#the death of one time fees in the pursuit of profits is going to make me [redacted] every ceo ever

[razzbberyl]

what do you mean i have to pay a subscription fee for a notes app

[unkinglysaul]

friendly neighborhood blob named Bloo, back at it again with a new muse~

⸢ DANIEL HENNEY, 37, CIS MALE, HE/HIM ⸥ — well, that looks like ( SOLOMON RYU ), that ( LEGAL SERVICES LAWYER ) living over in ( SOUTH CONGRESS ). they’ve called austin home for ( 9 YEARS ) now, and i hear you can usually find them at ( WESTWOOD COUNTRY CLUB ). people say they’re ( ADAPTABLE ) and ( INTELLIGENT ), but that they also can be a bit ( PRAGMATIC ) and ( STUBBORN ). they remind me of ( PAPERS MESSILY COVERING A DIMLY LIT OFFICE DESK, THE CREAKING OF BONES AND MUSCLES DURING A FULL BODY YAWN, WORKING AN EARLY MORNING SWEAT ). — ⸢ BLOO, SHE/THEY, 23, CST ⸥

BIOGRAPHY:

TRIGGER WARNING: Death mentions, prostitution mention.

Only a few years after her escape, Saul was born to a young refugee that recklessly fell in love with her caretaker; an American soldier allied with South Korea to help enforce martial law. Though the man had genuinely cared for him and his mom, he wasn’t around for long as he died in action defending the border from one of many North Korean attacks. Left on her own with barely any help from a government that had its hands tied at the time, she managed to provide a roof over their heads and three square meals by working at brothel. Money was always tight as his mom kept saving bits and pieces so they could eventually afford the fees for paperwork so they may apply to immigrate anywhere instead of staying in a nation so divided.

Finally, when he was about eight years old, they were granted passage and made the move all the way to San Antonio, Texas. While the American government wasn’t able to provide much, they had at least an apartment for themselves and his mom now held a respectable job working at a food production factory that offered good benefits. She eventually met someone new and they had a daughter, one whom she was quick to accept and love even though the father backed out -- he had actually tried to pressure his mom into getting an abortion, which she refused, leading to the break-up. The family of three were happy in spite of their hardships, Saul latching onto his baby sister and doing his best to teach her Korean as they both struggled through English.

The most tolling moment for the two children was when his mom suffered a fatal accident while on shift one day and, though the police wanted to place them in the adoption system, Saul insisted that he was old enough to take care of Ana himself. He was reluctantly provided all the necessary forms to become a legal guardian, gain proper licenses to drive and work, using what little funds were left in their family’s name. From then on, he went between school during the day and shifts at a chain restaurant during the evening, being extra friendly and helpful in order to get better tips when he could. He continued this cycle tirelessly for the last two high school years and through college before upgrading to a paid internship at the city sanctioned law firm.

Saul has only been climbing ever since, going from intern to city hall recordkeeper to one of the lawyer’s personal assistant, splitting his profits between rent, food, utilities, as well as whatever his sister needed so she can pursue her dreams and reach her full potential. When he finally gained his Juris Doctor (JD) degree, he had earned enough respect from what have become peers in the field that he was almost immediately given lawyer status, deciding to work in legal services so that can aid those that are in need as he once was, knowing that he had personal experience in what they’re going through. Though he knew he could stop studying, he continued in his education and received a Master of Laws (LLM) and Business Administration. The state appointed him as the head lawyer for all legal service cases a couple years later, forcing the siblings to move to Austin and start anew.

For almost a decade, he’s been the man in charge, and is well-received by both the bigwigs and general public. Always on his feet, Saul’s constantly between cities and getting to know people from all walks of life so that him and his teams may better assist. With the upsurge of immigration cases especially in the past few years, he’s been working his hardest to fight an uphill battle at a momentum that’s been nothing but relentless. This, coupled with Ana finally moving out, has certainly affected him but he’s too afraid to show weakness at this crucial time.

click anywhere on this line for stats!!

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

TATIANA RYU, YOUNGER HALF-SISTER: (WANTED CONNECTION!) She, through thick and thin, is his rock. Ana’s why he’s stayed so focused throughout his young adult life; when their mom passed away, he decided to become the main provider, still going to school all day then spending all evening waiting tables and earning as many tips as he could. Saul set an example for hard work, and he never strayed from his path of success, always moving jobs that made more and more money so he could better support her in her pursuits. In return, she was his emotional tether to earth, and they’re practically inseparable to this day. Ana just moved out in the last few years and that has, no doubt, taken a toll on him even though he’s unaware of it.

(PRO-BONO) CLIENTS: No matter what part of Texas they’re from, middle- and low-income families (as well as the elderly) have the right to ask their city government for legal aid. In comes Saul! Though his main job involves going through files and collaborating with different firms across the state so that the cases are properly assigned ever since he earned his own office at Austin’s city hall nine years ago, he’s been known to take up cases now and again to keep his wits sharp on the field. Along the way, he’s bonded with the clients he’s worked with, and many of them respect him for the work he does, all for little to no pay outside pay outside federally provided wages.

EXES, FLIRTATIONSHIPS, & HOOK-UPS: His bachelor status hasn’t remained all these years for a lack of trying, trust him. Though Saul wants to settle down at some point, it feels as if his work is never done. Most of the people he’s been with want someone who’s not only stable financially, but emotionally present -- something he has yet to work on and has become his biggest flaw. Even when he’s with the person he’s currently dating, his mind’s not always focused on the moment but his case files, and he has a hard time separating what’s logically sound with concern for his career from what his heart really wants. As a result, his more recent relationships haven’t really been proper attempts at making a connection, but a series of hook-ups and dates that haven’t really gone past the surface; nice dinners, nights spent at each other’s places, moments with cute kisses for greetings, held hands whenever out and about, and tender touches when they think they’re alone. Maybe someone will be able to crack past his perfect little facade, but only time can tell.

hit me up at @dagohoydared#8007 on Discord if you wanna plot!

[williscortez]

Seven Great Things About Retirement Planning

You will find many added benefits of retirement planning that range from both financial to personal and psychological. Let's look at seven common reasons financial planning for retirement will do the job for youpersonally.

Peace of Mind

This is undoubtedly one of the main benefits of retirement life planning. Planning ahead not just lessens your tension but in addition from the many years prior into it. The dearth of planning will leave a cloud of doubt.

Just Contextualize Pre Retirement Decisions

If you have the opportunity to plan for the retirement on, you will have the ability to make more effective career-related and general financial selections prior to retirement with appropriate planning. Could it be wiser to keep at the current law business or begin your own practice? Can the mid to late career degree, license or credential make sense monetarily? These conclusions might differ for someone with twenty years into retirement in contrast to someone with five decades prior retirement.

Finding on the Exact Same Page

Some of the benefits of premature financial planning for retirement is that you can make sure your plans perform well with other parties that are pertinent. It's certainly not too early to produce sure that your better half and you really are on an identical page together with lifestyle and spending wants in retirement but your significant other you may want to have a dialog together with.

Few retirement programs are often affected by a saver's urge to fulfill other objectives such as assisting an adult child in starting or acquiring their business. To the extent that these goals can influence your own retirement savings, you may benefit from going.

Tax Benefits

There are lots of tax advantages of retirement planning, including cutting down the amount of taxes that you will cover throughout retirement and guaranteeing that beneficiaries to retirement along with also other accounts type s spend out as much tax as feasible.

Some of the key places that many individuals overlook within their lifetime whilst saving for retirement is tax filings. This calls for establishing unique"pools" of profit accounts which can be taxable, tax free and tax-deferred. These various accounts permit cash to be more withdrawn from quite a few sources depending on future conditions.

Cost Saving

There are numerous ways to lessen fees with planning. Many of the insurance policies you'll need can be gotten in a premium once younger and in a healthy body as opposed to waiting before retirement and exceeding a rate or refusal of coverage.

People who understand the place they'd like to live responsibly frequently want to examine options besides buying during exactly the exact time they retire. Could it not create financial sense to acquire the property from the desirable retirement spot beforehand and let it out? In the event you plan to construct a brand new home, Just how long do you really need? retirement planning may raise the likelihood that your goals are satisfied with at the least cost.

Viewing Financial Problems in Context

One of the maximum benefits of planning, generally speaking, is that you can determine just how your entire monetary goals relate to another rather than evaluating them into isolation.

Heritage Opportunities

Planning for retirement can also supply gain for your heirs or your own favorite charitable causes. See your legacy as a whole, maybe not only the distribution of one's assets in death to beneficiaries. Your wishes could be more complex than you might imagine.

Perhaps your retirement conclusion involves unwinding or buying a business you've started. You may possibly discover your choices affect not just yourself however employees. You might intend to dedicate a certain sum of your values to various triggers and have charitable pursuits.

Chat Using a Professional

Quite a few retirement savers may gain from working with an expert to discuss these issues. Think of how a skilled practitioner may be in a position to help to your retirement planning needs that are particular.

[killingamericanhighereducation]

The Dirty, Rotten, Crooked, Broken, Student Loan System and The Immoral Bankers, Brokers, Collectors, and Corrupt Politicians Who Make Billions Off of It While the Courts Garnish Wages and Destroy Lives

Why when I pay the 850.00 or 1100.00 per month payments, the principle amount seems to not move and has gone up. I have been working on this debt since 1996. Got off of welfare as college was the way out....or so I thought. When I retire, I will be living on the streets. I tried. I failed. I raised my kids and they have student loans too as we thought that was the only way to get out of poverty. Never again will I encourage a young person to attend college in the US. Not a good idea. I have a nursing degree, my son has an IT degree and my daughter a business degree. But we barely get by. No home purchases, no car and no giving to economy. What is wrong with this picture? Lisa Powers  December 20, 2019 Manchester   (https://studentdebtcrisis.org/read-student-debt-stories/)

The Killing of American Higher Education - PART ONE

Introduction

The U.S. spends almost double that of anywhere else in the world on higher education and that's before the interest charges are shackled upon the students. Nine million Americans are either in default, deferment or forbearance on their student loans with a million more each year. These students are Democrats, Republicans, African American, Caucasians, Latinx, Asian, Native American, young, old, married, divorced, LGBTQ, fathers, mothers...every single demographic that exists. It's not a political party issue - it's blatant criminal activity by our elected officials, their collection agencies and the Department of Education. They have created a life-long debt sentence for these students for their own profit at the cost of our country's future.

