The company has meetings, obviously. Lots of them. But it also has a couple fail-safes in place to ensure they're not the sort of dead-eyed affairs many of us are accustomed to.
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Out of all places to stick your head into, a particle accelerator would rank among the worst. Yet, on that fateful day of 13 July 1978, thirty-six-years-old Russian scientist Anatoli Bugorski just had to.
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It's an internet fight and only the funniest meme will emerge victorious. This week's challengers? Oscars memes, German TikTok teens, Mayor Pete's playlist and Ohio 2.
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They posted videos online, shared pictures and dramatic stories from inside the quarantined city that has been virtually cut off from the rest of the country. Now, Fang Bin and Chen Qiushi are nowhere to be found.
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When you think of 3D printing, you probably imagine a structure being created layer by layer, from the bottom up. Now, researchers say they have developed a completely new way of creating 3D objects that offer remarkable resolution "in record time."
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This gorgeous book from Julia Rothman provides detailed illustrations of how everything around us actually works. 'Nature Anatomy' is a perfect introduction to the natural world for kids, but grown-ups will definitely enjoy it too.
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After spending nearly two decades facilitating deportations as a Customs and Border Protection officer, Raul Rodriguez discovered that he was not a US citizen. Now he's at risk of deportation himself.
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The first four days of the illness were brutal. "I suffered from a high fever and pains that tortured every part of my body," said Tiger Ye. He spent the days watching Japanese cartoons to distract from the discomfort.
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You know when you've built something up in your head and when you finally get to experience it, it doesn't stack up to your expectations? This dog knows the feeling.
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The variety of album art produced during the decade of Italo disco's height had one foot firmly planted in the realm of futuristic fantasy, often composed in an airbrush style.
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Many cities in the United States and Canada have a problem with Canada geese. Rochester, Minnesota, however, is a town that is uniquely proud of — and plagued by — its goose population.
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In the foreground, we have Bella Hadid strutting down the runway for the Marc Jacobs fashion show. But when you peer closer into the background, there are some quite unusual things happening.
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Who are the best emo bands ever? That's a tricky question, since the genre itself has a slippery definition. We looked back at 35 years of emo rock music to figure the 100 best songs.
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I don't mind spending money, but I hate getting scammed. The idea that I need to get a new phone every year or two just because Apple makes one or my carrier offers an "upgrade" is a scam.
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The movie famously had to go through a complete redesign of its main character after fan backlash. Does the redesign of the movie save it or is "Sonic the Hedgehog" a slog? Here's what the reviews say.
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I've discovered a strange little data set that helps explain how we evolved to an era where we're constantly updating our autobiographies one Instagram story at a time.
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When "American Ninja Warrior" producer Johnathan Walton began to suspect his best friend — whom he'd loaned nearly $70,000 — was not the royal she claimed, he launched an investigation that uncovered dozens of alleged victims.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Navy warship seized weapons believed to be of Iranian "design and manufacture," including 150 anti-tank guided missiles and three Iranian surface-to-air missiles, the American military said on Thursday.
In a statement, the military said the guided-missile cruiser Normandy boarded a dhow, a traditional sailing vessel, in the Arabian Sea on Sunday.
"The weapons seized include 150 'Dehlavieh' anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM), which are Iranian-manufactured copies of Russian Kornet ATGMs," the statement said.
China reports 5,090 new coronavirus cases and 121 new deaths from the outbreak taking the total to 55,748 cases and 1380 deaths reported from the mainland by end of February 13 - National Health Commission pic.twitter.com/36EP45bMYs
#UPDATE The United States said it has secured a seven-day reduction in violence in Afghanistan that it hopes will allow it to strike a deal with the Taliban, as President Donald Trump said a peace accord was "very close" https://t.co/wUxVCfw6iZpic.twitter.com/RQEiCd3ALG
U.S. brings new charges against Huawei and its CFO Meng Wanzhou, including racketeering and conspiring to steal trade secrets from six tech companies pic.twitter.com/QVg0VgEsfv
Medical workers in protective suits attend to novel coronavirus patients in the ICU of a designated hospital in Wuhan, February 6, 2020. China Daily via REUTERS
Osama bin Laden sits with his adviser Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri during an interview with Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir. Hamid Mir took this picture during his third and last interview with Osama bin Laden in November 2001 in Kabul. Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri was present in this interview and acted as the translator of Osama bin Laden.
As the war in Afghanistan drags on, and as President Donald Trump reportedly approves a tentative peace deal with the Taliban, several experts addressed a national security question that has dogged policy makers for years: if the 13,000 American troops still in Afghanistan were to leave, would the country become a launching pad for a second terrorist attack on the scale of September 11, 2001?
That question was brought up at a Senate hearing on Tuesday, where former officials from the U.S. military and State Department agreed that a large military presence in Afghanistan would not be necessary to ensure a second plot against the U.S. on the scale of 9/11 does not unfold. Instead, the officials said the U.S. could rely on diplomacy and its current mix of worldwide counter-terrorism assets to defeat any emerging threats to the homeland.
WNU Editor: The Taliban and Al Qaeda are still allies. Some Al Qaeda leaders who were involved in 9/11 are still active today, including current Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Taliban control large sections of Afghanistan, and will probably gain more if the US leaves. I am sure that Al Qaeda would take advantage of such a situation, and establish in these Taliban controlled regions bases of operations. Is Al Qaeda still focused on attacking America? They have been saying for years that this is one of their goals, and I believe them. So will leaving Afghanistan cause another 9/11? All that I know is that the Al Qaeda leadership have wanted another 9/11 since 9/11, and if the Taliban do succeed in controlling Afghanistan they will then be one step closer in accomplishing just that.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced an "important breakthrough" in broader negotiations with the Taliban. The US is involved in talks seeking a path to peace in war-torn Afghanistan.
The United States has secured a seven-day partial truce with the Taliban, following talks to negotiate a path to peace in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said on Thursday.
"The United States and the Taliban have negotiated a proposal for a seven-day reduction in violence," he said.
The announcement was made as NATO defense ministers met in Brussels, and a day after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani touted "notable progress" in negotiations with the insurgent group.
* International organisations have called for 'life-saving intervention' to allow aid to flow into country, which borders China, where virus was first identified * Personal protective gear and testing kits urgently needed to prepare for possible outbreak, Red Cross says
The United States is "deeply concerned" about the possible impact of a coronavirus outbreak in North Korea and is prepared to facilitate efforts by US and international organisations to contain the spread of the virus there, the State Department said on Thursday.
"We strongly support and encourage the work of US and international aid and health organisations to counter and contain the spread of coronavirus in the DPRK," spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said after the Red Cross called for an urgent exemption to sanctions on Pyongyang to help prevent a coronavirus outbreak.
"The United States is ready and prepared to expeditiously facilitate the approval of assistance from these organisations," Ortagus added in a statement.
WNU Editor: If the Covid-19 coronavirus takes a hold in North Korea, I agree with all the experts that this will be a disaster. The U.S. offer to help North Korea is the right thing to do.
More News On The Coronavirus Outbreak In North Korea
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un walk after lunch at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa island in Singapore June 12, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
SEOUL — North Korea has delayed its much-anticipated "Christmas surprise" of a major intercontinental ballistic missile test out of concern that such a provocation — after two years of stop-start nuclear diplomacy — would trigger sharp negative reactions from Washington and the international community.
South Korean analysts, including a high-level defector from the North, say Pyongyang's planning for a launch also has been delayed by the coronavirus outbreak in China, which shares a long border with North Korea and serves as its closest security and economic ally.
"The most friendly country of North Korea — China — is having serious difficulties, and North Korea doesn't want to make things worse," said Lee Gee-dong, vice president of the Institute for National Security Strategy in Seoul. "I think for the coming three or four months, it will be quite quiet and the North Koreans will not carry out any provocative or dangerous actions against the world."
* Public fury is growing, with calls for more freedom of speech, but observers don't expect any dramatic changes * Xi Jinping has been mostly absent from view, as heads start to roll in Hubei province
Right in the centre of China, the city of Wuhan in Hubei province has also been at the heart of some key political events in the country's modern history.
It was where a nationalist revolution began in 1911 that overthrew the Qing dynasty, ending thousands of years of imperial rule. And from where supreme leader Mao Zedong famously swam across the Yangtze River in 1966 at the age of 72, as he launched the Cultural Revolution – a decade of social and political turmoil which left wounds that remain unhealed.
This winter, it was the starting point for an outbreak of a new coronavirus – which causes the disease now officially known as Covid-19 – that has rapidly spread across the country and beyond, claiming the lives of more than 1,300 people and infecting over 59,000 so far.
The long-awaited assault in Syria's Idlib province by President Bashar al-Assad's army, backed by Russian airpower and Iranian-sponsored militias, is well underway. Again, the people of Syria are experiencing horrific tragedy. Assad justifies his actions in terms of counterterrorism. But his scorched-earth tactics primarily kill, maim and render homeless innocent civilians, most from the nation's Sunni majority population.
* Latest figures follow the roll-out this week of expanded diagnostic criteria amid a purge of party officials in Hubei * Total mainland cases now at more than 64,627 and deaths at 1,483
China's Hubei province, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, reported a further 4,823 cases of the disease early on Friday morning, bringing the total in the mainland to 64,627.
Deaths in the country caused by the disease, now officially known as Covid-19, reached 1,483 after the province's health commission announced a daily increase of 116.
Current as of midnight on Thursday, the figures were the second daily batch to be released since the roll-out of expanded diagnostic criteria, under which a diagnosis based on an analysis of symptoms is considered a confirmed case.
A B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber, assigned to the 509th Bomb Wing, Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, sits on the flight line, Oct 24, 2019. Consistent training and exercising validates the B-2's ability to respond to challenges all over the globe. (Sr. Airman Thomas Barley/Air Force)
WASHINGTON — After years of delays and technical issues, the Air Force is restructuring a key B-2 modernization program, transforming it from a suite of technologies meant to help the bomber evade Russia and China into a less ambitious cockpit display upgrade.
In the Air Force's fiscal year 2021 budget request, the service zeroes out the Defensive Management System Modernization program, or DMS-M, over the next five years. Instead, it intends to put about $155 million toward a cockpit upgrade that will include a more advanced graphics processor and modernized displays.
Washington (CNN)The Senate passed an Iran War Powers resolution on Thursday, a rare measure that was approved with bipartisan support despite the fact that it has been opposed by President Donald Trump and aims to rein in his ability to use military action against Iran without congressional approval.
The vote was 55-45. Eight Republicans voted in favor of it: Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Todd Young of Indiana, Mike Lee of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Jerry Moran of Kansas.
The President warned the Senate not to green-light the measure on Wednesday, tweeting that "it is very important for our country's security that the United States Senate not vote for the Iran War Powers Resolution," and adding, "If my hands were tied, Iran would have a field day." The White House has also issued a veto threat against it.
Germany has voted to pay €77 million for the first prototypes of a "new generation fighter" for European armed forces. The country's defense minister has called it a concrete step towards European security.
Bundestag lawmakers approved on Wednesday the initial funds for a transnational project with France to create a new fighter jet and develop a program aimed at bringing together European military forces.
Representatives in German parliament's lower chamber signed-off on loans worth €77 million ($83 million) to build the first sets of the "new generation fighter." France is expected to contribute the same amount.
The research initiative forms an important part of Germany's joint Future Combat Air System (FCAS) with Spain and is part of a wider plan to draw back on the European Union's long dependency on US aircraft, drones and satellites.
415 million children are living in a conflict zone according to a new report by Save the Children@AFP graphic shows key figures pic.twitter.com/1fIcDI4qsU
Children face a greater risk than ever before of growing up surrounded by war, sexual abuse and recruitment into armed groups, a study by the charity Save the Children reported. Children in Africa are the most affected.
Nearly one in six children around the world — 415 million children in all — were living in a conflict zone in 2018, more than double the figure recorded in 1995, according to a report released Thursday by Save the Children.
"It's staggering that the world stands by while children are targeted with impunity," the charity's chief executive Inger Ashing said in a statement. "Since 2005, at least 95,000 children were recorded to have been killed or maimed, tens of thousands of children abducted, and millions of children denied access to education or health services after their hospitals were attacked."
National Security Adviser told a room full of Atlantic Council attendees on Tuesday that significant cuts were under way at the leak-prone White House National Security Council, confirming a Monday report in the Washington Examiner that up to 70 positions would be cut.
While O'Brien pitched it as a return to "a manageable size," he didn't mention what the Examiner reported - namely, that most of the cuts would be Obama-era holdovers such as anti-Trump impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, 44, and his twin brother Yevgeny, who were fired from the NSC last week and escorted out of the White House by security.
WNU Editor: National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien does have a point that American foreign policy is not run (and should not be run) by Lieutenant Colonels .... 'We are not a banana republic': National security adviser defends Vindman dismissals (Politico). So this begs an answer .... they were there for three years, so who was running foreign policy, at least in regards to Ukraine.
The U.S. military is bracing for possible Russian disinformation regarding the spread of the coronavirus outbreak, according to Department of Defense documents obtained by Newsweek.
Military planners are actively tracking disinformation campaigns promulgated by accounts operated by — or attributable to — the Russian government. Between January 28 and February 3, the "coronavirus" hashtag was the most used by major Russian news Twitter accounts, according to the documents.
Information about the new coronavirus flooding social media was cause for concern among World Health Organization (WHO) officials who said they were working to diminish an "infodemic." Such campaigns, while not uncommon, are an obstacle for implementing an effective response, those officials said.
But the documents obtained by Newsweek more broadly reveal U.S. military efforts to track and detail social media during a heated election year as cyber officials at U.S. Cyber Command are anticipating further Russian meddling in the 2020 presidential elections which could rival Kremlin efforts in 2016.
WNU Editor: I have been following this story since the beginning. For now the Russian government news agencies have been saying the same thing as everyone else.
* More than 500 global leaders will gather in Germany over the weekend to discuss everything from the development of 5G networks to nuclear weapons to the recent coronavirus outbreak. * The 56th Munich Security Conference brings together more than 35 heads of state, 100 foreign and defense ministers as well as leaders from business and international organizations. * Attendees include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
MUNICH — More than 500 global leaders gather here over the weekend to discuss everything from the development of 5G networks to nuclear weapons to the recent coronavirus outbreak.
The 56th Munich Security Conference, held at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel, brings together more than 35 heads of state, 100 foreign and defense ministers as well as leaders from business and international organizations. The conference will run Friday through Sunday.
This year's attendees include French President Emmanuel Macron, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
U.S. Northern Command is executing plans to prepare for a potential pandemic of the novel coronavirus, now called COVID19, according to Navy and Marine Corps service-wide messages issued this week.
An executive order issued by the Joint Staff and approved by Defense Secretary Mark Esper this month directed Northern Command and geographic combatant commanders to initiate pandemic plans, which include ordering commanders to prepare for widespread outbreaks and confining service members with a history of travel to China.
The Navy and Marine Corps messages, issued Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, reference an executive order directing U.S. Northern Command to implement the Department of Defense Global Campaign plan for Pandemic Influenza and Infectious Diseases 3551-13.
The document serves as the Pentagon's blueprint for planning and preparing for widespread dispersion of influenza and previously unknown diseases.
* South Korean media said the trade official was arrested and immediately shot * Kim Jong-un has imposed military law to enforce the coronavirus quarantine * North Korea has no confirmed cases but has taken strict quarantine measures
A North Korean official has been executed for going to a public bath while he was meant to be in quarantine, a report in the South has claimed.
The trade official was arrested and immediately shot after risking the spread of coronavirus by visiting the public bath, the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper reported.
The official had been placed in isolation after travelling to China with Kim Jong-un imposing military law to enforce the lockdown, sources said.
North Korea has not yet confirmed any cases of the virus, but has taken drastic measures to stop it spreading over its border with China.
#UPDATE Global oil demand will suffer its first quarterly drop in a decade as the COVID-19 virus lashes the economy in China and its impact ripples throughout the world, the International Energy Agency has warned
415 million children are living in a conflict zone according to a new report by Save the Children@AFP graphic shows key figures pic.twitter.com/1fIcDI4qsU
In the Defense News Minute for Feb. 12, 2020: A big question in this year's defense budget request was if the Navy could afford 355 ships. Find out the answer. #FY21#Navy#budget2021pic.twitter.com/wLP5JS5sag
A police officer wears a mask as he walks in front of the Oriental Pearl Tower in Lujiazui financial district in Pudong, Shanghai, China, February 5. REUTERS/Aly Song
WNU Editor: OMG!!! That is Shanghai's financial district. This is unprecedented in modern times. We are seeing a country shutting-down completely. The above picture is from this photo-gallery .... China's empty streets amid coronavirus fears (Reuters).
* David Flores and Morris Cordewell donned hazmat suits for their subway prank * Cordewell, holding a bucket with biohazard markings, spills liquid on the floor * Concerned passengers jumped out the way but others realized it was not a virus * Prank comes as the death toll soared over 1,100, with 45,000 infected globally
Two Instagram pranksters have outraged New Yorkers by pretending to contaminate a subway carriage with coronavirus.
