through interesting storytelling, innovative initiatives, and world-class design. – Arry Yu, StormX

2. Marcus Lemonis

The more I watch him, the more Marcus Lemonis has climbed my list of favorite entrepreneurs and branding experts. His branding strategy always involves the people who have started the business and staying true to the original concept the business was founded on. The best part about the way he approaches the reshaping/rebranding of the businesses he invests in is how he cares about his partners along with how he wants both employee and employer to be in a win/win situation. Just because he’s a highly successful entrepreneur, it doesn’t mean he’s abandoned his humility. In fact, his humility and honesty are his most valuable assets. As a business owner, seeing someone with that kind of business portfolio and net worth treating other people with such respect is very inspiring. – Jared Ross Weitz, United Capital Source Inc.

3. Cody Wilson

This is going to be a controversial pick, but Cody Wilson is one of the people I see as a branding genius. He’s the founder of Defense Distributed, a nonprofit organization centered around firearm production and distribution. They’re so controversial because of their products centered around 3D-printing guns, which has placed them at the forefront of the American gun control debate. Wilson has managed to turn a concept as terrifying as creating unlicensed garage guns into a sleek and modern business serving as a reflection of the IoT paradigm. He’s successfully sold his company as a bulwark for the second amendment and weathered some of the most intense press scrutiny unscathed. His brand is an example of how to be controversial and successful. – Bryce Welker, Crush The PM Exam

4. Elon Musk

Elon Musk is on top of his game when it comes to branding. He strategically posts about current events on Twitter, sharing both the good and the bad, and still manages to keep an unbiased opinion. He stays true to his own beliefs and consistently puts out the same message across everything that he does. His entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to change the world through tech inspire me and so many others across the world. – Samuel Thimothy, OneIMS – Integrated Marketing Solutions

5. Barbara Corcoran

Barbara Corcoran sold her business in 2001 and hasn’t had a specific business venture since. Yet, somehow, she has been able to stay relevant by building her personal brand. From Shark Tank to Dancing with the Stars, she finds ways to make herself stay relevant. Rather than building a new business, she monetizes her brand with media engagements and inbound business investment opportunities. – Fan Bi, Menswear Reviewed

6. Darren Rowse

I admire the community that Darren Rowse has managed to create around his ProBlogger brand. His website is full of great advice for bloggers and his Facebook group is very active with writers helping each other out. He’s been able to successfully turn his brand into a fully engaged community which is hard to do. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

7. Tony Hsieh

I love how Tony has leveraged his personal beliefs to build his company’s reputation. He is known as the architect who builds strong company cultures that deliver great customer experiences. I believe that in the long term the companies that operate with honesty and transparency will be those that flourish. He has created both a personal and company brand that is often referenced as the quintessential customer-centric model. Customers want to do business with him and his company is a sought-after place to work.  – Brian Greenberg, Life Insurance Quotes

8. Marie Forleo

Marie has done an incredible job branding herself, her most notable program “B-School” and her overall business. Every external brand touch point is consistent. The topics and advice she discusses on MarieTV resonate with just about any entrepreneur. The real deal, Marie is one of the few marketing experts that has been able to reach millions and teach thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs how to plan, launch and grow successful businesses. – Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Creative Development Agency, LLC

9. Neil Patel

Neil Patel has created a great personal brand for himself. He has a well-optimized website, strong social media presence, a podcast and most recently has shifted over to video. I like that his brand is about experimenting with different marketing techniques and he then spills his secrets as to what worked for him and what didn’t work so well. Learning from him has saved me time and money by implementing processes right the first time. – Jared Atchison, WPForms

10. Gary Vaynerchuk

I’ve actually had the opportunity to meet Gary at his office in Hudson Yards. The eeriest thing was the conversation felt oddly normal because I had watched literally every video available on his YouTube well before ever meeting him. It was like we had been having the conversation every week for years. I start with that because of what he has helped me most with — authenticity. He is the exact same person you see plastered on social when you see him in person, very thankful and genuine. He has also helped me to learn to give without the expectation of anything in return. Those two things have helped me learn to be a better version of myself. – Frank B. Mengert, ebenefit Marketplace (ebm)