This paper will include politicians and politics but is not pro Democratic Party or Pro Republican Party. The reality of today is that most politicians are arrogant, self-serving assholes and all have damaged our country in pursuit of their own wealth building agendas (this is also not new).

The student loan debt crisis didn't just appear. The warning sirens have been blaring for over a decade with the causes of it going further back than that. The subprime mortgage crisis was also seen years before but again, the people that could have changed it, the politicians, chose to do nothing until it was too late and then they bailed out the firms to the tune of $30 trillion. That same year Goldman Sachs paid out record bonuses to the very people who caused it. Why was this allowed and why is the student loan debt allowed? Because nasty, rotten, bankers, brokers, collection agencies, politicians and billionaires are making a great deal of money off of the dreams and misfortunes of students and the mismanagement of higher education (again allowed). Shame on them all. A pox on them all. There are solutions beyond the news bites and campaign rhetoric but solutions don’t pay as well.

Forced to compete in the higher education war for a job. Now I'm crushed with the weight of student loan payments and no end to the payoff. I've been forced to withdraw from contributing to my retirement fund so that I can make the enormous monthly payments. On a 50k loan, I'll (if I don't expire first) will have paid over 250k for this loan. By the way, my annual income will never match the debt I've accrued in order to compete for a professional hire career! I think it's important to note that community colleges had not yet molded programs to support a full-time employee who would be taking full-time credit hours. This forced many adult college bound students into the private college sector. These colleges continue to price-gauge adult students with inflated credit hour costs, books, and fees. My best option would be to quit working all together! I'll never see the light of day, so why bother making a good living? I support student debt forgiveness! Jennifer  November 25, 2019 Columbus (https://studentdebtcrisis.org/read-student-debt-stories/)

The student loan debt crisis is not new. It wasn’t like a tornado that pops up with the warning sirens giving only minutes of notice before it destroys everything in its path. It has been in the making since the 1970s and touched down on land over a decade ago. It was seen then – sirens blaring and it was projected to get worse. The narrative never changed - do not ignore this or very bad things will happen – and it has. Our elected officials didn’t just ignore it but instead they have actively, albeit quietly, ensured the system remained broken and has supported the loan “servicing” agencies in pushing their boots harder on the necks of borrowers for their own profits.These numbers, including our $1.7 trillion student loan debt figures are always increasing so this is a snapshot of the first quarter of 2019 –

Federal loan borrowers in repayment: 18.6 million.

Federal loan borrowers with loans in deferment: 3.4 million.

Federal loan borrowers with loans in forbearance: 2.7 million.

Federal loan borrowers with loans in default: 5.2 million.

11.3 million American citizens cannot make their payments. Twenty-five percent of all borrowers will go into default and that’s where the true ugly begins. At this point interest begins to quickly pile on and can double, triple, quadruple…more from the original loan amount.

Once in default, the loan is sent to collections - this is also the point where the power finance players make their money. With the blessing of congress and the courts, wages are garnished, social security payments are garnished, tax refunds are taken in full, you are no longer eligible for deferments or forbearance, and your credit is ruined. This can also cost you your job, or prevent you from future employment. This will last until the loan is paid back or until death (except private student loans where they can come after the estate).

How we reached this point can be very confusing (intentionally designed) so I’m going to attempt to deconstruct the main areas that facilitated the fraud and the areas that keep it going and growing. All of these issues have been previously reported by numerous journalists but have not always tied the relationships together of higher education, politicians (all branches of the federal government), collection/servicing agencies, financial institutions, billionaires and how they worked and continue to work together to commit such a monumental deception on the American public.

There are many rabbit holes that they want you to get lost in so I’ll address some of those right now. This piece will not explain all the differences between all the various student loans available today – understanding that like a financial aid officer at a college doesn’t change the corruption. It will not explain in-depth how all the financial tools work involved in this industry – understanding that like a broker doesn’t change the corruption. It will not explain the various loan repayment programs and faulty formulas used by the collection/servicing agencies – understanding these like the Department of Education will not change the corruption. It cannot cover every institution that has operated fraudulently nor all the dirty, immoral, unethical people involved…but I’ll give it the old college try.  

Beware phony advocates for reform that appear to speak on your behalf with partial fixes but do so just to ensure there are no real changes to the system that would result in any financial losses for themselves and the masters they serve. The predatory student loan industry exists because our elected officials are either corrupt themselves, don’t take the time to truly understand all the complex aspects of the abuse and fraud in the system (they choose to listen to the industry’s own lobbyists instead of their own constituents), or are just plain morons. Regardless, all kill American higher education.

The American student loan system – government loansharking enforced with judicial muscle. The mafia never had it so good.

No Good Deed Goes Unexploited

It is important to understand the history of how we arrived at our current crisis, because as I said it’s not new, it didn’t just happen last year. It was not only allowed but designed, fed, and encouraged to be the devious monster that exists today. This is not the complete history but what is needed to bring us to today.

1944. The GI Bill was established to reward veterans who served their country during WWII to catch up with those Americans who remained in college during this time. Prior to this, many of these people would never have been able to afford to go to college before or after their service. This is really the first involvement we see of the federal government assisting citizens who didn’t have the wealth to attend college on their own. There were advocates that wanted this extended beyond veterans to allow more Americans to benefit from higher education but the majority members of congress felt that since they never received that, no one else should either. No free rides was the mantra.

1958. The “Red Menace” swept the country and with Russia’s launch of Sputnik, Congress would sponsor low-interest loans under national security. It’s of interest to also note that the National Defense Education Act also included debt cancellation for those students who became teachers. There was still no support for need or academic based undergraduate funding.

I wanted to go to school to help people, and my master’s degree allows me to do that every day. But with over $75,000 in debt, partially due to ever-accruing interest, it feels like I’ll never get ahead and will struggle with this my entire life. I know God will take care of me; I just don’t know how. Emily August  May 23, 2019 Detroit (https://studentdebtcrisis.org/read-student-debt-stories/)

1965. President Johnson and the 89th Congress enacted the Higher Education Act. Title IV was the first true federal government commitment to providing college opportunity to students in need. This included the Guaranteed Student Loan (GSL) and College Work-Study Programs which also applied to middle-income families. Because the cost of education was somewhat affordable then, any loans to the middle class would have been a small percentage of the program. Enrollments increased and student aid appropriations took the lion’s share of compared to other domestic social programs. 1972. This was a big year in higher education. The reauthorization of the HEA laid the foundation for today’s student loan system including establishing the term “postsecondary” to recognize that not everyone needed a four-year bachelor’s degree but did need further education of some sort. This would allow financial aid for those students attending community colleges, trade schools, vocational schools and students attending part-time. The reauthorization also included:

Pell Grants began here as a way students could directly receive federal aid beyond the campus-based programs.

Private schools were now allowed to participate fully in receiving these monies.

State Incentive Grants which provided matching dollars to help states expand their need-based grants.

Hidden quietly in the darkest corners of Title IV where mold feeds and vermin defecate, they established the Student Loan Marketing Association, aka Sallie Mae, as a publicly chartered corporation to increase funding to guaranteed student loans (GSL).

This was to be a new era in the building of our country. We were the world leaders in almost everything during this time and the importance of education was critical to our country’s growth and future prosperity. It was supposed to be a good thing.

The Old Sons Of Bitches

In the early 1970s, while the protests of the Vietnam War were still in full swing on college campuses throughout the country, legislators became paranoid that these long-haired, lazy, hippie, pinkos would use the bankruptcy system to get out of paying the federal government back for their student loans (this was the early 70s and our government was completely controlled by wealthy, white men who did think like this). This fear had nothing to do with reality and there was no evidence to support this position. At that time their main target was those pursuing medical and law degrees that were higher priced. Keep in mind that the degree costs were a small fraction compared to today’s tuition.

In 1973 the Congressional Commission on the Bankruptcy Laws of the United States issued a report which included that student loan debt cannot be discharged for five years after graduation. Three years later the Education Amendments of 1976, Section 439A, was adopted even though the Government Accounting Office (GAO) reported less than 1% of student loans had gone to bankruptcy. Now, no student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy until five years after graduation, or unless the borrower could prove repayment imposed “undue hardship” (which was never defined by the law makers). While this passed it did have more than a few critics. Michigan Congressman, James O’Hara stated that establishing this “... treats educational loans precisely as the law now treats loans incurred by fraud, felony, and alimony-dodging. No other legitimately contracted consumer loan … is subjected to the assumption of criminality which this provision applies to every educational loan.”

In 1978, with the passage of the Bankruptcy Reform Act, the exception to bankruptcy discharge of student loans was moved from the Higher Education Act to the U.S. Bankruptcy Code at 11 USC 523(a)(8). While Congress sought to reverse the earlier exception, the Senate’s version prevailed maintaining the inability to discharge student loans for five years and adding that it applied to loans back by the government and nonprofit institutions of higher education.

In 1979, Congress wanted to address the problem of lack of participation by lenders (although this wasn’t known to be a problem by anyone) so they quietly passed an amendment giving banks a higher rate of return on student loan by linking them changes in Treasury bill rates. Prior to this the government set a cap on what lenders would make. With banks making more money, the student loan industry was born.

Just because the corrupt say it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s still not corrupt.

The Noose Tightens

1986-92. Loan volume shot up again after the 1986 and 1992 Higher Education Act (HEA) reauthorizations.  In 1990 the Crime Control Act extended the period before student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy from five years to seven years and then a year later the statute of limitations on defaulted loans, six years, was totally eliminated by the Higher Education Technical Amendments. There was a failed push to increase Pell Grants to reduce the reliance on loans and instead Congress raised the borrowing limits of students and created a new unsubsidized loan for the middle-class that was no longer based on financial need. This meant anyone could now take on a

We are being held captive in an 8% pay back on our kids Parent Plus loans. We have tried to re-fi them, and nobody will touch it. This has made our monthly bills higher than our income! It should be illegal to offer these loans without qualifying, and to keep us locked in this excessively high interest rate! Laura MacCormack  May 9, 2019 Green Creek (https://studentdebtcrisis.org/read-student-debt-stories/)

student loan regardless of their income or parents’ income. Smelling more money could be made off of the well-meaning, caring, loving parents they also uncapped the Parent Loan (PLUS) program. Now parents could borrow, on behalf of their children, the full amount of their children’s’ educational costs. Because of these changes, enrollment took off and in a short two year period the amount borrowed increased over $10 billion.The Student Loan Reform Act of 1993 revised how loans are serviced, financed and allowed for more students to take out more loans. This also established an income-based repayment plan stretching out to a home mortgage length of 25 years. The Department of Education responded by creating more than 70 complex rule-making packages further complicating the regulatory process for students, schools and the government itself.