David Flores and Morris Cordewell donned hazmats suits for the stunt while holding a container filled with liquid that had biological hazard markings on it.
In the video Cordewell gets up and spills the liquid over the floor as train passengers quickly jump out of harm's way. However, it turns out their bucket contained Kool-Aid juice.
The latest prank comes as the coronavirus death toll soared to over 1,100, with more than 45,000 infected around the world. That includes 12 with the virus in the US.
WNU Editor: Ten years ago I caught a flu-like bug after visiting Mexico/California that kept me bedridden for almost 3 months. In the first week of the infection I was so sick and weak that on one of those days I lost my will to live. It is the only time that I have ever felt that way, and one that I do not want to repeat. What I learned from that experience is that this is how diseases like pneumonia, Covid-19, etc. kill people. They sap your will to live, and once your body understands that you do not want to live, it quickly accommodates you.
That is why Covid-19 is not a joking manner, and why it is very deadly. It destroys your respiratory system, and it drains your will to live. I am now hearing and reading reports from China that if you have to be admitted into a hospital with Covid-19, the mortality rate is an astounding 20%. I am also reading that it takes a long time to recover from this disease. So what does this all mean? We are not at the end of this disease spreading and/or levelling off, we are at the beginning of what will probably become a worldwide pandemic that many experts have been fearing for a long time.
SENIOR members of the European Parliament sparked fury after threatening to plunge the EU into chaos by vetoing the bloc's next multi-annual budget if their demands aren't met.
THE European Union has taken yet another bitter post-Brexit shot at the UK, boasting the bloc's security will now be more efficient and claiming Britain "wanted Europe to do nothing at all".
CORONAVIRUS panic has hit London after it emerged that Britain's ninth confirmed patient had attended a central London summit in the days before going to hospital.
SCIENTISTS are in the early stages of testing a cure for the latest outbreak of Coronavirus after finding and developing a new antiviral drug that had a positive affect on monkeys carrying a disease within the coronavirus family.
GEORGE GALLOWAY has revealed why a French exit from the European Union is a "rising demand" among millions of French people, as Emmanuel Macron faces the "biggest crisis" of his presidency to date.
LEO VARADKAR is facing up to the humiliating prospect of having to form a coalition with rivals Fianna Fail in a desperate bid to hold onto power, with Sinn Fein set to be forced out despite scoring a shock general election win.
EXPERTS are concerned about the rate the Coronavirus is spreading after the ninth case of the disease was confirmed in London yesterday, with the tube being branded as a 'network' for the spreading of disease
Delhi High Court Result 2020Released: Dear Candidates !!! The officials of the High Court of Delhi has conducted the written examinations for recruiting various posts. Many candidates have appeared for the Delhi HC Examination and waiting for the results. So, in order to help the candidates, we have provided a quick link to download the Delhi High Court Result 2020 on this page. Now, The High Court of Delhi officials has released the Delhi High Court Result 2020 for various examinations. Go through the entire page to know more information about the Delhi High Court Result 2020.
Delhi High Court Judicial Service Result 2020 Released: A huge number of aspirants attended the Delhi High Court Judicial Service Examination held on 02nd February 2020. And all the eligible candidates were searching for the Delhi High Court Judicial Service Result 2020. Here, we are there to help those candidates who are waiting for Delhi High Court Judicial Service Result 2020. Moreover, the Delhi High Court has declared the Judicial Service Result on 13th February 2020. Therefore, we have given a direct link to check the Delhi High Court Judicial Service Result 2020. So, by just clicking the link aspirants can download the Delhi High Court Judicial Service Result 2020, Cut Off Marks, Merit List 2020.
Delhi High Court Judicial Service Prelims Result 2020:Click Here Delhi High Court Judicial Service Result 2020:Click Here
Delhi High Court Chauffeur Result 2020Released: Dear Candidates !!! Are you eagerly waiting for Delhi High Court Chauffeur Result 2020? Let's check it on this page. The Delhi High Court officials have released the Result for Chauffeur post on 06th February 2020. However, the candidates who appeared for the Delhi High Court Chauffeur Examination can check their Results here. Here, we provide you a direct link to check your Delhi High Court Chauffeur Result 2020. Furthermore, candidates can check the Delhi High Court Chauffeur Cut Off Marks and Merit list 2020 on this page.
22.12.2019, 26.12.2019 to 31.12.2019, 01.01.2020 to 05.01.2020, 11.01.2020, 12.01.2020, 18.01.2020 & 19.01.2020
Result Date
06th February 2020
Selection Procedures
Exam and Skill Test, Interview
Job Location
Delhi
Official Website
delhihighcourt.nic.in
Delhi High Court Chauffeur Skill Test Result 2020:Click Here Delhi High Court Chauffeur Result 2020:Click Here
Delhi High Court Final Result 2020 Released: Dear Candidates !!! The Delhi High Court officials had declared the Delhi High Court SPA Result 2020 on 23rd January 2020. Further, the officials had released the results for Senior Personal Assistant, Senior Judicial Translator, and Judicial Translator posts. All the exam participants can also check the Delhi High Court Final Result 2020 either from the official portal as well as from this page itself. At the end of the page, we had also given the direct link to check and also download the Delhi High Court Final Result 2020. Hence, we had given detailed information about the Delhi High Court Final Result 2020, Cut Off Marks, Merit List2020 in the below section.
Delhi High Court Result 2020 – Overview
Description
Details
Organization Name
High Court of Delhi
Post Name
Senior Personal Assitant, Senior Judicial Translator, Judicial Translator
Above all the details will give information such as the Organization name, Post name, number of vacancies, the category of the Results, Exam Date, the Result Release Date, Selection Process, the job location, and the Official site to check the Delhi High Court Results. Therefore, the selection process consists of Written Test and Interview. Candidates who got shortlisted in the Written Examination will be eligible to go for further selection rounds. All the exam participants can gather detailed information about Delhi High Court Cut Off Marks 2020 and also Merit List 2020 from the below sections.
Delhi High Court Cut Off Marks 2020
The officials of the High Court of Delhi had decided the Delhi High Court Cut Off Marks 2020. So that it will be easy to shortlist the candidates and pick up the candidate for the respective post. Many of the candidates had applied and are eagerly waiting to check the Delhi High Court Cut Off Marks 2020. For the sake of the candidates, we have given the details of Delhi High Court Cut Off Marks 2020. Most importantly, Delhi High Court Cut Off Marks 2020 depends on a few factors. They are,
Candidate's Category
No of Qualifiers
Level of the Question paper.
Availability of Vacancies
And the number of candidates attended the exam
Delhi High Court Merit List 2020
In this section, candidates can get the complete details of Delhi High Court Merit List 2020. The Delhi High Court Merit List 2020 contains the list of candidates who scored the highest marks in the written examination. All the candidates have to check the details present on the Delhi High Court Merit List 2020. Delhi High Court Merit List 2020 will be released by the officials of the High Court of Delhi. If you have any quires about the Delhi High Court Merit List 2020 visit the official site.
How to Download the High Court of Delhi Result 2020?
Visit the official site of Delhi High Court @ delhihighcourt.nic.in.
On the Latest Announcements, find the High Court of Delhi Result 2020 link.
And click on that link in a new page and enter the details.
After that, click on the Submit button.
Now, the High Court of Delhi Result 2020 will appear on the screen.
Download it and take a print out for further use.
Direct Links to Download Delhi High Court Result 2020
Delhi High Court HJS Mains Admit Card 2020 – Download the Delhi HC HJS Mains Admit Card here. Make sure that downloading aspirants should get qualified in the Prelims Exam. Thus, the board will release the Delhi HC Mains Admit Card at any time. Moreover, the Delhi HC Higher Judicial Services Mains Exam will be on 14th & 15th March 2020.
Delhi High Court Judicial Services Admit Card 2020 OUT | Candidates who have cleared the written examinations should qualify the Interview. The Interview will be held on 12th to 26th February 2020. The Delhi High Court Hall Ticket has issued the call letter on 05th January 2020.
Delhi High Court Judicial Services Hall Ticket 2020 – Download Here
High Court of Delhi Admit Card 2020 Released | Download the admit card for the HJS February Exam 2020. Thus, the hall ticket has been issued on 27th January 2020. Moreover, candidates can take down the exam on 02nd February 2020. Therefore, the Delhi High Court Hall Ticket is available to download at the below section.
Delhi High Court HJS February Exam Hall Ticket 2020 – Download Here
Delhi High Court Admit Card 2019 Released – The Hall Ticket is issued for the post of Private Secretary on 24th October 2019. The examination is going to be held on 07th November 2019. Hence, Aspirants are suggested to download the admit card at the end of the section. The direct link to download the admit card is available at the below table.
Delhi High Court Admit Card 2019 has been released on 04th October 2019. The Court has released the hall ticket for Judicial Services Mains Examination. So, the admit card is now available to download at the below section. Hence, the exam date has been declared on its official website. Thus, Candidates can get the exam date from the Delhi High Court Admit Card. So, Aspirants are suggested to download the hall ticket soon to get the exam date.
Enter the login details if Required and press submit.
The Admit Card is displayed on a new page.
Take a photocopy or save as PDF for future references.
Don't forget to carry the Admit Card to the Examination centre.
Details displayed on the Delhi High Court Admit Card 2020
Delhi High Court has planned to conduct exams for the various Posts. Those who have registered for the High Court Jobs in Delhi it is time to download the Admit Card 2020 for the upcoming Examination. For attending the Exams Hall Ticket are a mandatory one. So candidates should download the Admit Card 10 days before the Examination. The downloaded Call Letter should contain several pieces of information which should be proper and a valid one. Be sure that the below-listed information is correct and there is no mistake at any chance.
Name of the Candidate
Registration Number
Name of the Examination
Exam Date and Timing
Examination Centre
Instruction on the Admit Card
Delhi High Court Exam 2020 Information
Delhi High Court releases the hall ticket for various Exams. Those who manage to pass through the Written Exam conducted by the Delhi High Court will be selected for the posting. This is a huge competitive exam conducted by the Delhi High Court. The exams will be conducted as per the date and schedule. Candidates are asked to be on time to the examination hall, latecomers will not be allowed to take down the exam under any circumstances. While entering the Examination Hall, candidates Admit Card will be verified with the ID Proof. For the verification process, candidates are asked to bring any one of the below listed ID Proof details. Make sure your Hall Ticket details and ID Proof matches. In case of any mismatch or the particular person forgets to bring any of the listed will not be allowed to take down the examination.
Are you in search of CCI Artisan Trainee Syllabus Pdf? Then, you are in the right place for your search. On this page, you can get Cement Corporation of India AT exam syllabus completed details along with test patterns. You can also get CCI Lts Artisan Trainee Previous Papers to link in the below sections. For many more details read further sections of the article.
CCI Artisan Trainee Syllabus 2020 Pdf
Cement Corporation of India (CCI) recruitment 2020 notification has been released for various Artisan Trainee posts. There will be a lot of candidates who will be applying for this CCI AT exam since it comes under central government jobs. Thus, applicants who have not yet applied for the exam, apply before the last date of commencement.
Applicants who have already applied for the exam, need to concentrate more on CCI Ltd Artisan Trainee exam syllabus, which would help to understand the structure of the exam along with the type of questions asked in the exam.
CCI Ltd Artisan Trainee (AT) Exam Syllabus – Overview
MGVCL Vidyut Sahayak Previous Papers are available here. Aspirants who are looking for Madhya Pradesh Gujarat Vij Co Ltd Jr Assistant exam model question paper can download for free on our page. Also, check the written test exam pattern details and the exam date 2020 in the article below. Interested aspirants can check the official website mgvcl.com for more details.
MGVCL Vidyut Sahayak Previous Papers Pdf
Aspirants who are seeking for MGVCL Jr Asst Model Papers can get them here. On our page, we provide complete study material, preparation tips along with Madhya Gujarat Vij Co. Ltd Old Papers. Hence people can refer the last 5 years question papers of MGVCL. The advantage with the reference of these Previous Years Question Papers is you will know the exam structure and weight-age of each section.
Madhya Gujarat Vij Co. Ltd has given the notification to fill various Junior Assitant vacancies. However, aspirants who applied might be looking for the previous year question paper. Hence, to help the applicants in finding the papers easily, we have given direct links in the table below. Also, check the exam pattern details below and start your preparation. Here is an overview of MGVCL Vidyut Sahayak notification 2020.
MGVCL shortlist the applicants based on their performance in written examination. Where the applicants need to score the minimum marks to get qualified. The board gives the ranking to the applicants based on the rankings and performance in personal interview rounds candidates are recruited. Hence, check the exam pattern below and start your preparation today.
Knowledge of exam pattern helps the applicants in preparation and helps in scoring marks in the written test. However, here is the overview of the exam pattern for MGVCL Jr Assitant vacancies.
Madhya Gujarat Vij Co Ltd Vidhyut Sahayak Exam Pattern 2020
Section
Subject
Weight-age
1
General Knowledge
20%
2
English Language
20%
3
Maths & General Science
20%
4
Analytic & Logical Reasoning
20%
5
Computer Knowledge
20%
Sample Model Question Papers of MGVCL Jr Asst
Download MGVCL Jr Asst Previous Papers are available. Aspirants can practice the below Madhya Gujarat Vij Company Ltd Old Papers to get an idea about the exam. By practicing the number of Junior Assistant Question Papers, people can improve the time management which is important for every competitive exam. Aspirants can also check GK Updates and Current Affairs from our page. Click the below links to get MGVCL Vidyut Sahayak Previous Papers along with solutions for free of cost.
MKU Results 2020 Released: Dear Students !!! Check the Madurai Kamaraj University UG/PG Results, Students the individuals who are concentrating under the Madurai Kamaraj University and showed up for the Examination can check the MKU Exam Results from the official site i.e, mkuniversity.ac.in. We have given an immediate connection from the underneath table to get the outcomes with no perplexity and they can download the MK University Results independently. Understudies can check the MKU Results 2020 for all the Courses like, Under Graduate, Post Graduate, Diploma, and Regular and Supplementary Courses.
Madurai Kamaraj University has distributed the MKU Regular and Revaluation Results 2020. The University had led the UG, PG and Diploma Semester Examination. The individuals who have applied for MKU Revaluation would now be able to look at the Madurai Kamaraj University Revaluation Results here. So as to qualify the test understudies must go in both hypothesis/down to earth tests and furthermore score the base passing imprints required to breeze through the college semester test. We encourage Students to keep associated with our recruitment.guru site page to get the most recent Updated Madurai Kamaraj University Results 2020. Aside from this Students can check the MKU Exam Time Table, Admit Card, Syllabus, and others.
Latest Madurai Kamaraj University UG/PG Results 2020:Click Here
Visit the official website of Madurai Kamaraj University i.e mkuniversity.ac.in
On the home page, you will find the Results tab and click on the View results.
In the result page, you can find the results for various courses.
Click on the result link for which course you want to check.
The results will appear on the screen.
Take the printout of the MKU Revaluation Result for future reference.
About Madurai Kamaraj University
Madurai Kamaraj University is a state-funded college in Madurai town in the southern territory, India. It was built up in 1966 and has around 130,000 understudies in eighteen universities involving seventy-two divisions and 109 partnered resources. The Madurai Kamaraj University grounds are situated at Palkalai Nagar in the Madurai to Theni High street. The Madurai Kamaraj University grounds are found 13 kilometers a long way from the Periyar Bus stand and railroad station, 18 kilometers far away from the Integrated transport stand Mattuthavani. Transports are every now and again available from the Periyar Bus stand.
MKU Revaluation Results 2020
Understudies get an opportunity to apply for the revaluation, if the understudies may get low stamps in the assessment, they can apply for the Revaluation results. So again the leader of the Examiner will survey the appropriate response paper. After revaluation, understudies may get high stamps. In any case, in the event that anybody got low checks, they can apply for the Supplementary Examinations. For Revaluation and Supplementary, understudies should pay the charge. Understudies can get all the outcomes from this page Regular, Revaluation, and Supplementary Results. Understudies of Madurai Kamaraj University can likewise get the MKU Revaluation Results Also. Just we are encouraging the Students to every now and again visit this page to get the most recent refreshed MKU Revaluation Results 2020.
Aspirants who are searching for Syllabus & Exam Pattern for the Hartron Informatics Limited Programmer/ System Analyst Job get the required details in this section. Here we are also providing the Syllabus for Programmer in a pdf format. So you can download at a free of cost for the reference during the preparation of the exam.
HARTRON System Analyst Syllabus 2020
Name of the Organization
Hartron Informatics Limited (HIL) – Haryana State Electronics Development Corporation Limited (HARTRON)
HARTRON Syllabus 2020: Dear Aspirants !! Haryana State Electronics Development Corporation Limited Board Authority is planning to conduct the Written Examination to fill various vacancies. Aspirants can use this amazing chance to get Government Jobs in Haryana. Candidates who are willing to appear for written examination need to prepare with the help of HARTRON SETC Syllabus 2020 and the Exam Pattern. All the aspirants must download Haryana State Electronics Development Corporation Limited SETC Syllabus 2020 from the direct link given on this page.