11. Grant Cardone 

Grant Cardone’s content is always on. From social to podcasts to events and everything in between, he really is an inspiration. Love him or hate him, he has mastered his own authenticity and has been able to create a massive following and move his audience to action. In a climate of conformity, he has securely gone against conventional wisdom on delivery and public relations, and this mastery of content has secured him solid conversion rates for his products, books, and brand. – Matthew Capala, Alphametic

12. Gabby Bernstein

Gabby Bernstein is my personal branding idol because she has uplifting content that is authentic and real. She is consistent with her videos, email newsletter, and social media presence. I have followed her for about six years, and she has always adapted to whatever the new virtual platforms are and she has dominated them. Her brand is consistent and clean yet has allowed her space to grow, mature and change as a woman and teacher in ways that are easily communicated with her audience. – Ally Lozano, Ally Lozano LLC

13. Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins has built an empire helping others become the best versions of themselves. He’s an inspiring teacher and mentor to those who may not otherwise have a good role model or mentor in their lives. Tony’s communication skills are phenomenal. He’s able to talk to a room of people but connect to people individually. He can relate to a lot of different people which I think is one of the main reasons people like to listen to him speak and take his advice to heart. – Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights

14. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

With around 12.8 million followers on Twitter, Dwayne’s messages tend to speak mostly of hard work, love and making the most of one’s life. I feel his overall appreciation for life that shines through his posts works brilliantly in building a brand based on his core beliefs. His posts come with an element of charisma and intimacy. It appears that he’s tailored his page to suit the needs of his fans, often highlighting people with whom he has memorable encounters. This has more than the desired effect in breathing life into his brand because the appreciation he showers on others is always well-received. The inspirational stories he shares help build the emotional connection. Besides, his consistency, with around three to five tweets every day, tells his fans that he’s always around. – Derek Robinson, Top Notch Dezigns

15. Sara Blakely

Sarah Blakely has always been a personal idol, both when it comes to her business acumen and her personal branding. Even though she is now a billionaire, she frequently discusses her humble beginnings, discussing how she gave everything she had into starting Spanx. These stories are not glamorous, and are incongruent with her current status, yet she keeps telling them. This consistent message of determination against the odds positions her as a relatable leader and makes her an immediate inspiration for young entrepreneurs. As a woman, she knew the potential for her product, and she used her personal experience to find a consumer insight that changed the industry. Her personal branding is all about being herself and empowering others. – Kate Edwards, Heartbeat

16. Jay Shetty 

I have seen how Jay Shetty has built his brand around “Wisdom Goes Viral” from the get-go and there are so many motivational people who are similar to who he is and does what he does. To stand out among his peers, he created video content that touched people’s feelings. I’ve watched him grow his brand from the ground up and I can see how he has generated such a loyal fanbase through his small snacks of wisdom. Everyone can use a little wisdom now and then, even though it may feel like common sense. He has touched people in ways that are making the world a better place, a single individual at a time. He provides a great model and platform for me to then build my brand with my domain expertise. I haven’t been as successful as he has, but I know what is possible as well. – Sweta Patel, Silicon Valley Startup Marketing

The post 16 Entrepreneurs Share Their Personal Branding Idols appeared first on Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career.

16 Entrepreneurs Share Their Personal Branding Idols

What public figure is your personal branding idol, and what about their branding strategy inspires you the most?

These answers are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. YEC has also launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

1. Richard Branson

Richard Branson is one of my personal branding icons. From Virgin Records to Virgin Atlantic, he’s built a strong brand and following through interesting storytelling, innovative initiatives, and world-class design. – Arry Yu, StormX

2. Marcus Lemonis

The more I watch him, the more Marcus Lemonis has climbed my list of favorite entrepreneurs and branding experts. His branding strategy always involves the people who have started the business and staying true to the original concept the business was founded on. The best part about the way he approaches the reshaping/rebranding of the businesses he invests in is how he cares about his partners along with how he wants both employee and employer to be in a win/win situation. Just because he’s a highly successful entrepreneur, it doesn’t mean he’s abandoned his humility. In fact, his humility and honesty are his most valuable assets. As a business owner, seeing someone with that kind of business portfolio and net worth treating other people with such respect is very inspiring. – Jared Ross Weitz, United Capital Source Inc.