By 1998 the Higher Education Amendments, Section 971 eliminated the seven year period required before a student loan could be discharged in bankruptcy. There had been no debates or hearings on this prior to President Clinton signing the bill into law. This meant there was no longer a statute of limitations nor could student loans even be considered for bankruptcy – ever, unless the ambiguous, indeterminate, undefined “undue hardship” provision could be proven.

In 2005 the final nail was hammered into the hands of student borrowers by Congress with the passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. This meant all federal and private educational loans were excepted from bankruptcy discharge unless the undefined “undue hardship” could be proven (note – you have a better chance of being hit by lighting, which would probably be a welcome relief to my student loan borrowers, than having a judge dismiss a student loan in bankruptcy).

The politicians, with help from their financial keepers, knew by now that money, lots and lots of money, could be made off of student borrowers. By increasing funding to everyone, by ensuring every kind of nonprofit and private educational institution was eligible to receive federal and private loans, by supporting the skyrocketing costs of higher education, by removing the only tool that could provide some kind of market correction (bankruptcy), and by placing student loan debt in the financial markets (SLABS) which allowed those on the inside to make billions of dollars, they had successfully created the most devious, destructive system ever in the history of the United States.

I am 31 years old, divorced single mom of 2 with $134,000 + in student loan debt, much thanks to the interest. One loan I borrowed was for $5000, which I have paid roughly $5000 back, but still owe over $7000. So a $5000 loan turned into a $12000 loan after they tacked on interest. The remaining loans I have are private and federal. I can't afford to purchase a home. I can't afford to save towards my retirement. And there is absolutely nothing that I can do but to continue to pay the interest only payments to make it more affordable for me a month, but it will cost me 1,000s of dollars of additional interest to the life of my loans. Life happens, and the fact that we are punished with high interest that balloons our loans to an unrealistic amount is, without the ability to file bankruptcy or have the option to pause our loan payments without ramifications is wrong. Christie  May 1, 2019 Frisco (https://studentdebtcrisis.org/read-student-debt-stories/)

What was originally meant to help those of us with the least financial means attend higher education, breaking the cycle of poverty, was now viewed and constructed by those in power as a money making machine. Success of higher education forever forward was measured by the amount of campaign contributions from this new “industry.” Citizens were cut and bled and the feeding frenzy began.

[aydin-aleyna]

What Are The Principal Varieties Of Life Insurance?

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) dramatically alters healthcare markets and well being insurance methods within the United States. Rental reimbursement which pays for a rental vehicle when the insured's automobile is out of commission on account of a loss coated underneath complete or collision coverages. Do not simply check one firm and determine something, however verify 2-three companies and see which firm is reliable and providing you with extra advantages other than insurance. Accidental dying and AD&D insurance policies very not often pay a profit, both because the reason for loss of life is just not coated by the policy or as a result of death happens properly after the accident, by which era the premiums have gone unpaid.

Amica - Based mostly on the corporate's financial strength and claims paying capability, Amica Mutual Group has obtained a rating of A+ (Superior) from A.M. Best Firm. Legislation that handed in the House final November would start to make some of these revisions, requiring FEMA to tell dwelling patrons if their properties have flooded earlier than and require communities to provide you with plans for minimizing flood risk.

Financial advisers warn that the expansion fee of a policy with money worth is often paltry in comparison with other monetary devices, resembling mutual funds and change-traded funds (ETFs). Tax-deferred asset safety and accumulation—any enhance in money worth of your insurance coverage because of funding gains isn't taxed till you withdraw the money after you retire.

Most monetary advisors will advocate that you simply buy life insurance as quickly as someone else is dependant in your revenue. Keep in mind, for those who intend to interchange or change an present protection, you ought to make certain that the agent promoting the new coverage has your finest pursuits at coronary heart, and bases the purchase recommendation on an applicable wants evaluation.

There is a lump sum death benefit, paid to your beneficiary income tax free. First, the corporate presents quotes for term life insurance online. A life insurance coverage could assist your partner preserve his or her way of life and take the steps obligatory to move forward. The premium is collected by the insurance company and when it comes time to pay a claim, they take money from that assortment” to compensate the coverage holder.

Insurance corporations must pay the proceeds of the life insurance policy to the beneficiary within two months of receiving proof of death and verifying the beneficiary. Pacific Life refers to Pacific Life Insurance Firm and its associates, including Pacific Life & Annuity Firm. Proceeds from a life insurance coverage can be used to help pay funeral expenses and memorial providers.

On the whole, firms often supply better rates at "breakpoint" protection levels of $100,000, $250,000, $500,000, and $1,000,000. You'll be able to select various term insurance lengths, beginning https://insurancemalaysia2u.com/ with annual renewable term (1 year), 5 12 months, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30. Once the term expires, the time period insurance coverage could be renewed annually, but be forewarned that your cost of insurance will go up every year.

There may be one more way to get insurance is that perform some research on internet, for example find out the businesses who provide insurance and go to their website, you will get all the details about the insurance insurance policies they supply. Out there by means of the office, time period life coverage helps shield your family for a set time period, at low or sometimes no value to you.

When looking for probably the most affordable term life insurance, it should also be vital to factor within the insurance firm's rating into your general resolution. Stage Time period Life insurance, policy from series TCL-LPT.1 may not be obtainable in all states. If Bill would not have personal liability insurance, then his assets are uncovered. Most entire life insurance policies provide the choice to take out loans against that cash value.

[sheminecrafts]

The other smartphone business

With the smartphone operating system market sewn up by Google’s Android platform, which has a close to 90% share globally, leaving Apple’s iOS a slender (but lucrative) premium top-slice, a little company called Jolla and its Linux-based Sailfish OS is a rare sight indeed: A self-styled ‘independent alternative’ that’s still somehow in business.

The Finnish startup’s b2b licensing sales pitch is intended to appeal to corporates and governments that want to be able to control their own destiny where device software is concerned.

And in a world increasingly riven with geopolitical tensions that pitch is starting to look rather prescient.

Political uncertainties around trade, high tech espionage risks and data privacy are translating into “opportunities” for the independent platform player — and helping to put wind in Jolla’s sails long after the plucky Sailfish team quit their day jobs for startup life.

Building an alternative to Google Android

Jolla was founded back in 2011 by a band of Nokia staffers who left the company determined to carry on development of mobile Linux as the European tech giant abandoned its own experiments in favor of pivoting to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. (Fatally, as it would turn out.)

Nokia exited mobile entirely in 2013, selling the division to Microsoft. It only returned to the smartphone market in 2017, via a brand-licensing arrangement, offering made-in-China handsets running — you guessed it — Google’s Android OS.

If the lesson of the Jolla founders’ former employer is ‘resistance to Google is futile’ they weren’t about to swallow that. The Finns had other ideas.

Indeed, Jolla’s indie vision for Sailfish OS is to support a whole shoal of differently branded, regionally flavored and independently minded (non-Google-led) ecosystems all swimming around in parallel. Though getting there means not just surviving but thriving — and doing so in spite of the market being so thoroughly dominated by the U.S. tech giant.

TechCrunch spoke to Jolla ahead of this year’s Mobile World Congress tradeshow where co-founder and CEO, Sami Pienimäki, was taking meetings on the sidelines. He told us his hope is for Jolla to have a partner booth of its own next year — touting, in truly modest Finnish fashion, an MWC calendar “maybe fuller than ever” with meetings with “all sorts of entities and governmental representatives”.

Jolla co-founder, Sami Pienimaki, showing off a Jolla-branded handset in May 2013, back when the company was trying to attack the consumer smartphone space.  (Photo credit: KIMMO MANTYLA/AFP/Getty Images)

Even a modestly upbeat tone signals major progress here because an alternative smartphone platform licensing business is — to put it equally mildly — an incredibly difficult tech business furrow to plough.

Jolla almost died at the end of 2015 when the company hit a funding crisis. But the plucky Finns kept paddling, jettisoning their early pursuit of consumer hardware (Pienimäki describes attempting to openly compete with Google in the consumer smartphone space as essentially “suicidal” at this point) to narrow their focus to a b2b licensing play.

The early b2b salespitch targeted BRIC markets, with Jolla hitting the road to seek buy in for a platform it said could be moulded to corporate or government needs while still retaining the option of Android app compatibility.

Then in late 2016 signs of a breakthrough: Sailfish gained certification in Russia for government and corporate use.

Its licensing partner in the Russian market was soon touting the ability to go “absolutely Google-free!“.

Buy in from Russia

Since then the platform has gained the backing of Russian telco Rostelecom, which acquired Jolla’s local licensing customer last year (as well as becoming a strategic investor in Jolla itself in March 2018 — ��to ensure there is a mutual interest to drive the global Sailfish OS agenda”, as Pienimäki puts it).

Rostelecom is using the brand name ‘Aurora OS‘ for Sailfish in the market which Pienimäki says is “exactly our strategy” — likening it to how Google’s Android has been skinned with different user experiences by major OEMs such as Samsung and Huawei.

“What we offer for our customers is a fully independent, regional licence and a tool chain so that they can develop exactly this kind of solution,” he tells TechCrunch. “We have come to a maturity point together with Rostelecom in the Russia market, and it was natural move plan together, that they will take a local identity and proudly carry forward the Sailfish OS ecosystem development in Russia under their local identity.”

“It’s fully compatible with Sailfish operating system, it’s based on Sailfish OS and it’s our joint interest, of course, to make it fly,” he adds. “So that as we, hopefully, are able to extend this and come out to public with other similar set-ups in different countries those of course — eventually, if they come to such a fruition and maturity — will then likely as well have their own identities but still remain compatible with the global Sailfish OS.”

Jolla says the Russian government plans to switch all circa 8M state officials to the platform by the end of 2021 — under a project expected to cost RUB 160.2 billion (~$2.4BN). (A cut of which will go to Jolla in licensing fees.)

It also says Sailfish-powered smartphones will be “recommended to municipal administrations of various levels,” with the Russian state planning to allocate a further RUB 71.3 billion (~$1.1BN) from the federal budget for that. So there’s scope for deepening the state’s Sailfish uptake.

