Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 34
January 6, 2021
How to extend your iPhone battery life
December 14, 2020
February 29, 2020
Uber Will Now Offer Its Own Taxi-Style Ad Service On Drivers’ Cars
Uber has announced a new deal to put digital ads atop some of its vehicles, an area the company has previously explored, which many see as a potential profitability booster for the ride-hail leader.
The ad service, called “Uber OOH Powered by Adomni,” will reportedly be rolled out during the month of March with 1000 vehicles in Atlanta, Dallas, and Phoenix.
A website for Uber’s partnership with outdoor ad-tech company Adomni describes the collaboration as an “unmissable new omni-present advertising network that cuts through clutter with street-level engagement.”Uber has also previously explored partnerships with dedicated ad-tech companies.
As former Forbes staffer Biz Carson reported in 2019, the digital car-top ad startup Firefly announced last spring that it was coming to car tops in NYC (including Uber’s), “thanks to a fresh $30 million funding round led by GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) with participation from existing investor NFX.”
Firefly, which launched for Uber and Lyft as well as some NYC taxis last June, offered to help ride-hail drivers earn extra income by letting the company display ads on the roofs of their cards. It currently operates in five cities, including Los Angeles, where some officials have questioned the safety of digital billboards or car-top ads for nearby drivers.
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December 2, 2019
Happy Chinese New Year 2020: Year Of the Rat Notebook And Journal
Adidas Wilson Collection features a wide variety of everyday themed composition notebook covers to get you in the journalism, jotting, or fantasy writing spirit. This Chinese New Year themed cover will be the perfect gift. · Size: 6 x 9 inch· Paper: Lined on white paper· Pages: 120 wide ruled pages· Cover: Soft cover· Perfect for gel pen, ink or pencils· Great size to carry everywhere in your bag, for work, business meetings, presentations· Makes a great holiday, birthday, business gift for Men, Women, entrepreneurs.
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October 3, 2019
The Biggest U.S. Banks Are Set to Automate Away 200,000 Jobs
Over the next decade, U.S. banks, which are investing $150 billion in technology annually, will use automation to eliminate 200,000 jobs, thus facilitating “the greatest transfer from labor to capital” in the industry’s history. The call is coming from inside the house this time, too—both the projection and the quote come from a recent Wells Fargo report, whose lead author, Mike Mayo, told the Financial Timesthat he expects the industry to shed 10 percent of all of its jobs.
This, Mayo said, will lay the groundwork for, and I quote, “a golden age of banking efficiency.” The job cuts are slated to hit front offices, call centers, and branches the hardest, where 20-30 percent of those roles will be on the chopping block. They will be replaced by better ATMs, automated chatbots, and software instruments that take advantage of big data and cloud computing to make investment decisions.
“The next decade should be the biggest decade for banks in technology in history,” Mayo said.
It is not rare that a report forecasts the imminent erosion of an industry’s jobs picture, but it is a little rare that a prominent industry analyst for one of said industry’s largest companies is so brazen—even giddy—about trumpeting the imminent loss of those jobs. The think tanks and corporations that typically unveil findings like these are usually at least nominally worried about ‘optics’ or being diplomatic when they talk about such significant jobs elimination, but this is banking, I guess.
The analysis itself is also secondary—filled with buzzwords and promises of harnessing big data and predictive algorithms that may or may not pan out to be as effective as currently thought—it is the confidence and enthusiasm for this schema that is key, as that is what will transform the report into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the banks buy what Mayo and Wells Fargo are selling, then the report will contribute to an automated arms race between companies to cut staff and purchase enterprise financial software products that is already underway. This is how a lot of corporate automation unfolds.
As a result, we can expect to interact with even more customer service chatbots and automated call menus (whether they work well or not), to see more financial decisions turned over to algorithms, and a continued flood of software products to enter the banking industry. And Wells Fargo certainly won’t be the only bank automating here: As the FT notes, Citigroup is planning to eliminate tens of thousands of call center workers, and Deutsche Bank expects to slash half its ~100,000-strong workforce.
