SBA Eases Construction Contracting for Small Businesses Amidst COVID-19 Repercussions | Small Biz Trends

August 30, 2023August 28, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has extended the moratorium on the 8(a) Business Development Bona Fide Place of Business (BFPOB) Requirement through September 30, 2024. Announced by Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman during her inaugural day of a multi-city Alaska tour, this decision underscores the SBA’s commitment to empowering small businesses in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduced in 2021 as a swift response to the pandemic and the ensuing trend of remote work, the BFPOB Requirement Moratorium is a part of the SBA’s 8(a) Business Development Program. Initially, it was created to alleviate the pressure on participating businesses from the mandate of maintaining a physical presence to be eligible for any 8(a) construction contract. This means that a participating small business aiming for an 8(a) construction contract can now bypass the need for a BFPOB within any geographic boundary.

Amazon Deploys Generative AI to Enhance Product Review Summaries | Small Biz Trends

August 30, 2023August 28, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Amazon has unveiled generative AI technology to synthesize product reviews. This innovative approach will allow small business owners and customers to quickly gauge products without sifting through countless individual reviews to streamline online shopping experiences,

Amazon aims to feature a concise paragraph on the product details page, encapsulating the primary features and the collective sentiment gathered from customer reviews. This summarization aims to give readers an immediate grasp of recurring themes and insights from the reviews, negating the need to go through each one.

US sues Elon Musk’s SpaceX over hiring policy | BBC News

August 28, 2023August 27, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has said it is suing Elon Musk’s SpaceX, alleging the rocket firm discriminates against refugees and asylum seekers in its hiring practices.

The DoJ says SpaceX falsely claimed that it was not allowed to hire non-US citizens.

The investigation into SpaceX by the DoJ was prompted after allegations of discrimination from a foreign worker.

The BBC has contacted SpaceX for comment.

The DoJ alleged that SpaceX “routinely discouraged asylees and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them, because of their citizenship status” from September 2018 to May 2022.

Hugging Face raises $235M from investors, including Salesforce and Nvidia | TechCrunch

August 25, 2023August 24, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

AI startup Hugging Face has raised $235 million in a Series D funding round, as first reported by The Information, then seemingly verified by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on X (formerly known as Twitter). The tranche, which had participation from Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce and Sound Ventures, values Hugging Face at $4.5 billion. That’s double the startup’s valuation from May 2022 and reportedly more than 100 times Hugging Face’s annualized revenue, reflecting the enormous appetite for AI and platforms to support its development.

Hugging Face offers a number of data science hosting and development tools, including a GitHub-like hub for AI code repositories, models and datasets, as well as web apps to demo AI-powered applications. It also provides libraries for tasks like dataset processing and evaluating models in addition to an enterprise version of the hub that supports software-as-a-service and on-premises deployments.

Who Bought Subway? Chain Sells for Billions to Roark Capital | Entrepreneur

August 25, 2023August 24, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

After nearly six decades as a family-owned business, Subway has been sold to private equity firm Roark Capital in a groundbreaking deal – but it’s not the only sandwich joint in the firm’s portfolio.

The sale puts Subway under the same umbrella as rival Jimmy John’s, which is controlled by Inspire Brands also owned by Roark Capital.

The sandwich giant announced the news in a press release on Thursday, and although terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, the Wall Street Journal previously reported that Roark offered Subway $9.6 billion after it was listed for sale in February for $10 billion.

Meta releases SeamlessM4T AI model for text and speech translation | Mashable

August 23, 2023August 22, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Meta’s latest AI output is a major advancement for real-time text and speech translation.

On Tuesday, the company released SeamlessM4T: a multimodal model that translates text to speech and vice versa. Meta claims SeamlessM4T is “the first all-in-one multilingual multimodal AI translation and transcription model,” meaning it is uniquely able to translate and transcribe languages at the same time. SeamlessM4T can translate speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, text-to-speech, and text-to-text inputs for up to 100 languages. Translations for speech-to-speech and text-to-speech translations outputs support 35 languages.

Elon Musk wants to remove headlines from news articles on X | Mashable

August 23, 2023August 22, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Elon Musk has a new idea on how to make X…better?

As first reported by Fortune, and then confirmed by Musk himself, Twitter’s owner plans to strip headlines from news articles shared on X (ex-Twitter).

Right now, links to news articles are displayed as “Cards,” consisting of an image, a link, a headline, and a summary of the article, which doesn’t count against X’s post-character limits. If Musk goes through with his idea, links to news articles would be stripped from all text, leaving just the lead image and the URL as the links to the actual article.

Of course, the user sharing the news article will be able to fill in the blanks themselves in the tweet, though it’s definitely not certain that they will do so.

Tesla begins notifying workers who were affected by data breach | CNN Business

August 22, 2023August 20, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Tesla has begun notifying current and former employees whose information was included in a confidential data breach in May.

In a notice posted on the Maine Attorney General’s website on Friday, Tesla (TSLA) said an investigation had found “two former Tesla (TSLA) employees misappropriated the information in violation of Tesla (TSLA)’s IT security and data protection policies” and that the electric automaker had since filed lawsuits against them.

“These lawsuits resulted in the seizure of the former employees’ electronic devices that were believed to have contained the Tesla information,” Tesla said. The company added that it “also obtained court orders that prohibit the former employees from further use, access, or dissemination of the data, subject to criminal penalties.”

What Is a Mobile CRM? | businessnewsdaily.com

August 21, 2023August 20, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Mobile CRM software is designed for mobile devices and usually has corresponding desktop versions.
The key benefits of using a mobile CRM center on keeping your sales, marketing and customer service fully functional wherever, whenever.
When implementing a CRM, you should prioritize your offline needs, team, technology and growth goals.
This article is for business owners and sales department leaders who are interested in purchasing a mobile customer relationship management (CRM) software solution.

These days, most important business software platforms come with mobile apps, and customer relationship management software (CRM) is no exception. In fact, mobile CRMs are uniquely dynamic tools that are so powerful that you need to fully understand them to properly harness them.

SBA Stands Ready to Assist Hawaii Businesses and Residents Affected by the Wildfires | Small Biz Trends

August 16, 2023August 15, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Low-interest federal disaster loans are now available to Hawaii businesses and residents as a result of President Biden’s major disaster declaration, U.S. Small Business Administration’s Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman announced.

The declaration covers Maui County as a result of the wildfires that began on Aug. 8.

“SBA’s mission-driven team stands ready to help Hawaii’s small businesses and residents impacted by wildfires,” said Administrator Guzman. “We’re committed to providing federal disaster loans swiftly and efficiently, with a customer-centric approach to help businesses and communities recover and rebuild.”