Russian Post is one early customer for Jolla’s locally licensed Sailfish flavor. Having piloted devices last year, Pienimäki says it’s now moving to a full commercial deployment across the whole organization — which has around 300,000 employees (to give a sense of how many Sailfish powered devices could end up in the hands of state postal workers in Russia).

A rugged Sailfish-powered device piloted by Russian post

Jolla is not yet breaking out end users for Sailfish OS per market but Pienimäki says that overall the company is now “clearly above” 100k (and below 500k) devices globally.

That’s still of course a fantastically tiny number if you compare it to the consumer devices market — top ranked Android smartphone maker Samsung sold around 70M handsets in last year’s holiday quarter, for instance — but Jolla is in the b2b OS licensing business, not the handset making business. So it doesn’t need hundreds of millions of Sailfish devices to ship annually to turn a profit.

Scaling a royalty licensing business to hundreds of thousands of users is sums to “good business”, , says Pienimäki, describing Jolla’s business model for Sailfish as “practically a royalty per device”.

“The success we have had in the Russian market has populated us a lot of interesting new opening elsewhere around the world,” he continues. “This experience and all the technology we have built together with Open Mobile Platform [Jolla’s Sailfish licensing partner in Russia which was acquired by Rostelecom] to enable that case — that enables a number of other cases. The deployment plan that Rostelecom has for this is very big. And this is now really happening and we are happy about it.”

Jolla’s “Russia operation” is now beginning “a mass deployment phase”, he adds, predicting it will “quickly ramp up the volume to very sizeable”. So Sailfish is poised to scale.

Step 3… profit?

While Jolla is still yet to turn a full-year profit Pienimäki says several standalone months of 2018 were profitable, and he’s no longer worried whether the business is sustainable — asserting: “We don’t have any more financial obstacles or threats anymore.”

It’s quite the turnaround of fortunes, given Jolla’s near-death experience a few years ago when it almost ran out of money, after failing to close a $10.6M Series C round, and had to let go of half its staff.

It did manage to claw in a little funding at the end of 2015 to keep going, albeit as much leaner fish. But bagging Russia as an early adopter of its ‘independent’ mobile Linux ecosystem looks to have been the key tipping point for Jolla to be able to deliver on the hard-graft ecosystem-building work it’s been doing all along the way. And Pienimäki now expresses easy confidence that profitability will flow “fairly quickly” from here on in.

“It’s not an easy road. It takes time,” he says of the ecosystem-building company Jolla hard-pivoted to at its point of acute financial distress. “The development of this kind of business — it requires patience and negotiation times, and setting up the ecosystem and ecosystem partners. It really requires patience and takes a lot of time. And now we have come to this point where actually there starts to be an ecosystem which will then extend and start to carry its own identity as well.”

In further signs of Jolla’s growing confidence he says it hired more than ten people last year and moved to new and slightly more spacious offices — a reflection of the business expanding.

“It’s looking very good and nice for us,” Pienimäki continues. “Let’s say we are not taking too much pressure, with our investors and board, that what is the day that we are profitable. It’s not so important anymore… It’s clear that that is soon coming — that very day. But at the same time the most important is that the business case behind is proven and it is under aggressive deployment by our customers.”

The main focus for the moment is on supporting deployments to ramp up in Russia, he says, emphasizing: “That’s where we have to focus.” (Literally he says “not screwing up” — and with so much at stake you can see why nailing the Russia case is Jolla’s top priority.)

While the Russian state has been the entity most keen to embrace an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS — perhaps unsurprisingly — it’s not the only place in the world where Jolla has irons in the fire.

Another licensing partner, Bolivian IT services company Jalasoft, has co-developed a Sailfish-powered smartphone called Accione.

Jalasoft’s ‘liberty’-touting Accione Sailfish smartphone

It slates the handset on its website as being “designed for Latinos by Latinos”. “The digitalization of the economy is inevitable and, if we do not control the foundation of this digitalization, we have no future,” it adds.

Jalasoft founder and CEO Jorge Lopez says the company’s decision to invest effort in kicking the tyres of Jolla’s alternative mobile ecosystem is about gaining control — or seeking “technological libration” as the website blurb puts it.

“With Sailfish OS we have control of the implementation, while with Android it is the opposite,” Lopez tells TechCrunch. “We are working on developing smart buildings and we need a private OS that is not Android or iOS. This is mainly because our product will allow the end user to control the whole building and doing this with Android or iOS a hackable OS will bring concerns on security.”

Lopez says Jalasoft is using Accione as its development platform — “to gather customer feedback and to further develop our solution” — so the project clearly remains in an early phase, and he says that no more devices are likely to be announced this year.

But Jolla can point to more seeds being sewn with the potential, with work, determination and patience, to sprout into another sizeable crop of Sailfish-powered devices down the line.

Complexity in China

Even more ambitiously Jolla is also targeting China, where investment has been taken in to form a local consortium to develop a Chinese Sailfish ecosystem.

Although Pienimäki cautions there’s still much work to be done to bring Sailfish to market in China.

“We completed a major pilot with our licensing customer, Sailfish China Consortium, in 2017-18,” he says, giving an update on progress to date. “The public in market solution is not there yet. That is something that we are working together with the customer — hopefully we can see it later this year on the market. But these things take time. And let’s say that we’ve been somewhat surprised at how complex this kind of decision-making can be.”

“It wasn’t easy in Russia — it took three years of tight collaboration together with our Russian partners to find a way. But somehow it feels that it’s going to take even more in China. And I’m not necessarily talking about calendar time — but complexity,” he adds.

While there’s no guarantee of success for Jolla in China, the potential win is so big given the size of the market that even if they can only carve out a tiny slice, such as a business or corporate sector, it’s still worth going after. And he points to the existence of a couple of native mobile Linux operating systems he reckons could make “very lucrative partners”.

That said, the get-to-market challenge for Jolla in China is clearly distinctly different vs the rest of the world. This is because Android has developed into an independent (i.e. rather than Google-led) ecosystem in China as a result of state restrictions on the Internet and Internet companies. So the question is what could Sailfish offer that forked Android doesn’t already?

An Oppo Android powered smartphone on show at MWC 2017

Again, Jolla is taking the long view that ultimately there will be appetite — and perhaps also state-led push — for a technology platform bolster against political uncertainty in U.S.-China relations.

“What has happened now, in particular last year, is — because of the open trade war between the nations — many of the technology vendors, and also I would say the Chinese government, has started to gradually tighten their perspective on the fact that ‘hey simply it cannot be a long term strategy to just keep forking Android’. Because in the end of the day it’s somebody else’s asset. So this is something that truly creates us the opportunity,” he suggests.

“Openly competing with the fact that there are very successful Android forks in China, that’s going to be extremely difficult. But — let’s say — tapping into the fact that there are powers in that nation that wish that there would be something else than forking Android, combined with the fact that there is already something homegrown in China which is not forking Android — I think that’s the recipe that can be successful.”

Not all Jolla’s Sailfish bets have paid off, of course. An earlier foray by an Indian licensing partner into the consumer handset market petered out. Albeit, it does reinforce their decision to zero in on government and corporate licensing.

“We got excellent business connections,” says Pienimäki of India, suggesting also that it’s still a ‘watch this space’ for Jolla. The company has a “second move” in train in the market that he’s hopeful to be talking about publicly later this year.

It’s also pitching Sailfish in Africa. And in markets where target customers might not have their own extensive in-house IT capability to plug into Sailfish co-development work Pienimäki says it’s offering a full solution — “a ready made package”, together with partners, including device management, VPN, secure messaging and secure email — which he argues “can be still very lucrative business cases”.

Looking ahead and beyond mobile, Pienimäki suggests the automotive industry could be an interesting target for Sailfish in the future — though not literally plugging the platform into cars; but rather licensing its technologies where appropriate — arguing car makers are also keen to control the tech that’s going into their cars.

“They really want to make sure that they own the cockpit. It’s their property, it’s their brand and they want to own it — and for a reason,” he suggests, pointing to the clutch of major investments from car companies in startups and technologies in recent years.

“This is definitely an interesting area. We are not directly there ourself — and we are not capable to extend ourself there but we are discussing with partners who are in that very business whether they could utilize our technologies there. That would then be more or less like a technology licensing arrangement.”

A trust balancing model

While Jolla looks to be approaching a tipping point as a business, in terms of being able to profit off of licensing an alternative mobile platform, it remains a tiny and some might say inconsequential player on the global mobile stage.

Yet its focus on building and maintaining trusted management and technology architectures also looks timely — again, given how geopolitical spats are intervening to disrupt technology business as usual.

Chinese giant Huawei used an MWC keynote speech last month to reject U.S.-led allegations that its 5G networking technology could be repurposed as a spying tool by the Chinese state. And just this week it opened a cybersecurity transparency center in Brussels, to try to bolster trust in its kit and services — urging industry players to work together on agreeing standards and structures that everyone can trust.

In recent years U.S.-led suspicions attached to Russia have also caused major headaches for security veteran Kaspersky — leading the company to announce its own trust and transparency program and decentralize some of its infrastructure, including by spinning up servers in Europe last year.

Businesses finding ways to maintain and deepen the digital economy in spite of a little — or even a lot — of cross-border mistrust may well prove to be the biggest technology challenge of all moving forward.

Especially as next-gen 5G networks get rolled out — and their touted ‘intelligent connectivity’ reaches out to transform many more types of industries, bringing new risks and regulatory complexity.

The geopolitical problem linked to all this boils down to how to trust increasing complex technologies without any one entity being able to own and control all the pieces. And Jolla’s business looks interesting in light of that because it’s selling the promise of neutral independence to all its customers, wherever they hail from — be it Russia, LatAm, China, Africa or elsewhere — which makes its ability to secure customer trust not just important but vital to its success.

Indeed, you could argue its customers are likely to rank above average on the ‘paranoid’ scale, given their dedicated search for an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS in the first place.

“It’s one of the number one questions we get,” admits Pienimäki, discussing Jolla’s trust balancing act — aka how it manages and maintains confidence in Sailfish’s independence, even as it takes business backing and code contributions from a state like Russia.

“We tell about our reference case in Russia and people quickly ask ‘hey okay, how can I trust that there is no blackbox inside’,” he continues, adding: “This is exactly the core question and this is exactly the problem we have been able to build a solution for.”

Jolla’s solution sums to one line: “We create a transparent platform and on top of fully transparent platform you can create secure solutions,” as Pienimäki puts it.

