#automation trade school philadelphia

[pttedu]

Meet Jim, an enthusiastic intern in Advanced Manufacturing and Automation at PTTI. In this episode, Jim shares his passion for Integrated Circuit (IC) design and application, offering a glimpse into his innovative mind and dedication to the field.

[go-gloriousheart]

The Best Markets For Real Estate Investment During The Coronavirus

The usual ways to assess actual estate markets are out the window this year. The standard equation is that greater jobs lead to greater demand for housing, but with a large loss of jobs in all markets this year, that evaluation doesn't work. So, how are we able to now decide which markets are the great bets for investors in 2020?

We must start with the belief that the modern scenario is temporary, that economic pastime will resume over the subsequent 12 months or so, and that most jobs will eventually go back. If that's now not the case (remember, the virus is in charge, no longer us - as Dr. Fauci says) you would possibly as well hold your money within the bank due to the fact we'll have an extended slide in real property values. But assuming that most jobs will return and that we won't see a wave of home income by means of determined owners, there are other approaches to discern out where and the way an funding makes the maximum sense - and with the least danger. First, which markets had been doing first-class earlier than the Corona recession? Nashville, Phoenix, Seattle, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Utah markets, the huge Texas markets, Philadelphia, Tampa, Raleigh and a dozen others had been developing at sturdy rates earlier this year. Strong increase creates issues of its personal, most notoriously rate bubbles that push real property values to unsustainable levels, but it's most probable that good boom will go back fastest within the markets that already had it - unless the coronavirus permanently adjustments how we behave... extra approximately that underneath.

A second way to choose the relative elegance of markets is to look how badly the recession has affected them so far. We have very few hard records as of now however will get extra inside the subsequent couple of months. The first truth we do realize is that 13 percentage of all jobs inside the US have been lost in April. How did man or woman markets degree up in opposition to this average? At the good stop, the Utah markets (Ogden, Provo, Salt Lake City) lost round 7 percent in their jobs. The large Texas markets were right behind along side Phoenix, Birmingham and Washington DC at 8 to 9 percent. April was just the first month for which we've tough numbers; as time goes by using this image will worsen so we must live on top of it, however in some unspecified time in the future each market will attain its own backside and then we'll have a true studying of how far it's miles from a 'normal' stage of increase. The velocity with which jobs are then regained may be a third indicator investors can use to decide where and whilst to invest. This might be a drawn-out procedure and it's not clean that every marketplace will get lower back to the level of employment it had earlier than the coronavirus struck. But we will already make a guess about this: what forms of jobs are maximum liable to everlasting misplaced due to how matters will trade?

We have a few clues. Although the general loss of jobs in April was 13 percentage, most effective 2 percent had been misplaced inside the finance quarter and only four percentage in government. But 10 percent of producing jobs have been misplaced and a whopping 48 percent of jobs in tourism, inns and restaurants.

Restaurants will exchange how they operate, neighborhood authorities budgets could be underneath large pressure for years, and other styles of groups will alternate too because the recession accelerates trends that have been underway for years. The retail zone will go online faster. Manufacturers will automate faster. More schooling might be on line, and so will greater healthcare. Everyone will try and do matters with fewer people. Some markets are greater at risk of these changes than others. We can add up the numbers of jobs in every market that are most prone to these larger forces and get a experience of the longer-time period neighborhood boom prospects. In a crude ranking, markets with low vulnerability encompass Richmond, Denver, Atlanta, Newark, Frederick County in Maryland, Raleigh, Dallas and Birmingham. Markets with high vulnerability consist of Las Vegas, Grand Rapids, Orlando and Milwaukee. These are beneficial approaches to compare markets however they don't give us final solutions yet. It's too early, we've got too little information, too few records. The essential message in 2020 is to follow the information, in a few months we'll have plenty greater. Then investors can be in a position to form a complete picture of the great markets for investment.

More..  Buy Apartments In Abu Dhabi , Apartments For Sale In Abu Dhabi , Abu Dhabi Apartments For Sale, Apartment For Sale In Abu Dhabi, Apartment Sale In Abu Dhabi, Buy Apartment In Abu Dhabi

[micaramel]

Artist: David Hartt

Venue: Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park

Exhibition Title: The Histories (Le Mancenillier)

Curated By: Cole Akers

Date: September 11 – December 19, 2019

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of the artist and Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park. Photos by Michael Vahrenwald.

Press Release:

Commissioned by the Beth Sholom Synagogue Preservation Foundation, David Hartt’s exhibition The Histories (Le Mancenillier) marks the first time that an artist has activated Beth Sholom’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed National Historic Landmark in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. Comprising contrasting media—from orchids and tapestries to hi-resolution video screens and quadraphonic sound— the exhibition explores histories of Jewish and Black diasporas in the United States and considers how the American cultural landscape is shaped by ethnic, economic, and religious migration. Hartt is interested in synthetic ideas of culture, in which “the voice, agency, geography, and temporality of others collude to produce a more compelling version of the world.”

Throughout much of his practice, which includes photography, video, sculpture, and installation, Hartt investigates the interplay between ideology, the built environment, and the communities that shape and are shaped by these concepts. Typically, Hartt begins a project by identifying a particular idea (for example, sovereignty or late capitalism) and subsequently locates a site through which he can complicate and spatialize the idea. This commission began with a specific building, reversing the artist’s usual approach. Rather than focus on the architecture, however, Hartt was drawn instead to the broader history of Beth Sholom Congregation and its relationship to the urban development of greater Philadelphia.

Founded in 1919, Beth Sholom Congregation’s first building was located at the intersection of North Broad Street and West Courtland Street in north Philadelphia’s Logan neighborhood. In the early 1950s, reflecting a nationwide trend of postwar suburbanization, the Congregation began to relocate to Elkins Park and commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design an “American synagogue” that aligned the Jewish experience with broader aspects of American culture and democratic ideals. The Logan building was sold and has since become the home of Beloved St. John Evangelistic Church, a congregation serving what is now a predominantly African- American community. The relationship between these two congregations led Hartt to consider the constant movement of Black and Jewish communities as a result of political, economic, and social currents.

Music plays a significant role in Hartt’s work, animating both his films and the physical environment of his installations. For this commission, Hartt has selected the music of 19th-century American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk as a cipher for the cultural histories at play in the exhibition. Born in New Orleans in 1829 to a Jewish father and a Creole mother, Gottschalk studied performance in Paris and was a contemporary of Frédéric Chopin. His internationally recognized compositions were the first to incorporate African- American and Afro-Caribbean vernacular song within a classical idiom—a hybrid approach that anticipated ragtime and jazz by more than 50 years. The parenthetical title of the exhibition, Le Mancenillier (the manchineel), is the name of a sweet but poisonous tropical plant that also titles an early Creole-influenced work by Gottschalk. Hartt considers the plant to be anti-colonial in that an arrow dipped in the sap of the manchineel is said to have killed Ponce de Leon, the conquistador who led the first European expedition to what is now Florida.

In an effort to address the contemporary moment and assert the productive movement of cultures, Hartt invited Ethiopian pianist Girma Yifrashewa to reinterpret the work of Gottschalk as the score for the exhibition. Classically trained in Bulgaria and based in Addis Ababa, Yifrashewa is an advocate of classical music in Africa whose own compositions are similarly hybrid, blending Ethiopian and European musical sources. Hartt also invited Philadelphia-based Haitian baritone Jean Bernard Cerin to organize a series of live musical activations featuring Jewish, Caribbean, and African-American compositions from the 19th and early 20th centuries. These events—many of which will feature a pianist and a vocalist—will be broadcast throughout the synagogue via an elaborate microphone that is mounted to a laser-cut brass stand designed by Hartt. Both Yifrashewa’s recordings of Gottschalk and the live activations will create an ambient environment throughout the synagogue’s interior.

Drawing on the visual idiom of the 19th- century landscape painter Martin Johnson Heade, whose paintings of orchids and hummingbirds bore a subtle affinity with the abolitionist movement, Hartt shot digital video and photography in New Orleans and Haiti, reinvestigating the vernacular presence of Caribbean culture in Gottschalk’s music. The images are used in one of two large-scale Jacquard-woven tapestries, both of which subtly change the geometry and sonic properties of the rooms. Large freestanding video monitors act as portals that superimpose distant landscapes onto the space, oscillating between two cultures and locations.

For Hartt, these historically-inflected works sidestep anachronism by adopting a “post-human” sensibility through the use of a drone-operated camera. The unblinking perspective adopts the aesthetics of surveillance technology. Formally, moreover, Hartt is indebted to conceptual artist Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971), a film made with an automated camera that moved in multiple directions while recording a remote landscape in Northern Quebec.

Hartt has created additional site-responsive elements that complement the building’s interior as well as the peculiarities of its structure. A selection of live tropical plants have replaced the Congregation’s customary artificial plantings throughout the building, and an arrangement of orchids captures leaking rainwater in the main sanctuary. Additionally, imagery of orchids made in the artist’s studio is incorporated into the film-based works and one of the large tapestries. Hartt understands this flower as a diasporic plant, since its unconventional roots attach themselves non-parasitically to various pre-existing organic frameworks.

The Histories (Le Mancenillier) is the first in a cycle of works by Hartt that borrows its title from the Greek historian Herodotus’ foundational history of Western culture. Replete with allegorical descriptions of regime changes, trade routes, and daily life during the 5th century BC, Herodotus’ text provides a model onto which Hartt transposes the United States and the Caribbean in the 19th century. In the artist’s words, his work demonstrates “the criss-crossed fault lines of empire, post- colonial contraction, and revolution that continue to haunt the physical and psychic infrastructure of today.” By layering the tropics within Beth Sholom, The Histories (Le Mancenillier) contends with ideas about culture, migration, and the environment, and it reflects on the site’s capacity to hold a generous, porous, and speculative concept of community.

Cole Akers Curator

David Hartt (b. 1967, Montréal) lives and works in Philadelphia where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. He has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa.

Hartt’s recent solo exhibitions include in the forest at the Graham Foundation in Chicago and Negative Space at Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin. His work has been included in several recent group exhibitions including Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at The Museum of Modern Art, America Is Hard to See at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Shine a light/Surgir de l’ombre: Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada.

Link: David Hartt at Beth Sholom Synagogue

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2r9FrbH

[gillespialfredoe01806ld]

Why More People Are Leaving New York Than Any Other State

monkeybusinessimages/iStock

In 2017, with a baby on the way, Lia LoBello Reynolds and Colin Reynolds realized staying in the city wasn’t feasible and commuting to and from the suburbs each day wasn’t a life they wanted. The couple got new jobs in Pennsylvania and bought a home in a small town 27 miles west of Philadelphia.

“I just couldn’t imagine being on a train for three hours of my life every day just because I want to work in a city I couldn’t afford to live in,” said Colin Reynolds, a 34-year-old who works in digital marketing.

Reynolds isn’t alone. According to recent data from the US Census Bureau, more people are leaving the state of New York. Between July 2017 and July 2018, the Empire State lost 180,306 people and gained only 131,746 new residents. A difference of 48,560 abandoned New York — the biggest decrease of any state in the U.S.

The problem is especially acute upstate where 42 out of 50 counties have seen a population decrease since 2010.

“Much more needs to be done to improve the basic climate for economic growth” upstate, said E.J. McMahon, the Research Director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank based in Albany. “It’s just not dynamic enough to hold more of its people.”

In New York City, the population is still growing, with the number of people living in the city increasing by nearly half a million from 2010 to 2017, but more and more people are moving away. In 2017, roughly 131 people left the metropolitan area each day, compared with 43 in 2014.

“The thought is, ‘I like it but I can’t afford it here and it’s hard,’” McMahon said of the driving force behind people leaving.

Here, former and soon-to-be former New Yorkers reveal why …

‘We were burnt out by New York City’

After moving to the city from Ohio in her early 20s, Victoria Libertore, 43, always thought she was a lifelong New Yorker. But her wife, Jennifer Koltun, had been wanting to leave for years.

“I was so burnt out on New York, it seems to have gotten noisier and dirty,” said Koltun, 57, also a native New Yorker. “I needed a lifestyle change, warmer climate and a more laid-back environment.”

In 2015, the couple, who lived in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, took a trip to Los Angeles, where they have many friends, and Libertore was surprised by how charmed she was by the palm trees, the friendly people and the old Hollywood history. She wasn’t quite ready to leave New York, but they started to plan for it.

In 2017, Koltun, who oversees operations for an IT leasing company based in Manhattan, told her boss she wanted to move to California. He was surprisingly receptive to it, and she spent a year automating the business so that she’d be able to relocate and work from home.

They finally made the move a few weeks ago, renting a three-bedroom, two-bath bungalow in Monrovia, a small city in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, about a half-hour’s drive from downtown LA.

Before they started house-hunting, they made a list of everything they wanted, from a back yard and a soaking tub to central air and a sliding barn door somewhere in the home. They found a luxuriously renovated 1922 bungalow that had 21 out of the 23 things they wanted, everything — even the barn door — except a pool and a refrigerator, which they had to purchase. They pay $3,000 a month for the 1,500-square-foot home, $170 more than they paid for a 1,067-square-foot loft near the Brooklyn Navy Yards with coin laundry in the basement and window units for A/C.

“It was loud, it was noisy, we lived by the BQE,” said Koltun, who loves that she now lives by a beautiful public course for golfing, a passion she wasn’t able to pursue in Kings County.

“I will say [our old] building was full of a lot of amazing people,” said Libertore. “Tattoo artists, film people, painters … that vibrancy was wonderful.”

The couple estimated that their expenses will be roughly the same as those they had in New York, but their quality of life already seems much higher.

