Category: News and Views

Business Couple Peter and Lydia Mehit Talk Tips In Starting a Business | UC Irvine Blackstone LaunchPad

~ CBPS ~ Leave a comment

IMAG01788Lydia 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.

Read More.

What Apple Just Did in Solar Is a Really Big Deal | Bloomberg Business

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

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.”

Read More.

This Incredible Hospital Robot Is Saving Lives. Also, I Hate It | WIRED

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

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.

Read More.

War Of The Wallets | TechCrunch

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

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.

Read More.

The 300 missing lottery millionaires | Money cnn

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

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.

Read More.

Coming Next Fall: More Chip and PIN Cards in the U.S. | US News

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

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.

Read More.

Windows RT dies with a whimper | Mashable

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

When Microsoft launched Windows 8 in the fall of 2012, its poster child was the Surface RT tablet. The thin, meticulously designed slate was supposed to showcase all that was good about the new touch-friendly version of Windows: dynamic live tiles, full-screen apps and lack of “chrome,” like a start button.

The device failed to attract customers, though, and Microsoft ended up losing nearly $1 billion on the tablet due to unsold inventory. A big part of what stymied the Surface was its operating system: a watered-down version of Windows called Windows RT that couldn’t run traditional desktop apps. It was Windows, just without any of the programs you actually wanted to run.

Read More.

BP Slashes Spending, Braces For Oil Prices To Stay Low | Forbes

~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Add BP to the list of oil companies slashing their spending in the wake of tumbling oil prices.

The company said Tuesday it was lowering its budget for exploration and production this year to $20 billion, down significantly from previous forecasts of $24 billion to $26 billion.

“We have now entered a new and challenging phase of low oil prices through the near and medium term,” said CEO Bob Dudley, adding that ”our focus must now be on resetting BP” and maintaining safe operations.

Read More.