Knowing the HARTRON SETC Syllabus 2020, Exam Pattern along with the HARTRON SETC Previous Year Papers will help the aspirants to get a complete idea about topics and subtopics appearing for the written examination successfully. Aspirants can also take the help of the HARTRON SETC Exam Pattern 2020 for State Eligibility Test in Computer Appreciation and Applications provides detailed information about subjects that helps to gain the highest marks in the examination. Go through the entire page and prepare according to the HARTRON SETC Syllabus 2020 to prepare well for the examination.
HARTRON SETC Exam Syllabus 2020 – Overview
Description
Details
Name of the Organization
Haryana State Electronics Development Corporation Limited
No of Vacancies
Various
Name of the Examination
State Eligibility Test in Computer Appreciation & Applications
Haryana State Electronics Development Corporation Limited will be selected the candidates through the following selection rounds. All the applicants must know the HARTON Selection Procedures given below.
Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result 2020 Released: Dear Candidates !!! Aspirants who are searching for the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result 2020 can get their results here. The Officials of Chandigarh Administration-Department of Personnel has conducted the written examination on 22nd December 2019 for filling 404 Administration Clerk, Steno-Typist posts. Also, the higher authority has declared the Chandigarh Administration Clerk on 13th February 2020. Go through the entire article to know more information about the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result 2020.
Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result 2020 @ chandigarh.gov.in
Aspirants who are eagerly waiting for the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result 2020 can access their results on this page. Now, the officials of Chandigarh Administration-Department of Personnel has announced the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result on 13th February 2020. So all the exam participants can keep in touch with our recruitment.guru webpage to get the day to day latest updates about the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result 2020. Candidates can know more information about the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Cut-Off Marks 2020 and Marit List 2020 on this webpage.
Chandigarh Administration Clerk, Steno-Typist Result 2020 – Overview
Written test (both Clerk & Steno-Typist), Typing Test on the computer (Clerk) and Stenography Test in English (Steno-Typist)
Job Location
Chandigarh
Official Website
chandigarh.gov.in
The above-given table gives information like Organization name, Post name, the number of posts, the Exam Date, the Result date, job location and also the official website of the board. For checking the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result 2020, candidates should have their roll number and password along with them. However, the Chandigarh Administration-Department of Personnel has released the Result based on the performance of the candidates in the Written Test. The officials have declared the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result 2020 on its official site. We have also given information about the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Cut Off Marks and Merit List 2020 on this page.
Chandigarh Administration Clerk Cut Off Marks 2020
In this section, candidates can get detailed information about the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Cut Off Marks 2020. The selection of the cut off marks is completely based upon the following factors.
The candidate's category (General, OBC, SC, ST).
The number of aspirants attended the examination.
The number of vacancies available.
The toughness of the question paper.
Based upon the previous year cut off marks.
If the aspirants score minimum marks in examination, they have a preference to go for the further rounds. Aspirants can check the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Cut Off Marks 2020 on the official site.
Chandigarh Administration Clerk Merit List 2020
If the aspirant scores the highest marks in the Examination, then the candidate is shortlisted according to the performance level and they are placed on the Chandigarh Administration ClerkMerit List 2020. Moreover, the officials provide the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Merit List 2020 according to the maximum marks obtained by the candidates. So download the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Merit List 2020 and then check it through name and roll number. Those candidates who in the Chandigarh Administration ClerkMerit List 2020 has the top preference for the next level of the selection process.
How to Download Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result 2020?
Visit the official website of Chandigarh Administration – Department of Personnel @ chandigarh.gov.in.
On the home page, you can find the What's New section.
From there find the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result 2020 Link.
check for the result link and then click on that link.
After that, enter the required details to log in.
Recheck the details that you have entered and then click the submit button.
Now, the Chandigarh Administration Clerk, Steno Typist Result 2020 appears on the screen.
Check the results and download them.
Take a print out of the result for further usage.
Direct Links to Download the Chandigarh Administration Clerk Result 2020
BARC Work Assistant Admit Card 2020 on February 2020 @ barc.gov.in. Thus, the exam will be held in the month of February 2020. Candidates who have applied for the post of Work Assistant Group C should download the admit card to take down the exam. Examiners are suggested to get ready to download the BARC Assistant Admit Card from the official website or through the direct link provided below.
BARC Work Assistant Admit Card 2020
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre will issue the admit card at any date of this month. The BARC Admit Card contains the details of candidates and also the exam details. Moreover, Aspirants must provide the Registration Number and the Password to download the hall ticket. The registration number had been provided at the time of application submission. Hence, the BARC Work Assistant Admit Card direct link will be active in the below section once the board releases it on the official website.
Download the BARC Work Assistant Admit Card from the direct link section. Before submitting the admit card aspirants are suggested to check to the details that you have given. Follow the steps given below to download the hall ticket.
Candidates Name
Name of the Candidate's Father
The venue of the Exam Centre
Date & Time of the Test
Reporting Time to the Exam Hall
Gender (Male/ Female)
Roll Number
Duration of the Online Test
Space for Invigilator's Signature
Registration Number
Name of the Test Centre
Category of the candidates
Space for Applicant's Signature
Name of the Exam Conducting Board
Photograph of the Candidate
Applicant's Date of Birth
Name of the Written Test
Important Guidelines for the Exam Takers
Full Name of the Applicant
Examination Centre Code
Signature of the Board Counselor
BARC Work Assistant Exam
BARC has announced the exam date in the month of February 2020. The exact date will be declared soon by the officials on their official portal. Stay tuned with our webpage to get the BARC Work Assistant Exam Date 2020. Download the BARC Work Assistant Syllabus PDF 2020 from this section. Get down to get the BARC Admit Card link.
BARC Work Assistant Exam Pattern: Preliminary Test
Sl No
Subjects
No of Questions
1
Mathematics
20
2
Science
20
3
General Awareness
10
Total Marks
150
Documents Along with BARC Assistant Admit Card
The below-listed documents are important to enter the exam hall. Competitors are suggested to download the admit card before the last date ends. If any mistakes found with the BARC Work Assistant Admit Card contenders must inform the board immediately to get the corrected admit card.
Original Photograph
Voter Card
Pan Card
Employee ID
College ID
PAN Card
Passport
Driving License
Any other ID proof issued by a Gazetted Officer
Bank Pass Book with the photograph
BARC Admit Card Download Steps 2020
Click on the BARC Hall Ticket 2020.
Enter the Registration Number and Password on the home page.
Now enter the image in the box that is available on the page.
Log in to get the BARC Assistant Admit Card.
Admit Card page will appear on the screen.
Fill the needed credentials into the hall ticket which are asked.
After filling recheck the details that you have entered.
Once done with the checking Submit the admit card.
Finally, download the hall ticket after the submission.
Take a photocopy of the BARC Exam Admit Card.
Carry for the exam and for the upcoming selection rounds.
1 – Where can I download the BARC Work Assistant Hall Ticket?
Applicants can get the direct link to download the BARC Group C Admit Card from the official portal/ from the direct link provided at the Important Link section.
2 – What is the BARC Work Assistant Hall Ticket Release Date?
Authorities of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre will issue the admit card at the declared date. Check with the official website frequently to get the admit card.
AKNU Results 2020 Declared: Dear Students !!! Understudies who have gone to the AKNU Degree Exam and hanging tight for AKNU Degree Exam Results can check the Adikavi Nannaya University Results 2020 here. We update the most recent Degree aftereffects of AKNU for different course results. Understudies who have shown up for these assessments can check the outcomes from the University Official Website i.e, aknu.edu.in. Additionally here on this page, we have connected an immediate connect to get the outcomes with no disarray. Understudies can stay in contact with our recruitment.guru website page to find out about the AKNU Results 2020.
The AKNU PG and UG Results are discharged on the official site. We update this AKNU Exam Results 2020 page with the most recent outcome that is discharged on the official site by the authority AKNU board. So to find out about the AKNU Degree Result and different outcomes up-and-comers must bookmark this page. For additional data about Adikavi Nannaya University Results, understudies can check the official site. Here, the understudies can get the Adikavi Nannaya University Results 2020 for Regular, Supplementary and Reval Examinations. Understudies can allude to this site page to get the most recent AKNU Results 2020.
Adikavi Nannaya University was built up in March 2006 through the Government of Andhra Pradesh Act No. 28 of 2006 at Rajahmundry. The Adikavi Nannaya University is one of a kind expansion to the current Universities in India. Adikavi Nannaya University is named after Adikavi of Telugu writing Nannayabhatta who is the primary validated writer of a book made in the Telugu Language. The Adikavi Nannaya University takes care of the instructive need of both East and West Godavari regions. In the new thousand years when the worldview has moved to make India a Knowledge society, Adikavi Nannaya University endeavors to be a functioning supporter of the ever-extending field of information.
AKNU Supplementary/Revaluation Results
Understudies get an opportunity to apply for the revaluation, if the understudies may get low stamps in the assessment, they can apply for the Revaluation results. So again the leader of the Examiner will audit the appropriate response paper. After revaluation, understudies may get high stamps. In any case, on the off chance that anybody got low checks, they can apply for the Supplementary Examinations. For Revaluation and Supplementary, understudies should pay the charge. Understudies can get all the outcomes from this page Regular, Revaluation, and Supplementary Results. Understudies of Adikavi Nannaya University can additionally get the AKNU Revaluation Results Also. Just we are encouraging the students to regularly visit this page. Get the most recent updates of all Adikavi Nannaya University Results 2020.
DAVV Result 2020 Released for BA, B.SC, B.Com, M.SC, M.Ed, and furthermore Other Exams on 13th February 2020 the Official Website. Hopefuls who are keen on downloading the DAVV Exam Results 2020 can look at the beneath segment. Get the total UG/PG Semester test stamps through www.dauniv.ac.in result 2020. We encourage the understudies to take the total insights about the DAVV online Results 2020 from our page. Understudies utilize this page to know all the DAVV time table, DAVV Admit Card, Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyala DAVV Result 2020. Experience the whole article to get all the most recent updates of DAVV University Results 2020.
देवी अहिल्या विश्वविधालय डीएवीवी परिणाम 2020 Announced. In this way, understudies of Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya University its the opportunity to look at your DAVV Result 2020. Applicants the individuals who have gone to the Annual and Semester Examination led by the Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya can look at the DAVV UG/PG Semester Exam Result 2020 given on this page. Here, we have refreshed the as of late discharged DAVV Results 2020 on this website page presently competitors can look at the Result through Online mode. Additionally, we have given direct connections to check the most recent DAVV Results 2020 in the beneath segment.
Visit the official website of Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya i.e dauniv.ac.in
On the home page, you will find the results tab and click on the results.
In the result page, you can find the results for various courses.
Click on the result link for which course you want to check.
The results will appear on the screen.
Take the printout of the DAVV Result until the official marks card is released by the DAVV Board.
About Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya
Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya is a State University whose locale was at first confined to Indore city. Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya is the University of Indore was developed in 1964 by an Act of Legislature of Madhya Pradesh. It directs all the schools inside the three grounds. There are numerous different schools subsidiary to the college in Indore. The college has in excess of 300 associated schools conferring instruction at undergrad and post-graduate levels in fundamental and expert controls. It has 9000 understudies on grounds and a sum of more than 300,000 understudies in partnered schools.
DAVV Supply/Revaluation Results
Understudies get an opportunity to apply for the revaluation, if the understudies may get low checks in the assessment, they can apply for the DAVV Revaluation Results. So again the leader of the Examiner will survey the appropriate response paper. After revaluation, understudies may get high stamps. All things considered, on the off chance that anybody got low stamps, they can apply for the Supplementary Examinations. For Revaluation/Supplementary, understudies should pay the expense. Understudies can get all the outcomes from this page Regular, Revaluation, and Supplementary Results. Additionally, Students of Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyala University, Indore can likewise get the MBA Results Also. Just we are encouraging the Students to as often as possible visit this page to get the most recent refreshed DAVV Result 2020.
A lower risk investment has lower potential for profit. A higher risk investment has a higher potential for profit but also a potential for a greater loss.
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MUMBAI: Fourteen entities including foreign banks, private equity funds and other local non-bank lenders have begun talks with the administrator of bankrupt mortgage lender Dewan Housing Finance (DHFL) and its adviser EY to buy the company's entire retail portfolio worth Rs 32,000 crore, multiple people involved in the process said.The Shriram Group, Edelweiss Financial Services, Adani Capital, a consortium led by the Piramal Group-Bain Capital and Indostar Capital are among those that have shown interest in buying the portfolio. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank are the foreign banks in the race along with private equity funds such as Warburg Pincus, AION Capital, Lone Star and SSG Capital. Local asset reconstruction company Arcil may also participate, people said.The winner is also expected to bag multiple real estate properties owned by DHFL, including 18 retail branches, multiple floors in the TCG Financial Centre and HDIL Towers in suburban Mumbai.'Interesting Opportunity'The expressions of interest are to be submitted on February 17 after which interested parties will begin due diligence. 74126781 "DHFL presents an interesting opportunity and we are considering submitting a no-obligation expression of interest," said Ravi Subramanian, MD, Shriram Housing Finance. "However, there are concerns over asset quality and inappropriate transactions as pointed out by the investigating authorities. While we are interested in taking a closer look at the possibility of a deal, a key driver of our interest in DHFL would be the ability to segregate the good from the bad."Edelweiss too confirmed the development and said it's focused on strengthening its retail credit franchise and that it regularly evaluates good quality organic or inorganic opportunities.DHFL is the first financial services company to be admitted to the bankruptcy courts after the Reserve Bank of India superseded its board and appointed former Indian Overseas Bank chief, R Subramaniakumar, as the administrator to resolve DHFL's Rs 85,000-crore debt. Its erstwhile promoter Kapil Wadhawan is behind bars on allegations of being instrumental in laundering huge sums of money as part of a deal with gangster Iqbal Mirchi.A recent Enforcement Directorate probe also alleged that Wadhawan siphoned off Rs 12,700 crore through 79 shadow companies and one lakh fictitious accounts. While bidders are being cautious regarding the asset quality, the fact that they would get a portfolio of Rs 62,000 crore – Rs 32,000 retail book and the remaining securitised pool at one go — is a big pull."The bidder will also not have to shell out more than Rs 5,000-6,000 crore initially as they have to pay back the lenders through the lifecycle of the loan — this is also bringing in a lot of investor interest," said one official involved in the sale process.After submitting expressions of interest, interested bidders will have to complete data analysis by March 2 and then submit final bids by April 16. The company's assets under management are at Rs 1.19 lakh crore.The DHFL administrator decided to segregate the loan book into three groups.
For one coronavirus patient at ground zero of the outbreak, the journey from infection to recovery was a nightmare scenario that entailed multiple hospital visits, symptoms so severe he thought he would die and quarantine under police watch.Tiger Ye -- not his real name -- is a 21-year-old student in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the new, still little understood virus first emerged. Ye, who doesn't want to be identified for fear of being ostracized, first suspected he'd caught the illness that's spread around the world on Jan. 21, when he felt too weak to finish dinner. He checked his temperature, and it was up.At the time, little was known about the virus now known as 2019-nCov, but paranoia was rapidly building after authorities confirmed the highly contagious pathogen was spreading between humans in the city of 11 million. It was midnight when Ye arrived at Wuhan's top-tier Tongji Hospital to see a waiting room filled with people like him. Feverish, he knew he would have to wait hours to be tested."I was scared," he said. "Countless cases were piling up on the desks, and every single doctor was wearing protective clothes, something I'd never seen before."What followed was more than two weeks of anxiety and desperation as Ye tried to confirm if he had the pneumonia-causing virus and get treatment for his increasingly severe symptoms. He was one of the lucky ones, beating the sickness in part because his father -- a health care worker -- was aware of the risks earlier than most of Wuhan's population.Under SiegeMore than 1,000 people have died from the new coronavirus in Hubei, the Chinese province that Wuhan is the capital of, as a severe shortage of hospital beds, testing kits and other basic medical equipment mean many have to stand in line for hours to get diagnosed, and some die before even seeing a doctor. China has quarantined vast swathes of Hubei, and the outbreak has caused parts of the world's second-biggest economy to shut down as scientists across the world race to find a cure.The night Ye first sought treatment, he was able to procure medicine from a smaller hospital nearby after abandoning the wait at Tongji. Because his symptoms weren't classed as very severe, doctors told him to just go home and quarantine himself.The first four days of the illness were brutal."I suffered from a high fever and pains that tortured every part of my body," said Ye, who's a big fan of Japanese culture and has ambitions of becoming a voice actor. He spent the days watching Japanese cartoons to distract from the discomfort.'Coughing Like I Was Going to Die'By the time his follow-up appointment at the hospital arrived four days later, the Wuhan government had locked down the city, barring anyone from leaving to stop the virus' spread. Everything changed in an instant: roads were empty, prices for fresh fruit and vegetables surged, and residents were unsure if they were even allowed to leave their apartments.Ye's condition had also deteriorated. "I was coughing like I was going to die," he said.At the hospital, multiple CT scans showed it was highly likely Ye had contracted the novel coronavirus and that it had spread to his lungs. Doctors deliberated if he qualified for a nucleic acid test, which would use the virus' genetic sequence to confirm if he had been infected, but it was decided his case wasn't severe enough, and the precious supply of test kits had to be reserved for more critical patients.'Hell's Door'Diagnosis has emerged as one of the major stumbling blocks in getting the virus under control in Hubei, where the number of those who fear they are infected far outweighs the capacity of hospitals to confirm if they are. On Thursday, Hubei began counting patients who were diagnosed via CT imaging alongside those who tested positive with the nucleic acid kits, resulting in a more than 45% surge in the number of confirmed cases, to nearly 50,000 people.As Ye convalesced at home after his second hospital visit -- not knowing if he had the virus or not -- his brother and grandmother also began to show symptoms of infection. Overnight, Ye's condition worsened to the point he thought he might die."I thought I was knocking on hell's door," he said.Ye went back to the hospital after his temperature soared to 39 degrees Celsius (about 102 degrees Fahrenheit). Doctors put him on an iv and administered Kaletra, a combination drug used to treat HIV that has shown some success in combating the virus, bringing his temperature down to 37 degrees by the end of the day.China Stages Clinical Trial Blitz in Search of Coronavirus CureA week after the symptoms first began, Ye appeared to be reaching a turning point.Virus ConfirmedThe young student's condition was steadily improving when he finally secured one of the coveted test kits on Jan. 29. It confirmed he had the virus that's triggered travel bans around the world. His doctor gave him a five-day course of the antiviral drug Aluvia and sent him back to his three-bedroom apartment for quarantine, in part because the hospital didn't have enough beds to accommodate him.Nine days later on Feb. 7, another set of nucleic acid tests came back negative for the virus, but Ye wasn't out of the woods. After reports that even patients who tested negative could slip into critical distress, the local government quarantined him in a hotel that had been turned into a makeshift hospital. Police stood guard outside to prevent anyone from leaving or entering.Ye was allowed to go home five days later, ending a saga that began more than three weeks ago. He's thankful he survived, and salutes the doctors and nurses who put their own lives at risk to help him. Some doctors told him they suspected they had the virus, but continued to treat patients.China's Sick Doctors Show How Infection Breaches Fan CoronavirusLike many Chinese, Ye is critical of the government's response to the outbreak, especially the slow initial response from local officials that meant a precious opportunity to contain the virus early on was missed. The two most senior Communist Party cadres in Hubei were replaced Thursday, as Beijing tries to gain control of the spiraling crisis."Hubei has missed one opportunity after another while they were trying to keep things under wraps," Ye said. "Things wouldn't have come to this point if the government hadn't hidden information a month ago."