“New York is like no other place. That boldness, that intensity, the grittiness,” said Libertore. But “life doesn’t have to be so hard.”

‘I can’t find any jobs upstate’

Upstate’s population is especially dwindling, and some of the most severe losses have occurred in Broome County, situated on the border with Pennsylvania.

Mike Gehm, 38, was born and raised in the county and currently lives in Binghamton, but he said it’s time to get out. He and his fiancée, 26, an overnight stocker at Walmart, and 5-year-old daughter are planning to move south in about a month’s time.

“We finally made the decision to just say, ‘the heck with it’ and go,” said Gehm, who plans to move to Lexington, Kentucky, or a smaller town in West Virginia — areas he has selected based on school ratings, cost of living, jobs and landscape.

He previously worked in construction but has been a stay-at-home dad for the past year, in part because he’s lacked opportunities to work outside the home.

“Jobs are limited around here … It’s hard for me to find [one],” said Gehm, who plans on working in construction or retail once he moves. The minimum wage will be lower down south — $7.25 an hour in Kentucky and $8.75 in West Virginia, compared with $11.10 in New York state — but Gehm thinks the lower cost of living will more than make up for potentially lower earnings.

“I’m dropping $250 a month on electric,” he said. “Everything is an outrageous price for us [up here].”

They currently pay about $750 per month rent on a two-bedroom trailer. Down south, Gehm estimated that they’ll be able to get a four-bedroom house for $400 to $500 per month.

Ultimately, the move is about providing a better life for his young daughter. A milder climate will allow her more time outdoors, and Gehm worries about the levels of radon — a naturally occurring gas that can cause lung cancer — in the area. He also hasn’t been thrilled with the local kindergarten and says schools are rated better where they’re headed.

“The biggest thing to me is school systems up here. They need to do better,” he said.

While moving will mean being a nine-plus hour drive from family, Gehm said part of the appeal is making a fresh start somewhere new.

He said: “We want to make it on our own.”

‘We didn’t want to have kids in the city’

Colin and his wife Lia LoBello Reynolds, 38, knew they didn’t want to raise a family in the city, so when they found out she was pregnant in July 2017, moving was on their mind.

Conveniently, that same month they were both offered jobs by a multinational Malvern, Pennsylvania.-based manufacturing company that was a client of Lia’s, who works in communications and was at an agency at the time.

“That was sort of like the universe aligning for us,” said Colin.

They moved to Pennsylvania in December 2017, first renting an apartment in Phoenixville and then buying a four-bedroom home in Glen Mills, a town about 27 miles west of Philadelphia with a population just under 20,000. Their mortgage is $4,000 a month, just $200 more than they were paying for their apartment in the Financial District, which had one bedroom that lacked a door.

They both took roughly 30 percent pay cuts with the move but say with a lower cost of living, lower taxes and potential bonuses, they are still coming out ahead.

They love having a big backyard for their dog and plenty of space to play indoors and out for their 9-month-old son, but living in a relatively sleepy town has been an adjustment.

“It’s quiet,” they both said with a chuckle.

“Our last apartment, if you craned your neck a little bit, you could see the World Trade Center right out our window,” Lia continued. “Now you make two rights out of our development and you see an Arabian horse farm. It could not be more different.”

After living in New York City for 14 years, Lia finds the single-lane country roads and unlit streets a bit unnerving and insisted they get an alarm system, though the area is quite safe.

“Lia could walk around Alphabet City at 3 in the morning and not blink an eye, but we are in a house and it’s dark out and we are alone and she’s, like, freaking out,” said Colin.

Their commute is relatively easy, a 25-minute drive they make together, and their office is all about work-life balance. Everyone tends to commute and leave around 4 p.m. to avoid traffic, which is nice, though Colin misses grabbing drinks after work with colleagues. They both lament how easy it was to socialize when they lived in Manhattan.

“We’re still kind of working on making friends,” said Colin.

Lia noted that she has to make more of a conscious effort to stay up on what’s in and out, something that seemed to occur naturally riding the subway and walking around New York City.

“You don’t pick up as much,” she said. “Whatever the next trend is, I’m going to be reading about it instead of seeing it.”

But overall, they are happy with the move and their new life.

“In New York, people live to work. Out here, it’s really work to live,” said Lia. “There’s something really nice about it.”

The post Why More People Are Leaving New York Than Any Other State appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

from DIYS http://bit.ly/2sDEm9q

[davidoespailla]

Why More People Are Leaving New York Than Any Other State

monkeybusinessimages/iStock

In 2017, with a baby on the way, Lia LoBello Reynolds and Colin Reynolds realized staying in the city wasn’t feasible and commuting to and from the suburbs each day wasn’t a life they wanted. The couple got new jobs in Pennsylvania and bought a home in a small town 27 miles west of Philadelphia.

“I just couldn’t imagine being on a train for three hours of my life every day just because I want to work in a city I couldn’t afford to live in,” said Colin Reynolds, a 34-year-old who works in digital marketing.

Reynolds isn’t alone. According to recent data from the US Census Bureau, more people are leaving the state of New York. Between July 2017 and July 2018, the Empire State lost 180,306 people and gained only 131,746 new residents. A difference of 48,560 abandoned New York — the biggest decrease of any state in the U.S.

The problem is especially acute upstate where 42 out of 50 counties have seen a population decrease since 2010.

“Much more needs to be done to improve the basic climate for economic growth” upstate, said E.J. McMahon, the Research Director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank based in Albany. “It’s just not dynamic enough to hold more of its people.”

In New York City, the population is still growing, with the number of people living in the city increasing by nearly half a million from 2010 to 2017, but more and more people are moving away. In 2017, roughly 131 people left the metropolitan area each day, compared with 43 in 2014.

“The thought is, ‘I like it but I can’t afford it here and it’s hard,’” McMahon said of the driving force behind people leaving.

Here, former and soon-to-be former New Yorkers reveal why …

‘We were burnt out by New York City’

After moving to the city from Ohio in her early 20s, Victoria Libertore, 43, always thought she was a lifelong New Yorker. But her wife, Jennifer Koltun, had been wanting to leave for years.

“I was so burnt out on New York, it seems to have gotten noisier and dirty,” said Koltun, 57, also a native New Yorker. “I needed a lifestyle change, warmer climate and a more laid-back environment.”

In 2015, the couple, who lived in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, took a trip to Los Angeles, where they have many friends, and Libertore was surprised by how charmed she was by the palm trees, the friendly people and the old Hollywood history. She wasn’t quite ready to leave New York, but they started to plan for it.

In 2017, Koltun, who oversees operations for an IT leasing company based in Manhattan, told her boss she wanted to move to California. He was surprisingly receptive to it, and she spent a year automating the business so that she’d be able to relocate and work from home.

They finally made the move a few weeks ago, renting a three-bedroom, two-bath bungalow in Monrovia, a small city in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, about a half-hour’s drive from downtown LA.

Before they started house-hunting, they made a list of everything they wanted, from a back yard and a soaking tub to central air and a sliding barn door somewhere in the home. They found a luxuriously renovated 1922 bungalow that had 21 out of the 23 things they wanted, everything — even the barn door — except a pool and a refrigerator, which they had to purchase. They pay $3,000 a month for the 1,500-square-foot home, $170 more than they paid for a 1,067-square-foot loft near the Brooklyn Navy Yards with coin laundry in the basement and window units for A/C.

“It was loud, it was noisy, we lived by the BQE,” said Koltun, who loves that she now lives by a beautiful public course for golfing, a passion she wasn’t able to pursue in Kings County.

“I will say [our old] building was full of a lot of amazing people,” said Libertore. “Tattoo artists, film people, painters … that vibrancy was wonderful.”

The couple estimated that their expenses will be roughly the same as those they had in New York, but their quality of life already seems much higher.

“New York is like no other place. That boldness, that intensity, the grittiness,” said Libertore. But “life doesn’t have to be so hard.”

‘I can’t find any jobs upstate’

Upstate’s population is especially dwindling, and some of the most severe losses have occurred in Broome County, situated on the border with Pennsylvania.

Mike Gehm, 38, was born and raised in the county and currently lives in Binghamton, but he said it’s time to get out. He and his fiancée, 26, an overnight stocker at Walmart, and 5-year-old daughter are planning to move south in about a month’s time.

“We finally made the decision to just say, ‘the heck with it’ and go,” said Gehm, who plans to move to Lexington, Kentucky, or a smaller town in West Virginia — areas he has selected based on school ratings, cost of living, jobs and landscape.

He previously worked in construction but has been a stay-at-home dad for the past year, in part because he’s lacked opportunities to work outside the home.

“Jobs are limited around here … It’s hard for me to find [one],” said Gehm, who plans on working in construction or retail once he moves. The minimum wage will be lower down south — $7.25 an hour in Kentucky and $8.75 in West Virginia, compared with $11.10 in New York state — but Gehm thinks the lower cost of living will more than make up for potentially lower earnings.

“I’m dropping $250 a month on electric,” he said. “Everything is an outrageous price for us [up here].”

They currently pay about $750 per month rent on a two-bedroom trailer. Down south, Gehm estimated that they’ll be able to get a four-bedroom house for $400 to $500 per month.

Ultimately, the move is about providing a better life for his young daughter. A milder climate will allow her more time outdoors, and Gehm worries about the levels of radon — a naturally occurring gas that can cause lung cancer — in the area. He also hasn’t been thrilled with the local kindergarten and says schools are rated better where they’re headed.

“The biggest thing to me is school systems up here. They need to do better,” he said.

While moving will mean being a nine-plus hour drive from family, Gehm said part of the appeal is making a fresh start somewhere new.

He said: “We want to make it on our own.”

‘We didn’t want to have kids in the city’

Colin and his wife Lia LoBello Reynolds, 38, knew they didn’t want to raise a family in the city, so when they found out she was pregnant in July 2017, moving was on their mind.

Conveniently, that same month they were both offered jobs by a multinational Malvern, Pennsylvania.-based manufacturing company that was a client of Lia’s, who works in communications and was at an agency at the time.

“That was sort of like the universe aligning for us,” said Colin.

They moved to Pennsylvania in December 2017, first renting an apartment in Phoenixville and then buying a four-bedroom home in Glen Mills, a town about 27 miles west of Philadelphia with a population just under 20,000. Their mortgage is $4,000 a month, just $200 more than they were paying for their apartment in the Financial District, which had one bedroom that lacked a door.

They both took roughly 30 percent pay cuts with the move but say with a lower cost of living, lower taxes and potential bonuses, they are still coming out ahead.

They love having a big backyard for their dog and plenty of space to play indoors and out for their 9-month-old son, but living in a relatively sleepy town has been an adjustment.

“It’s quiet,” they both said with a chuckle.

“Our last apartment, if you craned your neck a little bit, you could see the World Trade Center right out our window,” Lia continued. “Now you make two rights out of our development and you see an Arabian horse farm. It could not be more different.”

After living in New York City for 14 years, Lia finds the single-lane country roads and unlit streets a bit unnerving and insisted they get an alarm system, though the area is quite safe.

“Lia could walk around Alphabet City at 3 in the morning and not blink an eye, but we are in a house and it’s dark out and we are alone and she’s, like, freaking out,” said Colin.

Their commute is relatively easy, a 25-minute drive they make together, and their office is all about work-life balance. Everyone tends to commute and leave around 4 p.m. to avoid traffic, which is nice, though Colin misses grabbing drinks after work with colleagues. They both lament how easy it was to socialize when they lived in Manhattan.

“We’re still kind of working on making friends,” said Colin.

Lia noted that she has to make more of a conscious effort to stay up on what’s in and out, something that seemed to occur naturally riding the subway and walking around New York City.

“You don’t pick up as much,” she said. “Whatever the next trend is, I’m going to be reading about it instead of seeing it.”

But overall, they are happy with the move and their new life.

“In New York, people live to work. Out here, it’s really work to live,” said Lia. “There’s something really nice about it.”

The post Why More People Are Leaving New York Than Any Other State appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

Why More People Are Leaving New York Than Any Other State

[nilority-blog]

Just who are among the most influential blacks in technology? Here’s a snapshot: One leads a dominant software brand that enables thousands of companies and millions of people worldwide to avoid a range of cyberthreats. Another high-powered executive has unveiled the next generation in mobile technology that will dramatically change the way we work, live, and conduct business. One entrepreneur has built a company that uses innovation to bring renewable energy to countries and could provide the answer to sustainability for a continent—and the world. And another CEO runs a publicly traded company that helps police departments detect and analyze gunshots as a means of reducing urban violence.

The aforementioned disruptors and more than a score of others represent a phalanx of CEOs, founders of ground-breaking enterprises, and corporate leaders who help drive the strategic direction at some of America’s most iconic tech companies. In the process, they impact a range of sectors, including financial services, manufacturing, food services, and entertainment to name but a few. Those found on our roster represent the following:

-Leaders who oversee, operate, and guide the strategic direction of publicly traded and privately held high-impact tech companies

-Top executives on leadership teams overseeing overall management, operations, product development, and corporate strategy

-Individuals who have engaged in driving digital transformation for their companies and customers

As such, we decided not to include core investors, venture capitalists, and corporate board members who play no other role within the tech space.

We have identified those on our list by consulting leaders, executives, experts, and consultants within and outside Silicon Valley.

Still trying to figure out the names of the four who we included as part of our opening snapshots? Read on to find these amazing leaders and others who comprise our list of Top Tech Influencers.

-—Reporting by Lisa Fraser, Roland Michel, Delicia Paisley-Smith and Tiamari Whitted

The 2018 List of the Most Influential Blacks in Technology 

Top CEOs

Ralph A. Clark

President & CEO

ShotSpotter Inc.