Mayo has been making the cable TV rounds, touting this incoming golden age of high-tech ultra-streamlined, automated banking, an age in which fleshy humanoid obstructions are finally smoothed out of the picture, making way for a purer, faster flow of capital from customer to banking executive. “This is fantastic,” he said on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “This should lead to record efficiency and market share gains by scale players, reflecting our theme, ‘Goliath is Winning,’” Mayo wrote in his report, and he says the same on the newscasts.
Insofar as a banking analyst can claim a catchphrase, “Goliath is Winning” is Mayo’s, and he says it often—about big bank mergers, about the dominance of Morgan Stanley, and so on. The point is that banks that scale, win. Banks that grow, merge, and leverage their scale win more. And banks that have already scaled up to a nearly incomprehensible degree will win the *most*, now by automating their staff and cutting labor costs across the board—allowing, of course, more of the earnings to flow upstream and be concentrated among an ever-smaller pool of people.
In the context of hundreds of thousands of people being automated out of their jobs by corporate executives, “Goliath is winning” may seem more like the kind of thing you would expect a RoboCop villain to say. But it is also almost objectively correct. ‘Goliath’ is winning, squeezing out smaller competitors and smaller banks, and Goliath is also winning by replacing its human employees with instruments that direct capital more swiftly from us to it.
Now, in a just world, there would be ample safety net, health care, and employment alternatives for the tellers, call center workers, and front office staffers poised to lose their jobs, as many of them may find said jobs uninspiring. We don’t have all of those things in the U.S., of course, and the “greatest transfer from labor to capital” will leave a city-sized population jobless and struggling. On the consumer side, my concern is that we’ll be stuck, at least in the interim, with a host of frustrating automated customer service systems, and ever-fewer options when it comes to picking a bank as the margins of the massive players edge out the ones that can’t automate. It is, as ever, useful to remember to think about who automation is serving, and Mayo has made it rather explicit for us in this case—it’s Goliath.
Also helpful is the ambiguity with which Mayo has painted in his automating Goliath. Goliath could refer to the banks themselves, which are ever-purer pools of capital, or it could be the elite c-suite executives at those major banking companies—they’re the chief beneficiaries of this automation, after all—or I guess it could just be capitalism itself.
In the current formulation, Goliath is winning, and 200,000 people are losing.
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Federal Aviation Administration Gives UPS Green light to Deliver Via Drone
United Parcel Service announced this week that it had received a certification from the Federal Aviation Administration to use drones to deliver medical packages at campuses across the country.
The certification will allow U.P.S. to use multiple drones to deliver health care supplies within federal regulations and to fly drones beyond the visual line of sight, according to a statement from the F.A.A.
For the past year, U.P.S. has been collaborating with the F.A.A. flying drones at the WakeMed campus in Raleigh, N.C., delivering medical packages — including blood samples and tissues — to different buildings on the property, according to Scott Price, the chief strategy and transformation officer at U.P.S.
During its yearlong trial period, he said, U.P.S. flew about 1,000 single-operator drone flights at the WakeMed campus.
While U.P.S.’s drone airline, UPS Flight Forward, is currently limited by the certification to operating on medical campuses for the next couple of years, the company hopes to expand after that. “This is the first step to being able to enable deliveries to homes and rural areas,” Mr. Price said on Wednesday.
The F.A.A. certification for U.P.S.’s drone airline comes at a time when the United States is making a push to remain at the forefront of unmanned aviation, the agency said. “This is a big step forward in safely integrating unmanned aircraft systems into our airspace,” said Elaine L. Chao, the United States secretary of transportation.
So far, the F.A.A. has awarded only one other certificate to fly drones. That was granted to Wing, the drone-delivery unit of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The two certifications are different. Wing is allowed to use only one pilot and one drone at a time, while U.P.S. is allowed to use several pilots and numerous drones simultaneously, said Tammy Jones, an F.A.A. spokeswoman.
Currently the F.A.A. is reviewing requests or indications of intent from six other companies to conduct commercial drone operations, Ms. Jones said.
Other countries have also begun drone deliveries of vital medical supplies. Zipline distributes blood in Rwanda using drones, and Swoop Aero delivers vaccines and other medical supplies in the Pacific.
Drone deliveries have also proved to be economical for U.P.S.
“Delivery by drone is cheaper than the cost of a person driving a car,” Mr. Price said.