New Delhi: Microsoft is pushing ahead with a strategy to create a separate business unit within large IT companies, in a drive to accelerate its India business. Called the ITeS 360 solution, the business unit helps IT companies in selling the entire stack of Microsoft offerings — ranging from artificial intelligence solutions to business applications — over the cloud to their customers who may be spread across the globe.The business unit leader housed inside an IT company will ensure that the local Microsoft office in that particular location helps rolling out the solution, Microsoft India president Anant Maheshwari told ET in an interview. This is a major overhaul in terms of strategy, under which the local Microsoft official would only be concerned with sales at the India operations.The country's largest software services firm, Tata Consultancy Services, and third largest HCL Technologies are some of the players that have already partnered with Microsoft on this initiative.Maheshwari said this was part of the "One Microsoft" strategy, which was a brainchild of chief executive Satya Nadella. The Microsoft CEO is expected to visit India later this month, the US-based company said.Maheshwari said Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service is really on a high growth clip in India, and nearly "doubled" in 2019. The company is now moving forward to deploying new business models in India and one of these is IteS 360."(The Indian) IT (industry) is today roughly a $180 billion industry. There is a significant value that they can provide in driving cloud solutions as part of this $180 billion. That's what they're doing when they go and drive digital transformation in different parts of the world," he said. "They need cloud solutions and Microsoft is able to provide them with not just cloud solutions, but also with very significant value adds like data, artificial intelligence, modern workplace solutions like business applications, etc."Maheshwari said there was no real scale that existed in the companies earlier, "but they have now understood the power of the go-to-market that we provide around the world". For instance, one of the largest IT companies in India could be in 10 different geographies and wants to call on 15 different customers. In every one of those geographies, a local Microsoft person works with them to go and address the business problem together, he said. 74127845
New Delhi: Here's a consumer demand generator — Covid-19. Masks and sanitizers are flying off the shop shelves in India, especially in metros like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata, thanks to buyers responding to the disease scare.Medical supplies shops in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru and epharmacy startups like 1mg and PharmEasy are all about to face an acute shortage of masks and sanitizers in the coming weeks.According to data shared by All Food and Drug License Holders Foundation (AFDLHF) that represents around 7,000 pharmaceutical suppliers, the total market for masks has swelled up to Rs 450 crore over the last two months from about Rs 200 crore annually. India currently has capacity to make 300,000-400,000 masks with 2.5-3 million in stocks now."Demand was earlier 600,000-700,000 a month. Now sales are about 1-1.2 million a month," said Abhay Pandey, national president, AFDLHF.Besides big metros, demand for masks, hand sanitizers and soaps is also high in Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Jaipur, according to online pharmacy PharmEasy. "We are experiencing a surge in demand for our protective face masks in India, North America, Europe and China. We are increasing production at multiple facilities globally to address the growing demand," said a Honeywell spokeswoman to an emailed questionnaire. In India, the US and Europe, Honeywell products are sold through retailers, including suppliers of industrial parts and safety products. 74127608 Export BanNirvana Being, a shop in the posh Khan Market locality in Delhi, is selling about 12,000-15,000 masks per day (offline and online). "We expect to be out of stock in a week or so," Jai Dhar Gupta, founder of Nirvana Being, told ET. The most efficient masks, also tested by Nelson Labs in USA, are Vogmask and the O2 Curve mask that have a viral filtration efficiency that exceeds 99.99%.Mumbai's Sterling Chemist shop at Peddar Road has run out of N95 masks since a week now. At Bengaluru's Yasho Pharma at Residency Road, demand for masks has gone up 200 times, while at Sreedhar Medicals, sales of masks and sanitisers have gone up 3-4 times over the last few weeks. In the upmarket areas of Kolkata such as Salt Lake and Park Street, the N95 masks and hand sanitizers are almost over in at least a couple of shops where ET checked.The export demand for 3 ply face masks has shot up especially from countries like China and Thailand. Overall, products that assist in health and general hygiene are seeing a surge.
New Delhi: Here's a consumer demand generator — Covid-19. Masks and sanitizers are flying off the shop shelves in India, especially in metros like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata, thanks to buyers responding to the disease scare.Medical supplies shops in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru and epharmacy startups like 1mg and PharmEasy are all about to face an acute shortage of masks and sanitizers in the coming weeks.According to data shared by All Food and Drug License Holders Foundation (AFDLHF) that represents around 7,000 pharmaceutical suppliers, the total market for masks has swelled up to Rs 450 crore over the last two months from about Rs 200 crore annually. India currently has capacity to make 300,000-400,000 masks with 2.5-3 million in stocks now."Demand was earlier 600,000-700,000 a month. Now sales are about 1-1.2 million a month," said Abhay Pandey, national president, AFDLHF.Besides big metros, demand for masks, hand sanitizers and soaps is also high in Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Jaipur, according to online pharmacy PharmEasy. "We are experiencing a surge in demand for our protective face masks in India, North America, Europe and China. We are increasing production at multiple facilities globally to address the growing demand," said a Honeywell spokeswoman to an emailed questionnaire. In India, the US and Europe, Honeywell products are sold through retailers, including suppliers of industrial parts and safety products. 74127608 Export BanNirvana Being, a shop in the posh Khan Market locality in Delhi, is selling about 12,000-15,000 masks per day (offline and online). "We expect to be out of stock in a week or so," Jai Dhar Gupta, founder of Nirvana Being, told ET. The most efficient masks, also tested by Nelson Labs in USA, are Vogmask and the O2 Curve mask that have a viral filtration efficiency that exceeds 99.99%.Mumbai's Sterling Chemist shop at Peddar Road has run out of N95 masks since a week now. At Bengaluru's Yasho Pharma at Residency Road, demand for masks has gone up 200 times, while at Sreedhar Medicals, sales of masks and sanitisers have gone up 3-4 times over the last few weeks. In the upmarket areas of Kolkata such as Salt Lake and Park Street, the N95 masks and hand sanitizers are almost over in at least a couple of shops where ET checked.The export demand for 3 ply face masks has shot up especially from countries like China and Thailand. Overall, products that assist in health and general hygiene are seeing a surge.
Mumbai: Telecom operators rejected Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) chairman RS Sharma's contention that 5G base price was recommended after industry feedback, saying all telcos unanimously had called for lower prices in the 5G band of 3.3-3.6 GHz and the 700 MHz bands."There was industry wide consultation and all players had said that the pricing in the significant — 700 MHz, 3.3-3.6 GHz—spectrum was over priced and had suggested alternative price points in our submissions," Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) director general Rajan Mathews told ET.The industry body, which represents private players Vodafone Idea, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, said the members were unanimous in highlighting the fact that spectrum was over priced and needed to be brought down substantially if the prime minister's vision for 'Digital India' was to become a reality."Further these high prices are contradictory to the Cabinet approved NDCP 2018, which stressed that the industry should not continue to be looked at to extract revenue for the government," Mathews added, highlighting the impact of not paying heed to their pleas.These comments come on the back of Sharma reiterating that recommendations on pricing of spectrum, including 5G airwaves, had been finalised based on industry feedback, and it is for the individual stakeholders to decide whether to participate in the auction or not.But the telcos' submissions say otherwise. For instance, Bharti Airtel wanted the value of 700 MHz band kept equal or lower than the price of 800 MHz band spectrum while Reliance Jio wanted the same band's base price to be kept at 50% of the reserve price (RP) in previous auction/estimated value. Vodafone Idea had suggested that Trai look at international benchmarks, financial deterioration and the exits/consolidations in sector whilst revising the valuation for the 700MHz band.When the regulator had asked if the realised/auction determined prices achieved in the October 2016 auction for various spectrum bands can be taken as the RP in respective spectrum bands for the forthcoming auction, the telcos suggested discounts.Airtel had suggested that for the spectrum band with market discovered auction price, the same reserve price without any indexation should be adopted. And for band which remained unsold in previous auction, 80% valuation as the RP should be taken. Jio wanted valuation to be revisited according to market realities and RP to be reduced.On the other hand, Vodafone Idea stressed on discounts ranging from 20% to 50% and reiterated that indexing as a practice should be discontinued.The tussle between the regulator and operators, weighed by huge debt and facing new adjusted gross revenue dues, over base price has been on since telcos said they cannot buy airwaves at Trai's given prices.
By Grant SmithGlobal oil demand will drop this quarter for the first time in over a decade as the coronavirus batters China's economy, the International Energy Agency said.The new estimates show that oil markets face a significant surplus despite the latest production cuts by OPEC and its partners. Crude already sank to a one-year low below $50 a barrel last week and the impact of the epidemic will be felt throughout the year, the agency said."Demand has been hit hard by the novel coronavirus and the widespread shutdown of China's economy," the Paris-based IEA said. "The crisis is ongoing and at this stage it is hard to be precise about the impact."World fuel consumption -- which had previously been expected to grow by 800,000 barrels a day during the three-month period, compared with a year earlier -- will instead contract by 435,000 a day, the IEA said in its monthly oil market report.For 2020 as a whole, the virus will curb annual growth in global consumption by about 30% to 825,000 barrels a day, the lowest since 2011. The effects will be more significant than those of the 2003 SARS epidemic because of China's increased importance and integration within the world economy.The outbreak has shuttered businesses and prompted the quarantine of tens of millions of people in China, the world's biggest crude importer. The country accounted for about 75% of last year's oil-demand growth, according to the IEA, which advises most major economies.Earlier this week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration also cut its demand outlook due to the virus. The EIA lowered its first quarter global petroleum and liquids consumption forecast by 880,000 barrels a day.U.S. crude futures have fallen 17% this year as traders assessed the impact of the epidemic. Consumers are unlikely to benefit from the drop in fuel prices because the disease will inflict damage on the wider economy, the IEA said.OPEC+ CutsThe outbreak has prompted Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, to push its allies in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and beyond to consider an emergency meeting and further production cuts. However, Russia, the kingdom's most important partner in managing supplies, has so far resisted the initiative.Even though the group launched new supply curbs at the start of this year, the slump in demand threatens markets with a surplus of about 1.7 million barrels a day during the first quarter and 560,000 in the second. Last month, OPEC was already pumping the least crude since the financial crisis of 2009, according to the IEA.The OPEC+ alliance had already faced an oversupply in the first half of 2020 because of the ongoing output surge from U.S. shale-oil drillers, the agency said. That industry is likely to remain resilient against the price slump until later in the year, it predicted.Given the abundance of supply, disruptions in OPEC members such as Libya and Nigeria are having little impact on prices, the agency said.
What have you made of the overall earnings season so far?As far as the earnings season has panned out till now, the banking sector has seen higher slippages from most of the public sector banks and to some extent the private sector banks. However, the asset quality has improved. The gross NPL as well as net NPL ratios of the banking sector has clearly improved. So far as the manufacturing sector is concerned, the revenue growth has been weak and that is quite obvious because the GDP growth has continued to slow down. The infrastructure demand for cement has remained weak. Steel demand from the automobile sector has remained weak but the lower commodity prices to some extent helped the manufacturing companies to improve their EBITDA margins. Overall, it has been quite a subdued season except for two or three banks which have reported good numbers. But overall, the numbers have not been very great. At the start of this fiscal, we were expecting much higher earnings growth for Nifty, but now, we are looking at 10% earnings growth for the current fiscal, going to 25% earnings growth for the next fiscal. How would you look at this market? Polarisation has increased now. Would you look at cheap stocks where growth visibility is not quite good now but if things stabilise growth could be better or would you go with the high PE stocks but steady growth?There is a disparity wherein the quality stocks are trading at valuations not seen before and it is very difficult to recommend these stocks at this kind of valuations and justify a target price and buy recommendation on these stocks. Yet some of the quality names have continued to grow. What do you make of the telecom pack? Is telecom interesting? Any picks over there?In fact, the telecom sector has gone through several years of sidelined growth. In between, there was aggressive buying of spectrum auction and as a result, the balance sheets of the existing telecom players have actually got bloated. In addition to that, we had new players who really targeted the overall prices and so there was a lot of pain in the sector. In the last few months we have started to see that the sector is kind of bottoming out, telecom prices, cellular voice prices have increased and in fact major players are now talking about the ARPU going up to Rs 150 per month and the ROCE going up to 15%. Now they have started to talk positively and we believe this is one of the key signs and in fact the stock prices have also responded. As you said, while we can definitely increase the ARPU, for return on capital employed to improve, the denominator that is capital employed should either come down or at least stay at the same level. But with the 5G auction, what happens is yet to be seen. If there is again aggressive buying at auction, then we will have the same situation of bloated balance sheets. That is the key point. But I think that the trends are positive. The body language of managements is positive and the outlook being shared by them also is going in the right direction. We are very positive on Bharti Airtel. We have increased our target price on that. We are also very positive on Reliance Industries. How do you think the markets would react to any escalation in coronavirus outbreak? Are FIIs closely watching across asset classes?So far as the coronavirus is concerned, there was earlier a lockdown in China up till February 10 and there was a feeling that if the lockdown continues much beyond that, then maybe the supply chain could get disrupted and some of the consumer durable companies who are dependent on their components from China could also be affected, as would the metals sector because China consumes almost 50% of the world metal production. Any slowdown in the infrastructure or GDP growth or demand in China would definitely impact commodity prices and to that extent some of the metal stocks could have been under pressure. But at the same time, the crude prices have corrected. So, investors are taking cognisance of these things. Yes, coronavirus outbreak in China could slow down global economic growth, but India is more of a domestic focussed economy and only particular sectors like chemicals, pharma and consumer durables are dependent on the Chinese supply. Other sectors would continue to perform as well. In fact, from a margin or cost perspective, any correction in the commodity prices could be positive for Indian manufacturing companies. Unless it becomes a globally riskoff trade which would impact FII flows into India, it could be something we need to worry about. We are seeing that the domestic mutual fund flows have been quite strong, especially in the small and midcap space. I am not too worried because of this and I think the Chinese authorities will definitely bring the overall thing under control very shortly. ONGC will declare its numbers tomorrow. What are you anticipating?I am not really following ONGC so much but we are seeing that a lot of these oil and gas companies have not reported great numbers, especially the Oil India Ltd. But on the other hand, city gas distributors are reporting a very great set of numbers. Overall, in the oil and gas space, the focus right now is on the gasifiers as well gas marketing companies. We continue to like that space within the oil and gas sector. What do you make of some of these India centric pharma companies mid-sized companies where institutional holding is limited? Sanjeev Zarbade: In the pharma sector, broadly valuations have been corrected. There are very good quality names there already. These stocks are trading in the range of 18 to 20 times one year forward earnings. Even the sector leaders are trading in these kinds of valuation multiples. We believe that the valuations are reasonable and at least the domestic focussed players like Alkem can continue to trade at a higher level. At the same time, there are some companies like Lupin which have a sizable domestic market play but valuations are still at quite a discount. This is a sector for stock picking and it can outperform going ahead because we believe here the worst is over.