If you can identify technology that has helped reduce gun violence, police departments from Chicago to New York will point to ShotSpotter Inc. Ralph A. Clark, the company’s president and CEO, has been responsible for making the company the leader in gunshot detection, location, and forensic analysis. And most recently, he expanded the company’s portfolio with the acquisition of HunchLab technology from Philadelphia-based Azavea, which will enable the company to apply risk modeling and AI to help forecast when and where crimes are likely to occur and provide deterrence recommendations for specific patrol missions.

Clark’s 30 years of corporate, financial, and organizational leadership has led to the company’s superior performance. His previous positions include serving as president and CEO at GuardianEdge Technologies Inc., leading its transformation into a leader in endpoint data protection before helping orchestrate its acquisition by Symantec, and chief financial officer at Snap Appliance Inc. Prior to his role at Snap Appliance, he worked at several VC-backed startups, leading a number of them to successful acquisitions. Early in his career, Clark, who holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of the Pacific, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, excelled in sales and marketing roles at IBM as well as served as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs & Co. L.L.C. and Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., handling transactions involving tech companies.

  Marc Jones

Chairman and CEO

Aeris

On the cutting edge of technology as chairman and CEO of Aeris, Marc Jones has led his team over the past decade to help power the world’s largest companies through the Internet of Things (IoT). Named by Goldman Sachs as one of the nation’s leading entrepreneurs in 2012 and 2013, Jones grew up in Chicago before heading west to Stanford University, where he received both his undergraduate and law degrees. As a young attorney, he was recruited by top-tier investment banks and then by some of his clients. In his early 30s, he was named president and COO of Madge Networks, where he helped turn the upstart network solutions company with $40 million in revenue into an industry leader producing revenue of $500 million. Madge’s initial public offering was successfully executed on Jones’ watch. After Madge, Jones served as the chairman and CEO of Visionael, a pioneer in enterprise network management and automation, raising over $40 million to fuel its rapid growth. In addition to his professional work, he serves as the chair of Management Leadership for Tomorrow and a board member of the California Health Care Foundation and a trustee for Stanford University.

  Eric Kelly

Chairman & CEO

Sphere 3D Corp.

A Silicon Valley heavyweight for more than three decades, Eric Kelly serves as chairman and CEO of Sphere 3D Corp., which delivers containerization, virtualization, and data management solutions via hybrid cloud, cloud, and on-premise implementations through its global reseller network and professional services organization.  He has served as Sphere 3D’s chairman since July 2013, and gained the CEO position in 2014, after its merger with Overland Storage, the enterprise he helmed five years prior to the transaction. Under his leadership, net revenues of the publicly traded company increased to $81.5 million for FY 2017  and its portfolio of brands expanded to provide solutions for the healthcare, education, government, and financial services sectors.

His previous positions have included vice president and general manager of Storage Systems Solutions at Adaptec Inc.; president and CEO of Snap Appliance; president of the Systems Division at Maxtor Corp., as well as various executive-level roles with Dell Computer Corp., Diamond Multimedia, Conner Peripherals, and IBM.

His business acumen placed him in high demand in business and government circles. In fact, Kelly, who earned an M.B.A. from San Francisco State University and a B.S. in Business from San Jose State University, served two terms on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Manufacturing Council, providing counsel to the Obama administration on strategies and policy recommendations to promote and advance domestic manufacturing.

  François Locoh-Donou

President & CEO

F5 Networks Inc.

Having lived in the West African nation of Togo and France, François Locoh-Donou brings a unique global perspective to his leadership of Seattle-based F5 Networks Inc. Named president, chief executive officer, and a member of the board of directors in April 2017, he brought two decades of enterprise technology experience to the company, which specializes in application delivery networking technology.  His prowess delivered record revenue for the publicly traded company of $2.1 billion in 2017.

Locoh-Donou previously held successive leadership positions at Ciena, the network strategy and technology company, including chief operating officer; senior vice president, Global Products Group; vice president and general manager, EMEA; vice president, International Sales; and vice president, Marketing. Prior to joining Ciena, he held R&D roles at Photonetics, a French optoelectronics company.

Locoh-Donou, who received his bachelor’s and master’s in physics engineering at École Centrale de Marseille; a master’s in optical communications from Télécom Paris Tech, and his M.B.A. from Stanford, serves on the advisory board of Jhpiego, a nonprofit global health affiliate of Johns Hopkins University. He is also the co-founder of Cajou Espoir, a cashew-processing facility that employs several hundred people in rural Togo, 80% of whom are women. Cajou Espoir exports more than 400 tons of cashew kernels annually to the U.S. and Europe.

  Charles E. Phillips

President & CEO

Infor Inc.

Charles E. Phillips has built Infor Inc. into a multinational tech powerhouse. As CEO of one of the world’s largest providers of enterprise software applications since 2010, he has been responsible for doubling the company’s revenue to $2.7 billion and size to more than 15,000 employees. It also became the first major software company to offer an integrated, end-to-end application suite for entire industries: the first Industry Cloud Company. Due to this phenomenal growth, Koch Equity Development, a division of Koch Industries, made a $2.5 billion investment in the firm last year.

Phillips, who was named one of BE’s Most Powerful Executives in Corporate America has spent his career transforming companies with technology, industry domain, and unconstrained thinking. As such, the former captain in the Marine Corps.—who rose to become a managing director at Morgan Stanley and co-president and director of Oracle—has been highly sought after for service on boards, including Viacom Corp., Banco Santander, Apollo Theater, Business Executives for National Security, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Phillips, who holds a bachelor’s degree from the Air Force Academy, an M.B.A. from Hampton University, and a law degree from New York University, serves as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a member of the President’s Economic Advisory Board during the Obama administration.

  Corey E. Thomas

President & CEO

Rapid7

Rapid7 is one of the go-to companies for major corporations that seek to detect and respond to cyberattacks. Due to the leadership of Corey E. Thomas, its president and CEO, that reputation is well deserved. In fact, the Rapid7 Insight platform collects data from across a given company’s environment to enable teams to manage weaknesses, monitor user behavior, search logs, and other functions. It handles such services for more than 7,000 organizations—including Microsoft, Macy’s, Netflix, and Intuit—in more than 120 countries.

Thomas is one of the leading experts in this arena: In 2018, he was elected to the Cyber Threat Alliance board of directors and the Massachusetts Cybersecurity Strategy Council.

Having received a bachelor’s in electrical engineering and computer science from Vanderbilt University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, Thomas has led an array of tech companies to the next stage of innovation. Before joining Rapid7, he was vice president of marketing at Parallels Inc., a virtualization technology company; and group project manager of Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, launching the worldwide availability of SQL Server 2005 and steering product planning for its data platform.

Top Entrepreneurs 

Chris Young

President & CEO

McAfee L.L.C.

In an era of cyberthreats, Christopher Young seeks to make the world more secure. As chief executive officer of McAfee L.L.C., he drives the company’s security business across hardware and software platforms and as a result, the firm generated 2017 revenues exceeding $3 billion. Through his leadership, McAfee protects mission-critical systems and data for a myriad of the world’s largest publicly traded corporations. Moreover, vast arrays of government agencies and non-governmental organizations as well as more than 400 million consumers rely on its cybersecurity solutions.

Young’s expertise has been tapped at the highest levels of government and business. For instance, he serves as a member of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC), which advises the U.S. government on national security and emergency preparedness. He also played a key role in the establishment and governance of the nonprofit Cyber Threat Alliance—a group of companies that share intelligence in this area.

He can also be found on the boards of American Express and Snap Inc. Moreover, the Harvard M.B.A. served on the board of trustees of Princeton University, his alma mater.

  Jessica O. Matthews

CEO

Uncharted Power

For years, Jessica Matthews has held a true passion for helping countries within the African continent. At the age of 22, the Nigerian-American innovator and entrepreneur created SOCCKET, a soccer ball that produced kinetic energy during play that could be used to power a lamp, cell phone, or other devices. The invention proved invaluable to Nigeria and other countries challenged by sporadic blackouts.

Roughly a decade later, that one invention has grown into Uncharted Power, “an energy and data technology firm that produces infrastructure solutions for communities, facilities, and the Internet of Things (IoT).” As such, it has developed an array of kinetic energy-generating vehicles like MORE (Motion-based, Off-grid Renewable Energy) and the energy-harnessing Pulse jump rope to serve major corporations and governments in Nigeria, Angola, Malawi, and Senegal, among others.  The company has more than 10-plus global patents that are either finalized or pending,

In 2016, Matthews became the first black woman to raise $7 million in a Series A financing, which was led by the NIC Fund with participation from Kapor Capital, Magic Johnson Enterprises, BBG Ventures, and Lingo Ventures. The Harvard grad has won over 25 awards, including being named the Black Enterprise Innovator of the year in 2013.

  Charley Moore

CEO & Founder

Rocket Lawyer

Charley Moore was seeking to solve a huge problem for small businesses: an online service that would provide entrepreneurs with legal advice on an accessible and affordable platform. When he launched San Francisco-based Rocket Lawyer, Moore took a risk with his company in the beginning by offering free services. The move paid off: His venture went from 25,000 subscribers to over 1 million users. The company was growing so rapidly that the staff increased from 50 employees to 100 employees.

Moore, a former internet law and business attorney for high-power Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, received $40 million in venture funding from August Capital, Google Ventures (now GV), and Investor Growth Capital between 2009 and 2013 to finance the infrastructure and operations. Today, the United States Naval Academy and University of California at Berkeley law school graduate has transformed Rocket Lawyer into an evolving, global operation that has helped more than 20 million people with their legal issues, ranging from business incorporations to estate planning as well as created more than 100,000 business contracts a month. Rocket Lawyer has also been ranked among the be 100s, the nation’s largest black-owned businesses.

  Guy Primus

CEO & Founder

The Virtual Reality Co.

When BE wrote about Guy Primus in 2016, we reported that this innovative entrepreneur represents one of the few African Americans (perhaps the only) heading up a virtual reality content studio. As co-founder of the Virtual Reality Studio, his company announced that it raised $23 million to produce original virtual reality content and position VRC as the premier VR storyteller and industry lead. And VRC continues to break new ground. Earlier this year, it announced its deal with Universal Studios and entertainment colossus Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, launching “Jurassic World VR Expedition, an interactive cinematic virtual reality (VR) game that transports players to the visually stunning jungles of Isla Nublar, where fans will engage in an epic rescue adventure inspired by the Jurassic World film series.” The game was unveiled in June at more than 100 Dave & Buster’s entertainment centers—and as Variety reported in September, the biggest location-based VR debut ever. Moreover, VRC’s deal has been cited as “one of the most successful commercial VR partnerships for a major motion picture studio to date.”  Primus told Variety: “This will be the first time that a studio receives a 7-figure check for VR.”

Primus will continue to engage in similar partnerships with companies like motion seat maker D-Box Technologies, which helped introduce the company’s first original VR experience, an animated series, Raising a Rukus, as well as scout other family-friendly fare. His previous experience in senior-level roles such as COO of Overbrook Entertainment, director of Digital Media for Starbucks Entertainment, and group product manager at Microsoft has positioned him for such game-changing moves. Primus, who received his bachelor’s and master’s in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, will stay plugged into the latest tech developments: He’s also the chairman emeritus of the advisory board of top-ranked School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at his alma mater.

  David L. Steward

Chairman

World Wide Technology

Through continuous innovation and forging partnerships with Cisco, Dell EMC, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprises and other tech giants, David L. Steward has built World Wide Technology into a force within the industry. In fact, he grew WWT from a small product reseller that he founded in 1990 into a technology solutions provider that can meet the networking, big data, IoT, security, and storage needs of large public and private organizations worldwide. With $10.7 billion in 2017 revenues, WWT is the nation’s largest black-owned company and one of the biggest minority suppliers in the country.

Maintaining that WWT is headquartered in “Silicon Valley in St. Louis,” Steward recently announced his company’s inclusion in Gartner’s August 2018 Market Guide for Digital Business Consulting Services “as one of the 20 Representative Vendors in DBCS across digital strategy, digital customer, and employee experience, and digital business model transformation.” To better serve customers, WWT created the Advanced Technology Center, a brick-and-mortar campus containing labs used for product demonstrations, proofs of concept, building reference architectures, and so much more.

The Clinton, Missouri, native started his career in sales before launching WWT with less than 10 employees—now, WWT has 4,000-plus employees. Steward holds a bachelor’s degree from Central Mission State University.

Top Executives

Ty Ahmad-Taylor

Vice President, Product Marketing

Facebook

When Tyrone “Ty” Ahmad-Taylor took on the position as Facebook’s vice president of Product Marketing, members of the leadership team viewed the addition as a “big win” for its monetization strategy. In his role, he leads a team of 300 professionals engaged in product management and strategy, go-to-market plans, and financial analysis to both the advertising engineering organization and financial analysis teams—vital to the tech leader that produced 2017 global revenues of $40.7 billion.

When Facebook selected Ahmad-Taylor, the company recruited C-suite material: he previously held the position of president and CEO of THX Ltd, the innovative audio-visual company founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas. One of his groundbreaking projects was launching THX Live! during the debut of Beyoncé’s Formation World Tour. The Haverford College graduate with a B.S. in economics and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University has also held the position of vice president of SmartTV Services at Samsung, directing global teams in the U.S. and Korea. The innovator is also founder of FanFeedr, a service he operated to provide statistics and data to sports fans, which he sold to Samsung Electronics. As an inventor, he has several patents, including a design for a system providing on-demand viewing for Comcast, and a patent for a set-top box.

He was recently appointed to the board of directors of GoPro, the digital camera producer, and continues to serve as a member of the boards of Industry Leaders for the Consumer Technology Association and not-for-profit Urbanworld Film Festival.

