Organic farming and the market for organic agricultural products are booming worldwide, including in France. However, enthusiasm remains very concentrated ...
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Organic farming and the market for organic agricultural products are booming worldwide, including in France. However, enthusiasm remains very concentrated ...
A lot like the Xiaomi Mi 9, but lighter and smaller. Also comes without the 3.5 mm audio jack and with more modest chipset and price - that's the Xiaomi Mi 9 SE's short story. Now that the phone is with us we will try and tell you the long one once we take it through our full testing procedure. You even might think SE stands for Small Edition, because it doesn't look that special. But when we tinkered around a little more, we realized it is a very snappy phone, with its Snapdragon 712 chipset and the 6 GB RAM. The weight of 155 grams and the small footprint will...
Organic farming and the market for organic agricultural products are booming worldwide, including in France. However, enthusiasm remains very concentrated ...
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Census of Agriculture showed encouraging trends for Ohio agriculture, one farming group thinks.
Organic farming and the market for organic agricultural products are booming worldwide, including in France. However, enthusiasm remains very concentrated ...
Makiko Yamazaki / Reuters:
Japan will tighten restrictions on export of materials used in smartphone displays and chips to South Korea from July 4, over a dispute about war-time labor — TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan will tighten restrictions on the export of high-tech materials used in smartphone displays and chips …
WOODBURY – Residents at a recent selectmen meeting asked town officials to look into pushing organic farming methods for agricultural fields in public parks.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Census of Agriculture showed encouraging trends for Ohio agriculture, one farming group thinks.
Organic farming and the market for organic agricultural products are booming worldwide, including in France. However, enthusiasm remains very concentrated ...
SOMERVILLE — Last year, Anil Roopchand got behind on shoveling out the goat pens in the barn at his family's Hewett Road farm, on land that has been ...
Many producers follow organic guidelines without making it official.
Daniel Palmer / CoinDesk:
CoinMarketCap acquihires the team of Hashtag Capital, which started as a crypto trading fund, to improve the easily faked volume-weighted crypto price estimates — As its bid to improve its crypto data offering continues, CoinMarketCap is snapping up a firm building technology said to provide a “true price” for cryptocurrencies.
Some Iowa producers are questioning the value of pursuing an organic certification with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Organic farming and the market for organic agricultural products are booming worldwide, including in France. However, enthusiasm remains very concentrated ...
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat:
Bleckwen, a cybersecurity company developing AI-based fraud detection and prevention systems for banks and others, emerges from stealth, raises $10M Series A — Bleckwen, a cybersecurity firm developing fraud detection and prevention systems for banks and financial technology companies …
Organic farming and the market for organic agricultural products are booming worldwide, including in France. However, enthusiasm remains very concentrated ...
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Nielsen Music Mid-Year Report: on-demand audio streams in the US grew 31.6% YoY to 507.7B in the first half of 2019 — Music streaming services have already delivered a new high of half a trillion (507.7 billion) on-demand streams in the first half of 2019, according to Nielsen's mid-year Music Report released this week.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Census of Agriculture showed encouraging trends for Ohio agriculture, one farming group thinks.
Leigh Cuen / CoinDesk:
TaTaTu, after raising $575M from royals and celebs in a private 2018 ICO for its blockchain-based Netflix-like service, now says it is not a blockchain business — What started as a $575 million token sale is now a rewards program for watching videos. — TaTaTu's initial coin offering …
Strong Animals, a brand of Ralco, announced today that it has launched a new organic, Organic Materials Review Institute-certified essential oil product ...
Organic farming and the market for organic agricultural products are booming worldwide, including in France. However, enthusiasm remains very concentrated ...
Bloomberg:
EU-based IT-consultant Capgemini to buy Altran for $4.1B, to fill the gap in its services competing with rivals like Accenture for IoT, 5G, and AI contracts — Capgemini SE said it will acquire Altran Technologies SA for 14 euros-a-share to expand its software engineering network with internet and technology companies.
Patience Haggin / Wall Street Journal:
Data mining and ad targeting company LiveRamp, formerly known as Acxiom, to acquire Data Plus Math, which helps advertisers analyze TV viewer data, for $150M — Cash-and-stock deal, valued at $150 million, combines companies' data sets that help advertisers check efficiency of campaigns
The Government of India and the state governments have found a way to improve the administrative system of natural items alongside revealing numerous plans ...
In the last 7 years there has been a quiet redefinition taking place in the USDA National Organic Program that oversees organic standards. Large scale industrial ...
FreshPlaza, portal for the *fresh* produce industry, offering the latest news, job advertisements, pricewatching, and photo reports.
ONTARIO — 1. Recall. In December of 2018, an organic farmer self-tested an insecticide labeled “organic” before applying it to his crop and found three ...