Bengaluru: India saw the highest number of traditional computer shipments in 2019 in the past six years, according to International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The shipments include desktops, notebooks, and workstations.The country witnessed more than 18% year-on-year growth to 11 million units during 2019, according to the data released by IDC. The growth was largely driven by the government-driven education projects and upgrade purchases for Windows 10.According to the IDC data, the last quarter of the year (Q4) also saw a 16.5% YoY growth with 2.3 million shipments, primarily contributed by the strong growth in the commercial segment. In fact, after a YoY decline for five straight quarters, the consumer segment saw growth shipping close to 9,50,000 units.With notebook PCs becoming thinner and lighter with enhanced mobility features, consumers are increasingly giving preference to such devices in segments such as education sub verticals, and enterprises. "Notebook PCs saw highest-ever annual shipments with a 67.7% category share in 2019. The desktop category also witnessed a 5.7% YoY growth largely driven by the refresh buying from banking and financial institutions and touched a 30.7% category share for the year.On the processor front, shortage in availability of Intel's CPU was a concern point for vendors throughout the year and this provided room for AMD to enter certain segments and helped vendors to fill the gaps to some extent, noted IDC. However, Intel remains a leading processor brand with a 70.8% share in the traditional PC category.
By Avik ChandaWhile the recent budget has announced a number of tax holidays, waivers and incentives intended to pull the economy out of the woods, one school of thought opines that these may result in forced savings of earnings accrued, instead of increased spending. Even if these measures do buoy the economy via increased spending across all major sectors, that in itself will take considerable time to manifest itself on the ground. In the meantime, with persistent retrenchment in the service sectors, companies in India are continuing to struggle with personnel deemed to be 'surplus'.Retrenchment is possibly the means most frequently resorted to in a slowdown or recessionary scenario, going back at least to the days of the Great Depression of 1928, and arguably one of the least effective. India's unemployment rate has climbed steadily from 6.70 percent in November 2018 to 8.50 percent in October 2019, a record in over four decades. Any continuance of the approach of 'sacking people', while it may provide temporary pecuniary relief, is more likely than not to be counter-productive over a longer term. Retrenchment, especially once it becomes endemic, even within a given sector, dampens. It sends panic signals across allied sectors, which tend to follow suit, with a ripple adverse effect on investment and spending patterns. Further, it exerts a heavy emotional and psychological burden on the employees who remain and work under conditions of relentless stress and uncertainty, in turn diminishing their productivity – an aspect that is usually overlooked.Among HR circles, furloughing is increasingly being proposed as the alternative, 'softer' approach. The idea is simple. Companies will work out the seasonality of demand for workload, and by corollary, the number of employees that need to be actively engaged at various points in a given year. Accordingly, it prepares a roster, for a chunk of the employees, who are then sent on furlough, in this case – leave without pay, for a period of weeks, if not months, to cover the lean period for the company. On paper, such an approach sounds efficient, responsive and compared to retrenchment, humane.The challenge lies in its execution. First, the tenability of companies of being able to accurately predict downtime for its workforce. While this may be possible for companies whose products have an easily identifiable seasonality, e.g. manufacturers of aerated drinks, the principle is difficult to apply across a broad range of industries, particularly in a disruptive environment. Second, there is at present no robust and evolved framework of furloughing, within the legal system, governing the conditions and terms of disengagement. Consequently, the implementation of furloughing is likely to be more ad-hoc and company-specific. This in turn provides no safeguards to employees, and unilateral renewal of furloughing contracts on the part of employers effectively translates to retrenchment.In companies where momentary cost-saving is the need of the hour, there's another measure at hand, which while being more effective on the ground, has hugely positive symbolic import. Stakeholders taking a cut on their own sizeable bonuses, not to mention regular paychecks, will demonstrate that they can lead from the front in hard times, swiftly win them goodwill and trust from the workforce, and motivate employees to go the extra mile, in working towards common objectives.Even so, the question of effectively utilizing surplus workforce remains. And this is where the judicious redeployment of personnel to other departments or initiatives becomes important. This has a number of advantages over furlough. To begin with, the employees involved continue to receive their pay, and so be in a position to enjoy a sustained sense of financial security. But being in a new role also entails value-addition in terms of experience, and possibly skills, enhancing the self-esteem of the employees, leading to higher levels of motivation and productivity, and therefore a better return-on-investment on the salary being paid to those individuals. Finally, deployment in tasks and roles that play to the specific strengths of individuals may actually serve to reduce the cost and effort of re-skilling, prior to redeployment. However, one ought to be cautious in terms of how this is being executed. There is a traditional method, for instance used in all recruit-to-order instances, where the HR team maps a combination of industry and domain experience, along with educational qualifications, in order to ascertain the degree of fitment to the roles in question.The drawback here is that it misses asking some key questions. What are these individuals, slated to be redeployed, intrinsically good at? What's their true potential with regard to the identified attributes that are presently in demand by the organization? And how can firms show that they continue to value the contribution of its employees? Instituting a new approach to talent management warrants not just a new mindset that is more open and experimental, but also a new set of tools. The starting point for a project of redeployment needs to be a comprehensive measure of the employees' strengths, mindsets and potential – as opposed to focusing on the lacunae that need to be addressed. In this regard, the application of Positive Psychology, in lieu of traditional psychometrics, would be most effective. By fostering positive emotions in individuals, deeper engagement in one's work and better relationships with co-workers, infusing jobs with more meaning and a sense of accomplishment, the mechanism may provide the answer that companies so urgently need.Avik Chanda is a business advisor, researcher, columnist and entrepreneur. He is the author of "From Command To Empathy: Using EQ in the Age of Disruption".
Simsim, a social commerce startup in India, said on Friday it has raised $16 million in seven months of its existence as it attempts to replicate the offline retail experience in the digital world with help from influencers.
The Gurgaon-based startup said it raised $16 million across seed, Series A and Series B financing rounds from Accel Partners, Shunwei Capital and Good Capital. (The most recent round, Series B, was of $8 million in size.)
"Despite e-commerce players bandying out major discounts, most of the sales in India are still happening in brick-and-mortar stores. There is a simple reason for that: Trust," explained Amit Bagaria, co-founder of Simsim, in an interview with TechCrunch.
The vast majority of Indians are still not comfortable with reading descriptions — and that too in English, he said.
Simsim is taking a different approach to tackle this opportunity. On its app, users watch short-videos produced in local languages by influencers who apply beauty products or try out dresses and explain the ins-and-outs of the products. Below the video, the items appear as they are being discussed and users can tap on them to proceed with the purchase.
“Videos help in educating users about the category. So many of them may not have used face masks, for instance. But it becomes easier when the community influencer is able to show them how to apply it,” said Rohan Malhotra, managing partner at Good Capital, in an interview with TechCrunch.
Influencers typically sell a range of items and users can follow them to browse through the past catalog and stay on top of future sales, said Bagaria, who previously worked at the e-commerce venture of financial services firm Paytm .
“This interactiveness is enabling Simsim to mimic the offline stores experience,” said Malhotra, who is one of the earliest investors in Meesho, also a social commerce startup that last year received backing from Facebook and Prosus Ventures.
“The beauty to me of social commerce is that you’re not changing consumer behavior. People are used to consuming on WhatsApp — and it’s working for Meesho. Over here, you are getting the touch and feel experience and are able to mentally picture the items much clearer,” he said.
Simsim handles the inventories, which it sources from manufacturers and brands, and it works with a number of logistics players to deliver the products.
“Several Indian cities and towns are some of the biggest production hubs of various high-quality items. But these people have not been able to efficiently sell online or grow their network in the offline world. On Simsim, they are able to work with influencers and market their products,” said Bagaria.
The platform today works with more than 1,200 influencers, who get a commission for each item they sell, said Bagaria, who plans to grow this figure to 100,000 in the coming years.
Even as Simsim, which has been open to users for six months, is still in its nascent stage, it is beginning to show some growth. It has amassed over a million users, most of whom live in small cities and towns, and it is selling thousands of items each day, said Bagaria.
He said the platform, which currently supports Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and English, will add more than a dozen additional languages by the end of the year. In about a month, Simsim also plans to start showing live videos, where influencers will be able to answer queries from users.
In case you haven’t heard, TC Sessions: Mobility is back for second year. This one-day event, which will be held May 14 in San Jose, promises to feature some of best and brightest engineers, policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs and innovators, all of whom are vying to be a part of this new age of transportation.
Attendees of TC Sessions: Mobility can expect interviews with founders, investors and inventors, demos of the latest tech, breakout sessions, dozens of startup exhibits and opportunities to network and recruit.
We have announced several speakers for the event, including Klaus Zellmer, the president and CEO of Porsche Cars North America, Waymo's href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/08/tc-sessions-mobility-2020-boris-sofman-of-waymo-and-nancy-sun-of-ike/">Boris Sofman, Ike Robotics co-founder and chief engineer Nancy Sun, Trucks VC general partner Reilly Brennan and Shin-pei Tsay, director of policy, cities and transportation at Uber.
And now we have another star to add to our TC Sessions: Mobility list. TechCrunch is excited to announce that Olaf Sakkers, general partner at Maniv Mobility will be joining us on stage this year. Sakkers is a founding partner at Maniv Mobility, a global fund investing in mobility.
Maniv started out with a focus on transportation and mobility-related startups in Israel, with a few in investments in the U.S. It expanded its mission to the global stage, a move buoyed by a $100 million fund that it closed last July with backing from 12 corporations, including the venture arms of Aptiv, BMW, Hyundai, Lear Corp., LG Electronics, the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, Shell and Valeo.
Maniv’s portfolio includes vehicle security company Owlcam, peer-to-peer car-sharing company Turo, teleoperations startup Phantom Auto, autonomous vehicle-focused chipmaker Hailo, shared electric moped company Revel, Spain-based car subscription startup Bipi and in-vehicle software management firm Aurora Labs.
Stay tuned to see who we'll announce next.
And … $250 Early-Bird tickets are now on sale — save $100 on tickets before prices go up on April 9; book today.
Students, you can grab your tickets for just $50 here.
If you’re an early-stage, mobility startup, make sure you grab an exhibitor package to get your startup in front of today’s leading mobility leaders. Packages come with 4 tickets each and are just $2000. Book yours here.
Hollie Russon Gilman is a Fellow at New America's Political Reform Program, Lecturer at Columbia University, a Non-Resident Fellow at Georgetown's Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation and is the co-author of Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis.
Tara Dawson McGuinness, a former senior advisor to President Obama, is a Senior Fellow at New America and teaches public policy in the McCourt school at Georgetown University.
What happened in Iowa’s Democratic caucus last week is a textbook example of how applying technological approaches to public sector work can go badly wrong just when we need it to go right.
While it’s possible to conclude that Iowa teaches us that we shouldn't let tech anywhere near a governmental process, this is the wrong conclusion to reach, and mixes the complexity of what happened and didn't happen. Technology won't fix a broken policy and the key is understanding what it is good for.
What does it look like to get technology right in solving public problems? There are three core principles that can help more effectively build public-interest technology: solve an actual problem, design with and for users and their lives in mind and start small (test, improve, test).
Before developing an app or throwing a new technology into the mix in a political process it is worth asking: what is the goal of this app, and what will an app do that will improve on the existing process?
Getting it right starts with understanding the humans who will use what you build to solve an actual problem. What do they actually need? In the case of Iowa, this would have meant asking seasoned local organizers about what would help them during the vote count. It also means talking directly to precinct captains and caucus goers and observing the unique process in which neighbors convince neighbors to move to a different corner of a school gymnasium when their candidate hasn't been successful. In addition to asking about the idea of a web application, it is critical to test the application with real users under real conditions to see how it works and make improvements.
In building such a critical game-day app, you need to test it under more real-world conditions, which means adoption and ease of use matters. While Shadow (the company charged with this build) did a lightweight test with some users, there wasn't the runway to adapt or learn from those for whom the app was designed. The app may have worked fine, but that doesn't matter if people didn't use it or couldn't download it.
One model of how this works can be found in the Nurse Family Partnership, a high-impact nonprofit that helps first-time, low-income moms.
This nonprofit has adapted to have feedback loops from its moms and nurses via email and text messages. It even has a full-time role "responsible for supporting the organization's vision to scale plan by listening and learning from primary, secondary and internal customers to assess what can be done to offer an exceptional Nurse-Family Partnership experience."
Building on its program of in-person assistance, the Nurse Family Partnership co-designed an app (with Hopelab, a social innovation lab in collaboration with behavioral-science based software company Ayogo). The Goal Mama app builds upon the relationship between nurses and moms. It was developed with these clients in mind after research showed the majority of moms in the program were using their smartphones extensively, so this would help meet moms where they were. Through this approach of using technology and data to address the needs of their workforce and clients, they have served 309,787 moms across 633 counties and 41 states.
Another example is the work of Built for Zero, a national effort focused on the ambitious goal of ending homelessness across 80 cities and counties. Community organizers start with the personal challenges of the unhoused — they know that without understanding the person and their needs, they won't be able to build successful interventions that get them housed. Their work combines a methodology of human-centered organizing with smart data science to deliver constant assessment and improvements in their work, and they have a collaboration with the Tableau foundation to build and train communities to collect data with new standards and monitor progress toward a goal of zero homelessness.
Good tech always starts small, tests, learns and improves with real users. Parties, governments and nonprofits should expand on the learning methods that are common to tech startups and espoused by Eric Reis in The Lean Startup. By starting with small tests and learning quickly, public-interest technology acknowledges the high stakes of building technology to improve democracy: real people's lives are at stake. With questions about equity, justice, legitimacy and integrity on the line, starting small helps ensure enough runway to make important changes and work out the kinks.
Take for example the work of Alia. Launched by the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), it’s the first benefits portal for house cleaners. Domestic workers do not typically receive employee benefits, making things like taking a sick day or visiting a doctor impossible without losing pay.
Its easy-to-use interface enables people who hire house cleaners to contribute directly to their benefits, allowing workers to receive paid time off, accident insurance and life insurance. Alia’s engineers benefited from deep user insights gained by connecting to a network of house cleaners. In the increasing gig economy, the Alia model may be instructive for a range of employees across local, state and federal levels. Obama organizers in 2008 dramatically increased volunteerism (up to 18%) just by A/B testing the words and colors used for the call-to-action on their website.
There are many instructive public interest technologies that focus on designing not just for the user. This includes work in civil society such as Center for Civic Design, ensuring people can have easy and seamless interactions with government, and The Principles for Digital Development, the first of which is "design with the user." There is also work being done inside governments, from the Government Digital Service in the U.K. to the work of the United States Digital Service, which was launched in the Obama administration.
Finally, it also helps to deeply understand the conditions in which technology will be used. What are the lived experiences of the people who will be using the tool? Did the designers dig in and attend a caucus to see how paper has captured the moving of bodies and changing of minds in gyms, cafes and VFW halls?
In the case of Iowa, it requires understanding the caucuses norms, rules and culture. A political caucus is a unique situation.
Not to mention, this year the Iowa Caucus deployed several process changes to increase transparency but also complexify the process, which needed to also be taken into account when deploying a tech solution. Understanding the conditions in which technology is deployed requires a nuanced understanding of policies and behavior and how policy changes can impact design choices.
Building a technical solution without doing the user-research to see what people really need runs the risk of reducing credibility and further eroding trust. Building the technology itself is often the simple part. The complex part is relational. It requires investing in capacity to engage, train, test and iterate.
We are accustomed to same-day delivery and instantaneous streaming in our private and social lives, which raises our expectations for what we want from the public sector. The push to modernize and streamline is what leads to believing an app is the solution. But building the next killer app for our democracy requires more than just prototyping a splashy tool.
Public-interest technology means working toward the broader, difficult challenge of rebuilding trust in our democracy. Every time we deploy tech for the means of modernizing a process, we need to remember this end goal and make sure we're getting it right.
Facebook is adding another app to its group of experimental projects from the NPE Team, an initiative it announced last year focused on rapidly trying out new ideas in social to see how users react. This week, the team released its fourth app experiment with the launch of Hobbi, a photo and video sharing app designed for documenting your personal projects and hobbies.
Though Hobbi takes obvious cues from Pinterest, it’s not just a pinboard of inspirational ideas. Instead, the app is designed to help hobbyists organize photos of their own projects into themed collections — like gardening, cooking, arts & crafts, décor and more. The idea is to track the progress you’re making over time.
There’s not a social networking component to the app beyond being able to create video highlight reels you could share externally with friends after your projects are complete.
In that sense, Hobbi is more like an editor and organizer than any sort of new social network.
It’s also a very simple app with limited controls or editing options, compared with something like Instagram’s more robust Stories editor, for instance.
It’s interesting, however, that Hobbi’s launch follows shortly after that of Tangi, an app from Google’s Area 120 incubator also focused on creativity, hobbies, and DIY content. Arguably Tangi is a different type of app, as it’s designed around short-form video — similar to a curated TikTok for DIY. But for both companies to launch experiments in the DIY space signals that’s an area where there’s potential to still carve out a niche, despite Pinterest’s domination as a home for hobbies, projects, and interests.