  Ime Archibong

VP of Strategic Partnerships

Facebook

Ime Archibong is the go-to executive to develop Facebook’s most valued strategic alliances, product integrations, and new commercial opportunities across a variety of sectors. The tech executive began his career at Facebook in November 2010 as director of partnerships, leading the team to accelerate and drive the tech giant’s product and strategies to various businesses around the world.

Since he came aboard, his role has become more expansive. Beyond media, music, and video partnerships, he travels the globe to find new means to connect millions worldwide through platforms like Facebook Groups and Messenger and initiatives to support its community of more than 9,000 developers as well as a multitude of small businesses.

Nigerian-born Archibong is extremely passionate about spreading awareness about diversity within the tech industry. He attended Yale University and studied electrical engineering and computer science. Determined to be an engineer, he gained his first opportunity at IBM and focused on licensing its global portfolio of storage research technology. After working several years at IBM, he was recruited to work at Facebook, developing strategies to help the world connect to the internet. Due to his influence and reach, Archibong, who also holds an M.B.A. from Stanford, has been recognized among the 40 under 40 Top Diverse Talent in Silicon Valley by theREGISTRY Bay Area and Digital Diversity Network.

  Marc Brown

Corporate Vice President,  Corporate Development

Microsoft 

Marc Brown represents one of the executives who powers the strategic direction of Microsoft. An 18-year veteran of the tech giant, which produced $110 billion in FY 2018 revenues, he oversees mergers and acquisitions and strategic investments. During his tenure, he has led more than 100 transactions collectively valued at more than $16 billion, including the acquisitions of Fast Search and Transfer, Tellme Inc., Danger Inc., Frontbridge, Softricity, and Massive Inc.

Prior to his role at Microsoft, Brown worked as a corporate lawyer at Boston-based Global 50 law firm Goodwin Procter L.L.P. as an associate in its corporate group, representing venture capital and private equity firms in structuring, analyzing, drafting, negotiating, and closing leveraged buyouts, recapitalizations, and early and later-stage venture investments for clients such as Alta Communications, TA Associates, Summit Partners, Great Hill Partners, and eCOM Partners.

Brown, who received his bachelor’s degree from Colgate University, an M.B.A. from New York University’s Stern School of Business, and a law degree from Georgetown University, had a previous stint as an investment banker at UBS.

  Stacy Brown-Philpot

CEO

TaskRabbit

Stacey Brown-Philpot continues to be the transformative force behind TaskRabbit, a “gig economy” leader that hires freelancers for odd jobs or “Taskers” and matches them with clients. As CEO, Brown-Philpot has expanded the company’s footprint by expanding its Tasker pool to more than 60,000, raising growth capital, and developing business-building partnerships like the one it struck with tech behemoth Amazon. Last year, however, she closed a masterstroke of a deal: Swedish home products retailer Ikea acquired TaskRabbit, which now operates as an independent subsidiary. The transaction gave TaskRabbit additional resources and heightened global branding—it has already doubled its scope to 40 markets in the U.S.—while Ikea gained a much-needed digital platform and expertise. Synergies, however, are readily apparent as Ikea promotes the fact that Taskers are on hand to provide furniture assembly, among other services.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Brown-Philpot never envisioned being a part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. The Detroit native started her professional career as an accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then took a job as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. While working at the financial giant, she had the opportunity to work on tech deals. Intrigued by the growth in the industry and booming IPO activity, she attended Stanford Business School. After earning her M.B.A., she landed a role at Google. Her nine-year stint there provided the opportunity to work in India and launch Black Googlers Network, an employee resource group. A member of the be Registry of Corporate Directors, Philpot-Brown also sits on two corporate boards—Nordstrom and HP Inc.—and nonprofit Black Girls Code.

  Sam Bright

Vice President & General Manager, Soft Goods, eBay North America

eBay Inc.

A seasoned Silicon Valley executive, Sam Bright has more than 14 years of experience in the tech space that made him well-equipped to lead the multibillion-dollar Soft Goods business unit at eBay North America. As such, he oversees the sale of an eclectic mix of merchandise: Art & Collectibles, Media, Toys & Lifestyle, Sporting Goods, and Soft Home.

His expertise spans across a range of disciplines, including strategy, investment banking, corporate development, market research, and P&L ownership.

Since joining eBay six years ago, Bright has built an impressive portfolio and generated momentum via programming with brands like Marvel, StubHub, and Verizon. He previously led eBay’s Art & Collectibles platform with more than 50 million listings, ranging from rare comic books and high-end antiques to cryptocurrencies and sports memorabilia. In 2017, his leadership grew it into a multibillion-dollar category at the e-commerce enterprise.

Prior to that role, the Taylor University and Harvard Business School graduate led and scaled the Strategic Partnerships/Business Development team for eBay’s $30 billion Americas business, where he inked over 70 product, vertical, mobile, marketing, and data partnerships over the course of two years.

He also currently serves on the board of directors at Benetech, a Palo-Alto, California-based nonprofit that develops and uses technology to drive positive social change.

  Craig Cuffie

Senior Vice President and Chief Procurement Officer

Salesforce.com

As Senior Vice President and Chief Procurement Officer, Craig Cuffie oversees Direct and Indirect Sourcing, Procurement, Shared Services, Supplier Diversity and Data Center Fulfillment at Salesforce, the leader in customer relationship management software in the “cloud.” In that role, he and his team manage $3.5 billion of procurement spend, as Salesforce seeks to reach its revenue growth target of more than $20 billion.

Cuffie is a veteran who has been engaged in an array of assignments in the tech space. Before joining Salesforce, he served as managing director at Eagle Island Advisors, a boutique private equity firm focused on sourcing lower mid-market opportunities in the third-party logistics industry. Moreover, he’s held various senior management roles throughout the years at revolutionary companies including Jawbone, Clearwire, and Intuit. Cuffie has over 18 years of experience in aerospace and high technology companies, most notably with Quantum Inc., Lam Research Inc., and United Technologies Corp. Over time, Cuffie achieved several leadership roles in general management, business development, program and project management, manufacturing, and supply chain.

Cuffie is a member of the Executive Leadership Council, the Stanford Global Supply Chain Forum, and the Institute for Supply Management. As an adviser to numerous Silicon Valley startups, Cuffie offers coaching to help build their business. He received his master’s degree in management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

  David Drummond

Senior Vice President, Corporate Development; Chief Legal Officer; Chairman, GV and CapitalG

Alphabet Inc.

David Drummond represents the legal powerhouse behind Alphabet Inc. and is considered one of the most powerful executives in the tech industry. In fact, Drummond, a former partner of the premier tech law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, played a major role in the transformation of how the world shares information, serving as Google’s first outside counsel and working with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to incorporate the company and secure its initial rounds of financing. The senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer seeks to protect the firm in legal battles, whether dealing with Uber or the European Union, as well as oversees its investment vehicles GV (formerly Google Ventures), which led the $6.5 million Series A round financing in Blavity earlier this year, and Capital G, which has Airbnb, Snap Inc., and SurveyMonkey in its portfolio and made a $1 billion investment in the ridesharing company Lyft last year. He has also personally invested in ventures such as Ozy Media, co-founded by former CNN journalist Carlos Watson and serves on the board of Rocket Lawyer. One of be’s Most Powerful Executives in Corporate America, Drummond is an independent corporate director on the board of KKR, the nation’s largest private equity firm.

Drummond, a graduate of Santa Clara University who holds an M.B.A. from Stanford, helped initiate the company’s $32 million-plus racial justice portfolio. In April, he spoke at the Vera Institute Gala on the importance of criminal justice system reform: “If you don’t have the data, you will never change them.” Drummond also played a role in kick-starting the Hidden Genius Project with a $1 million grant as a means of getting more young black males connected to tech. In 2017, he visited Chicago to present a $1.5 million grant to native Chance the Rapper’s nonprofit and a few other organizations to help students.

  Malik Ducard

Global Head of Learning, Social Impact, Family, Film & TV

Google/YouTube

In his current role, Malik Ducard oversees and drives business development efforts for the platform’s family, entertainment, and educational partnerships and programming. This innovator joined YouTube almost eight years ago, earning the reputation for dynamic, decisive leadership that fuses tech, business, user, and social interests.

A huge literacy advocate, Ducard launched the YouTube Kids app and YouTube Learning, an effort designed to expand and enhance education on the platform. Under his stewardship, YouTube recently announced a $20 million investment in educational videos with topics ranging from school subjects to cooking, and will soon roll out the YouTube Learning Fund focused on investing in educational content creators, aka EduTubers. Moreover, he has also helped launch #YouTubeBlack, a creator-driven movement aimed at spotlighting and supporting black creators on the platform.

A Columbia University graduate, with an M.B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson School of Management, Ducard currently serves on the board of the Digital Diversity Network, a nonprofit trade association whose mission is to advance diversity, create access, and champion inclusion within the digital and technology sectors, and as board president of LA Makerspace, a nonprofit organization that brings STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics) education to Los Angeles students.

Aicha S. Evans

Senior Vice President & Chief Strategy Officer

Intel Corp.

As Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Intel Corp., Aicha S. Evans leads Intel’s efforts to convert from a PC-centric company to a data-centric juggernaut. Selected one of be’s Most Powerful Executives in Corporate America, Evans manages the companywide execution for the enterprise that generated 2017 revenue of $59.4 billion.

Evans started her career at Intel in 2006, as a software integration and test manager. Over the years, she has held numerous management positions responsible for Intel’s wireless efforts, including software engineering and support for customers deploying WiMAX networks in various parts of the globe. Evans also managed Wi-Fi engineering and product lines in Israel. Evans has also served as general manager of Wireless Platform Research & Development Group.

Prior to Intel, The George Washington University graduate with a bachelor’s in computer engineering gained a decade of tech management experience in numerous roles at Rockwell Semiconductors, Conexant, and Skyworks. Evans serves as a member of the Supervisory Board at SAP SE and has served as an independent director of Autoliv Inc. from February 2015 to May 2017.

  Ehrika C. Gladden

Vice President/General Manager

Cisco Refresh, a Cisco Capital Business

Ehrika Gladden leads Cisco Refresh, the global organization for the $250 million business unit Cisco Capital. Her responsibilities include managing the delivery of the profit and loss for sales, marketing, channels, operations, and supply chain. She is also responsible for identifying growth opportunities in the multibillion-dollar remanufactured equipment market and defining the growth strategy for this next-phase startup business.

Her prowess and track record have earned her recognition and respect as an outstanding industry leader. Known as a global turnaround specialist and market disruptor, Gladden has successfully applied her commercial expertise in a range of international markets, including Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.

Prior to this role, she served as vice president for market strategy in Cisco’s $19-billion Enterprise Networking Business Unit, identifying core growth markets for the worldwide IT and networking leader.

This strong advocate for inclusion built a program to attract, retain, and promote diverse talent. As such, the initiative has resulted in three times the promotion rate for program participants and earned her multiple awards for inclusive leadership development.

Gladden, who graduated from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, currently serves as a Cisco Foundation Trustee and director for the Pennsylvania Women’s Conference Board. She is also a member of the Executive Leadership Council, the preeminent organization for black senior executives.

Xavier “X” Jernigan

Head of Cultural Partnerships

Spotify

As Head of Cultural Partnerships at Spotify, one of Xavier “X” Jernigan’s current responsibilities is to engage students via Spotify’s Opening Act HBCU Conference as a means to recruit top talent to the music streaming service from within the African American and LatinX communities. It’s a symbiotic process, as the conference provides students with varied opportunities, allowing them to see the value of applying their soft and hard skills to increase their advantage in the tech, music, and media industries.

Prior to this role, the Florida A&M University graduate served as Head of North America, Shows & Editorial at Spotify where he oversaw music programming and curation for the USA and Canada.

A pop culture expert, he was recently installed on The Kennedy Center’s Hip Hop Culture Council, a new initiative to help expand its presence at the institution and deepen public knowledge of the genre. He’s also the host of “Showstopper,” a Spotify original podcast about memorable music moments in film and television.

  Arthur P. Johnson Jr.

Vice President, Corporate Development and Strategic Planning

Pure Storage Inc.

Arthur Johnson takes point for corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions activities, building a deal-making team that helps drive the growth of Pure Storage, the data storage leader that produced more than $1 billion in FY 2018 revenues. He orchestrated the first-ever M&A deal for the Mountain View, California-based company, completing the acquisition of StorReduce, a cloud-first software-defined storage solutions firm, in August.

Prior to this current position, Johnson drove inorganic growth at Twilio, a cloud communications platform, as vice president of Strategy, Corporate Development and Global Partnerships, and Managing Partner of TwilioFund. His previous roles include serving as operating partner at VC powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz, chief operating officer for Cisco WebEx and vice president, corporate development at Intuit. He also led Hewlett Packard’s Software Division’s Strategic Planning group.

This 20-plus year expert in strategy operations, M&A, business development, and finance received his bachelor’s degree from California State University-Los Angeles and an M.B.A. from Stanford University Business School. He launched his career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, before engaging in a range of tech sectors such as big data, mobile and security, and application programming interfaces (APIs).

  Marachel Knight

Senior Vice President, Wireless Engineering, Construction and Operations

AT&T Inc.