“The way it goes is that Jolla with Sailfish OS is always offering the transparent Sailfish operating system core, on source code level, all the time live, available for all the customers. So all the customers constantly, in real-time, have access to our source code. Most of it’s in public open source, and the proprietary parts are also constantly available from our internal infrastructure. For all the customers, at the same time in real-time,” he says, fleshing out how it keeps customers on board with a continually co-developing software platform.

“The contributions we take from these customers are always on source code level only. We don’t take any binary blobs inside our software. We take only source code level contributions which we ourselves authorize, integrate and then we make available for all the customers at the very same moment. So that loopback in a way creates us the transparency.

“So if you want to be suspicion of the contributions of the other guys, so to say, you can always read it on the source code. It’s real-time. Always available for all the customers at the same time. That’s the model we have created.”

“It’s honestly quite a unique model,” he adds. “Nobody is really offering such a co-development model in the operating system business.

“Practically how Android works is that Google, who’s leading the Android development, makes the next release of Android software, then releases it under Android Open Source and then people start to backboard it — so that’s like ‘source, open’ in a way, not ‘open source’.”

Sailfish’s community of users also have real-time access to and visibility of all the contributions — which he dubs “real democracy”.

“People can actually follow it from the code-line all the time,” he argues. “This is really the core of our existence and how we can offer it to Russia and other countries without creating like suspicion elements each side. And that is very important.

“That is the only way we can continue and extend this regional licensing and we can offer it independently from Finland and from our own company.”

With global trade and technology both looking increasingly vulnerable to cross-border mistrust, Jolla’s approach to collaborative transparency may offer something of a model if other businesses and industries find they need to adapt themselves  in order for trade and innovation to keep moving forward in uncertain political times.

Antitrust and privacy uplift

Last but not least there’s regulatory intervention to consider.

A European Commission antitrust decision against Google’s Android platform last year caused headlines around the world when the company was slapped with a $5BN fine.

More importantly for Android rivals Google was also ordered to change its practices — leading to amended licensing terms for the platform in Europe last fall. And Pienimäki says Jolla was a “key contributor” to the Commission case against Android.

European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, on April 15, 2015 in Brussels, as the Commission said it would open an antitrust investigation into Google’s Android operating system. (Photo credit: JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images)

The new Android licensing terms make it (at least theoretically) possible for new types of less-heavily-Google-flavored Android devices to be developed for Europe. Though there have been complaints the licensing tweaks don’t go far enough to reset Google’s competitive Android advantage.

Asked whether Jolla has seen any positive impacts on its business following the Commission’s antitrust decision, Pienimäki responds positively, recounting how — “one or two weeks after the ruling” — Jolla received an inbound enquiry from a company in France that had felt hamstrung by Google requiring its services to be bundled with Android but was now hoping “to realize a project in a special sector”.

The company, which he isn’t disclosing at this stage, is interested in “using Sailfish and then having selected Android applications running in Sailfish but no connection with the Google services”.

“We’ve been there for five years helping the European Union authorities [to build the case] and explain how difficult it is to create competitive solutions in the smartphone market in general,” he continues. “Be it consumer or be it anything else. That’s definitely important for us and I don’t see this at all limited to the consumer sector. The very same thing has been a problem for corporate clients, for companies who provide specialized mobile device solutions for different kind of corporations and even governments.”

While he couches the Android ruling as a “very important” moment for Jolla’s business last year, he also says he hopes the Commission will intervene further to level the smartphone playing field.

“What I’m after here, and what I would really love to see, is that within the European Union we utilize Linux-based, open platform solution which is made in Europe,” he says. “That’s why we’ve been pushing this [antitrust action]. This is part of that. But in bigger scheme this is very good.”

He is also very happy with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which came into force last May, plugging in a long overdue update to the bloc’s privacy rules with a much beefed up enforcement regime.

GDPR has been good for Jolla’s business, according to Pienimäki, who says interest is flowing its way from customers who now perceive a risk to using Android if customer data flows outside Europe and they cannot guarantee adequate privacy protections are in place.

“Already last spring… we have had plenty of different customer discussions with European companies who are really afraid that ‘hey I cannot offer this solution to my government or to my corporate customer in my country because I cannot guarantee if I use Android that this data doesn’t go outside the European Union’,” he says.

“You can’t indemnify in a way that. And that’s been really good for us as well.”

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[endenogatai]

The other smartphone business

With the smartphone operating system market sewn up by Google’s Android platform, which has a close to 90% share globally, leaving Apple’s iOS a slender (but lucrative) premium top-slice, a little company called Jolla and its Linux-based Sailfish OS is a rare sight indeed: A self-styled ‘independent alternative’ that’s still somehow in business.

The Finnish startup’s b2b licensing sales pitch is intended to appeal to corporates and governments that want to be able to control their own destiny where device software is concerned.

And in a world increasingly riven with geopolitical tensions that pitch is starting to look rather prescient.

Political uncertainties around trade, high tech espionage risks and data privacy are translating into “opportunities” for the independent platform player — and helping to put wind in Jolla’s sails long after the plucky Sailfish team quit their day jobs for startup life.

Building an alternative to Google Android

Jolla was founded back in 2011 by a band of Nokia staffers who left the company determined to carry on development of mobile Linux as the European tech giant abandoned its own experiments in favor of pivoting to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. (Fatally, as it would turn out.)

Nokia exited mobile entirely in 2013, selling the division to Microsoft. It only returned to the smartphone market in 2017, via a brand-licensing arrangement, offering made-in-China handsets running — you guessed it — Google’s Android OS.

If the lesson of the Jolla founders’ former employer is ‘resistance to Google is futile’ they weren’t about to swallow that. The Finns had other ideas.

Indeed, Jolla’s indie vision for Sailfish OS is to support a whole shoal of differently branded, regionally flavored and independently minded (non-Google-led) ecosystems all swimming around in parallel. Though getting there means not just surviving but thriving — and doing so in spite of the market being so thoroughly dominated by the U.S. tech giant.

TechCrunch spoke to Jolla ahead of this year’s Mobile World Congress tradeshow where co-founder and CEO, Sami Pienimäki, was taking meetings on the sidelines. He told us his hope is for Jolla to have a partner booth of its own next year — touting, in truly modest Finnish fashion, an MWC calendar “maybe fuller than ever” with meetings with “all sorts of entities and governmental representatives”.

Jolla co-founder, Sami Pienimaki, showing off a Jolla-branded handset in May 2013, back when the company was trying to attack the consumer smartphone space.  (Photo credit: KIMMO MANTYLA/AFP/Getty Images)

Even a modestly upbeat tone signals major progress here because an alternative smartphone platform licensing business is — to put it equally mildly — an incredibly difficult tech business furrow to plough.

Jolla almost died at the end of 2015 when the company hit a funding crisis. But the plucky Finns kept paddling, jettisoning their early pursuit of consumer hardware (Pienimäki describes attempting to openly compete with Google in the consumer smartphone space as essentially “suicidal” at this point) to narrow their focus to a b2b licensing play.

The early b2b salespitch targeted BRIC markets, with Jolla hitting the road to seek buy in for a platform it said could be moulded to corporate or government needs while still retaining the option of Android app compatibility.

Then in late 2016 signs of a breakthrough: Sailfish gained certification in Russia for government and corporate use.

Its licensing partner in the Russian market was soon touting the ability to go “absolutely Google-free!“.

Buy in from Russia

Since then the platform has gained the backing of Russian telco Rostelecom, which acquired Jolla’s local licensing customer last year (as well as becoming a strategic investor in Jolla itself in March 2018 — “to ensure there is a mutual interest to drive the global Sailfish OS agenda”, as Pienimäki puts it).

Rostelecom is using the brand name ‘Aurora OS‘ for Sailfish in the market which Pienimäki says is “exactly our strategy” — likening it to how Google’s Android has been skinned with different user experiences by major OEMs such as Samsung and Huawei.

“What we offer for our customers is a fully independent, regional licence and a tool chain so that they can develop exactly this kind of solution,” he tells TechCrunch. “We have come to a maturity point together with Rostelecom in the Russia market, and it was natural move plan together, that they will take a local identity and proudly carry forward the Sailfish OS ecosystem development in Russia under their local identity.”

“It’s fully compatible with Sailfish operating system, it’s based on Sailfish OS and it’s our joint interest, of course, to make it fly,” he adds. “So that as we, hopefully, are able to extend this and come out to public with other similar set-ups in different countries those of course — eventually, if they come to such a fruition and maturity — will then likely as well have their own identities but still remain compatible with the global Sailfish OS.”

Jolla says the Russian government plans to switch all circa 8M state officials to the platform by the end of 2021 — under a project expected to cost RUB 160.2 billion (~$2.4BN). (A cut of which will go to Jolla in licensing fees.)

It also says Sailfish-powered smartphones will be “recommended to municipal administrations of various levels,” with the Russian state planning to allocate a further RUB 71.3 billion (~$1.1BN) from the federal budget for that. So there’s scope for deepening the state’s Sailfish uptake.

Russian Post is one early customer for Jolla’s locally licensed Sailfish flavor. Having piloted devices last year, Pienimäki says it’s now moving to a full commercial deployment across the whole organization — which has around 300,000 employees (to give a sense of how many Sailfish powered devices could end up in the hands of state postal workers in Russia).

A rugged Sailfish-powered device piloted by Russian post

Jolla is not yet breaking out end users for Sailfish OS per market but Pienimäki says that overall the company is now “clearly above” 100k (and below 500k) devices globally.

That’s still of course a fantastically tiny number if you compare it to the consumer devices market — top ranked Android smartphone maker Samsung sold around 70M handsets in last year’s holiday quarter, for instance — but Jolla is in the b2b OS licensing business, not the handset making business. So it doesn’t need hundreds of millions of Sailfish devices to ship annually to turn a profit.

Scaling a royalty licensing business to hundreds of thousands of users is sums to “good business”, , says Pienimäki, describing Jolla’s business model for Sailfish as “practically a royalty per device”.

“The success we have had in the Russian market has populated us a lot of interesting new opening elsewhere around the world,” he continues. “This experience and all the technology we have built together with Open Mobile Platform [Jolla’s Sailfish licensing partner in Russia which was acquired by Rostelecom] to enable that case — that enables a number of other cases. The deployment plan that Rostelecom has for this is very big. And this is now really happening and we are happy about it.”