Facebook so far has launched just a handful of NPE Team-branded apps. In November, it launched a chat app for making friends called Bump and a social music app Aux. Its first experiment, a meme editor called Whale, has already shut down, however.
Facebook so far has declined to comment on its plans for any individual NPE Team app, pointing back to its original announcement that said availability would depend on the app. The company had also said the experiments in many cases would be short-lived, as the NPE Team will shut down apps that people don’t find useful and then move on to create others.
The Information also today published news of Hobbi’s launch, noting that Pinterest shares fell on the news.
Hobbi became available as of yesterday on iOS only. We were able to download it in the U.S. but it’s also available in Columbia, Belgium, Spain, and Ukraine.
Major artificial intelligence and graphics chipmaker Nvidia reported its 2020Q4 financials today (the company's fiscal quarter ends on January 26th, 2020). The company announced revenues of $3.11 billion for the quarter, a jump of 41% from the year ago quarter and a small bump from the third quarter.
Even more importantly, the company's gross margin improved remarkably year-over-year, moving from 54.7% to 64.9%. The company reported a net income of $950 million for the quarter. After-hours traders jumped into the stock, with Yahoo Finance reporting a roughly 6.32% increase in the company's share price immediately following the earnings.
That positive news though didn't overcome the full-year fiscal numbers though, which painted a more complicated picture for the company. Revenue was down slightly for the 2020 fiscal year compared to 2019, and operating expenses, operating income, net income, and diluted earnings all headed the wrong way, in some cases by more than 30%.
Nvidia's struggles in 2019 weren't unique to the chipmaker, as last year was bruising for the chip industry overall. The industry's total sales declined the fastest in more than a decade from a number of factors, including less demand in some parts of the market, oversupply in other parts of the market (driving down prices and thus sales revenue), as well as on-going trade tensions between the U.S., China, South Korea, and Japan.
Nvidia itself has had a huge number of ups and down in recent years. Riding the crest of the crypto wave, the company's stock soared as crypto miners sought the company's GPUs, which were well-positioned to handle the hashing functions at the core of many proof-of-work crypto protocols. Yet, the crypto winter crushed the stock, which saw a precipitous decline of 50% at the tail end of 2018.
The past year though has seen Nvidia turn something of a corner. It started the year with a share price of around $150, and today closed at nearly $271, a gain of more than 80%. Part of that story — as it is with the rest of the chip industry — is the sense that a whole new set of workflows (and therefore markets) are moving to silicon, including in automotive, high-performance computing (where Nvidia acquired Mellanox for $6.9 billion early last year), Internet of Things, and even in 5G.
That excitement on the big corporate side has also shown up in the venture world as well. Startups like Cerebras, Nuvia, Graphcore and more are targeting these new workflows, putting pressure on Nvidia, Intel, and other incumbents to outperform these upstarts.
Soylent, the once high-flying Los Angeles-based meal replacement startup that has raised $72.4 million in financing from investors including Google Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Andreessen Horowitz, has shaken up its executive team.
This week, the company announced in a blog post that the company’s chief financial officer, Demir Vangelov, would be taking over the top spot at the company and current chief executive Bryan Crowley would be stepping down.
“We would like to thank Bryan Crowley for his immense contributions to the company,” wrote Soylent chairman and founder Rob Rhinehart, in a statement.
Vangelov, who’s taking over from Crowley, previously served as an executive at the milk alternative company Califia Foods and at Oberto Foods, so he knows consumer packaged brands.
Crowley came to the company with grand ambitions to revitalize the Soylent brand and product line. The company had introduced a line of snack bars to complement its line of powders and drinks, while updating its drink line with a nootropic beverage containing caffeine and supplements supposedly designed to boost cognitive performance in addition to providing a meal replacement.
Soylent also set up fancy digs in Los Angeles’ arts district and established a Food Innovation Lab, which only a year ago awarded $25,000 to a few food startups working there.
Now, only a year later, the Food Innovation Lab is shuttered and Soylent has moved to a smaller office space. The company declined to comment on the news or its new strategy.
In some ways, Soylent may suffer from being a progenitor of an investment thesis which has passed it by. When the company launched in 2013, it was a fairly novel idea to start a new food brand, as Rhinehart notes in the blog post announcing the executive change:
Soylent started as a movement. In 2013, there was scarcely any innovation or attention to one of the world’s most important product sectors: our food. Today, innovative food companies are performing record-breaking IPOs, new retailers are raising massive growth rounds, and food, agriculture, and ingredient technologies are some of the most disruptive startups in the ecosystem. But we still have a lot of work to do to fulfill Soylent's mission of nutrition for all.
Today we are making some changes at the company. We are renewing our commitment to being transparent, authentic and science-driven, all while putting the customer first. To do this we are going to re-focus on our core products. We will be improving our current product line as well as bringing some truly innovative ideas off the shelf and into the market, and we will be improving our prices by focusing on quality over quantity when it comes to distribution and marketing.
It’s par for the course that major tech platforms will launch a lot of services, then sunset those that are less popular. But this week comes one that especially smarts (for me and some of my TechCrunch coworkers at least). LinkedIn has announced that on March 18, it will shut down Sales Navigator for Gmail, an extension that provided further information about the person you were emailing in Gmail, which was formerly known as Rapportive (which it picked up by way of an acquisition of a startup of the same name).
LinkedIn told TechCrunch that the reason was low usage.
"We continuously work with our customers and partners to focus on building and supporting the features that best help them build and maintain relationships with their buyers,” said Lindsey Edwards, LinkedIn’s product lead for LinkedIn Sales Solutions. “As a result of low adoption, we have decided to sunset the Sales Navigator for Gmail feature on March 18, 2020."
The rise and fall of Sales Navigator for Gmail-née-Rapportive underscores a lot of what makes me sad, cynical and annoyed about how platforms ingest amazing startups, with all the prospects for growth that this entails, and then the service dies. In the case of this particular sunset, it also underscores how LinkedIn itself has changed.
A little history.
LinkedIn acquired Rapportive back in 2012 for a price reported to be in the region of $15 million — a song, really — part of a small acquisition spree aimed at improving how LinkedIn helped people manage their business contacts (others in the spree included Cardmunch and ConnectedHQ).
When it originally launched as a startup, Rapprtive provided a little bit of magic to Gmail users. When you had the extension activated, if you typed in an email address, a list of the person’s social accounts, information from their LinkedIn profiles and recent Tweets would come up in the margin. (Magic is the operative word here: the founder, Rahul Vohra, eventually left LinkedIn and many years later founded Superhuman, an email app with lots of extra features that aims to “make you feel like you have superpowers.”)
The idea was that you could use those bits of information to craft a richer email, for example if you were pitching something to the person in question, or trying to impress them for another reason.
Putting aside the fact that sometimes having access to too much information can be creepy, the idea was very clever in that way that simple things can be. In the backend, Rapportive was linking up and integrating all that information by way of the email address you’d just typed in, which meant that you could also use the extension for reverse engineering. If you were guessing at an email address, you could type it in and see if the person’s social profiles popped up.
If they did, you knew you were typing in an address that wouldn’t bounce. (This proved to be a huge thing for someone like me trying to quietly hunt down, for example, if someone had taken a job at a particular company, say if a startup she or he worked for had gotten stealthily acquired.)
After LinkedIn acquired Rapportive, it was business as usual for a while, with LinkedIn keeping the name and all its features intact.
But over time, that changed. LinkedIn itself went through a process of cutting off a lot of apps that tapped into its social graph, essentially building the walls around its garden a little higher to encourage more people to pay up for LinkedIn’s premium tiers, or at least visit an increasingly more limited version of the site as free users to bring it more traffic (and possibly get upsold to the premium tiers).
A free version of the product remained, but was regularly offline and generally quite buggy. At least one fan had hacked a way to keep using it in a less buggy way, but all in all, it’s really no surprise that a product that at one time did that magical thing you wish for in all of your tech — it “just worked” — which once reportedly had 65 million contact lookups per month (and probably, given more attention, would have grown with the growth of everything else on this internet of ours) eventually found itself with “low adoption.”
In each of the recent turns, I’ve tried to find useful replacements, and I hope I do find one eventually (I’m trying another one out today, ping me if you have suggestions too).
In the meantime, farewell to one of the most useful tools LinkedIn had under its belt.
A team at MIT's CSAIL demonstrated a new kind of "skin" designed to bring a sense of touch and place to soft robotic arms. The findings, which debuted in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters this week, find the researchers covering a soft robotic "trunk" in flexible sensors made from material used for "electromagnetic interference shielding."
The usually rigid material was reconfigured into a "kirigami" configuration, laser cut and reassembled into chain-linked rows so it can be stretched and flexed to adhere to the shape of the robot and move with it. The components are essentially off-the-shelf for most labs and could serve as a low-cost way to add a sense of touch to the growing field of soft robots.
"Think of your own body: You can close your eyes and reconstruct the world based on feedback from your skin," CSAIL's Daniela Rus said in a release announcing the research. "We want to design those same capabilities for soft robots."
Researchers then built a neural network to process the results and distinguish the signal from the noise that the sensors were collecting, reinforced by a more traditional motion capture system. Moving forward, CSAIL will be exploring new configurations and working to improve the neural networks.
Tinder is testing a series of new social features designed to boost conversations between users on its service. One of the new features is a conversational prompt, first teased during parent company Match Group’s recent earnings. The prompt encourages users to respond to questions or finish a sentence in order to better showcase their personality with their answers. The other, a “Share to Matches” option, allows users to post photos, looping videos and other content that can only be seen by their existing matches.
With both new additions, the overall goal is to encourage Tinder users to start messaging with others in the app.
Breaking the ice to chat with an online stranger is often one of the more difficult aspects of online dating. That’s led to many a Tinder user resorting to cheesy one-liners, jokes or overly risque remarks as an attempt to get a reaction or make light of the awkwardness of being on a dating app to begin with. But now Tinder seems to be borrowing ideas from Match Group’s newest acquisition, Hinge, which relies on conversational prompts and captioned photos to get users to show off more of their personality on their profiles.
Meanwhile, Tinder’s new option to upload content that can only be seen by existing matches could be a useful way of nudging shy matches to initiate a conversation for the first time, as well as re-engage matches where the conversation had dropped off.
The features were discovered by app sleuth Jane Manchun Wong and confirmed by Tinder as tests. However, Match Group said earlier this month during earnings that Tinder would soon roll out new social engagement features, including prompts.
A Tinder spokesperson confirmed both features are tests.
“At Tinder, our goal is to make it easier to connect with new people. We're testing ways to make it easier for members to express themselves and share their personalities, while keeping the experience simple and fun,” they said. “These changes may or may not roll out to everyone over time.”
Because the features are tests, some users may see both, some may see neither, and some may see just one or the other.
They may also not appear exactly as showcased in the above tweets.
For example, below is an image of a conversational prompt being shown to a Tinder U user.
Tinder declined to say where or when the tests were running or when they may roll out more broadly to users. However, the Spring Break prompt offers a good hint in terms of when something like this may become more broadly available to test recipients.
The additions are only two of several tests Tinder will run in the months ahead. The now-massive dating app can afford to be more experimental, having already established itself as a market leader — in 2019, Tinder brought in $1.2 billion in revenue, leading it to be the top-grossing (non-game) app of the year.
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Today we’re adding five names to the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) club and listing all preceding members in a single post. This series, which was a bit of an accident, if I’m being honest, has included more than a dozen companies that have reached $100 million ARR, along with a handful more that are close.
Today we’re adding Seismic, ThoughtSpot, Noom, Riskified and Moveable Ink to the list. As always, we have funding histories, growth metrics and interviews below on the new group. But at this juncture, as we head toward the two-dozen company mark, it’s a good time to ask, what is this list that we’re compiling?
At first, the goal of the jokingly-named “$100 million ARR club” was to highlight companies that were of real scale, an idea designed to gently push back against the “unicorn” moniker. As more and more unicorns were born and the private-capital world became adept at getting startups of all maturity levels over the requisite $1 billion valuation threshold, the term began to feel too diluted to have much signaling value.
While, in contrast, $100 million in ARR felt much more “hard” to the valuation metric’s comparable squishiness. But, since that first post, more and more companies have written in, sharing hard metrics and the series has continued. Perhaps we’re really just compiling an IPO watchlist, a grouping of firms that will probably go (or should go) public in the next 18 months.
Let’s dig into our new additions. Then, we’ll list all our prior entrants with links to our preceding coverage in case you are playing catch up. With that, here’s the entire $100 million ARR club a list of companies that we think could go public inside the next six quarters.
Riot Ventures, the Los Angeles-based, early-stage and deep technology investment firm is going out to market to raise a $75 million second fund to finance the development of startups in LA and beyond, according to fundraising documents viewed by TechCrunch.
The firm has largely flown under the radar, but it has been investing in startups applying innovations in automation, artificial intelligence, computer vision, computational biology, material sciences and robotics to industrial products and processes for the past two years.
Its first fund was a modest $10 million vehicle that the firm’s co-founders, Stephen Marcus and Will Coffield, raised to test the thesis their fledgling fund was exploring. Chiefly, they thought that robotics and machine learning were going to transform everything from aerospace to industrial manufacturing and retail, and they saw Los Angeles as a unique location from which to deploy capital.
Since the initial fund launched in 2017, the companies in Riot’s portfolio — including a number of later-stage special purpose investments made in companies like the point-of-sale tablet manufacturer Toast; the metal 3D printing equipment manufacturer Desktop Metal; and Shield AI, a stealthy drone company that works in the defense industry — are now worth roughly $16 billion.
In all, Riot has invested around $60 million through its direct investments and special purpose vehicles. But it’s not the capital that sets the firm apart, according to the pitch deck viewed by TechCrunch.
Marcus has a long background in angel investing and company creation. He’s a six-time serial entrepreneur whose sold telecom companies to acquirers like American Tower, Sprint and National Grid. Meanwhile, Coffield has spent the past several years building out a network in Los Angeles and eight years in the venture capital industry.
However, the firm places its emphasis on its newest partner, Jenna Bryant, a recruiter who spent the past years building out teams for some of the biggest names in the Los Angeles technology and entertainment industries, including Walt Disney Co., Oculus, Snap, Tinder and others.
“We actively recruit for our portfolio companies which enables us to meet a large swath of highly technical people,” the firm writes in its pitch deck. “We use this pool to win deals, make our companies more valuable, and find future hard tech founders. This is a core asset and function for our firm led by our Partner Jenna Bryant.”
Just as important as its recruitment practice is its position in Los Angeles, which is emerging as a hotbed for talent in robotics, rocketry, drones and defense. That’s borne out by investments in companies like Shield AI and Elementary Robotics — two companies in the Riot portfolio based in Southern California.
Automated license plate readers, ALPRs, would be controversial even if they were responsibly employed by the governments that run them. Unfortunately, and to no one’s surprise, the way they actually operate is “deeply disturbing and confirm[s] our worst fears about the misuse of this data,” according to an audit of the programs instigated by a Californian legislator.
“What we've learned today is that many law enforcement agencies are violating state law, are retaining personal data for lengthy periods of time, and are disseminating this personal data broadly. This state of affairs is totally unacceptable,” said California State Senator Scott Weiner (D-SF), who called for the audit of these programs. The four agencies audited were the LAPD, Fresno PD and the Marin and Sacramento County Sheriffs Departments.
The inquiry revealed that the programs can barely justify their existence and do not seem to have, let alone follow, best practices for security and privacy:
Los Angeles alone stores 320 million license plate images, 99.9% of which were not being sought by law enforcement at the time of collection.
Those images were shared with “hundreds” of other agencies but there was no record of how this was justified legally or accomplished properly.
None of the agencies has a privacy policy in line with requirements established in 2016. Three could not adequately explain access and oversight permissions, or how and when data would or could be destroyed, “and the remaining agency has not developed a policy at all.”
There were almost no policies or protections regarding account creation and use and have never audited their own systems.
Three of the agencies store their images and data with a cloud vendor, the contract for which had inadequate if any protections for that data.
In other words, “there is significant cause for alarm,” the press release stated. As the programs appear to violate state law they may be prosecuted, and as existing law appears to be inadequate to the task of regulating them, new ones must be proposed, Wiener said, and he is working on it.
Earlier this week, much was made of the e-commerce business Brandless deciding to shutter its doors. Industry observers found its fate particularly interesting, given that Brandless was only a few years old and had raised substantial funding, including $100 million from the SoftBank Vision Fund alone.
Still, Brandless is far from alone in having tried — and failed — to break away from its many rivals and become the kind of juggernaut that makes venture investors money. There are thousands of companies that have raised funding over the last decade that once looked like bigger opportunities or whose growth has slowed and for which follow-on dollars are harder to find.
Ravi Viswanathan of the venture firm NewView Capital sums up what’s happening out there this way: “Firms and funds are generally coming back to market faster with bigger funds, and they’e investing a lot more, so you’re seeing portfolio bloat across the industry. But [limited partners, the outfits and people supplying money to venture funds] are investing for you to make money, and that means spending time on the needle movers.”