Remember Fuchsia OS? It seems like every time we stumble upon an exciting new development regarding the mysterious open-source OS we have to dust it off from obscurity. That's just the nature of early development stage software, plus things are actually looking up on the exposure and availability side of things. After sharing a few tasty details about its side-project at the last I/O event, Google has now quietly launched a developer portal for Fuchsia OS. And to re-iterate the answer to everybody's pressing question before the comment section gets flooded again - NO, it is not...
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal:
A look at the challenges, downsides, and huge costs of 5G rollout in the US, which may take a decade or more to complete — As carriers launch their 5G networks, the promise of superfast wireless is clashing with the reality of the rollout; ‘the real onslaught has not yet begun’
Jon Russell / TechCrunch:
Splyt, which wants to bring international roaming to ride-hailing apps and already allows Alipay users to book Grab rides, raises $8M Series A from Grab, others — The vision of a universal global ride-hailing service is over. Uber's decision to exit markets like China …
Strong Animals, a brand of Ralco, announced today that it has launched a new organic, Organic Materials Review Institute-certified essential oil product ...
The Government of India and the state governments have found a way to improve the administrative system of natural items alongside revealing numerous plans ...
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Census of Agriculture showed encouraging trends for Ohio agriculture, one farming group thinks.
Organic farming and the market for organic agricultural products are booming worldwide, including in France. However, enthusiasm remains very concentrated ...
FreshPlaza, portal for the *fresh* produce industry, offering the latest news, job advertisements, pricewatching, and photo reports.
DUBUQUE, Iowa (AP) — Instead of spraying pesticides, Dubuque's Stone Hollow Gardens & Shroomery uses predatory insects.
Satoshi Sugiyama / Japan Times:
At G20, Japanese PM Shinzo Abe announces “Osaka Track” to promote cross-border data flow as 24 countries, including the US and China, sign statement of support — OSAKA - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday at the G20 summit formally declared the launch of the “Osaka Track,” …
Independent restaurant owners may be doomed, and perhaps grocery stores, too.
Such is the conclusion of a growing chorus of observers who’ve been closely watching a new and powerful trend gain strength: that of cloud kitchens, or fully equipped shared spaces for restaurant owners, most of them quick-serve operations.
While viewed peripherally as an interesting and, for some companies, lucrative development, the movement may well transform our lives in ways that enrich a small set of companies while zapping jobs and otherwise taking a toll on our neighborhoods. Renowned VC Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital seemed to warn about this very thing in a Financial Times column that appeared last month, titled “The cloud kitchen brews a storm for local restaurants.”
Moritz begins by pointing to the runaway success of Deliveroo, the London-based delivery service that relies on low-paid, self-employed delivery riders who delivery local restaurant food to customers — including from shared kitchens that Deliveroo itself operates, including in London and Paris.
He believes that Amazon’s recent investment in the company “might just foreshadow the day when the company, once just known as the world’s largest bookseller, also becomes the world’s largest restaurant company.”
That’s bad news for people who run restaurants, he adds, writing, “For now the investment looks like a simple endorsement of Deliveroo. But proprietors of small, independent restaurants should tighten their apron strings. Amazon is now one step away from becoming a multi-brand restaurant company — and that could mean doomsday for many dining haunts.”
The good news . . . and the bad
He’s not exaggerating. While shared kitchens have so far been optimistically received as a potential pathway for food entrepreneurs to launch and grow their businesses — particularly as more people turn to take out — there are many downsides that may well outweigh the good, or certainly counteract it. Last year, for example, UBS wrote a note to its clients titled “Is the kitchen dead?” wherein it suggested the rise of food delivery apps like Deliveroo and Uber Eats could well prove ruinous for home cooks and as well as fresh food providers, including restaurants and supermarkets.
The economics are just too alluring, suggested the bank. Food is already inexpensive to have delivered because of cheap labor, and that will cost center will disappear entirely if delivery drones every take off. Meanwhile, food is becoming cheaper to make because of central kitchens, the kind that Deliveroo is opening and Uber is reportedly beginning move into, as well. (In March, Bloomberg reported that Uber is testing out a program in Paris where it’s renting out fully equipped, commercial-grade kitchens to serve businesses that selling food on delivery apps like Uber Eats.)
The favorable case for cloud kitchens argues that businesses using the spaces are paying less than they would for traditional restaurant real estate, but the reality is also that most of the businesses moving into them right now aren’t small restaurateurs but quick service brands that already have a following and aren’t particular known for emphasis on food quality but instead for churning out affordable food, fast.
As Eric Greenspan, an L.A.-based chef who has appeared on many Food Network shows and has opened and closed numerous restaurants over the course of his career, explains in a new, independent documentary about cloud kitchens: “Delivery is the fastest growing market in restaurants. What started out as 10 percent of your sales is now 30 percent of your sales, and [the industry predicts] it will be 50 to 60 percent of a quick-serve restaurant’s sales within the next three to five years. So you take that, plus the fact that quick-serve brands are kind of the key to getting a fat payout at the end of the day . . .”