3. Cody Wilson

This is going to be a controversial pick, but Cody Wilson is one of the people I see as a branding genius. He’s the founder of Defense Distributed, a nonprofit organization centered around firearm production and distribution. They’re so controversial because of their products centered around 3D-printing guns, which has placed them at the forefront of the American gun control debate. Wilson has managed to turn a concept as terrifying as creating unlicensed garage guns into a sleek and modern business serving as a reflection of the IoT paradigm. He’s successfully sold his company as a bulwark for the second amendment and weathered some of the most intense press scrutiny unscathed. His brand is an example of how to be controversial and successful. – Bryce Welker, Crush The PM Exam

4. Elon Musk

Elon Musk is on top of his game when it comes to branding. He strategically posts about current events on Twitter, sharing both the good and the bad, and still manages to keep an unbiased opinion. He stays true to his own beliefs and consistently puts out the same message across everything that he does. His entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to change the world through tech inspire me and so many others across the world. – Samuel Thimothy, OneIMS – Integrated Marketing Solutions

5. Barbara Corcoran

Barbara Corcoran sold her business in 2001 and hasn’t had a specific business venture since. Yet, somehow, she has been able to stay relevant by building her personal brand. From Shark Tank to Dancing with the Stars, she finds ways to make herself stay relevant. Rather than building a new business, she monetizes her brand with media engagements and inbound business investment opportunities. – Fan Bi, Menswear Reviewed

6. Darren Rowse

I admire the community that Darren Rowse has managed to create around his ProBlogger brand. His website is full of great advice for bloggers and his Facebook group is very active with writers helping each other out. He’s been able to successfully turn his brand into a fully engaged community which is hard to do. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

7. Tony Hsieh

I love how Tony has leveraged his personal beliefs to build his company’s reputation. He is known as the architect who builds strong company cultures that deliver great customer experiences. I believe that in the long term the companies that operate with honesty and transparency will be those that flourish. He has created both a personal and company brand that is often referenced as the quintessential customer-centric model. Customers want to do business with him and his company is a sought-after place to work.  – Brian Greenberg, Life Insurance Quotes

8. Marie Forleo

Marie has done an incredible job branding herself, her most notable program “B-School” and her overall business. Every external brand touch point is consistent. The topics and advice she discusses on MarieTV resonate with just about any entrepreneur. The real deal, Marie is one of the few marketing experts that has been able to reach millions and teach thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs how to plan, launch and grow successful businesses. – Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Creative Development Agency, LLC

9. Neil Patel

Neil Patel has created a great personal brand for himself. He has a well-optimized website, strong social media presence, a podcast and most recently has shifted over to video. I like that his brand is about experimenting with different marketing techniques and he then spills his secrets as to what worked for him and what didn’t work so well. Learning from him has saved me time and money by implementing processes right the first time. – Jared Atchison, WPForms

10. Gary Vaynerchuk

I’ve actually had the opportunity to meet Gary at his office in Hudson Yards. The eeriest thing was the conversation felt oddly normal because I had watched literally every video available on his YouTube well before ever meeting him. It was like we had been having the conversation every week for years. I start with that because of what he has helped me most with — authenticity. He is the exact same person you see plastered on social when you see him in person, very thankful and genuine. He has also helped me to learn to give without the expectation of anything in return. Those two things have helped me learn to be a better version of myself. – Frank B. Mengert, ebenefit Marketplace (ebm)

11. Grant Cardone 

Grant Cardone’s content is always on. From social to podcasts to events and everything in between, he really is an inspiration. Love him or hate him, he has mastered his own authenticity and has been able to create a massive following and move his audience to action. In a climate of conformity, he has securely gone against conventional wisdom on delivery and public relations, and this mastery of content has secured him solid conversion rates for his products, books, and brand. – Matthew Capala, Alphametic

12. Gabby Bernstein

Gabby Bernstein is my personal branding idol because she has uplifting content that is authentic and real. She is consistent with her videos, email newsletter, and social media presence. I have followed her for about six years, and she has always adapted to whatever the new virtual platforms are and she has dominated them. Her brand is consistent and clean yet has allowed her space to grow, mature and change as a woman and teacher in ways that are easily communicated with her audience. – Ally Lozano, Ally Lozano LLC

13. Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins has built an empire helping others become the best versions of themselves. He’s an inspiring teacher and mentor to those who may not otherwise have a good role model or mentor in their lives. Tony’s communication skills are phenomenal. He’s able to talk to a room of people but connect to people individually. He can relate to a lot of different people which I think is one of the main reasons people like to listen to him speak and take his advice to heart. – Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights

14. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

With around 12.8 million followers on Twitter, Dwayne’s messages tend to speak mostly of hard work, love and making the most of one’s life. I feel his overall appreciation for life that shines through his posts works brilliantly in building a brand based on his core beliefs. His posts come with an element of charisma and intimacy. It appears that he’s tailored his page to suit the needs of his fans, often highlighting people with whom he has memorable encounters. This has more than the desired effect in breathing life into his brand because the appreciation he showers on others is always well-received. The inspirational stories he shares help build the emotional connection. Besides, his consistency, with around three to five tweets every day, tells his fans that he’s always around. – Derek Robinson, Top Notch Dezigns

15. Sara Blakely

Sarah Blakely has always been a personal idol, both when it comes to her business acumen and her personal branding. Even though she is now a billionaire, she frequently discusses her humble beginnings, discussing how she gave everything she had into starting Spanx. These stories are not glamorous, and are incongruent with her current status, yet she keeps telling them. This consistent message of determination against the odds positions her as a relatable leader and makes her an immediate inspiration for young entrepreneurs. As a woman, she knew the potential for her product, and she used her personal experience to find a consumer insight that changed the industry. Her personal branding is all about being herself and empowering others. – Kate Edwards, Heartbeat

16. Jay Shetty 

I have seen how Jay Shetty has built his brand around “Wisdom Goes Viral” from the get-go and there are so many motivational people who are similar to who he is and does what he does. To stand out among his peers, he created video content that touched people’s feelings. I’ve watched him grow his brand from the ground up and I can see how he has generated such a loyal fanbase through his small snacks of wisdom. Everyone can use a little wisdom now and then, even though it may feel like common sense. He has touched people in ways that are making the world a better place, a single individual at a time. He provides a great model and platform for me to then build my brand with my domain expertise. I haven’t been as successful as he has, but I know what is possible as well. – Sweta Patel, Silicon Valley Startup Marketing

The post 16 Entrepreneurs Share Their Personal Branding Idols appeared first on Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career.

Comfort and Accessibility Above High-Tech Features

Wired Magazine recently published an article that describes the current 'low-tech' revolution that may be reshaping the technologies sector. The article highlights several current examples of how the particular 'quality' of technological innovation is being expanded to favor availability over high-tech characteristics. Wired describes the MP3 as typically the classic example: typically the music format first broke ground as an accessible plus portable file that users could talk about and publish on the internet. Music aficionados and record companies denounced the MP3, saying it provided substandard sound quality to be able to the CD. Just what the music market didn't understand is that 'quality' was throughout the attention of the particular beholder; Online users close to the world utilized MP3s because involving their accessibility, that has been more important to them than an apparent decrease in sound fidelity. Today, typically the MP3 has overtaken the CD due to the fact of its convenience. The Wired Publication article goes on to point out there other products and even sectors which are operating the 'low tech' wave, from point-and-shoot Flip Video Video cameras for the easily available Google Documents. Every single of these items might be considered second-rate with their competitors within a side-by-side characteristic comparison, however , they have proven prosperous due to their very own lack of bells and whistles. I'd like in order to take this chance to share several additional unmentioned products plus industries which can be reaping helpful benefits from convenience over features. Feel free to enhance the list if you believe of anything else. 1. Documentary Movie The documentary is definitely the polar contrary of the exclusive effects-laden blockbuster movies that individuals became used to within the 90s. In the place of A-listers in addition to huge explosions, documentary film utilizes real people and relatively simple editing to tell a convincing history. In the latest decade, documentary provides proved not only to become a durable art form but additionally a cost-effective package office draw. Videos like 'An Annoying Truth' and 'Fahrenheit 9/11' grossed massive numbers and price a fraction involving what a standard blockbuster takes to create. Documentary film will be on the surge and represents a low-tech and effective way to link the group with relevant stories. Off-shoots involving documentary, like fact TV, have also verified to be incredibly successful despite the cliche formatting and relatively low production value. check here on your 'Back to the Basics' Sports Philosophy During the past decade we've observed championship teams happen not based in their huge superstar power but upon teamwork and some sort of philosophy in being successful at 'the basics. ' Whether it be getting that extra bottom on a sac-fly or finding 4 different receivers having an array of screen passes; the tiny things are precisely what have been earning games. The Fresh York Yankees, together with an all-star-studded selection and astronomical spend grade, have hit a brick wall in many respects to live approximately their ten year potential due to be able to an insufficient concentration about the details. Typically the Yankees are similar to a high-def. camcorder that touts several features, but falls short of the basics to make it practical and usable. 3 or more. Applicant Tracking In the world of corporate recruiting, we have a complex maze involving collaboration and candidate tracking steps of which proceed a seek the services of. Many software alternatives with this in-depth method give you a wealth involving features to improve a company's ability to trail potential job applicants. These kinds of many bells and whistles often only slow the process though. Some software developers took a different route and chosen to cut out the particular extra features and instead concentrate in accessibility and collaboration: the basic principles for some sort of more efficient applicant tracking solution. These kinds of simple but hassle-free solutions are rapidly making headway because of the 'get-to-the-point' nature in addition to 'anytime, anywhere' on-line accessibility. 4. Twitter In a globe where we include social networks for each possible niche, many laden with high technology features to 'increase social communication, ' Twitter has verified again that simplicity is king. Basically, you can adhere to, be followed in addition to tweet. Twitter is definitely successful because it offers latched onto the basic need in order to 'publicize' even the particular most menial activities of our lives. consumer tracking