Knight is accelerating AT&T’s 5G evolution, the next generation of mobile technology, which will transform business. In fact, she managed the trials to test the connectivity and speed of 5G, gauging its use for first responders within “smart cities” or smartphones video access of the company’s its DirecTVnow service. (See feature on the AT&T Business Summit, this issue.) One of be’s Most Powerful Executives in Corporate America, Knight has always had a cutting-edge role within the mammoth company. In her previous role as senior vice president of Wireless Network Architecture and Design, she was responsible for all facets of mobile device technology and tools. Throughout her 20-year career at AT&T, she has held myriad leadership positions in engineering, marketing, and technology operations,

Knight—a licensed professional engineer and certified project management professional with a master’s degree in information networking from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Florida State University—also has two patents under her belt: Systems for Use with Multi-Number Cellular Devices and Messaging Forwarding System. She received the Black Engineer of the Year President’s Award in 2013, and Women of Color Professional Achievement Award in 2014.

This innovator has also invested her time nurturing the careers of women and minorities both internally and externally. She sits on the boards of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering and After School Matters. She also served as co-founder and national advisor of AT&T Women of Technology as well as a national board advisor for oxyGEN, an AT&T employee resource group that seeks to attract, develop, and retain young professionals.

  Tony Prophet

Chief Equality Officer

Salesforce Inc.

Tony Prophet helps accelerate overall corporate strategy as chief equality officer at Salesforce. A member of the leadership team, he drives equality initiatives with a focus on LGBTQ and racial equality for the company that reported 2017 revenues of $8.4 billion. Prophet also directs its Ethical & Humane Use of Technology Innovation, ensuring optimal customer experience as well as igniting positive social change. As such, he reports directly to Chairman and co-CEO Marc Benioff.

Realizing that people are the true drivers of innovation, Prophet has been a tireless advocate for defending the rights of young workers, providing information on women’s health issues for female employees, and improving education for migrant workers’ children among other issues.

His technical and P&L background, however, has been critical in preparing him for his current position. Prior to coming aboard Salesforce, Prophet was a corporate vice president at Microsoft, where his team initiated the Windows 10 Go to Market and Launch planning. After the release of Windows 10 in 2015, it garnered more than 200 million users within six months, gaining the reputation as Microsoft’s most prosperous and fastest-growing operating system. At the time, he served as co-executive sponsor of Blacks at Microsoft and founding executive of BlackLight, an organization empowering black marketers at Microsoft. Hewlett Packard Enterprise appointed him senior vice president, Supply Chain Operations Personal Systems in 2006, and then six years later, he assumed the role of senior vice president, Operations, Printing & Personal Systems. In 2013, HP PC and Printing Operations delivered more than 100 million units, generating $55 billion in revenue and $4.8 billion in operating profit while serving as a principal driver of HPE’s $11.6 billion of cash from operations.

  Troy Richardson

Senior Vice President & General Manager, Enterprise & Cloud  Application Offering Group

DXC Technology

In his role, Troy Richardson focuses on alliance-driven enterprise solutions and next-generation cloud applications to help clients modernize and design intelligent back-office processes.  The 2017 merger of CSC and the Enterprise Services business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise spawned this $25 billion global end-to-end IT services leader. Richardson’s division is critical as DXC develops partnerships, offers guidance, and provide tools that enable customers to make decisions more efficiently as well as execute digital transformation strategies.

In his previous role, Richardson served as CSC’s general manager/global sales leader, responsible for all aspects of sales, including operations and strategic alliances.

Over the past decade, Richardson gained valuable management experience and industry contacts key to his current assignment. In 2007, he served as head of Xiocom Wireless Inc. before serving as president of Novell Americas, overseeing its sales and consulting business across the U.S., Latin America, and Canada. Prior to DXC, he held the position of senior vice president of Global Alliance Sales for Oracle in which he managed $2 billion in strategic partner sales for Oracle’s Diamond System Integration Partners and delivered triple-digit year-on-year growth in cloud revenues. He was also responsible for the growth of enterprise and mid-market segment as senior vice president of Global Cloud Sales for E&C at SAP, and bolstered sales from top global clients in manufacturing, energy, oil and gas, among others, as vice president and general manager of Global Account Sales at HP.

  Scott Taylor

EVP, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary

Symantec Corp.

Scott Taylor began his career at Symantec in 2007, and quickly moved up to general counsel in 2008. In his current role, he leads a global team of 143 professionals for the software giant and oversees its intellectual property portfolio, government affairs, public policy, corporate responsibility, and philanthropic work.

The Stanford University and George Washington University Law School graduate has gained vast experience working at other tech companies including Phoenix Technologies Ltd. He was previously chief administrative officer and senior vice president of Phoenix Technologies Ltd. and vice president and general counsel of Narus Inc.

Besides demonstrating superior legal chops for the company that generated $4 billion in 2017 revenues, Taylor is a staunch advocate of corporate diversity, pushing for more black talent at Symantec and within the tech sector as a whole. For instance, he serves as the executive champion and sponsor of SyBER, Symantec’s Black Employee Resource Group.

He also sits on the corporate board of Piper Jaffray and a national advisory board of the Stanford University Center for Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity.

  Toni Townes-Whitley

President, U.S. Regulated Industries

Microsoft

Toni Townes-Whitley leads the U.S. sales strategy for driving digital transformation across customers and partners within the public sector and regulated industries. She’s the highest-ranking African American female executive at Microsoft with responsibility for approximately $11 billion P&L and 2,000-plus sales professionals. As such, she has developed a strong, undisputed track record for accelerating profitable business performance and building high-performance teams.

Her organization is responsible for executing on Microsoft’s market-focused strategy related to the U.S. public sector and regulated industries, including education, financial services, government, and health.

In addition to leading this team, Townes-Whitley drives the formation of Microsoft’s worldwide AI National Plans and represents the global salesforce on the tech giant’s Aether Committee (AI and Ethics in Engineering and Research), which recommends policies and procedures to address the implications of AI on society.

The Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School graduate also serves as a co-executive sponsor for the Blacks and Africans Employee Resource Group at Microsoft; an adviser to the Women’s Center of Northern Virginia; and a past president of Women in Technology.

  Wanji Walcott

Senior Vice President & General Counsel

PayPal Holdings Inc.

As senior vice president and general counsel at PayPal, Walcott has been responsible for building a legal team of more than 170 professionals across the globe. As such, she directs them to tackle legal issues in more than 200 markets, dealing with an expansive regulatory environment in the U.S. and abroad given the San Jose-based online payment company’s innovative thrust.

Since joining PayPal in 2015 as vice president of Legal Product, she has risen up the ranks to become the company’s first African American general counsel. A member of the company’s executive leadership team and industry influencer, Walcott was also named one of be’s Most Powerful Executives last year.

These days, she has also been focused on identifying initiatives to foster a more diverse and inclusive corporate culture. As such, her staunch advocacy in this area has recently been making headlines. In fact, she serves as the executive sponsor for PayPal’s women’s interest network, Unity, and helped launch Amplify, PayPal’s black employee network.

Walcott has more than 20 years of legal experience, particularly in fintech and payments law. Prior to PayPal, Walcott, who holds a bachelor’s and a law degree from Howard University and law school graduate served as senior vice president and managing counsel at American Express Co. At Amex, where she worked as lead counsel for its Enterprise Growth Group, developing the global strategy to expand emerging and digital payments services. She is also a member of the Executive Leadership Council.

Edward Ward

Senior Vice President of Engineering Client Solutions

Dell Inc.

Edward Ward leads a worldwide team of engineers and technical professionals who handle engineering and development of commercial PCs and workstations, consumer PCs, platform software, data security software, and IoT solutions.

A member of be’s Most Powerful Executives in Corporate America, Ward gained decades of management experience before tackling his current position. At NCR Corp, he held the position of vice president of Engineering Shared Components & Technical Services, responsible for worldwide engineering and development of the hardware, firmware, and software drivers for shared components across NCR’s financial, retail, and travel lines of business.

As vice president of Engineering Technical Services & NCR University Relations from November 2009 to May 2011, he focused on cost reduction, field quality improvement, and enhancing design review processes across all of NCR’s product lines. Ward also maximized NCR’s University Relations program to develop and encourage technical collaboration, R&D, internships, and community outreach programs to fundamental research and engineering institutions. Committed to inspiring African American youth’s interest and engagement in STEM education, Ward is a member of the local chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers and executive sponsor at Dell for the national organization.

  Tony West

Chief Legal Officer

Uber Technologies Inc.

As chief legal officer at Uber, West leads a global team of more than 500 in the company’s Legal, Compliance and Ethics, and Security functions.

With more than 20 years of experience in the public and private sectors, West joined Uber as the peer-to-peer ridesharing company dealt with major reputational challenges.  He previously served as corporate secretary and executive vice president of Public Policy and Government Affairs of PepsiCo, where he prioritized diversity and ethical practices and led PepsiCo to be named one of the most ethical companies by the Etisphere Institute 10 years in a row.

From 2012 to 2014, the Obama administration appointee served as Associate Attorney General of the United States, the third highest-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that role, he supervised the department’s Civil Rights, Antitrust, Tax, Environment and Natural Resources, and Civil Divisions, as well as the Office of Justice Programs, the Office on Violence Against Women, and Community Oriented Policing Services Office. From 2009 to 2012, he was Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Division, the largest litigating division of the Justice Department. In fact, Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, tapped the Stanford Law School graduate due to his experience as a federal prosecutor and commitment to corporate ethics and diversity.

  Kareem Yusuf

General Manager, Watson IoT

IBM Corp.

Kareem Yusuf prepares customers for the future today. He leads Watson IoT—Internet of Things—the IBM business unit focused on helping clients in asset-intensive industries. The Watson IoT is a cognitive system that learns from and infuses intelligence into the physical world. As such, his team helps clients transform their enterprises by maximizing value from their connected assets, leveraging insights, and AI.

The 19-year IBM veteran has held a variety of leadership positions within the tech giant that produced 2017 revenues of $79 billion. His prior position was chief product & technology officer, Watson Customer Engagement in which he helped drive digital marketing, commerce, and supply chain success using cognitive technology. He has also worked with software development and SaaS operations, mergers & acquisitions, and field technical sales.

With a doctorate from the University of Leeds (England) focused on decision support systems for civil engineering construction, Yusuf admits to having “an active interest in all things technical, with a particular interest in digital media and programming languages.” He is also an author and a TED speaker. In fact, his TED Talk focused on the importance of emotional tone in the digital age, including everything from email to data.                                  be

The post List of the Most Influential Blacks in Technology appeared first on Black Enterprise.

Go to Source List of the Most Influential Blacks in Technology Just who are among the most influential blacks in technology? Here’s a snapshot: One leads a dominant software brand that enables thousands of companies and millions of people worldwide to avoid a range of cyberthreats.

[nicholerestrada]

These 14 startups endorsed by the seed-stage investment firm Pear just hit the fundraising trail

Earlier this week, in a beautiful garden in Woodside, Ca., the team at the five-year-old, seed-stage venture firm Pear hosted it fifth annual demo day. It’s an event that’s limited to roughly 100 VCs who year after year happily fill the space to see what Pear — which has written early checks to the “unicorn” delivery service DoorDash and newly public Guardant Health, among others — has up its sleeve.

As with last year, what those investors wound up seeing on Tuesday was 15 teams, most of them six months old or younger and led by current students or recent graduates who’d been invited by Pear to build companies over ten weeks in its Palo Alto offices. These ranged from a startup with ambitious plans to build a new commercial space station, to a machine learning-powered cloud video platform that makes it far easier to edit video clips, to a startup that uses AI to negotiate salary discussions on behalf of its clients.

But in a bit of a twist, this time around, Pear also featured a sprinkling of young companies that are now ready for Series A funding, including a solar design and sales platform for residential and commercial photovoltaic systems, and a company that thinks its check-out free shopping technology could help all kinds of Amazon rivals compete with the giant’s growing number of surveillance-powered, no-checkout convenience stores.

In case you’re an investor or just someone interested in keeping your thumb on the pulse of what’s happening in emerging tech, herewith is a quick snapshot of each of the companies that were featured as part of the program. (Well, all but one that expressly asked us not to write about what it’s working on. We’ll just tell you that it’s a kind of social network and, remarkably, it feels fresh.)

If you’re interested in reaching out to any of these folks, you can find of all of their email addresses here.

Pre-Seed / Seed

Orion Span

Tagline: The World’s Private Space Station

Describes itself as: What was once the domain of governments is now the domain of private industry. So it was with aviation and now, too, it is with space travel. SpaceX revolutionized the launch business and is worth $27 billion today. Orion Span will do the same with the destination business. Orion Span’s Aurora Station’s patented IP and operational concepts emphasize simplicity, cutting costs in extraordinary ways and improving accessibility in ways never seen before in space station design.

Location: San Mateo, Ca, and Houston, Tx.

Employees: 5

Metrics: Twenty-six space tourists have agreed to put $80,000 each to be on the waitlist; 1,578 media outlets worldwide have covered us; and four partners are signed with three more on the way.

Team: Orion Span includes some of the folks who built the International Space Station. Its CEO is a marketer and entrepreneur with a few startups under his belt. Its architect designed the ISS Enterprise module. It CTO designed and built spacecraft systems for the ISS. And its COO oversaw the build of NASA Orion spacecraft as a former general manager.

Young Alfred

Tagline: Home Insurance Marketplace

Describes itself as: Young Alfred turns the nightmare experience of shopping for home insurance online into an informed, 15-minute transaction. As a customer, you get your top three curated home insurance options from a list of more than 20 carriers and can purchase with just one click. A marketplace model drives transparency, saves money, and leads to five times higher purchase conversion than a single-carrier model.

Locations: Philadelphia and New York

Employees: 6

Metrics: Thousands of applications for home insurance a month, with 24 direct carrier relationships across 13 states.

Team: The founders met during their first week at Wharton Business School. David comes from private equity and has experience acquiring and growing businesses. Jason is an engineer turned high frequency trader who has built trading systems for the likes of Citadel and DRW.