Jolla’s “Russia operation” is now beginning “a mass deployment phase”, he adds, predicting it will “quickly ramp up the volume to very sizeable”. So Sailfish is poised to scale.

Step 3… profit?

While Jolla is still yet to turn a full-year profit Pienimäki says several standalone months of 2018 were profitable, and he’s no longer worried whether the business is sustainable — asserting: “We don’t have any more financial obstacles or threats anymore.”

It’s quite the turnaround of fortunes, given Jolla’s near-death experience a few years ago when it almost ran out of money, after failing to close a $10.6M Series C round, and had to let go of half its staff.

It did manage to claw in a little funding at the end of 2015 to keep going, albeit as much leaner fish. But bagging Russia as an early adopter of its ‘independent’ mobile Linux ecosystem looks to have been the key tipping point for Jolla to be able to deliver on the hard-graft ecosystem-building work it’s been doing all along the way. And Pienimäki now expresses easy confidence that profitability will flow “fairly quickly” from here on in.

“It’s not an easy road. It takes time,” he says of the ecosystem-building company Jolla hard-pivoted to at its point of acute financial distress. “The development of this kind of business — it requires patience and negotiation times, and setting up the ecosystem and ecosystem partners. It really requires patience and takes a lot of time. And now we have come to this point where actually there starts to be an ecosystem which will then extend and start to carry its own identity as well.”

In further signs of Jolla’s growing confidence he says it hired more than ten people last year and moved to new and slightly more spacious offices — a reflection of the business expanding.

“It’s looking very good and nice for us,” Pienimäki continues. “Let’s say we are not taking too much pressure, with our investors and board, that what is the day that we are profitable. It’s not so important anymore… It’s clear that that is soon coming — that very day. But at the same time the most important is that the business case behind is proven and it is under aggressive deployment by our customers.”

The main focus for the moment is on supporting deployments to ramp up in Russia, he says, emphasizing: “That’s where we have to focus.” (Literally he says “not screwing up” — and with so much at stake you can see why nailing the Russia case is Jolla’s top priority.)

While the Russian state has been the entity most keen to embrace an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS — perhaps unsurprisingly — it’s not the only place in the world where Jolla has irons in the fire.

Another licensing partner, Bolivian IT services company Jalasoft, has co-developed a Sailfish-powered smartphone called Accione.

Jalasoft’s ‘liberty’-touting Accione Sailfish smartphone

It slates the handset on its website as being “designed for Latinos by Latinos”. “The digitalization of the economy is inevitable and, if we do not control the foundation of this digitalization, we have no future,” it adds.

Jalasoft founder and CEO Jorge Lopez says the company’s decision to invest effort in kicking the tyres of Jolla’s alternative mobile ecosystem is about gaining control — or seeking “technological libration” as the website blurb puts it.

“With Sailfish OS we have control of the implementation, while with Android it is the opposite,” Lopez tells TechCrunch. “We are working on developing smart buildings and we need a private OS that is not Android or iOS. This is mainly because our product will allow the end user to control the whole building and doing this with Android or iOS a hackable OS will bring concerns on security.”

Lopez says Jalasoft is using Accione as its development platform — “to gather customer feedback and to further develop our solution” — so the project clearly remains in an early phase, and he says that no more devices are likely to be announced this year.

But Jolla can point to more seeds being sewn with the potential, with work, determination and patience, to sprout into another sizeable crop of Sailfish-powered devices down the line.

Complexity in China

Even more ambitiously Jolla is also targeting China, where investment has been taken in to form a local consortium to develop a Chinese Sailfish ecosystem.

Although Pienimäki cautions there’s still much work to be done to bring Sailfish to market in China.

“We completed a major pilot with our licensing customer, Sailfish China Consortium, in 2017-18,” he says, giving an update on progress to date. “The public in market solution is not there yet. That is something that we are working together with the customer — hopefully we can see it later this year on the market. But these things take time. And let’s say that we’ve been somewhat surprised at how complex this kind of decision-making can be.”

“It wasn’t easy in Russia — it took three years of tight collaboration together with our Russian partners to find a way. But somehow it feels that it’s going to take even more in China. And I’m not necessarily talking about calendar time — but complexity,” he adds.

While there’s no guarantee of success for Jolla in China, the potential win is so big given the size of the market that even if they can only carve out a tiny slice, such as a business or corporate sector, it’s still worth going after. And he points to the existence of a couple of native mobile Linux operating systems he reckons could make “very lucrative partners”.

That said, the get-to-market challenge for Jolla in China is clearly distinctly different vs the rest of the world. This is because Android has developed into an independent (i.e. rather than Google-led) ecosystem in China as a result of state restrictions on the Internet and Internet companies. So the question is what could Sailfish offer that forked Android doesn’t already?

An Oppo Android powered smartphone on show at MWC 2017

Again, Jolla is taking the long view that ultimately there will be appetite — and perhaps also state-led push — for a technology platform bolster against political uncertainty in U.S.-China relations.

“What has happened now, in particular last year, is — because of the open trade war between the nations — many of the technology vendors, and also I would say the Chinese government, has started to gradually tighten their perspective on the fact that ‘hey simply it cannot be a long term strategy to just keep forking Android’. Because in the end of the day it’s somebody else’s asset. So this is something that truly creates us the opportunity,” he suggests.

“Openly competing with the fact that there are very successful Android forks in China, that’s going to be extremely difficult. But — let’s say — tapping into the fact that there are powers in that nation that wish that there would be something else than forking Android, combined with the fact that there is already something homegrown in China which is not forking Android — I think that’s the recipe that can be successful.”

Not all Jolla’s Sailfish bets have paid off, of course. An earlier foray by an Indian licensing partner into the consumer handset market petered out. Albeit, it does reinforce their decision to zero in on government and corporate licensing.

“We got excellent business connections,” says Pienimäki of India, suggesting also that it’s still a ‘watch this space’ for Jolla. The company has a “second move” in train in the market that he’s hopeful to be talking about publicly later this year.

It’s also pitching Sailfish in Africa. And in markets where target customers might not have their own extensive in-house IT capability to plug into Sailfish co-development work Pienimäki says it’s offering a full solution — “a ready made package”, together with partners, including device management, VPN, secure messaging and secure email — which he argues “can be still very lucrative business cases”.

Looking ahead and beyond mobile, Pienimäki suggests the automotive industry could be an interesting target for Sailfish in the future — though not literally plugging the platform into cars; but rather licensing its technologies where appropriate — arguing car makers are also keen to control the tech that’s going into their cars.

“They really want to make sure that they own the cockpit. It’s their property, it’s their brand and they want to own it — and for a reason,” he suggests, pointing to the clutch of major investments from car companies in startups and technologies in recent years.

“This is definitely an interesting area. We are not directly there ourself — and we are not capable to extend ourself there but we are discussing with partners who are in that very business whether they could utilize our technologies there. That would then be more or less like a technology licensing arrangement.”

A trust balancing model

While Jolla looks to be approaching a tipping point as a business, in terms of being able to profit off of licensing an alternative mobile platform, it remains a tiny and some might say inconsequential player on the global mobile stage.

Yet its focus on building and maintaining trusted management and technology architectures also looks timely — again, given how geopolitical spats are intervening to disrupt technology business as usual.

Chinese giant Huawei used an MWC keynote speech last month to reject U.S.-led allegations that its 5G networking technology could be repurposed as a spying tool by the Chinese state. And just this week it opened a cybersecurity transparency center in Brussels, to try to bolster trust in its kit and services — urging industry players to work together on agreeing standards and structures that everyone can trust.

In recent years U.S.-led suspicions attached to Russia have also caused major headaches for security veteran Kaspersky — leading the company to announce its own trust and transparency program and decentralize some of its infrastructure, including by spinning up servers in Europe last year.

Businesses finding ways to maintain and deepen the digital economy in spite of a little — or even a lot — of cross-border mistrust may well prove to be the biggest technology challenge of all moving forward.

Especially as next-gen 5G networks get rolled out — and their touted ‘intelligent connectivity’ reaches out to transform many more types of industries, bringing new risks and regulatory complexity.

The geopolitical problem linked to all this boils down to how to trust increasing complex technologies without any one entity being able to own and control all the pieces. And Jolla’s business looks interesting in light of that because it’s selling the promise of neutral independence to all its customers, wherever they hail from — be it Russia, LatAm, China, Africa or elsewhere — which makes its ability to secure customer trust not just important but vital to its success.

Indeed, you could argue its customers are likely to rank above average on the ‘paranoid’ scale, given their dedicated search for an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS in the first place.

“It’s one of the number one questions we get,” admits Pienimäki, discussing Jolla’s trust balancing act — aka how it manages and maintains confidence in Sailfish’s independence, even as it takes business backing and code contributions from a state like Russia.

“We tell about our reference case in Russia and people quickly ask ‘hey okay, how can I trust that there is no blackbox inside’,” he continues, adding: “This is exactly the core question and this is exactly the problem we have been able to build a solution for.”

Jolla’s solution sums to one line: “We create a transparent platform and on top of fully transparent platform you can create secure solutions,” as Pienimäki puts it.

“The way it goes is that Jolla with Sailfish OS is always offering the transparent Sailfish operating system core, on source code level, all the time live, available for all the customers. So all the customers constantly, in real-time, have access to our source code. Most of it’s in public open source, and the proprietary parts are also constantly available from our internal infrastructure. For all the customers, at the same time in real-time,” he says, fleshing out how it keeps customers on board with a continually co-developing software platform.

“The contributions we take from these customers are always on source code level only. We don’t take any binary blobs inside our software. We take only source code level contributions which we ourselves authorize, integrate and then we make available for all the customers at the very same moment. So that loopback in a way creates us the transparency.

“So if you want to be suspicion of the contributions of the other guys, so to say, you can always read it on the source code. It’s real-time. Always available for all the customers at the same time. That’s the model we have created.”

“It’s honestly quite a unique model,” he adds. “Nobody is really offering such a co-development model in the operating system business.

“Practically how Android works is that Google, who’s leading the Android development, makes the next release of Android software, then releases it under Android Open Source and then people start to backboard it — so that’s like ‘source, open’ in a way, not ‘open source’.”

Sailfish’s community of users also have real-time access to and visibility of all the contributions — which he dubs “real democracy”.

“People can actually follow it from the code-line all the time,” he argues. “This is really the core of our existence and how we can offer it to Russia and other countries without creating like suspicion elements each side. And that is very important.