Bright Lights, Big City: Award-Winning Immersive Design

EARLY BIRD DEADLINE: AUGUST 13, 2018

100 million pixels of visual storytelling transformed a Dubai retail destination into a jaw-dropping immersive experience.

It’s a pretty big deal for a client to ask you to create a massive digital experience within a one-of-a-kind luxury retail environment. And it’s a really big deal when that retail environment is located in the heart of Dubai, a city known for its rare ability to continually expand, innovate—and define what a city of the future really looks like. That was the task CityWalk Dubai posed to Montreal-based Float4, a multidisciplinary studio that integrates digital experiences in physical spaces to amplify their identity.

Float4 readily accepted that challenge and exceeded expectations—including those of HOW’s International Design Awards judges, who awarded the project Best of Show. “CityWalk is an impressive combination of scale and craftsmanship,” says judge Leland Maschmeyer. “It’s rare for a work of art to reshape how you experience a physical space.” But that’s exactly what Float4’s contribution to CityWalk did.

BUILDING AN EXPERIENCE

Float4 strives to redefine conventions by designing and producing site-specific multimedia installations. “Our firm stands out in that we craft experiences that often have never been done before, and that’s thanks to the trusted relationships we develop with our clients,” says Alexandre Simionescu, Float4’s principal. “This aspect of novelty is also one of the elements that characterizes our corporate culture. Finding a way to do things that are challenging is something that sets our firm apart.”

CityWalk is an outdoor urban destination providing innovative retail and upscale dining for visitors and locals alike. It breaks the paradigm of standard retail environments and provides an outdoor meeting point, accessible to all. It’s also special because it provides access to a pedestrian retail experience that’s so common in many cities across the world, but that is quite rare in Dubai.

Float4’s objective for CityWalk was to create a multimedia infrastructure showcasing visually striking content in a luxury retail setting. The space encompasses an outdoor digital experience of more than 12 football fields in size, and includes more than 30 LED installations, nearly 30 projectors, and a water fountain show where content is projected onto water screens. All totaled, there are more than 100 million pixels of engaging, entertaining content that runs seamlessly on a digital structure that’s entirely custom-built.

CityWalk is comprised of three main areas—the Gateway, the Showstreet and the Place des Lumières—each set to elevate the customer’s experience throughout their journey.

As guests enter through the Gateway, CityWalk’s main entrance, they are immersed in an alley featuring two giant LED screens 93 yards in length, as well as a structure made up of LED hexagonal displays serving as a digital canopy. The large-scale screens display hypnotizing moving videos that morph content such as colorful galaxies and short stories into surrealistic, playful worlds that add an element of surprise.

The Showstreet, which connects the Gateway to the Place des Lumières, stretches nearly 109 yards and includes a ground projection provided by 12 high-definition projectors. This entertainment street is the focal point of the lighting scheme where floodlights are mounted at high level to provide playful, general ambient lighting to the floor, while integrated facade lighting ensures that vertical surfaces are well illuminated as part of a cohesive composition. The high-level projection on the floor allows for a flexible and creative layer of additional media for visitors, crafting an immersive showtime experience that interplays with the surrounding media screens and ceiling. This section can also easily be transformed into an interactive experience that reacts to guests’ movements.