Aligned Carbon

Tagline: Next 1000x computing revolution using carbon nanotube

Describes itself as: Aligned Carbon is the first company to sell carbon nanotube wafers in a way that seamlessly fit into the nanofabrication requirements of the integrated circuit industry. The large historical gains in performance due to continued shrinking of silicon transistors are now only realizing marginal improvements with exponentially increasing costs. This has come at a time with the push for faster and lower power computing capabilities continue to grow rapidly due to AI, AR, big-data analytics and other memory-starved workloads. Monolithic 3D integration is the nanoelectronics industry’s next paradigm for computing and the sequential integration of carbon nanotube logic with traditional silicon logic and memory is the leading technology. Performance and efficiency improvements of over 1000x are anticipated, and Aligned Carbon’s products solve the carbon nanotube materials problem to revolutionize a $500B industry.

Location: Silicon Valley

Employees: 3

Metrics: Aligned Carbon has worked with over a dozen companies and universities while developing their unique carbon nanotube products of interest to the largest chip manufacturers in the world.

Team: Co-founded in 2018 by J Provine, Greg Pitner, and Cara Beasley, three Stanford scientists who met over a shared love for nanotechnology. Collectively they have over 35 years of nanofabrication research experience with universities, start-ups, and corporate giants.

Mirra

Tagline: Mirra creates products and experiences to make no-bullshit skincare easily accessible.

Describes itself as: Mirra is a skincare platform of more than 100,000 beauty nerds who believe that the most important ingredient is transparency. By marrying content, community and commerce, Mirra empowers millennial women with the tools they need to decode the unregulated, $14 billion skincare industry. After releasing a weekly skincare newsletter that grew to more than 100,000 subscribers without ad spend, Mirra is now launching an exclusive line of skincare products.

Location: San Francisco

Employees: undisclosed

Metrics: Mirra’s first product is a weekly skincare newsletter which has grown exponentially without ad spend. Now, after listening to the holes in its readers’ routines, Mirra is launching its own exclusive line of skincare products next year.

Team: Mirra is founded by Katia Ameri, a 26-year-old Stanford alumna with a background in venture capital and consumer products.

Reduct

Tagline: AI-powered cloud video: the power of video, with the ease of text.

Describes itself as: Reduct makes a machine learning-powered cloud video platform that anyone can use. If you can write a text document, you can search, edit, and share video with Reduct. By making tools for video creation accessible to everyone, the company aims to turn everyone’s favorite medium of consumption (the average American watches six hours of video a day) into a ubiquitous mode of communication. The company is currently enabling design & UX research teams to incorporate video into workflows and will create a horizontal product targeting professionals whose profession isn’t video editing.

Location: San Francisco

Employees: 4

Metrics:  Since January, the company has acquired 35 paying business customers, including Fortune 500 companies and several technology companies valued at more than $1 billion. It says it has also processed more than 50,000 minutes of video, and customers report time savings of more than ten times what they experience when using traditional video tools.

Team: CEO Prabhas Pokharel studied computer science at Harvard and product design at Stanford, and has spent the last decade creating human-centered products. CTO Robert Ochshorn is a machine learning researcher who has given talks at Google Brian, Apple and Stanford. He is an alum of Cornell CS, and has held research positions at MIT, Harvard, and Alan Kay-initiated CDG Labs.

Zubale

Tagline: A platform that empowers companies to make better product decisions in emerging markets.

Describes itself as: Zubale connects companies directly with consumers on their smartphones to crowdsource multiple digital tasks in exchange for rewards. Companies can crowdsource tasks like in-store audits, product trial activations, and market research studies, and receive real-time intelligence from consumers to make faster and more confident decisions. Consumers complete tasks and earn mobile phone credit and other digital rewards that they can redeem through making online purchases.

Location: Mexico City, Mexico

Employees: 10

Metrics: Zubale launched its mobile app three weeks ago and says it has had more than 20,000 branded tasks completed already by consumers.

Team: The founders, Allison Campbell and Sebastian Monroy, have over 15 years of expertise developing and selling new products to consumers at Walmart and Procter and Gamble. Allison launched and ran businesses for Walmart in India and led strategic initiatives across 25 countries. Sebastian led sales teams for P&G in Mexico and across Latin America to distribute products to reach the millions of mom and pop shops that make up 50 percent of spend.

Riva

Tagline: Your career advocates – helping the $2.3T job changer market

Describes itself as: Riva builds automation to help the 41 million people who changing jobs every year — and the 5 million college seniors who graduate — negotiate their job offers. Nearly two-thirds of people do not negotiate their job offers. And research shows that women especially tend to suffer in the negotiation process, furthering the gender pay gap. Riva builds software that can predict an employee’s worth and generate negotiation emails and phone scripts that can be used by the employee to negotiate with the employer.

Location: Palo Alto, California

Employees: 7

Metrics: The average increase per negotiation is $23,000. The company is already working with several large partners including schools, engineering communities, and nursing associations to get its product to the mass market.

Team: CEO Stephanie Young has four degrees from Stanford, including an MBA and graduate degree in computer science. She previously helped launch Google AdWords Express’ first ever mobile app.

LivingLab

Tagline: A shared living community offering per-room leases in furnished property.

Describes itself as: LivingLab is a platform that enables co-living in any rental property, making it easy for professionals to find community in shared housing. Our technology matches individuals to bedrooms in beautiful homes and then configures those properties to include furnishings, WiFi, utilities, housekeeping and community events. We can complete this process in 48 hours. By individually pricing rooms and offering flexible lease lengths, LivingLab is able to collect 30 percent of rent for its services.

Location: Durham, North Carolina

Employees: 6

Metrics: LivingLab says it has placed 500 users into 45 residents across 10 properties, generating on average $2,280 in recurring revenue per customer per year.

Team: CEO Mitchel Gorecki, CTO Patrick Wickham, and COO Colin Tai.

Kick It Labs

Tagline: Building consumer apps for high schoolers and college students inspired by youth culture.

Describes itself as: A creative lab that’s launching new consumer social experiences every week, inspired by youth culture, for high schoolers and college students in the pursuit of building the next billion person consumer product.

Location: Palo Alto

Employees: Undisclosed

Metrics: The company says its most promising and exciting experiments to date have centered around street wear, high school social products, and men’s fashion.

Team: Cofounders Akshar Bonu and Sathish Nagappan among others have graduated from Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford and have been building apps for high schoolers and college students for over a decade, they say. They have also spent time at Andrew Ng’s AI Lab, Nervana Systems, Amazon, Google and Intel.

Series A

Aurora Solar

Tagline: Building the operating system of the power source of the future.

Describes itself as: More than $200 billion per year is spent on developing solar projects through a fragmented network of solar installers, who work with financiers, equipment manufacturers, engineering service providers and more. Aurora’s software is used by thousands of solar installers to precisely quote, design and sell solar projects, without visiting the site. With the solar industry forecasted to grow over five times its curren size over the next decade, Aurora will be the platform through which every new solar project is designed, sold, financed and serviced.

Location: San Francisco, CA

Employees: 43

Metrics: More than 50,000 solar projects a month (totaling $3 billion in value) are created on the platform each month. More than1,500,000 solar projects have been created in the company’s software, it says.

Team: CEO/CTO: Christopher Hopper, is a Stanford MBA and MEng from Imperial College; COO/CRO Samuel Adeyemo, is a Stanford MBA/MSc and former portfolio manager for JPMorgan’s  Chief Investment Office.

Thinknum

Describes itself as: Thinknum creates datasets from a broad array of public online sources, capturing ephemeral information on the products, operating markets and labor markets of 400,000-plus global companies across sectors, and provides rich toolsets for extracting intelligence. Data sets include pricing trends for individual products at specific retailers, such as electronics and restaurant menu items, to hiring activity across macro industries and particular companies down to the location.

Location: New York, NY

Employees: 18

Metrics: The company says it’s currently seeing $3 million in ARR, thanks to its work with more than 150 corporations and investment firms.

Team: The founders met at Princeton University and worked at Goldman Sachs and a hedge fund before starting Thinknum.

EmCasa

Tagline: Real estate tech brokerage in Brazil

Describes itself as: EmCasa is the only brokerage in Brazil that offers 3D tours in the vast majority of its listings, helping buyers and sellers avoid unnecessary visits. Also, EmCasa is the only brokerage in Brazil that built a proprietary algorithm that offers online property valuations, better managing customer price expectations and providing more accurate listing recommendations. Finally, EmCasa is the only brokerage in Brazil that charges a 3 percent commission on full-service, which is half of what other companies charge.

Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Employees: 18

Metrics: The company says it has 650 active listings currently, versus just 20 in January; it also says its revenue growth rate of 118 percent CQGR.

Team: EmCasa’s CEO, Gustavo Vaz, is a Harvard MBA and was formerly COO of Easy Taxi and Chief Strategy of Frontier Car Group; Gabriel Laet, the company’s CTO/CPO, founded and sold Doubleleft, a gaming and software development company; and Lucas Cardozo, EmCasa’s COO, was a former Bain & Company consultant and the VP of strategy at Brasil Brokers, the second largest Brokerage firm in Brazil.

Polarr

Tagline: Big brains in small devices

Describes itself as: Polarr is a computational photography company that’s focused on computer graphics, computer vision and artificial intelligence. The company has created one of the most successful and two-time best of Apple App Store winning pro photography app; in the meantime, it’s developing its own Polarr Vision Engine for internal usage, as well as helping others to build immersive C.V. experiences on the edge.

Location: San Jose, CA, Beijing, China

Employees: 25

Metrics: Profitable, tripling revenue every year.

Team: Polarr’s CEO, Borui Wang has an M.S. in AI and HCI from Stanford, and is an ex-Googler at Youtube. Polarr’s CTO, Derek Yan, has an M.S. in EE from Stanford, and is an ex-Googler in ATAP.

Zippin

Tagline: Checkout-free shopping for every store.

Describes itself as: Zippin’s vision is to transform retail by banishing checkout lines and self-scanners for good using patent-pending AI, machine learning and sensor future technology. Its technology platform provides checkout-free shopping experience for retailers looking for a solution rivaling Amazon Go’s approach.

Location: San Francisco, CA

Employees: 10

Metrics: Working store in downtown San Francisco, and POCs with several globally recognized retail brands and real estate owners.

Team: CEO Krishna Motukuri has spent more3 than 20 years in retail and e-commerce, including with Amazon and Naspers. Chief Scientist Motilal Agrawal is a computer vision expert from SRI International, where he led and contributed to several products used by U.S. Defense and intelligence agencies. The company’s head of engineering, Abhinav Katiyar, previously spent more than 15 years with VMware.

Pictured above: Pear founders Pejman Nozad and Mar Hershenson.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/28/these-14-startups-endorsed-by-the-seed-stage-investment-firm-pear-just-hit-the-fundraising-trail/

Source: https://hashtaghighways.com/2018/11/01/these-14-startups-endorsed-by-the-seed-stage-investment-firm-pear-just-hit-the-fundraising-trail/

from Garko Media https://garkomedia1.wordpress.com/2018/11/01/these-14-startups-endorsed-by-the-seed-stage-investment-firm-pear-just-hit-the-fundraising-trail/

[pttedu]

Powering Up: Navigating Electrical Technician Training in Philadelphia Delve into the realm of electrical technician training programs across Philadelphia. From understanding the core principles of electrical systems to mastering cutting-edge technologies, this guide sheds light on the diverse courses available. Learn about the practical training, apprenticeships, and industry connections these programs offer, providing a comprehensive roadmap for aspiring electrical technicians in the city.

[pttiedu]

The Role Of Skilled Trades Training In Electrical Infrastructure

Skilled trades training plays a significant role in the growth and development of electrical infrastructure. Dive in to learn these benefits in detail!

electrician trade school in North east Philadelphia, automation certification training Institute in Lansdowne, PA, electrician school in philadelphia, electrician school philadelphia, electrical training in philadelphia, electrician classes in philadelphia, electrician trade school philadelphia, become an electrician, industrial automation in philadelphia, automation certification training Institute in Overbook Park,

[garkomedia1]

These 14 startups endorsed by the seed-stage investment firm Pear just hit the fundraising trail

Earlier this week, in a beautiful garden in Woodside, Ca., the team at the five-year-old, seed-stage venture firm Pear hosted it fifth annual demo day. It’s an event that’s limited to roughly 100 VCs who year after year happily fill the space to see what Pear — which has written early checks to the “unicorn” delivery service DoorDash and newly public Guardant Health, among others — has up its sleeve.

As with last year, what those investors wound up seeing on Tuesday was 15 teams, most of them six months old or younger and led by current students or recent graduates who’d been invited by Pear to build companies over ten weeks in its Palo Alto offices. These ranged from a startup with ambitious plans to build a new commercial space station, to a machine learning-powered cloud video platform that makes it far easier to edit video clips, to a startup that uses AI to negotiate salary discussions on behalf of its clients.

But in a bit of a twist, this time around, Pear also featured a sprinkling of young companies that are now ready for Series A funding, including a solar design and sales platform for residential and commercial photovoltaic systems, and a company that thinks its check-out free shopping technology could help all kinds of Amazon rivals compete with the giant’s growing number of surveillance-powered, no-checkout convenience stores.

In case you’re an investor or just someone interested in keeping your thumb on the pulse of what’s happening in emerging tech, herewith is a quick snapshot of each of the companies that were featured as part of the program. (Well, all but one that expressly asked us not to write about what it’s working on. We’ll just tell you that it’s a kind of social network and, remarkably, it feels fresh.)

If you’re interested in reaching out to any of these folks, you can find of all of their email addresses here.