During an age when fewer people frequent them traditional restaurants — with their overhead and turnover and razor-thin margins — running one simply makes less and less sense, Greenspan continues. “[Opening] up a brick-and-mortar restaurant these days is just like giving yourself a job. Now [with centralized kitchens], as long as the product is coming out strong, I don’t need to be there as a presence. I can quality control remotely now. I can go online and [sign out of a marketplace like Postmates or UberEats or Deliveroo] and not piss off any customers, because if I just decided to close the restaurant one day, and you drove over and it was closed, you’d be pissed. But if you’re looking for [one of my restaurants] in Uber Eats and you can’t find it because I turned it off, well, you’re not pissed. You just order something else.”
Big players only need apply . . .
The model works for now for Greenspan, who is running numerous restaurant “concepts” from one cloud kitchen in L.A. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that facility belongs in part to Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick, who was quicker than some to grok the opportunity that shared kitchens present. In fact, it was early last year that he announced he was investing $150 million in a startup called City Storage Systems that focused on repurposing distressed real estate assets and turning them into spaces for new industries, like food delivery.
That company owns CloudKitchens, which invites chains, as well as independent restaurant and food truck owners, to lease space in one of their facilities for a monthly fee, along with additional fees for data analytics meant to help the entrepreneurs boost their sales.
The pitch to restaurateurs is that CloudKitchens can reduce their overhead, but of course, the company is also amassing all kinds of data about its tenants and their customer preferences in the process that one could them seeing using over time. Little wonder that Amazon wants in, or that these outfits have at least one serious competitor in China — Panda Selected — that is doing exactly the same thing and which raised $50 million led by Tiger Global Management earlier this year.
No one can fault these savvy entrepreneurs for seizing on what looks like a gigantic business opportunity. Still, the kitchens, which make all the sense in the world from an investment standpoint, should not be embraced so readily as a panacea, either.
Most obviously, they rely on the same people who drive Ubers and handle food deliveries — people who aren’t afforded health benefits and whose financial picture is forever precarious as a result. As with Uber drivers, Deliveroo employees tried to gain status as “workers” last year with better pay and paid but they were denied these rights because they have the option of asking other riders to take their deliveries. The EU Parliament more recently passed new rules to protect so-called gig economy workers, though the measures don’t go far. (Meanwhile, in the U.S, Uber and Lyft continue to fight legislation that would give employee status to contract workers.)
Ripple effects . . .
Matt Newberg, a founder and foodie from New York, says he could see the writing on the wall when he recently toured CloudKitchen’s two L.A. facilities, along with the shared kitchens of two other companies: Kitchen United which last fall raised $10 million from GV, and and Fulton Kitchens, which offers commercial kitchens for rent on an annual basis.
Newberg is responsible for the aforementioned documentary (which you can also watch below), and he suggests that he most taken aback by the conditions of the first facility that CloudKitchens opened and operates on West Washington Boulevard in South L.A. Though most restaurant kitchens are chaotic scenes, Newberg said that as “someone who loves food and sustainability” the easy-to-miss warehouse didn’t feel “very humane” to him when he walked through it. It’s windowless for one thing (it’s a warehouse). Newberg says that he also counted 27 kitchens packed into what are “maybe 250-square-feet to 300 square-foot spaces,” and a lot of people who appeared to be in panic mode. “Imagine lots of screaming, lots of sirens triggered when an order gets backed up, tablets everywhere.”
Adds Newberg, “When i walked in, I was like, holy shit, no one even knows this exists in L.A. It felt like Ground Zero. It felt like a military base. I mean, it seemed genius, but also crazy.”
Newberg says CloudKitchen’s second, newer location is far nicer, as are the facilities of Kitchen United and Fulton Kitchens. “That [second CloudKitchen warehouse] felt like a WeWork for kitchens. Super sleek. It was as quiet as a server farm. There were still no windows, but the kitchens are nicer and bigger.”
Growing pains . . .
Every startup has growing pains, naturally, and presumably, shared kitchen companies are not immune to these. Still, Moritz, the venture capitalist, warns that they will benefit some far more than others. Writing in the FT, he says that in the early 2000s, his firm, Sequoia, invested in a chain of kebab restaurants called Faasos that planned to delivery meals to customers’ homes but was getting crushed by high rents and turnover among other things, so opened a centralized kitchen to sell kebobs. Now, he says, Fassos produces a wide variety of foods, including other Indian specialities but also Chinese and Italian dishes under separate brand names.