“That is the only way we can continue and extend this regional licensing and we can offer it independently from Finland and from our own company.”

With global trade and technology both looking increasingly vulnerable to cross-border mistrust, Jolla’s approach to collaborative transparency may offer something of a model if other businesses and industries find they need to adapt themselves  in order for trade and innovation to keep moving forward in uncertain political times.

Antitrust and privacy uplift

Last but not least there’s regulatory intervention to consider.

A European Commission antitrust decision against Google’s Android platform last year caused headlines around the world when the company was slapped with a $5BN fine.

More importantly for Android rivals Google was also ordered to change its practices — leading to amended licensing terms for the platform in Europe last fall. And Pienimäki says Jolla was a “key contributor” to the Commission case against Android.

European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, on April 15, 2015 in Brussels, as the Commission said it would open an antitrust investigation into Google’s Android operating system. (Photo credit: JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images)

The new Android licensing terms make it (at least theoretically) possible for new types of less-heavily-Google-flavored Android devices to be developed for Europe. Though there have been complaints the licensing tweaks don’t go far enough to reset Google’s competitive Android advantage.

Asked whether Jolla has seen any positive impacts on its business following the Commission’s antitrust decision, Pienimäki responds positively, recounting how — “one or two weeks after the ruling” — Jolla received an inbound enquiry from a company in France that had felt hamstrung by Google requiring its services to be bundled with Android but was now hoping “to realize a project in a special sector”.

The company, which he isn’t disclosing at this stage, is interested in “using Sailfish and then having selected Android applications running in Sailfish but no connection with the Google services”.

“We’ve been there for five years helping the European Union authorities [to build the case] and explain how difficult it is to create competitive solutions in the smartphone market in general,” he continues. “Be it consumer or be it anything else. That’s definitely important for us and I don’t see this at all limited to the consumer sector. The very same thing has been a problem for corporate clients, for companies who provide specialized mobile device solutions for different kind of corporations and even governments.”

While he couches the Android ruling as a “very important” moment for Jolla’s business last year, he also says he hopes the Commission will intervene further to level the smartphone playing field.

“What I’m after here, and what I would really love to see, is that within the European Union we utilize Linux-based, open platform solution which is made in Europe,” he says. “That’s why we’ve been pushing this [antitrust action]. This is part of that. But in bigger scheme this is very good.”

He is also very happy with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which came into force last May, plugging in a long overdue update to the bloc’s privacy rules with a much beefed up enforcement regime.

GDPR has been good for Jolla’s business, according to Pienimäki, who says interest is flowing its way from customers who now perceive a risk to using Android if customer data flows outside Europe and they cannot guarantee adequate privacy protections are in place.

“Already last spring… we have had plenty of different customer discussions with European companies who are really afraid that ‘hey I cannot offer this solution to my government or to my corporate customer in my country because I cannot guarantee if I use Android that this data doesn’t go outside the European Union’,” he says.

“You can’t indemnify in a way that. And that’s been really good for us as well.”

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With the smartphone operating system market sewn up by Google’s Android platform, which has a close to 90% share globally, leaving Apple’s iOS a slender (but lucrative) premium top-slice, a little company called Jolla and its Linux-based Sailfish OS is a rare sight indeed: A self-styled ‘independent alternative’ that’s still somehow in business.

The Finnish startup’s b2b licensing sales pitch is intended to appeal to corporates and governments that want to be able to control their own destiny where device software is concerned.

And in a world increasingly riven with geopolitical tensions that pitch is starting to look rather prescient.

Political uncertainties around trade, high tech espionage risks and data privacy are translating into “opportunities” for the independent platform player — and helping to put wind in Jolla’s sails long after the plucky Sailfish team quit their day jobs for startup life.

Building an alternative to Google Android

Jolla was founded back in 2011 by a band of Nokia staffers who left the company determined to carry on development of mobile Linux as the European tech giant abandoned its own experiments in favor of pivoting to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. (Fatally, as it would turn out.)

Nokia exited mobile entirely in 2013, selling the division to Microsoft. It only returned to the smartphone market in 2017, via a brand-licensing arrangement, offering made-in-China handsets running — you guessed it — Google’s Android OS.

If the lesson of the Jolla founders’ former employer is ‘resistance to Google is futile’ they weren’t about to swallow that. The Finns had other ideas.

Indeed, Jolla’s indie vision for Sailfish OS is to support a whole shoal of differently branded, regionally flavored and independently minded (non-Google-led) ecosystems all swimming around in parallel. Though getting there means not just surviving but thriving — and doing so in spite of the market being so thoroughly dominated by the U.S. tech giant.

TechCrunch spoke to Jolla ahead of this year’s Mobile World Congress tradeshow where co-founder and CEO, Sami Pienimäki, was taking meetings on the sidelines. He told us his hope is for Jolla to have a partner booth of its own next year — touting, in truly modest Finnish fashion, an MWC calendar “maybe fuller than ever” with meetings with “all sorts of entities and governmental representatives”.

Jolla co-founder, Sami Pienimaki, showing off a Jolla-branded handset in May 2013, back when the company was trying to attack the consumer smartphone space.  (Photo credit: KIMMO MANTYLA/AFP/Getty Images)

Even a modestly upbeat tone signals major progress here because an alternative smartphone platform licensing business is — to put it equally mildly — an incredibly difficult tech business furrow to plough.

Jolla almost died at the end of 2015 when the company hit a funding crisis. But the plucky Finns kept paddling, jettisoning their early pursuit of consumer hardware (Pienimäki describes attempting to openly compete with Google in the consumer smartphone space as essentially “suicidal” at this point) to narrow their focus to a b2b licensing play.

The early b2b salespitch targeted BRIC markets, with Jolla hitting the road to seek buy in for a platform it said could be moulded to corporate or government needs while still retaining the option of Android app compatibility.

Then in late 2016 signs of a breakthrough: Sailfish gained certification in Russia for government and corporate use.

Its licensing partner in the Russian market was soon touting the ability to go “absolutely Google-free!“.

Buy in from Russia

Since then the platform has gained the backing of Russian telco Rostelecom, which acquired Jolla’s local licensing customer last year (as well as becoming a strategic investor in Jolla itself in March 2018 — “to ensure there is a mutual interest to drive the global Sailfish OS agenda”, as Pienimäki puts it).

Rostelecom is using the brand name ‘Aurora OS‘ for Sailfish in the market which Pienimäki says is “exactly our strategy” — likening it to how Google’s Android has been skinned with different user experiences by major OEMs such as Samsung and Huawei.

“What we offer for our customers is a fully independent, regional licence and a tool chain so that they can develop exactly this kind of solution,” he tells TechCrunch. “We have come to a maturity point together with Rostelecom in the Russia market, and it was natural move plan together, that they will take a local identity and proudly carry forward the Sailfish OS ecosystem development in Russia under their local identity.”

“It’s fully compatible with Sailfish operating system, it’s based on Sailfish OS and it’s our joint interest, of course, to make it fly,” he adds. “So that as we, hopefully, are able to extend this and come out to public with other similar set-ups in different countries those of course — eventually, if they come to such a fruition and maturity — will then likely as well have their own identities but still remain compatible with the global Sailfish OS.”

Jolla says the Russian government plans to switch all circa 8M state officials to the platform by the end of 2021 — under a project expected to cost RUB 160.2 billion (~$2.4BN). (A cut of which will go to Jolla in licensing fees.)

It also says Sailfish-powered smartphones will be “recommended to municipal administrations of various levels,” with the Russian state planning to allocate a further RUB 71.3 billion (~$1.1BN) from the federal budget for that. So there’s scope for deepening the state’s Sailfish uptake.

Russian Post is one early customer for Jolla’s locally licensed Sailfish flavor. Having piloted devices last year, Pienimäki says it’s now moving to a full commercial deployment across the whole organization — which has around 300,000 employees (to give a sense of how many Sailfish powered devices could end up in the hands of state postal workers in Russia).

A rugged Sailfish-powered device piloted by Russian post

Jolla is not yet breaking out end users for Sailfish OS per market but Pienimäki says that overall the company is now “clearly above” 100k (and below 500k) devices globally.

That’s still of course a fantastically tiny number if you compare it to the consumer devices market — top ranked Android smartphone maker Samsung sold around 70M handsets in last year’s holiday quarter, for instance — but Jolla is in the b2b OS licensing business, not the handset making business. So it doesn’t need hundreds of millions of Sailfish devices to ship annually to turn a profit.

Scaling a royalty licensing business to hundreds of thousands of users is sums to “good business”, , says Pienimäki, describing Jolla’s business model for Sailfish as “practically a royalty per device”.

“The success we have had in the Russian market has populated us a lot of interesting new opening elsewhere around the world,” he continues. “This experience and all the technology we have built together with Open Mobile Platform [Jolla’s Sailfish licensing partner in Russia which was acquired by Rostelecom] to enable that case — that enables a number of other cases. The deployment plan that Rostelecom has for this is very big. And this is now really happening and we are happy about it.”

Jolla’s “Russia operation” is now beginning “a mass deployment phase”, he adds, predicting it will “quickly ramp up the volume to very sizeable”. So Sailfish is poised to scale.

Step 3… profit?

While Jolla is still yet to turn a full-year profit Pienimäki says several standalone months of 2018 were profitable, and he’s no longer worried whether the business is sustainable — asserting: “We don’t have any more financial obstacles or threats anymore.”

It’s quite the turnaround of fortunes, given Jolla’s near-death experience a few years ago when it almost ran out of money, after failing to close a $10.6M Series C round, and had to let go of half its staff.

It did manage to claw in a little funding at the end of 2015 to keep going, albeit as much leaner fish. But bagging Russia as an early adopter of its ‘independent’ mobile Linux ecosystem looks to have been the key tipping point for Jolla to be able to deliver on the hard-graft ecosystem-building work it’s been doing all along the way. And Pienimäki now expresses easy confidence that profitability will flow “fairly quickly” from here on in.

“It’s not an easy road. It takes time,” he says of the ecosystem-building company Jolla hard-pivoted to at its point of acute financial distress. “The development of this kind of business — it requires patience and negotiation times, and setting up the ecosystem and ecosystem partners. It really requires patience and takes a lot of time. And now we have come to this point where actually there starts to be an ecosystem which will then extend and start to carry its own identity as well.”

In further signs of Jolla’s growing confidence he says it hired more than ten people last year and moved to new and slightly more spacious offices — a reflection of the business expanding.