Pre-Seed / Seed

Orion Span

Tagline: The World’s Private Space Station

Describes itself as: What was once the domain of governments is now the domain of private industry. So it was with aviation and now, too, it is with space travel. SpaceX revolutionized the launch business and is worth $27 billion today. Orion Span will do the same with the destination business. Orion Span’s Aurora Station’s patented IP and operational concepts emphasize simplicity, cutting costs in extraordinary ways and improving accessibility in ways never seen before in space station design.

Location: San Mateo, Ca, and Houston, Tx.

Employees: 5

Metrics: Twenty-six space tourists have agreed to put $80,000 each to be on the waitlist; 1,578 media outlets worldwide have covered us; and four partners are signed with three more on the way.

Team: Orion Span includes some of the folks who built the International Space Station. Its CEO is a marketer and entrepreneur with a few startups under his belt. Its architect designed the ISS Enterprise module. It CTO designed and built spacecraft systems for the ISS. And its COO oversaw the build of NASA Orion spacecraft as a former general manager.

Young Alfred

Tagline: Home Insurance Marketplace

Describes itself as: Young Alfred turns the nightmare experience of shopping for home insurance online into an informed, 15-minute transaction. As a customer, you get your top three curated home insurance options from a list of more than 20 carriers and can purchase with just one click. A marketplace model drives transparency, saves money, and leads to five times higher purchase conversion than a single-carrier model.

Locations: Philadelphia and New York

Employees: 6

Metrics: Thousands of applications for home insurance a month, with 24 direct carrier relationships across 13 states.

Team: The founders met during their first week at Wharton Business School. David comes from private equity and has experience acquiring and growing businesses. Jason is an engineer turned high frequency trader who has built trading systems for the likes of Citadel and DRW.

Aligned Carbon

Tagline: Next 1000x computing revolution using carbon nanotube

Describes itself as: Aligned Carbon is the first company to sell carbon nanotube wafers in a way that seamlessly fit into the nanofabrication requirements of the integrated circuit industry. The large historical gains in performance due to continued shrinking of silicon transistors are now only realizing marginal improvements with exponentially increasing costs. This has come at a time with the push for faster and lower power computing capabilities continue to grow rapidly due to AI, AR, big-data analytics and other memory-starved workloads. Monolithic 3D integration is the nanoelectronics industry’s next paradigm for computing and the sequential integration of carbon nanotube logic with traditional silicon logic and memory is the leading technology. Performance and efficiency improvements of over 1000x are anticipated, and Aligned Carbon’s products solve the carbon nanotube materials problem to revolutionize a $500B industry.

Location: Silicon Valley

Employees: 3

Metrics: Aligned Carbon has worked with over a dozen companies and universities while developing their unique carbon nanotube products of interest to the largest chip manufacturers in the world.

Team: Co-founded in 2018 by J Provine, Greg Pitner, and Cara Beasley, three Stanford scientists who met over a shared love for nanotechnology. Collectively they have over 35 years of nanofabrication research experience with universities, start-ups, and corporate giants.

Mirra

Tagline: Mirra creates products and experiences to make no-bullshit skincare easily accessible.

Describes itself as: Mirra is a skincare platform of more than 100,000 beauty nerds who believe that the most important ingredient is transparency. By marrying content, community and commerce, Mirra empowers millennial women with the tools they need to decode the unregulated, $14 billion skincare industry. After releasing a weekly skincare newsletter that grew to more than 100,000 subscribers without ad spend, Mirra is now launching an exclusive line of skincare products.

Location: San Francisco

Employees: undisclosed

Metrics: Mirra’s first product is a weekly skincare newsletter which has grown exponentially without ad spend. Now, after listening to the holes in its readers’ routines, Mirra is launching its own exclusive line of skincare products next year.

Team: Mirra is founded by Katia Ameri, a 26-year-old Stanford alumna with a background in venture capital and consumer products.

Reduct

Tagline: AI-powered cloud video: the power of video, with the ease of text.

Describes itself as: Reduct makes a machine learning-powered cloud video platform that anyone can use. If you can write a text document, you can search, edit, and share video with Reduct. By making tools for video creation accessible to everyone, the company aims to turn everyone’s favorite medium of consumption (the average American watches six hours of video a day) into a ubiquitous mode of communication. The company is currently enabling design & UX research teams to incorporate video into workflows and will create a horizontal product targeting professionals whose profession isn’t video editing.

Location: San Francisco

Employees: 4

Metrics:  Since January, the company has acquired 35 paying business customers, including Fortune 500 companies and several technology companies valued at more than $1 billion. It says it has also processed more than 50,000 minutes of video, and customers report time savings of more than ten times what they experience when using traditional video tools.

Team: CEO Prabhas Pokharel studied computer science at Harvard and product design at Stanford, and has spent the last decade creating human-centered products. CTO Robert Ochshorn is a machine learning researcher who has given talks at Google Brian, Apple and Stanford. He is an alum of Cornell CS, and has held research positions at MIT, Harvard, and Alan Kay-initiated CDG Labs.

Zubale

Tagline: A platform that empowers companies to make better product decisions in emerging markets.

Describes itself as: Zubale connects companies directly with consumers on their smartphones to crowdsource multiple digital tasks in exchange for rewards. Companies can crowdsource tasks like in-store audits, product trial activations, and market research studies, and receive real-time intelligence from consumers to make faster and more confident decisions. Consumers complete tasks and earn mobile phone credit and other digital rewards that they can redeem through making online purchases.

Location: Mexico City, Mexico

Employees: 10

Metrics: Zubale launched its mobile app three weeks ago and says it has had more than 20,000 branded tasks completed already by consumers.

Team: The founders, Allison Campbell and Sebastian Monroy, have over 15 years of expertise developing and selling new products to consumers at Walmart and Procter and Gamble. Allison launched and ran businesses for Walmart in India and led strategic initiatives across 25 countries. Sebastian led sales teams for P&G in Mexico and across Latin America to distribute products to reach the millions of mom and pop shops that make up 50 percent of spend.

Riva

Tagline: Your career advocates – helping the $2.3T job changer market

Describes itself as: Riva builds automation to help the 41 million people who changing jobs every year — and the 5 million college seniors who graduate — negotiate their job offers. Nearly two-thirds of people do not negotiate their job offers. And research shows that women especially tend to suffer in the negotiation process, furthering the gender pay gap. Riva builds software that can predict an employee’s worth and generate negotiation emails and phone scripts that can be used by the employee to negotiate with the employer.

Location: Palo Alto, California

Employees: 7

Metrics: The average increase per negotiation is $23,000. The company is already working with several large partners including schools, engineering communities, and nursing associations to get its product to the mass market.

Team: CEO Stephanie Young has four degrees from Stanford, including an MBA and graduate degree in computer science. She previously helped launch Google AdWords Express’ first ever mobile app.

LivingLab

Tagline: A shared living community offering per-room leases in furnished property.

Describes itself as: LivingLab is a platform that enables co-living in any rental property, making it easy for professionals to find community in shared housing. Our technology matches individuals to bedrooms in beautiful homes and then configures those properties to include furnishings, WiFi, utilities, housekeeping and community events. We can complete this process in 48 hours. By individually pricing rooms and offering flexible lease lengths, LivingLab is able to collect 30 percent of rent for its services.

Location: Durham, North Carolina

Employees: 6

Metrics: LivingLab says it has placed 500 users into 45 residents across 10 properties, generating on average $2,280 in recurring revenue per customer per year.

Team: CEO Mitchel Gorecki, CTO Patrick Wickham, and COO Colin Tai.

Kick It Labs

Tagline: Building consumer apps for high schoolers and college students inspired by youth culture.

Describes itself as: A creative lab that’s launching new consumer social experiences every week, inspired by youth culture, for high schoolers and college students in the pursuit of building the next billion person consumer product.

Location: Palo Alto

Employees: Undisclosed

Metrics: The company says its most promising and exciting experiments to date have centered around street wear, high school social products, and men’s fashion.

Team: Cofounders Akshar Bonu and Sathish Nagappan among others have graduated from Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford and have been building apps for high schoolers and college students for over a decade, they say. They have also spent time at Andrew Ng’s AI Lab, Nervana Systems, Amazon, Google and Intel.

Series A

Aurora Solar

Tagline: Building the operating system of the power source of the future.

Describes itself as: More than $200 billion per year is spent on developing solar projects through a fragmented network of solar installers, who work with financiers, equipment manufacturers, engineering service providers and more. Aurora’s software is used by thousands of solar installers to precisely quote, design and sell solar projects, without visiting the site. With the solar industry forecasted to grow over five times its curren size over the next decade, Aurora will be the platform through which every new solar project is designed, sold, financed and serviced.

Location: San Francisco, CA

Employees: 43

Metrics: More than 50,000 solar projects a month (totaling $3 billion in value) are created on the platform each month. More than1,500,000 solar projects have been created in the company’s software, it says.

Team: CEO/CTO: Christopher Hopper, is a Stanford MBA and MEng from Imperial College; COO/CRO Samuel Adeyemo, is a Stanford MBA/MSc and former portfolio manager for JPMorgan’s  Chief Investment Office.

Thinknum

Describes itself as: Thinknum creates datasets from a broad array of public online sources, capturing ephemeral information on the products, operating markets and labor markets of 400,000-plus global companies across sectors, and provides rich toolsets for extracting intelligence. Data sets include pricing trends for individual products at specific retailers, such as electronics and restaurant menu items, to hiring activity across macro industries and particular companies down to the location.

Location: New York, NY

Employees: 18

Metrics: The company says it’s currently seeing $3 million in ARR, thanks to its work with more than 150 corporations and investment firms.

Team: The founders met at Princeton University and worked at Goldman Sachs and a hedge fund before starting Thinknum.

EmCasa

Tagline: Real estate tech brokerage in Brazil

Describes itself as: EmCasa is the only brokerage in Brazil that offers 3D tours in the vast majority of its listings, helping buyers and sellers avoid unnecessary visits. Also, EmCasa is the only brokerage in Brazil that built a proprietary algorithm that offers online property valuations, better managing customer price expectations and providing more accurate listing recommendations. Finally, EmCasa is the only brokerage in Brazil that charges a 3 percent commission on full-service, which is half of what other companies charge.

Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Employees: 18

Metrics: The company says it has 650 active listings currently, versus just 20 in January; it also says its revenue growth rate of 118 percent CQGR.

Team: EmCasa’s CEO, Gustavo Vaz, is a Harvard MBA and was formerly COO of Easy Taxi and Chief Strategy of Frontier Car Group; Gabriel Laet, the company’s CTO/CPO, founded and sold Doubleleft, a gaming and software development company; and Lucas Cardozo, EmCasa’s COO, was a former Bain & Company consultant and the VP of strategy at Brasil Brokers, the second largest Brokerage firm in Brazil.

Polarr

Tagline: Big brains in small devices

Describes itself as: Polarr is a computational photography company that’s focused on computer graphics, computer vision and artificial intelligence. The company has created one of the most successful and two-time best of Apple App Store winning pro photography app; in the meantime, it’s developing its own Polarr Vision Engine for internal usage, as well as helping others to build immersive C.V. experiences on the edge.

Location: San Jose, CA, Beijing, China

Employees: 25

Metrics: Profitable, tripling revenue every year.

Team: Polarr’s CEO, Borui Wang has an M.S. in AI and HCI from Stanford, and is an ex-Googler at Youtube. Polarr’s CTO, Derek Yan, has an M.S. in EE from Stanford, and is an ex-Googler in ATAP.

Zippin

Tagline: Checkout-free shopping for every store.

Describes itself as: Zippin’s vision is to transform retail by banishing checkout lines and self-scanners for good using patent-pending AI, machine learning and sensor future technology. Its technology platform provides checkout-free shopping experience for retailers looking for a solution rivaling Amazon Go’s approach.

Location: San Francisco, CA

Employees: 10

Metrics: Working store in downtown San Francisco, and POCs with several globally recognized retail brands and real estate owners.

Team: CEO Krishna Motukuri has spent more3 than 20 years in retail and e-commerce, including with Amazon and Naspers. Chief Scientist Motilal Agrawal is a computer vision expert from SRI International, where he led and contributed to several products used by U.S. Defense and intelligence agencies. The company’s head of engineering, Abhinav Katiyar, previously spent more than 15 years with VMware.

Pictured above: Pear founders Pejman Nozad and Mar Hershenson.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/28/these-14-startups-endorsed-by-the-seed-stage-investment-firm-pear-just-hit-the-fundraising-trail/

from RSSUnify feed https://hashtaghighways.com/2018/11/01/these-14-startups-endorsed-by-the-seed-stage-investment-firm-pear-just-hit-the-fundraising-trail/

[investmart007]

The Cost of Money Tops The Counselors of Real Estate® Annual List of Top Ten Issues Affecting Real Estate

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/xvUqcf

The Cost of Money Tops The Counselors of Real Estate® Annual List of Top Ten Issues Affecting Real Estate

CHICAGO / JUNE 21, 2018 (STLRealEstate.News)  — The cost of money—Interest Rates and the Economy–leads the list of current issues on The Counselors of Real Estate’s annual list of Top Ten Issues Affecting Real Estate. As interest rates rise, the commercial and residential real estate markets are experiencing decreasing demand for commercial property, and higher home mortgage rates. Rate increases also limit value appreciation for commercial real estate and make housing less affordable. Lack of wage growth for all but the wealthiest population segment is dampening housing demand, and limiting consumer spending that the economy needs for growth. The Counselors cited a 2017 Brookings Institution study which showed real wages for most of the middle-class have only increased 3.5 percent since 1979, compared to a 24 percent rise for the top income segment.