So what’s a startup with dwindling attention from its investors to do? There are numerous options, some of which are newer than others, and some of which are more desirable than others.
Naturally some — maybe most — of these companies will eventually decide, like Brandless, to close down the works. This is the least favorable scenario for everyone involved, as it means lost jobs, lost dollars and often an uncertain future for the founders who’ve poured their heart and soul into the company.
Venture capitalists don’t love closing down companies, either, as it means writing down the holdings in their financial statements to their own investors, something they’d rather put off as long as possible — though external events can also impact the timing.
As Jeff Clavier of the venture firm Uncork Capital explains it, “We maintain a company’s valuation on our books until we decide to impair it.” But if a venture firm has a “big gain [because another company sold or went public], we might as well take advantage and sell the shares for $1 or forego them altogether,” minimizing the firm’s overall tax bill in the process.
Other companies that have grown more self-sufficient might look to buy back their shares from investors at a discount. Joel Gascoigne, the founder of a now six-year-old social media management company called Buffer, publicly outlined his own process for saving up enough money to buy out the company’s main venture investors a couple of years ago.
It’s not easy to pull off. Gascoigne says it took more than a year to persuade the VCs to take the deal he was offering them, and their relationship suffered as result.
The reason, offers Clavier, is that in a buyback scenario, an “investor has to admit complete defeat, and that’s kind of the last stop on the road.” Unsurprisingly, what Clavier deems a far better approach if possible is to “get out sooner, when there’s more time for a proper exit.”
Says Clavier, “The best thing you can do is find a nice home” for the founders, including so they can “move one, get a new gig, join something, rather than toiling away for the next three to five years” on a company that might eventually fail anyway.
At least, in some cases where the investors have essentially written the deal down to zero, they’ll let the founders retain their intellectual property.
“It’s worth something to him or her or them,” says Hunter Walk, co-founder of the venture firm Homebrew, “and it’s really not worth anything to the investors and maybe the founder wants to re-start it as a non-venture-backed company.”
Either way, Walk notes, this “usually occurs when they haven’t raised too much money.”
It’s a different story for those who’ve raised bigger rounds, as VCs need to wring what they can from accompany to fulfill their own fiduciary obligations. That means selling off assets, from office chairs to IP.
Thankfully, for startups going nowhere fast, there’s also a third option that’s picking up traction: private equity firms that have grown increasingly focused on tech. Their terms might not always be ideal, but the founder gets to claim an “exit” while the private equity firm gets to roll up sub-scale properties or bolt a startup onto one of its core assets and re-sell the package to another buyer.
These deals can sometimes be a “bitter pill to swallow” for investors, notes Viswanathan, but the “sooner you do it, the faster you free up resources and show your LPs that you can manage your portfolio.”
Other times, he notes, investors hang on with the expectation that the PE firm will fuel a better outcome for everyone.
Just last month, for example, Insight Partners, the New York-based private equity and venture firm, paid cash for Armis Security, a five-year-old company whose tech helps businesses secure their connected devices. Though terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, a number of Armis investors rolled their stakes into the new, Insight-controlled company.
A similar situation played out when the 13-year-old web content management company Acquia sold to Vista Equity Partners last fall.
What if such a deal never materializes? Well, there are other alternatives still for startups that are chugging along — just not as quickly as once expected.
One is to try debt lenders. Debt is always a gamble, but one that sometimes pays off.
Another is to use convertible notes if one’s investors (or even outsiders) are open to the idea. These notes are structured as debt that convert into equity upon a specific event like a certain date or the closing of a priced investment round.
There’s always the hope, too, that a venture investor will let a bet ride. Jason Lemkin, a former entrepreneur who now runs the venture firm SaaStr fund, says he’s open to doing this when he can. “My view as a founder and investor has evolved over time, but if I think it’s a good team and the company is achieving a few million in revenue and doesn’t need to raise money and has high retention and recurring revenue but is no longer on a venture trajectory, I’ll wait,” says Lemkin. “I’ll wait because things can change.”
It’s true of SaaS startups in particular, he says, “because competitors get acquired, they quit, they take too much money and stumble.” Meanwhile “if you’re the last man or woman standing, if you’re still out there fighting, you can win.”
A sealed order from a judge today has halted the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI project in its tracks until AWS’s protest of the contract award to Microsoft can be heard by the court.
The order signed by Judge Patricia E. Campbell-Smith of the U.S. Court Federal Claims stated:
The United States, by and through the Department of Defense, its officers, agents, and employees, is hereby PRELIMINARILY ENJOINED from proceeding with contract activities under Contract No. HQ0034-20-D-0001, which was awarded under Solicitation No. HQ0034-18-R-0077, until further order of the court.
The judge was not taking this lightly, adding that Amazon would have to put up $42 million bond to cover costs should it prove that the motion was filed wrongfully. Given Amazon’s value as of today is $1.08 trillion, they can probably afford to put up the money, but they must provide it by February 20th, and the court gets to hold the funds until a final determination has been made.
At the end of last month, Amazon filed a motion to stop work on the project until the court could rule on its protest. It is worth noting that in protests of this sort, it is not unusual to stop work until a final decision on the award can be made.
This is all part of an ongoing drama that has gone on for a couple of years since the DoD put this out to bid. After much wrangling, the DoD awarded the contract to Microsoft at the end of October. Amazon filed suit in November, claiming that the president had unduly influenced the process.
As we reported in December, at a press conference at AWS re:Invent, the cloud arm’s annual customer conference, AWS CEO Andy Jassy made clear the company thought the president had unfairly influenced the procurement process:
"I would say is that it's fairly obvious that we feel pretty strongly that it was not adjudicated fairly," he said. He added, "I think that we ended up with a situation where there was political interference. When you have a sitting president, who has shared openly his disdain for a company, and the leader of that company, it makes it really difficult for government agencies, including the DoD, to make objective decisions without fear of reprisal."
Earlier this week, the company filed paperwork to depose the president and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.
The entire statement from the court today halting the JEDI project:
**SEALED**OPINION AND ORDER granting [130] Motion for Preliminary Injunction, filed by plaintiff. The United States, by and through the Department of Defense, its officers, agents, and employees, is hereby PRELIMINARILY ENJOINED from proceeding with contract activities under Contract No. HQ0034-20-D-0001, which was awarded under Solicitation No. HQ0034-18-R-0077, until further order of the court.
Pursuant to RCFC 65(c), plaintiff is directed to PROVIDE security in the amount of $42 million for the payment of such costs and damages as may be incurred or suffered in the event that future proceedings prove that this injunction was issued wrongfully.
As such, on or before 2/20/2020, plaintiff is directed to FILE a notice of filing on the docket in this matter indicating the form of security obtained, and plaintiff shall PROVIDE the original certification of security to the clerk of court. The clerk shall HOLD the security until this case is closed.
On or before 2/27/2020, the parties are directed to CONFER and FILE a notice of filing attaching a proposed redacted version of this opinion, with any competition-sensitive or otherwise protectable information blacked out. Signed by Judge Patricia E. Campbell-Smith.
For two years running, Samsung played the same trick and front-loaded its annual event by announcing a new foldable.
Last year's announcement of the Fold was a huge one — the first viable (relatively speaking, of course) foldable handset from a major manufacturer. Of course, some stuff has happened in the intervening months, taking a bit of the shine off the device and the category at large.
This week at Unpacked 2020, Samsung came out of the gate swinging once again, announcing the Galaxy Z Flip at the top of the event. As with last year, the move had the effect of taking some of the wind out of its flagship announcement, a sign of a company convinced that standing out from the pack and reversing flagging smartphone sales trends will require some bold decision-making.
That's not to say the company's not pushing the envelope on its flagships. Between 100x zoom on the Ultra and 8K video on all of the devices, Samsung is still duking it out on imaging. But it appears not to have any illusions about what really gets users excited in an era of smartphone ubiquity.
GPS increasingly runs the entire planet. Supply chains, oceanic shipping, port docking and even our daily movements in cars, on bikes and walking around cities is dependent on a constellation of satellites hovering above us to make all this activity work in synchronicity.
Increasingly though, GPS is under attack. GPS spoofing, where the signals from GPS satellites are spoofed to send false data, can prevent devices from getting an accurate location, or any location at all. One of our TechCrunch contributors, Mark Harris, wrote a great piece in the MIT Technology Review about a recent spate of spoofing incidents in Shanghai, where shipping vessels would suddenly jump around the harbor as different signals got picked up.
GPS is one technology of a field known as Positioning, Navigation and Timing services (PNT). GPS is perhaps best known for its ability to pinpoint a device on a map, but it is also crucial in synchronizing clocks, particularly in extremely sensitive operations where milliseconds are crucial.
The increasing economic importance of the technology, along with the increasing risk it faces from bad actors, has forced the Trump administration to act. In a new executive order signed yesterday, the administration created a framework for the Department of Commerce to take the lead in identifying threats to America's existing PNT system, and also ensures that procurement processes across the government take those threats into account.
This process comes in the form of "PNT profiles," which the executive order described:
The PNT profiles will enable the public and private sectors to identify systems, networks, and assets dependent on PNT services; identify appropriate PNT services; detect the disruption and manipulation of PNT services; and manage the associated risks to the systems, networks, and assets dependent on PNT services. Once made available, the PNT profiles shall be reviewed every 2 years and, as necessary, updated.
In other words, these profiles are designed to ensure that systems work in concert with each other and are authenticated, so that systems don't have (obvious) security holes in their design.
That's a good first step, but unlikely to move the needle in protecting this infrastructure. Booz Allen Hamilton Vice President Kevin Coggins, who runs the firm's GPS resilience practice, explained to me last year that "In a system where you just blindly integrate these things and you don't have an architecture that takes security into account … then you are just increasing your threat surface." PNT profiles could cut down on that surface area for threats.
In a new statement regarding Trump's executive order, Coggins said that:
As a next step, the federal government should consider cross-industry standards that call for system diversity, spectral diversity, and zero-trust architectures.
System diversity addresses the dependence on a single system, such as GPS – some PNT alternatives have a dependence on GPS, therefore will fail should GPS become disrupted.
Spectral diversity involves using additional frequencies to carry PNT information – such as in systems using eLORAN or multi-GNSS – rather than just having a single frequency that is easy to target.
Finally, zero-trust architectures would enable PNT receivers to validate navigation and timing signals prior to using them – rather than blindly trusting what they are told.
This area of security has also gotten more venture and startup attention. Expect more action from all parties as these emerging threats to the economy are fully taken into account.
Walmart is shutting down its personal shopping service, Jet black, on February 21, after struggling to find adoption or additional investment. The service had allowed New York-area customers to text message orders for home delivery. According to its website, Jet black will now no longer accept new orders and will refund its customers their most recent $50 monthly membership fee.
The retailer is trying to spin the shutdown as a learning experience, noting that part of the initiative was to test and build technology that could eventually be applied to other parts of Walmart’s business. In Jet black’s case, Walmart learned about conversational commerce and how customers could use text messages to shop.
But according to an earlier report from The Wall Street Journal, Walmart had discussed investment with several potential partners, including Microsoft and VC firm NEA. Those talks didn’t pan out. Jet black, the report said, had gained fewer than 1,000 customers and remained a money-losing business.
To be fair, a high-end shopping service was largely an experimental concept for Walmart to dabble in, and it’s not surprising that it didn’t take off. After all, the Walmart brand today is aligned with cost savings and mainstream America, not necessarily the well-to-do, time-strapped urban parents to whom Jet black aimed to cater. It also overlapped with Walmart’s own home delivery options, including its successful Walmart Grocery service, which could deliver the fresh food Jet black could not.
Jet black received more attention than it likely warranted, given its concept and limited reach, for a few reasons. The service, which arrived in May 2018, was the first project to debut from Walmart’s tech incubator, Store No. 8, which drew interest. In addition, Jet black’s co-founder and CEO Jenny Fleiss previously co-founded Rent the Runway, a popular clothing rental startup catering to a similar upwardly mobile demographic.
Jet black also arrived at a time when a few startups had been trying text-based shopping, including Hello Alfred, Magic, GoButler, Operator, Fetch, Scratch and others. (Most have since failed or pivoted.) Walmart’s entry into this market, at the time, was then considered notable.
Walmart claimed last July Jet black’s customers were spending $1,500 per month, on average. But there weren’t enough customers — or efficiency in the business model — to make Jet black profitable.
In addition, Fleiss left the business last year, signaling Jet black’s struggles. She was replaced by Nate Faust, Walmart senior vice president of e-commerce logistics. The Journal reported Jet black was losing as much as $15,000 per year per member, as of last summer. Today it says 293 Jet black employees will be laid off as a result of the shutdown.
A Walmart spokesperson confirmed this figure to TechCrunch, as well, noting that 58 other employees are being retained to help apply Jet black’s learning to other areas, including Walmart Grocery.
“We've learned a lot through Jet black, including how customers respond to the ability of ordering by text as well as the type of items they purchase through texting,” said Scott Eckert, SVP, Next Generation Retail and Principal, Store No 8, in an announcement. “We're eager to apply these learnings from Jet black and leverage its core capabilities within Walmart,” he added.
Huawei is being charged with conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statute. The DoJ alleges that Huawei and a number of its affiliates used confidential agreements with American companies over the past two decades to access the trade secrets of those companies, only to then misappropriate that intellectual property and use it to fund Huawei's business.
An example of this activity is provided in the indictment. Described as "Company 1," Huawei is alleged to have stolen source code for Company 1's routers, which it then used in its own products. Given the context, it is highly likely that Company 1 is Cisco, which in the indictment is summarized as "a U.S. technology company headquartered in the Northern District of California."
Huawei is also alleged to have engaged in more simple forms of industrial espionage. While at a trade show in Chicago, a Huawei-affiliated engineer "… was discovered in the middle of the night after the show had closed for the day in the booth of a technology company … removing the cover from a networking device and taking photographs of the circuitry inside. Individual-3 wore a badge listing his employer as ‘Weihua,’ HUAWEI spelled with its syllables reversed." Huawei said that the individual in question did so in a personal capacity.
In one case, a technology company looking for a partnership with Huawei sent over a presentation deck with confidential information about its business in order to generate commercial interest with Huawei. From the indictment:
Immediately upon receipt of the slide deck, each page of which was marked 'Proprietary and Confidential' by Company 6, HUAWEI distributed the slide deck to HUAWEI engineers, including engineers in the subsidiary that was working on technology that directly competed with Company 6's products and services. These engineers discussed developments by Company 6 that would have application to HUAWEI's own prototypes then under design.
Together, the indictment lists multiple examples of Huawei's alleged conspiracy to pilfer U.S. intellectual property.
According to the statement published by the Department of Justice, "As part of the scheme, Huawei allegedly launched a policy instituting a bonus program to reward employees who obtained confidential information from competitors. The policy made clear that employees who provided valuable information were to be financially rewarded." Per the indictment:
A ‘competition management group’ was tasked with reviewing the submissions and awarding monthly bonuses to the employees who provided the most valuable stolen information.
In addition to conspiracy, Huawei and the defendants are charged with lying to federal investigators and obstructing the investigation into the company's activity. Per the indictment:
For example, an official HUAWEI manual labeled ‘Top Secret’ instructed certain individuals working for HUAWEI to conceal their employment with HUAWEI during encounters with foreign law enforcement officials.
Furthermore, Huawei has been charged in connection with its activities in countries like Iran and North Korea. The DoJ's statement alleges that Huawei used code words and carefully selected local partners to conceal its activities in these states in order to avoid international sanctions that are placed on the two countries. It also alleges that the company and its representatives lied to congressional investigators when asked about the company's financial activities in the two countries.
The top two senators on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA) said in a joint statement that “The indictment paints a damning portrait of an illegitimate organization that lacks any regard for the law.”
Huawei, in response to the indictment, said in a corporate statement that “This new indictment is part of the Justice Department's attempt to irrevocably damage Huawei's reputation and its business for reasons related to competition rather than law enforcement. The ‘racketeering enterprise’ that the government charged today is nothing more than a contrived repackaging of a handful of civil allegations that are almost 20 years old and that have never been the basis of any significant monetary judgment against Huawei. The government will not prevail on these charges which we will prove to be both unfounded and unfair.“
The Trump administration has made targeting Huawei a major priority, attempting to block its access to Western markets. The administration's efforts have mostly been fruitless thus far, with both the United Kingdom and Germany in recent weeks allowing the company's technology products into their telecommunications networks. We have more coverage on these initiatives in an article TechCrunch published this morning:
The full list of defendants include Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.; Huawei Device Co., Ltd.; Huawei Device Usa Inc.; Futurewei Technologies, Inc.; Skycom Tech Co., Ltd.; and Wanzhou Meng.
Huawei representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Updated 1:45pm EST to include additional details from the indictment. Updated 4:45pm EST to include comments from Huawei
That couch you’re thinking about sure would look good in your living room… or would it?
To drag up a decade-old (!) catchphrase: There’s an app for that. There are a ton of apps for that, really. Seeing what furniture might look like in a room is one of the go-to examples of what augmented reality is good for, and there’s no shortage of retailers doing it in their apps.