Amazon has been pushing to deliver packages to its millions of customers by drones for a while. In 2013 Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, said in a “60 Minutes” interview that he foresaw drone deliveries for Amazon.
Three years later Mr. Bezos announced that Amazon had made its first drone delivery to a customer, in Cambridgeshire, England.
As for U.P.S., customers in urban areas should not hold their breath for drone deliveries, Mr. Price said. “Use in urban areas,” he said, “is not clear.”Read more about dronesLike ‘Uber for Organs’: Drone Delivers Kidney to Maryland WomanApril 30, 2019Skies Aren’t Clogged With Drones Yet, but Don’t Rule Them OutMarch 19, 2019
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How to Make Money Podcasting
“This podcast is brought to you by…”
Many podcasters dream of the day when they can quit their 9-5 and go all-in on their passion project. But how do you actually make money from your podcast? And what are the best strategies for monetizing your podcast?
When it comes to making money with your podcast, selling advertisements is often the first place people go. It may seem pretty straightforward to incorporate ads into your podcast, but it’s not always the best, or most lucrative, monetization strategy.
Many popular podcasts are funded through podcast sponsorships, mainly in the form of the “host-read ad” where the podcast host talks about a product in one (or several) of their podcast episodes.
This form of podcast advertising often relies on CPM ($$ per 1,000 downloads) revenue models, rewarding podcasters with the biggest audiences with the industry-standard hovering around $20 per thousand downloads.
Affiliate marketing is where you promote someone else’s product or service and receive a percentage of each sale in exchange for your help (also called a commission).
This model was popularized by podcasters like Pat Flynn, host of the Smart Passive Income Podcast, because it tilts the emphasis away from “how many downloads can you get?” to “how much does your audience trust you?”
Smaller businesses lean on affiliate marketing to expand their business because they only have to pay you for the sales you generate, so they’re making money no matter how many products they end up selling.
You could write an ebook on a topic related to your podcast, put together an online course, or create cheatsheets that your listeners would find valuable. You could also offer an exclusive webinar to go deeper into something that you discussed on your podcast.
Selling products you make is a popular option for many podcasters since you are an expert in the minds of your listeners and they’ve been able to “test-drive” you by listening to your podcast. For instance, Rick Mulready hosts a podcast about how to use Facebook ads to grow your business. Guess what else he offers? Online courses to help you implement the strategies he discusses on his podcast.
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August 3, 2019
Will Doctor Strange 2 Introduce Namor to the MCU?
Doctor Strange 2 director Scott Derrickson has teased Namor’s introduction into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige has talked many times in the past about his desire to put Namor in an MCU project. However, it isn’t as easy as just choosing the character and throwing him in. Marvel sold the rights to the character in the 1990s to Universal and have since gotten them back, but there are still some speedbumps. Feige had this to say about the situation last year.
“Let’s put it this way – there are entanglements that make it less easy. There are older contracts that still involve other parties that mean we need to work things out before we move forward on it. As opposed to an Iron Man or any of the Avengers or any of the other Marvel characters where we could just put them in.”
Scott Derrickson posted a picture of Doctor Stephen Strange underwater with Namor the Sub-Mariner closing in on him. The image is from the cover of 2011’s Fear Itself: The Deep #1. Additionally, Derrickson mentioned the 1967 song “Are You Experienced?” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Shortly after posting the picture, Derrickson deleted the post without giving an explanation. Thankfully, people took a screenshot of the original post and it has started to spread as fans get excited about the idea of Namor showing up in Doctor Strange 2 or another possible MCU project.
It has also been rumored that Namor will show up in Black Panther 2, but that also has not been officially confirmed at this time. With that being said, it sure looks like there are some talks about bringing the long-awaited character to the MCU. Kevin Feige will more than likely be the one to announce the news when everything is official. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens with the character.
Namor the Sub-Mariner was first introduced back in 1939 and was created by writer-artist Bill Everett for Funnies Inc. Namor is the mutant son of a human sea captain and a princess of the mythical undersea kingdom of Atlantis. The character possesses super-strength and aquatic abilities, much like DC’s Aquaman, though Namor was created first. Additionally, Namor is considered to be the first comic book antihero. He has been in storylines with The Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Defenders, and the Invaders.
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