v.19 n. 08 – Released February 20, 2015
YouTube will launch a new, child-friendly version of its service for mobile devices on Monday. USA Today broke details of the news, which we’ve confirmed with sources at the company.
The app will initially be available for Android and in the U.S. only, but the move is telling of the Google-owned company’s ambition to develop its service beyond just being the world’s largest repository of online videos. It already has its ‘Music Key’ service, and an ad-free version is reportedly on its way also.
The kids app will surface content suitable for youngsters, as you’d expect, and TechCrunch understands that it will include a number of parental control features, such as a limiter that restricts the time of each session, and a sound toggle for muting and unmuting videos. The app will ship with content from a range of partners from the entertainment industry, including Jim Henson TV, DreamWorks, National Geographic, and a range of high-profile YouTubers.
Good news. If you’re self-employed, a sole proprietor, or a freelancer, there are a number of travel and business-related expenses you can take advantage of to help reduce your taxable income. Keep in mind: in order for a travel expense to be deductible, you have to be away from your “tax home” (AKA your regular place of business).
So, when are you considered traveling away from your “tax home”? You are away from your tax home if:
Your job duties require you to be away from the general area of your tax home, substantially longer than an ordinary day’s work, AND . . .
You need to sleep or rest to meet the demands of your work while away from home.
Lydia mentioned to always have targets. When people talk to their weak ties, they need to have a specific person they are trying to reach for. It’s important to look up whom they want to work with.
“Once you have the connection, you have to tell people exactly how you want them to help you,” Peter said. “You need to be specific. I wish I had learned this sooner.”
Peter later mentioned the importance of learning your business idea well enough that you can talk about it without any hesitation. He also said to not let other people’s limitations stop you from doing what you need to get done.
v.19 n. 07 – Released February 12, 2015
It was a year ago this week that Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook responded to a climate-change heckler at the company’s annual shareholder meeting with an impassioned rebuttal in which he famously told investors who care only about profits to “get out of the stock.”
Now Cook is putting his prodigious sums of money where his mouth is, proclaiming the “biggest, boldest and most ambitious project ever,” an $850 million agreement to buy solar power from First Solar, the biggest U.S. developer of solar farms. The deal will supply enough electricity to power all of Apple’s California stores, offices, headquarters and a data center, Cook said Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco.
It’s the biggest-ever solar procurement deal for a company that isn’t a utility, and it nearly triples Apple’s stake in solar, according to an analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). “The investment amount is enormous,” said Michel Di Capua, head of North American research at BNEF. “This is a really big deal.”
The robot, I’m told, is on its way. Any minute now you’ll see it. We can track them, you know. There’s quite a few of them, so it’s only a matter of time. Any minute now.
Ah, and here it is.
Far down the hospital hall, double doors part to reveal the automaton. There’s no dramatic fog or lighting—which I jot down as “disappointing”—only a white, rectangular machine about four feet tall. It waits for the doors to fully part, then cautiously begins to roll toward us, going about as fast as a casual walk, emitting a soft beep every so often to let the humans around it know it’s on a very important quest. It’s not traveling on a track. It’s unleashed. It’s free.
The robot, known as a Tug, edges closer and closer to me at the elbow of the L-shaped corridor and stops. It turns its wheels before accelerating through the turn, then suddenly halts once again. Josh, the photographer I’d brought along, is blocking its path, and by way of its sensors, the robot knows it. Tug, it seems, is programmed to avoid breaking knees.
Being a contender in the mobile payments space is becoming a coveted position by large and small businesses. A largely fragmented sector with several unexpected turns over the years, the digital wallet battlefield has recently been showing signs of maturation, which tells us that the market is starting to consolidate and that prominent players may soon emerge.
Since the inception of mobile payments, there has been a lack of a cohesive solution by key players in the space. For example, businesses and payment vendors are at odds with the banks over sharing transaction revenues. And now cellular providers are creating a proprietary solution to avoid dealing with Apple and Google. As we leap into 2015, mobile payments are expected to become mainstream within the next 12 months, and the market has already begun to straighten out.
Odds are that there will be a million-dollar winner in this week’s Powerball lottery who will never know they won.
About $2 billion in lottery prizes go unclaimed every year. Many of those tickets are worth between $1 and $5, but some folks never realize that they have a life-changing prize in their pocket.
More than 300 prizes worth $1 million or more went unclaimed in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, according to Brett Jacobson. He developed an app called Lotto Lotto that alerts lottery players if they have a winning ticket. As part of the research to create the app, Jacobson requested lottery collection data from all of the state lottery commissions nationwide.
Americans traveling in other parts of the world are sometimes bewildered to discover that their debit or credit cards don’t work at automated kiosks that use new chip and PIN technology rather than magnetic stripes. (The technology is also referred to as EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, the three card brands that created the chip in Europe and Canada.)
EMV cards have been the standard in Canada, Europe and other parts of the world for several years now, but they’re not as widely used in the U.S. That’s likely to change next October, when liability for fraud shifts from U.S. card issuers to merchants if merchants don’t upgrade their payment terminals to properly accept chip-based cards. (Some smaller merchants may be slow to adopt the new technology if they feel it’s less expensive to assume the fraud risk than update their payment terminals.) President Barack Obama also recently signed an executive order to embed this technology in all government-issued credit and debit cards.
Dispatches From The Front 