The customer’s journey culminates in a circular space at the end of the Showstreet, also the highlight of the experience, which is the Place des Lumières. The space brings together more than 20 projectors and more than 100 lighting features into this 360-degree experience that gives the audience a multitude of viewpoints, making every occurrence unique. For five minutes every hour after dark, the Place des Lumières transforms into a show. At its center, an artificial pond comes to life when four computer-controlled hydraulic arms emerge from the water in sync with a custom built audio experience. Each arm, equipped with a system of nozzles, creates curtains of water on which projections are shown. When the show begins, people come from everywhere—every area, every alley—to gather around the fountain to enjoy the experience.

FINDING A WAY

So what does it take for a team of 20 to pull off such a massive high-tech project? “We had expertise in the field, which allows us to effectively tackle all the challenges that are inevitable with a project of this scale, and we also brought the right partners on board to deliver,” Simionescu says. “Our background in the video game industry, expertise in visual effects and hub of in-house creatives—in other words, our multidisciplinary talent—is what enabled us to push this project further. And collaboration is key to developing this type of project.”

About 50 people were involved in the year-and-a-half-long project. As executive producers, Float4 handled program strategy, content creation and technology infrastructure design. (The company has invested heavily in the development of its proprietary RealMotion platform, which has become the engine powering many of its projects for nearly a decade.) Float4 partnered with XYZ Cultural Technology to deliver the technological solution, and FLY and Gridspace to support the content. Other collaborators included Dubai-based RDK and Montreal-based LUZ Studio, Pixcom, La Majeure, Christie Digital and Freeworm Productions for everything from lighting design to soundtrack production.

While there’s no other single Float4 project that combines every element that can be found in City-Walk, the firm definitely drew upon a myriad of different aspects that they’ve done in the past. “Overall, it’s a very unique project that is hard to compare to anything else,” Simionescu says.

“We were tangential to the physical design of the space with this digital experience,” he continues. “The canvas and the audience were two of the main elements we looked at to draw inspiration from. Being sensitive to the culture was also a very important element, which did not constrain our creativity, but simply brought a different perspective.”

For instance, take the two content pieces showcased on the large screens during the Place des Lumières water show: “Future Now” is very much influenced by the vision of Dubai and its continuous evolution towards defining what a city of the future looks like. “Voyage into sound” echoes the importance of music in the local culture and how it has been used to tell stories over centuries as it transcends time.

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES

One of the biggest challenges from a content creation and production standpoint was the sheer size of the space and the multitude of platforms (LED, projection mapping, xf projection, custom LED ceiling, lighting, etc.). “With more than 100 million pixels across 30 different media supports, our production pipeline had to be streamlined beyond anything we had encountered until now,” Simionescu says. “The creative process was also a challenge by the sheer size of the space and the multitude of viewing points. It becomes very hard to convey an idea effectively when there are so many unique elements in play. Without the proper tools, it becomes a cognitive overload and you simply can’t process the information effectively in order to make good decisions. From a technical perspective, the amount of pixels that had to be processed required a performance criteria that is often delivered at the expense of flexibility, which in our case was not an option.”

It’s clear, however, that those obstacles did not stand in the way of stellar creative and technical execution. While Float4 can’t disclose exact numbers, they say the advertising revenue alone has provided a significant return on investment. “As the largest digital integration in the Middle East and quite possibly the world, CityWalk will become an attraction even by Dubai’s standards,” Simionescu says. “From the moment we launched the show, the place has been full every night. People go there, they walk there, and it’s now a destination in and of itself.”

Simionescu describes seeing the final version of the experience for the first time as “euphoria.” The public reaction was extremely positive, and people kept approaching the interactive design team to ask when the show would play again. “Seeing people taking pictures of it is always a great sign, and asking when they could see it again was an even better one to indicate how well received it is,” he says.

Simionescu adds that his favorite thing about the project is that there’s simply nothing else like it, even in a city like Dubai that has no shortage of eccentric projects. “The sum of all our efforts and our greatest achievement is to have contributed to a project that defines Dubai,” he says. “CityWalk presented a huge opportunity for us to work directly with the client in a place that is renown for its grandiose achievements.”

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