In a break with the tradition of list announcements, The Counselors (CRE®) professional association announced its issues list for 2018-2019 by differentiating between current and long-term impacts on real property. Counselors’ clients seek advice on today’s issues which will impact property today–and today’s issues which will impact their decisions over the next ten years. This year’s change in the way the list is presented clarifies that differentiation.

While Interest Rates and the Economy tops the Current Issues list, Infrastructure –and the lack of serious effort by the U.S. to address its condition and much-needed revitalization—is at the top of the list of broader, longer-term and emerging issues affecting real estate. Roads, bridges, airports, water and sewer lines, electricity, even public transit – all necessary to sustain and expand cities and communities—are deteriorating. U.S. infrastructure was given a D+ rating in the American Society of Civil Engineers 2017 Infrastructure Report Card. As much as $4.5 trillion is estimated by that organization to improve critical infrastructure by 2025.

The Top Ten Issues Affecting Real Estate announcement was made during the keynote address of the National Association of Real Estate Editors annual conference in Las Vegas last week by Joseph G. Nahas, Jr., CRE, 2018 chair of The Counselors of Real Estate–the invitation-only professional association for leading real estate advisors. Mr. Nahas is senior vice president, investor relations, Equus Capital Partners, Philadelphia.

The list is developed annually by members of The Counselors’ External Affairs group, led by Victor Calanog, Ph.D., CRE, chief economist and senior vice president, Reis, New York, N.Y., and Hugh F. Kelly, Ph.D., CRE, special advisor, Fordham University Real Estate Institute and principal, Hugh F. Kelly Real Estate Economics, New York, N.Y. The 1,100 CRE members around the world undertake an extensive collaborative dialogue on current issues and trends to identify the final list.

Additional Current Issues on The Counselors’ Top Ten List

Politics and Political Uncertainty was second on The Counselors’ Current Issues list. Tax reform and policies enacted to change the balance of trade with other countries impacts jobs, incomes and property of all types, commercial and residential. Congressional action to relax certain bank lending and asset management regulations was also among developing trends which may improve access to capital.

Other issues on this year’s list include

The lack of Housing Affordability across nearly every income bracket with the exception of the wealthiest households. The affordability crisis is fueled by not only low wages and rising mortgage rates, but also underproduction of housing for almost two decades.

Effects of Generational Change and Demographics – for the first time in more than half a century, there are four distinct groups exerting influence on both commercial and residential real estate – such as office design, student and elder housing, amenities, and locational preference. Aging Baby Boomers, a similar number of Millennials, and the smaller groups on either side of Millennials (Generation X, now mostly middle-age and Generation Y, including students and those in their early 20s).

Retail sector volatility, including the rise of E-commerce and Logistics that support warehousing and delivery of goods.

Additional Longer-Term Issues Noted by The Counselors of Real Estate

Following closely behind Infrastructure on the 2018-2019 list of Longer-Term Issues is Disruptive Technology. Examples include advanced robotic manufacturing and warehousing; driverless cars and trucks; the extensive availability and utilization of personal and transactional data (which enhances all kinds of business decisions), “smart” building technology that enables efficiency; global connectivity; automated business processes; and information protection through cybersecurity. Nearly every aspect of real estate is undergoing dramatic change as these types of technology are adopted.

Other issues announced were

Natural Disasters and Climate Change, which result in property and environmental damage from events such as severe storms, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, volcanic activity, and rising sea levels.

Immigration which, if reduced by law, will have a negative impact on new housing starts and home purchases as well as worsen the current skilled labor shortage in the U.S.

Energy and Water, natural resources important to property and quality of life, yet threatened by not only environmental damage (man-made and climatological), but entangling state and local regulations which complicate development and lack the standardization national regulations would provide.

Mr. Nahas emphasized that the issues are interconnected and reflective of accelerating changes being experienced in all property sectors. While many challenges were identified, he pointed to opportunities as well, embedded within every aspect of The Counselors’ Top Ten Issues Affecting Real Estate.

On the Watch List are four additional issues—Construction Costs, Urbanization & Suburbanization, Tax Cuts, and Societal Leadership.

Rising construction costs make some development unfeasible, and increases prices on commercial and residential property alike.

Cities continue to attract population and provide opportunities for Millennials, seniors, and other demographic segments as well as property investors, corporations and small businesses. Suburbs are adapting with city-like development and amenities.

Tax cuts positively impact commercial properties, although the effect of this legislation is still developing. This legislation has potential for corporations large and small to create jobs. Individual tax cuts may provide a small increase in disposable income and make home repair or remodeling more attractive; on the other side of the equation is limits on mortgage interest deductibility for homeowners.

A new surge of social activism among younger Americans, celebrities and a large portion of the American public surrounding the #MeToo women’s movement, gun control and diversity has potential – if sustained — to fuel business and social reform on many levels. The real estate industry has an opportunity to take a leadership position to hire, train and promote women and minorities; build responsibly and sustainably; create affordable housing, and enhance protections for properties, tenants and residents.

Current Issues

1. Interest Rates & The Economy 2. Politics & Political Uncertainty 3. Housing Affordability 4. Generational Change/Demographics 5. E-commerce & Logistics

Longer-Term Issues

1. Infrastructure 2. Disruptive Technology 3. Natural Disasters & Climate Change 4. Immigration 5. Energy & Water

The Counselors of Real Estate is known for thought leadership, extraordinary professional reach (more than 50 real estate specialties are represented by its member experts) and objective identification of the issues and trends most likely to impact real estate now and in the future. The issues in the annual Top Ten Issues Affecting Real Estate list are an unbiased assessment of the most critical factors impacting real property.

About The Counselors of Real Estate® The Counselors of Real Estate® is an international consortium of recognized problem solvers who provide reliable, state of the art advice on real property. Membership is extended by invitation and includes principals of real estate, financial, legal, and accounting firms as well as developers, economists, futurists, and leaders of Wall Street and academia. Counselors of Real Estate endowed the MIT Real Estate Center, brought parking garages to China, developed a master plan for the Philadelphia Public Schools and valued Yale University and The Grand Canyon. Award of the CRE® Credential attests to the exceptional real property experience and decision making skills of the recipient. Only 1,100 people in the world hold the CRE credential.

For more information, contact Alice Muncaster, Director of Communications: The Counselors of Real Estate, 430 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611; Main: 312/329.8427; Direct: 312/329.8430; Cell: 773/966.9223. Email: amuncaster(at)cre.org. website: http://www.cre.org

_____

SOURCE: Counselors of Real Estate

[pagedesignhub-blog]

Opinion: The sports activities speaking head is dead

New Post has been published on https://pagedesignhub.com/opinion-the-sports-activities-speaking-head-is-dead/

Opinion: The sports activities speaking head is dead

Just hours after ESPN introduced approximately 100 layoffs of excessive-profile staffers — inclusive of Trent Dilfer, Ed Werder, and Jayson Stark — the community had to host the NFL Draft in Philadelphia. There was a big reproduction of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on that museum’s steps, there had been cameos from celebrities like “Rocky’s” Apollo Creed himself and there has been a substantial outdoor crowd that made the event experience extra like a pageant than a bonus occasion in ESPN’s NFL broadcast deal.

Is that, in reality, the form of party you want to throw while you just kicked dozens of your maximum seen people out the door? It is if you need to show viewers, readers and your determine company, Disney DIS, -zero.51% that you plan on sticking round a while.

Big broadcast deals ESPN’s cash has been increasingly tied up in broadcast offers like the one it has with the NFL. Back in 2011, ESPN and the NFL reached a multi-faceted broadcast agreement that has paid the league $1.Nine billion a 12 months given that 2014 and could keep doing so thru 2021.

That deal consists of the whole lot from the rights to 17 “Monday Night Football” games a yr to Spanish-language announces. However, the price in that deal lies in the stay sports and activities coverage and, as ESPN has located in latest years, no longer a lot in proprietary publicizes like SportsCenter and the like.

ESPN itself notes that NFL viewership dropped eight% in 2016. “Monday Night Football” took the hardest hit, with 12% fewer fanatics tuning in. Nielsen predicted in December that ESPN had lost nine million viewers on account that 2013.

Turner is hurting too

It isn’t as though different cable networks aren’t faring as poorly. The Turner channels rank 2d and are further weighed down with the aid of rights offers. In 2014, for example, it teamed with ESPN on a 9-12 months deal that pays the National Basketball Association $24 billion for the right to air its games.

After Turner inked that deal, it became around and nearly at once laid off 10% of its personnel, mentioning declining ratings and a wealth of digital-amusement options. While my colleagues right here at MarketWatch say that’s a sign of the printed-rights bubble bursting — and they’ll be on to something there — it’s also an ominous indicator of the way sports broadcasts are going to exchange.

As ESPN found out during university bowl season, the average viewer would alternatively watch two groups with losing records play a bowling sport than pretty much whatever else on tv at the time. Four years ago, the overall performance of live sports proclaims spurred ESPN to pay Major League Baseball $seven-hundred million a 12 months for eight years for both broadcast and digital rights. In all, ESPN will pay extra than $five.5 billion 12 months in rights costs.

And it doesn’t even get all of that to itself. It has to percentage NFL broadcast rights with the networks, baseball with Fox FOX, -1.92% and Turner, the NBA with Turner, and diverse college athletic meetings with CBS CBS, -2.81% and Fox. Does it make feel, then, for ESPN to rent hockey and Nascar analysts to break down sports that visitors must go to NBC or Fox to look at? Does it pay to devote large resources to international football when NBC, Fox, and BeIN have cornered the entirety that isn’t pro football? Does it make sense to preserve going to a persona-based totally broadcast formula from the Nineteen Nineties when it’s clean that the sports activities themselves are largely what matters to ESPN’s viewers and its web site’s site visitors?

‘Inside baseball’ coverage

No, it doesn’t, that’s why you’re going to peer ESPN wring the entirety it can out of the coverage it’s already deciding to buy. We’ve referred to its commitment to the NFL’s Pro Bowl earlier than, but ESPN has been enhancing coverage round activities like university football signing day. It’s also already doing extra with less, giving NCAA announcers inclusive of Beth Mowins and Jessica Mendoza spots within the booth calling soccer and baseball. It’s taking what had been reputedly benign portions of its broadcast deals and remodeling them into fundamental occasions, transferring money to where enthusiasts and visitors are searching and faraway from wherein they aren’t.

There’s a risk that ESPN’s woes pressure athletic leagues and meetings to revalue what they’re promoting. But considering that the NFL has already tapped both Twitter TWTR, -2.03% and Amazon AMZN, +1.59% Prime for streaming offers and MLB running with Facebook FB, +zero.55% and nearby broadcasters on streaming rights, we’re guessing those expenses aren’t coming down any time quickly.

Retaining the ones live sports activities publicizes is highly-priced, however if you may squeeze more out of them to your cash at the same time as giving audiences greater motion and fewer speaking heads, that’s one manner to salvage a win out of what looks like if a big loss.

The Future of Sports Referee Employment Just Got Ivy The other day I was speaking to a radio character who has a radio sports activities communicate show. She became explaining to me why it became so critical to stop the dishonest in sports activities. Yes, we were given with regards to the upcoming Olympic Games, bicycle racing, baseball, and all the faux fouls we noticed within the World Cup in South Africa. You realize what I’m talking approximately, while a football participant gets barely touched, rolls round and falls down on the floor as though they broke their ankle, trying to get the alternative group to catch a bad and a yellow card. Okay so allow’s talk approximately this for second we could?

Obviously, there is no manner a single “human” referee, or maybe more than one “human” referees can see every unmarried foul or all of the interactions happening with all the players all of the time. They can handiest name the fouls as they see them, and this is why parents looking on TV may see a nasty that the referee would not, or that there may be a horrific name now and again. What if all that turned into automated with a number of the modern technology we have nowadays used to scan crowds, or pick out faces and airport to prevent terrorism?

Well, it turns available are plenty of navy grade technology which can also locate their manner into professional sports activities, navy switch technologies. We can also even begin seeing this in novice sports activities, or excessive school sports activities, or perhaps even kids playing soccer inside the AYS0. Seriously, a number of the technology out there is ripe for the sports activities venue.

FastCompany had an interesting article these days titled; ” Moneyball 2.Zero: How Missile Tracking Cameras Are Remaking The NBA – A new digicam device is including an entire new degree of analytics to basketball. We talk to insiders the use of it,” with the aid of Mark Wilson which said;

“The technology become initially evolved to track missiles. Now, SportVU structures dangle from the catwalks of ten NBA stadiums, tiny webcams that silently song each player as they shoot, skip and run throughout the court, recording each and each pass 25 times a second. SportVU can inform you no longer simply Kevin Durant’s capturing common, but his shooting common after dribbling one vs two instances, or his taking pictures common with a defender 3 toes away vs five ft away. Their device captures the X/Y coordinates of all of the players seventy two,000 times a sport.”

Yes, once I study that I became quite excited as I am running on a radio section discussing the destiny of sports, and how era will trade the whole thing from the Olympic Games to oldsters gambling tennis just for a laugh. Having such technologies will stage the gambling subject, and prevent the cheaters from taking manage of the game. Indeed, whilst you step at the courtroom, you may be agreeing to permit the remaining undercover agent device to observe your every pass. So do not choose your nose, as it will all be on digital camera. Indeed I hope you may please recollect all this and assume it.

[pttedu]

Powering Careers: Unleash Your Potential with Electrical Technician Training at PTTI

[pttedu]

Markus Ellis successfully graduates in the field of manufacturing, a testament to his dedication and expertise. His journey exemplifies the transformation from a student to a skilled professional ready to make a significant impact in the manufacturing industry.

[pttedu]

7 Ways To Craft Your Career As An Automotive Technician

One may achieve their professional goals and stay competitive in the industry as an automotive technician by applying some strategies into practice.