It’s the same playbook that Eric Greenspan is using, telling Food & WIne magazine last year that his goal was ultimately to have six delivery-only concepts running simultaneously, with two menus each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Greenberg, who is obviously media savvy, can probably pull it off, too, as has Fassos. But for restaurants that are not known franchises or have the star appeal of celebrity chef, the future might not look so bright.
Writes Moritz: “In some markets there is still an opportunity for hardened restaurant and kitchen operators — particularly if they are gifted in the use of social media to build a following and refashion themselves. But they need to move quickly before it becomes too expensive to compete with the larger, faster-moving companies. The mere prospect of Amazon using cloud kitchens to provide cuisine catering to every taste — and delivering these meals through services such as Deliveroo — should be enough to give any restaurateur heartburn.”
It should also worry people who care about their neighborhoods. Cloud kitchens may make it easier and cheaper than ever to order take-out, but there will be consequences, some of which most of us have yet to imagine.
For some reason I really like Sony Sound Forge Pro 10 even though I never actually used it for anything.
I guess I just miss the 2010 Windows 7 era
Julia Alexander / The Verge:
YouTube's use of demonetization as a form of punishment is not the same as moderation and does not work on major creators who have other sources of revenue — Steven Crowder's case is a perfect example — When YouTube wanted to punish political pundit Steven Crowder amid widespread outcry …
This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. This report is exclusively available to enterprise subscribers. To learn more about getting access to this report, email Senior Account Executive Jeff Jordan at jjordan@businessinsider.com, or check to see if your company already has access.
Although competition in the US wireless carrier market remains fierce, the price war among the Big Four US carriers — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint — began to cool over the past year.
In an attempt to avoid further competition on price, carriers began shifting their focus to adding value to their mobile plans with new offerings to differentiate from the competition. This helped average revenue per user (ARPU) start to stabilize across all carriers in Q1 2018, after declining over the last two years.
The Big Four have now begun reshuffling their unlimited plans to lure subscribers by providing more options. This strategy has been unrolling in two flavors: introducing new, expensive unlimited plan tiers loaded with an array of features and choices, while also catering to price-sensitive customers with more affordable plans that strip away extra perks like free digital content and international coverage. As a result, a new battleground is emerging, with differentiation now coming down to the value loaded in their mobile plans.
Looking forward, the US carrier market will see competitive pressure pick up due to a number of trends:
All of this means fostering loyalty and winning over new subscribers is more important than ever for the Big Four, making it crucial for these mobile carriers to understand consumer sentiment around their services.
In this report, Business Insider Intelligence uses consumer survey data from our proprietary panel, collected during 2017 and 2018, to evaluate which features are most important to consumers when selecting a mobile provider, as well as to determine which features would convince them to switch to the competition. It contains insights that can help telecoms guide strategic investment and marketing decisions to win and retain customers in this increasingly competitive space.
The companies mentioned in the report are: AT&T, Amazon, Apple, Charter, Comcast, Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, Sprint, T-Mobile, Tidal, and Verizon.
Here are some key takeaways from the report:
In full, the report:
SEE ALSO: 5G in the IoT: How the next generation of wireless technology will transform the IoT
Join the conversation about this story »
Google’s vice president of finance, has joined Postmates’ board of directors, the latest sign that the on-demand food delivery startup is prepping to take the company public.
Postmates announced Friday that Kristin Reinke, vice president of Finance at Google, will join the San Francisco startup as an independent director.
Reinke has been with Google since 2005. Prior to Google, Reinke was at Oracle for eight years. Reinke also serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Economic Advisory Council.
Her skill set will come in handy as Postmates creeps towards an IPO.
Earlier this year, the company lined up a $100 million pre-IPO financing that valued the business at $1.85 billion. Postmates is backed by Tiger Global, BlackRock, Spark Capital, Uncork Capital, Founders Fund, Slow Ventures and others. Spark Capital’s Nabeel Hyatt tweeted the news earlier Friday.
Happy to welcome Kristin to the board of @Postmates. Great times ahead. https://t.co/nEqu3A2YkE
— Nabeel Hyatt (@nabeel) June 28, 2019
“Postmates has established itself as the market leader with a focus on innovation and route efficiency in the fast‐growing on‐demand delivery sector. Given their strong execution, accelerating growth, and financial discipline, they are well positioned for continued market growth across the U.S.,” said Reinke. “I’m thrilled to join the board.”
The startup has been beefing up its executive quiver, most recently hiring Apple veteran and author Ken Kocienda as a principal software engineer at Postmates X, the team building the food delivery company’s semi-autonomous sidewalk rover, Serve.
Kocienda, author of “Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs,” spent 15 years at Apple focused on human interface design, collaborating with engineers to develop the first iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.
Sensor Tower reports that many mobile game publishers are hitting the $1M earnings milestone in 2021 -- though not as many as in 2016. Rea...