But when you’ve already got someone interested in making a purchase and poking around the item in, say, Safari, getting them to stop and download an app is kind of a big ask.
With cases like that in mind, Apple introduced a feature in 2018 that baked the “See this thing, but in your room!” concept right into iOS/iPad OS.
Called “Quick Look,” it allows for instant/one-tap AR experiences right within the apps the user already has, like Safari, Messages, Mail, etc. The retailer provides the 3D model (as a USDZ, a file format built in collaboration with Pixar), and Apple taps ARKit to render it as it would appear in the real world, handling everything from scaling to lighting and shadows.
At first, though, Quick Look was really just for that — looking. You could look at an item in AR, but that was about it.
Apple is expanding upon the concept a bit, allowing developers to bring a customizable button into the mix. It could be a purchase button, triggering an Apple Pay prompt on the spot. Or it can be wired up to do just about any other single action a retailer might want. It could initiate a customer support chat to let a customer ask about color options — or it could point them to local retailers who have it in stock so they can see it in person.
Apple is also quietly rolling support for spatial audio into Quick Look in the latest developer builds of iOS and iPad OS, allowing these 3D models to emanate sound — like, say, the bleeps and bloops of a toy, or music from a speaker — from wherever they’ve been virtually placed in the room. Move around the room, and the sound should shift accordingly.
Bringing more of the user experience directly into the built-in AR tool may seem like a small move, but it’s an interesting one. In 2018, Houzz CEO Adi Tatarko said that users of their AR tools were 11x more likely to make a purchase. Build.com found that people who checked out an item in AR were 22% less likely to return it. There are clearly benefits to AR in the mobile purchasing process — but the whole thing only works if it’s easy to use, quick and feels native. The more friction there is in the mix, the more people will drop out along the way.
Apple previewed the feature at WWDC last year; this week, a handful of big retailers — Home Depot, Wayfair, Bang & Olufsen and 1-800-Flowers — are rolling out their implementations. If improved sales/return numbers like the aforementioned hold true here, I’d expect it to become fairly commonplace across major retailers… and just like that, AR takes one big step closer to the mainstream.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
“The GSMA has cancelled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern and other circumstances, make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event,” CEO John Hoffman said in a statement.
Over the past few days, dozens of big name exhibitors announced they would skip this year's show. MWC usually attracts more than 100,000 attendees from 200 countries to Barcelona.
Essential was supposed to disrupt the smartphone industry, but it struggled with bad timing, broader industry issues and a founder embroiled in troubling allegations of sexual misconduct, ultimately failing to make it far beyond the launch of its first handset.
The funding will be used to help the company launch its first commercial satellites, which will be the bedrock of its future internet service offering, aimed at connecting the massive market of underserved populations around the world. The company’s focus on geostationary satellites — rather than satellites that hand off their connection through a kind of relay system — makes it different from many of the other entrants in the satellite internet race.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has published a bill which, if passed, would create a U.S. federal data protection agency designed to protect the privacy of Americans, with the authority to enforce data practices across the country.
While there are more AR platforms than the big three mentioned in the headline, Digi-Capital’s Tim Merel argues that they represent the top of the pyramid for three different types of AR roadmap. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
Facebook has been left red-faced after being forced to call off the launch date of its dating service in Europe because it failed to give its lead EU data regulator enough advanced warning, and it failed to demonstrate it had performed a legally required assessment of privacy risks.
The company, best known for its ElliQ home robot for the elderly, also disclosed that it’s working with the Toyota Research Institute to bring its technology to the automaker's LQ concept. Intuition’s goal is to build digital assistants that can create emotional bonds between humans and machines.
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Analyst Corner: Cost rationalisation leads to EBITDA growth for FLFL Revenue contribution of Central/Brand Factory/other brands stood at 49%/42%/9% for 3QFY20.
These delicious, attractive treats combine the best of fresh fruit and rich chocolate. The process is easy as long as you are cautious and patient. Melting chocolate can be finicky, but keep to low heat and all will be well.
Throw away damaged strawberries. Discard any strawberries that show signs of damage:[1]
Mushy or leaking juice
Large white or green areas
Dry, brown caps instead of green
You can use strawberries with missing caps and stems, but they won't last as long.
Wash the strawberries. Fill a colander with the strawberries. Rinse under cool, running water. Gently shake the colander to clean all sides of the strawberries.[2]
Don't wash the strawberries more than an hour in advance. They spoil quickly once washed.
Pat dry with paper towels. Even a drop of water can make the chocolate grainy and unpleasant. Pat dry, then space the strawberries out on dry paper towels to finish air drying. Leave them at room temperature to avoid condensation from the fridge.[3]
Skewer the strawberries (optional). Push a toothpick into each strawberry cap. You can skip this if the stems are still attached.
Cover a baking sheet with wax paper. Parchment paper will work as well. Aluminum foil will prevent sticking just as well, but may leave a pattern on the chocolate strawberries.
Choose high-quality chocolate. Besides the taste, cheap chocolate may not melt and harden evenly. Semisweet, bittersweet, or dark chocolate is easier to melt than milk and white chocolate.[4]
Use chocolate chips, or chop bars into even, ¼ inch (6 mm) pieces.
"Candy melts" are extra-easy to use, but usually don't taste as good as real chocolate.[5] If using a candy melt, follow the instructions on the label.
Add butter (optional). This makes the chocolate smoother and easier to use as a dip. Mix in 2 teaspoons (10 milliliters) unsalted butter for every 8 ounces (225 grams) chocolate.[6] Never use more than this, or the water in the butter could ruin the chocolate's texture.
Shortening has no liquid, so it will never ruin the chocolate. However, it should only be added after the chocolate has melted.[7]
Melt in a double boiler. You can make one of these at home by placing a stainless steel or heat-safe glass bowl over an ordinary pan. Fill the pan with an inch or two (2.5–5 cm) of water, but make sure it doesn't touch the bottom of the bowl.[8] Bring the water to a simmer, then add chocolate to the bowl and stir until melted.
Use the lowest heat setting possible to keep the water simmering. Chocolate melts at low temperatures, and can separate if heated too high.
Use a microwave instead. Be aware that this method comes with a high risk of damaged chocolate. It should only be used for small amounts of dark or bittersweet chocolate. Set the microwave to defrost or the lowest power setting. Microwave the bowl of chocolate for 30 seconds, then take out and stir. Repeat in 15–30 second intervals until fully melted. Let stand 30 seconds, then stir one last time.[9]
Melted chocolate may still look shiny and hard, and will not feel hot. You'll have to give it a stir to test for melting.
Let the chocolate cool slightly. Leave the chocolate at room temperature for a couple minutes. It's easiest to dip strawberries in chocolate that's at around 100ºF (38ºC). This is roughly human body temperature, so it will feel tepid.
Dip the strawberries. Hold each strawberry by the stem or using a toothpick. Dip it into the melted chocolate, nearly up to the green cap. As you pull it out, give it a small shake. This fills in gaps in the chocolate and leaves a smooth line. Finish by rotating the strawberry to let excess chocolate drip off.[10]
Lay on the prepared sheet. Place the dipped strawberries upside-down on the baking sheet covered in wax paper. Space them so they don't touch, or they'll stick together.
Decorate the strawberries (optional). Sprinkle chopped nuts or sprinkles over the chocolate while it is still soft. Or, if you'd like to add a classic white chocolate drizzle, refrigerate the strawberries first. Melt the white chocolate the same way as before, then drizzle it over the hardened chocolate using a fork.
Refrigerate for 15–30 minutes. Leave them in the refrigerator until the chocolate hardens completely. This should minimize the chance of white fat "blooming" to the surface.
The chocolate is still safe to eat if it does bloom. You may wish to decorate it as described above, in order to hide the white surface.
Store or serve immediately. These are best served the same day they are made. If storing them longer term, you have a few options:[11]
Room temperature: Hold flavor best, but only lasts 2–3 days. Keep covered but not in airtight container. May become limp. Hot temperatures will cause white fat blooms.
Refrigerator: Keeps for 5–7 days. Lay a paper towel at the base of a container and sprinkle with baking soda, then add berries and cover. This absorbs moisture, preventing sugar in the chocolate from forming white crystals.
Freezer: Best within 3 months, but keeps indefinitely. Chocolate must cover 100% of the strawberry to lock in juices. Freeze separated on a flat sheet first, to prevent sticking together.
These taste best if eaten within 24 hours. See the instructions above for storage advice if keeping them longer.
If you are making a large amount of chocolate strawberries, it may be worth your time to temper the chocolate between melting and dipping. This eliminates the chance of white "bloom," but can be tedious and difficult.
Sticky rice has a unique texture and flavor. It is used in many Japanese and Thai dishes. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to find. There are ways to cook regular, non-sticky rice so that it becomes somewhat stickier. This article will give you a few tips on how to cook regular, non-sticky rice so it becomes more sticky. It will also give you two recipes on how to make two popular "sticky rice" dishes, but with regular rice instead.
Know what to expect from these recipes. There is no real substitute for sticky rice; it is a type of rice (like brown rice) and not a dish (like fried rice). The flavor and texture of these recipes will be different because you are using regular rice. Also, be aware that even if you cook regular rice so that it becomes mushier or stickier, it still may not be sticky enough for nigiri-style sushi.
Consider some substitutes. Are you looking to make sticky rice out of regular rice because you cannot find it in a store? If you can't find sticky rice anywhere, try searching for "sweet rice," or "glutinous rice." They are the same thing.[3]
Try using another short-grain rice or risotto rice. Both will have a stickier texture once cooked (compared to medium and long-grained rice).[4] Short-grain rice is stickier than other types of rice once cooked because it has more starch in it.[5]
Do not rinse the rice before you cook it. Most people rinse rice for sanitary purposes, and to get rid of the starch dust. Starch is what causes rice to become sticky and clump together. If you cannot bear to eat rice without washing it, then rinse it once or twice—but don't rinse so much that the water runs clear. You still want some of that starch left.
Consider letting the rice soak in a pot of water before you cook it. Some people find that letting the rice soak in water helps it become stickier in the end. Try soaking it for 30 minutes to 4 hours. Drain the water once the rice has finished soaking.
Fill a large pot with 2 cups (450 milliliters) of water and add a few extra tablespoons of water. Using more water than you actually need will help make the ricer stickier and clumpier.[6]
Consider adding a dash of salt. This will give the rice some flavor and make it taste less bland.
Add 1 ½ cups (300 grams) of short-grain rice or 1 cup (200 grams) of medium or long-grain rice. Try to use the short-grain rice variety, if you can. Short-grain rice tends to have a higher starch content than medium or long-grain rice, which makes it slightly more sticky.
Both jasmine and basmati are considered to be medium-grain.
Bring the water to a boil over high heat. Do not cover the pot with a lid.
Reduce the heat once the water is boiling, and let the rice simmer for 10 minutes. At this point, you can place the lid on the pot.
Turn the heat off once the rice has absorbed all of the water. You may notice some steam holes in the rice.[7]
Leave the pot, covered, on the stove for 10 more minutes.[8] Rice gets stickier the longer you let it sit. If you make it a day or two ahead of time, your rice will be extra sticky. If you do plan on waiting that long, however, you might want to cover the rice and leave it in the fridge so that it doesn't dry out or spoil.
Serve the rice. Transfer the rice to a serving plate. If you want, you can fluff it a little bit with a fork to make it less clumpy.
Know what to expect. You may be able to get regular rice to taste similar to sushi rice with the help of the right seasoning. However, it is very difficult to get regular rice to have the same sticky consistency as sushi rice. You may be able to use the rice from this method in sashimi, bento, and sushi rolls, but you may find it too difficult to mold for nigiri.
Bring 2 cups (450 milliliters) of water to a boil in a large pot.
Add 1 ½ cups (300 grams) of short-grain rice or 1 cup (200 grams) of medium-grain rice. Try to use the short-grain rice variety, if you can. Short-grain rice tends to have a higher starch content than medium or long-grain rice, which makes it slightly more sticky.
Both jasmine and basmati are considered to be medium-grain.
Cover the pot with a lid and simmer for 15 minutes. The water will likely stop boiling for a few seconds when you add the rice. Wait for the water and rice start to boil again, then reduce the heat and cover the pot with a tight-fitting lid. Continue cooking the rice until all of the water is absorbed.
Combine 4 tablespoons of rice vinegar, 2 tablespoons of sugar, and 1 teaspoon of salt in a small saucepan. Mix everything together with a spoon. This will be the seasoning for your sushi rice. It may also help your rice become a little more sticky.
Bring the sushi rice seasoning to a boil over medium heat. Stir the seasoning with a fork or a small whisk until the sugar is dissolved.
Remove the seasoning from the stove. Set it aside and let it cool.
Transfer the rice to a glass bowl. During the next few steps, you want to avoid using anything made out of metal, or you will risk the vinegar picking up a metallic taste.
Pour the seasoning over the rice. Do this while the rice is still hot. You don't have to use all of the seasoning if you want a less-intense flavor.
Mix the rice and the seasoning together with a paddle. You can also use a spatula, but make sure that it is not made out of metal.
Consider working in front of a fan, or having someone wave a paper fan over the bowl. This will help the rice cool down faster.
Serve the rice while it is still warm. Japanese sticky rice is best while it is still warm, but not hot.
Fill a large pot with 2 cups (450 milliliters) of water and bring it to a boil.
Add 1 ½ cups (300 grams) of short-grain rice or 1 cup (200 grams) of medium-grain rice. For best results, try to use a short-grain rice type.[9] Short-grain rice tends to be starchier than medium or long-grain rice by nature, so it might give your better results.
Popular medium-grain rice varieties include jasmine and basmati.
Cover the pot with a and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium-low. Be sure to keep an eye on your pot so that it doesn't boil over.
In another pot, combine 1 ½ cups (337.50 milliliters) of coconut milk, 1 cup (225 grams) of white sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Stir everything together with a spoon to combine. You will be using this to season your rice.
To save time, consider doing this while the rice is cooking.
Bring the coconut milk mixture to a boil over medium heat. Be sure to stir the mixture from time to time. This will prevent it from getting scorched.
Stir the coconut milk mixture into the rice once the rice is done cooking. When the rice has finished cooking, take the rice pot off the stove and remove the cover. Pour the coconut milk mixture into the rice, and stir it using a fork or spatula.
Set the seasoned rice aside for one hour. Put the cover back on the rice pot, and place the pot some place where it won't be disturbed. This will give the rice enough time to soak up the flavors from the coconut milk mixture.
Combine ½ cup (112.50 milliliters) of coconut milk, 1 tablespoon of sugar, ¼ teaspoon of salt, and 1 tablespoon of tapioca starch in a saucepan. Stir everything together with a spoon. This will be your sauce. If you don't have any tapioca starch, you can also use cornstarch or arrowroot powder instead.[10]
Bring the sauce to a boil. Be sure to stir the sauce from time to time so that it doesn't curdle or scorch.
Prepare the mango. Start by peeling the mango. If your mango is ripe enough, you should be able to nick the skin with your knife, then pull the skin off. Once you have the mango peeled, cut it in half and remove the seed. Cut the mango into thin slices. Repeat this step for the other two mangoes.
Scoop the rice onto four plates. You can create more servings than just four, but the portions will be smaller.
Arrange the mango slices. You can set them down right next to the rice, or on top of the rice. If you are placing the slices on top of the rice, to overlap them to create a fan-like shape.
Drizzle the sauce over the mangoes and rice. If you want, you can also sprinkle some sesame seeds on top of the sauce.
Keep in mind that, because you are not using sticky rice, the texture may not be quite the same as in the traditional dish.
Short grain rice is not the same as sticky rice; however, it does have a higher starch content than regular rice. This means that, compared to other types of rice (such as medium grain or long grain), short grain rice tends to be stickier once cooked.
Consider soaking the rice in water for 30 minutes to 4 hours. This will help the rice cook faster.
Sticky rice and sushi rice are two different things. Sticky rice comes from Thailand and is commonly used in dessert dishes. Sushi rice is used to make sushi rolls. Because both types of rice have a sticky texture in the end, this article will cover how to make both types.
If you really want to use sticky rice in your recipe, but can't find it anywhere, try searching for it in an Asian market. Not all grocery stores carry sticky rice.
A trick that many cooks use to measure water levels is to place their finger just above the rice level. The water level is correct if it stops just under the first knuckle.
Sticky rice may also be labeled as "sweet rice," or "glutinous rice."[11]
Be aware that there is no real substitute for sticky rice or sushi rice. It is possible to cook regular rice so that it becomes stickier or mushier, but it will lack the particular flavor and texture that sticky rice is known for.
In Amsterdam they may say "Ik hou van je." In Paris, they most certainly say "Je t'aime." In Albania, they'll say "Te dua," and in Zulu, "Ngiyakuthanda!" It's the phrase we know as "I love you," and this is how you can say it in American Sign Language (ASL).
Chinese national thanks docs after discharge from isolation ward A 31-year-old Chinese national who was placed under isolation at Pune's Naidu Hospital for suspected exposure to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has
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Judicial Service
It’s also a very simple app with limited controls or editing options, compared with something like Instagram’s more robust Stories editor, for instance.