“It’s looking very good and nice for us,” Pienimäki continues. “Let’s say we are not taking too much pressure, with our investors and board, that what is the day that we are profitable. It’s not so important anymore… It’s clear that that is soon coming — that very day. But at the same time the most important is that the business case behind is proven and it is under aggressive deployment by our customers.”

The main focus for the moment is on supporting deployments to ramp up in Russia, he says, emphasizing: “That’s where we have to focus.” (Literally he says “not screwing up” — and with so much at stake you can see why nailing the Russia case is Jolla’s top priority.)

While the Russian state has been the entity most keen to embrace an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS — perhaps unsurprisingly — it’s not the only place in the world where Jolla has irons in the fire.

Another licensing partner, Bolivian IT services company Jalasoft, has co-developed a Sailfish-powered smartphone called Accione.

Jalasoft’s ‘liberty’-touting Accione Sailfish smartphone

It slates the handset on its website as being “designed for Latinos by Latinos”. “The digitalization of the economy is inevitable and, if we do not control the foundation of this digitalization, we have no future,” it adds.

Jalasoft founder and CEO Jorge Lopez says the company’s decision to invest effort in kicking the tyres of Jolla’s alternative mobile ecosystem is about gaining control — or seeking “technological libration” as the website blurb puts it.

“With Sailfish OS we have control of the implementation, while with Android it is the opposite,” Lopez tells TechCrunch. “We are working on developing smart buildings and we need a private OS that is not Android or iOS. This is mainly because our product will allow the end user to control the whole building and doing this with Android or iOS a hackable OS will bring concerns on security.”

Lopez says Jalasoft is using Accione as its development platform — “to gather customer feedback and to further develop our solution” — so the project clearly remains in an early phase, and he says that no more devices are likely to be announced this year.

But Jolla can point to more seeds being sewn with the potential, with work, determination and patience, to sprout into another sizeable crop of Sailfish-powered devices down the line.

Complexity in China

Even more ambitiously Jolla is also targeting China, where investment has been taken in to form a local consortium to develop a Chinese Sailfish ecosystem.

Although Pienimäki cautions there’s still much work to be done to bring Sailfish to market in China.

“We completed a major pilot with our licensing customer, Sailfish China Consortium, in 2017-18,” he says, giving an update on progress to date. “The public in market solution is not there yet. That is something that we are working together with the customer — hopefully we can see it later this year on the market. But these things take time. And let’s say that we’ve been somewhat surprised at how complex this kind of decision-making can be.”

“It wasn’t easy in Russia — it took three years of tight collaboration together with our Russian partners to find a way. But somehow it feels that it’s going to take even more in China. And I’m not necessarily talking about calendar time — but complexity,” he adds.

While there’s no guarantee of success for Jolla in China, the potential win is so big given the size of the market that even if they can only carve out a tiny slice, such as a business or corporate sector, it’s still worth going after. And he points to the existence of a couple of native mobile Linux operating systems he reckons could make “very lucrative partners”.

That said, the get-to-market challenge for Jolla in China is clearly distinctly different vs the rest of the world. This is because Android has developed into an independent (i.e. rather than Google-led) ecosystem in China as a result of state restrictions on the Internet and Internet companies. So the question is what could Sailfish offer that forked Android doesn’t already?

An Oppo Android powered smartphone on show at MWC 2017

Again, Jolla is taking the long view that ultimately there will be appetite — and perhaps also state-led push — for a technology platform bolster against political uncertainty in U.S.-China relations.

“What has happened now, in particular last year, is — because of the open trade war between the nations — many of the technology vendors, and also I would say the Chinese government, has started to gradually tighten their perspective on the fact that ‘hey simply it cannot be a long term strategy to just keep forking Android’. Because in the end of the day it’s somebody else’s asset. So this is something that truly creates us the opportunity,” he suggests.

“Openly competing with the fact that there are very successful Android forks in China, that’s going to be extremely difficult. But — let’s say — tapping into the fact that there are powers in that nation that wish that there would be something else than forking Android, combined with the fact that there is already something homegrown in China which is not forking Android — I think that’s the recipe that can be successful.”

Not all Jolla’s Sailfish bets have paid off, of course. An earlier foray by an Indian licensing partner into the consumer handset market petered out. Albeit, it does reinforce their decision to zero in on government and corporate licensing.

“We got excellent business connections,” says Pienimäki of India, suggesting also that it’s still a ‘watch this space’ for Jolla. The company has a “second move” in train in the market that he’s hopeful to be talking about publicly later this year.

It’s also pitching Sailfish in Africa. And in markets where target customers might not have their own extensive in-house IT capability to plug into Sailfish co-development work Pienimäki says it’s offering a full solution — “a ready made package”, together with partners, including device management, VPN, secure messaging and secure email — which he argues “can be still very lucrative business cases”.

Looking ahead and beyond mobile, Pienimäki suggests the automotive industry could be an interesting target for Sailfish in the future — though not literally plugging the platform into cars; but rather licensing its technologies where appropriate — arguing car makers are also keen to control the tech that’s going into their cars.

“They really want to make sure that they own the cockpit. It’s their property, it’s their brand and they want to own it — and for a reason,” he suggests, pointing to the clutch of major investments from car companies in startups and technologies in recent years.

“This is definitely an interesting area. We are not directly there ourself — and we are not capable to extend ourself there but we are discussing with partners who are in that very business whether they could utilize our technologies there. That would then be more or less like a technology licensing arrangement.”

A trust balancing model

While Jolla looks to be approaching a tipping point as a business, in terms of being able to profit off of licensing an alternative mobile platform, it remains a tiny and some might say inconsequential player on the global mobile stage.

Yet its focus on building and maintaining trusted management and technology architectures also looks timely — again, given how geopolitical spats are intervening to disrupt technology business as usual.

Chinese giant Huawei used an MWC keynote speech last month to reject U.S.-led allegations that its 5G networking technology could be repurposed as a spying tool by the Chinese state. And just this week it opened a cybersecurity transparency center in Brussels, to try to bolster trust in its kit and services — urging industry players to work together on agreeing standards and structures that everyone can trust.

In recent years U.S.-led suspicions attached to Russia have also caused major headaches for security veteran Kaspersky — leading the company to announce its own trust and transparency program and decentralize some of its infrastructure, including by spinning up servers in Europe last year.

Businesses finding ways to maintain and deepen the digital economy in spite of a little — or even a lot — of cross-border mistrust may well prove to be the biggest technology challenge of all moving forward.

Especially as next-gen 5G networks get rolled out — and their touted ‘intelligent connectivity’ reaches out to transform many more types of industries, bringing new risks and regulatory complexity.

The geopolitical problem linked to all this boils down to how to trust increasing complex technologies without any one entity being able to own and control all the pieces. And Jolla’s business looks interesting in light of that because it’s selling the promise of neutral independence to all its customers, wherever they hail from — be it Russia, LatAm, China, Africa or elsewhere — which makes its ability to secure customer trust not just important but vital to its success.

Indeed, you could argue its customers are likely to rank above average on the ‘paranoid’ scale, given their dedicated search for an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS in the first place.

“It’s one of the number one questions we get,” admits Pienimäki, discussing Jolla’s trust balancing act — aka how it manages and maintains confidence in Sailfish’s independence, even as it takes business backing and code contributions from a state like Russia.

“We tell about our reference case in Russia and people quickly ask ‘hey okay, how can I trust that there is no blackbox inside’,” he continues, adding: “This is exactly the core question and this is exactly the problem we have been able to build a solution for.”

Jolla’s solution sums to one line: “We create a transparent platform and on top of fully transparent platform you can create secure solutions,” as Pienimäki puts it.

“The way it goes is that Jolla with Sailfish OS is always offering the transparent Sailfish operating system core, on source code level, all the time live, available for all the customers. So all the customers constantly, in real-time, have access to our source code. Most of it’s in public open source, and the proprietary parts are also constantly available from our internal infrastructure. For all the customers, at the same time in real-time,” he says, fleshing out how it keeps customers on board with a continually co-developing software platform.

“The contributions we take from these customers are always on source code level only. We don’t take any binary blobs inside our software. We take only source code level contributions which we ourselves authorize, integrate and then we make available for all the customers at the very same moment. So that loopback in a way creates us the transparency.

“So if you want to be suspicion of the contributions of the other guys, so to say, you can always read it on the source code. It’s real-time. Always available for all the customers at the same time. That’s the model we have created.”

“It’s honestly quite a unique model,” he adds. “Nobody is really offering such a co-development model in the operating system business.

“Practically how Android works is that Google, who’s leading the Android development, makes the next release of Android software, then releases it under Android Open Source and then people start to backboard it — so that’s like ‘source, open’ in a way, not ‘open source’.”

Sailfish’s community of users also have real-time access to and visibility of all the contributions — which he dubs “real democracy”.

“People can actually follow it from the code-line all the time,” he argues. “This is really the core of our existence and how we can offer it to Russia and other countries without creating like suspicion elements each side. And that is very important.

“That is the only way we can continue and extend this regional licensing and we can offer it independently from Finland and from our own company.”

With global trade and technology both looking increasingly vulnerable to cross-border mistrust, Jolla’s approach to collaborative transparency may offer something of a model if other businesses and industries find they need to adapt themselves  in order for trade and innovation to keep moving forward in uncertain political times.

Antitrust and privacy uplift

Last but not least there’s regulatory intervention to consider.

A European Commission antitrust decision against Google’s Android platform last year caused headlines around the world when the company was slapped with a $5BN fine.

More importantly for Android rivals Google was also ordered to change its practices — leading to amended licensing terms for the platform in Europe last fall. And Pienimäki says Jolla was a “key contributor” to the Commission case against Android.

European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, on April 15, 2015 in Brussels, as the Commission said it would open an antitrust investigation into Google’s Android operating system. (Photo credit: JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images)

The new Android licensing terms make it (at least theoretically) possible for new types of less-heavily-Google-flavored Android devices to be developed for Europe. Though there have been complaints the licensing tweaks don’t go far enough to reset Google’s competitive Android advantage.

Asked whether Jolla has seen any positive impacts on its business following the Commission’s antitrust decision, Pienimäki responds positively, recounting how — “one or two weeks after the ruling” — Jolla received an inbound enquiry from a company in France that had felt hamstrung by Google requiring its services to be bundled with Android but was now hoping “to realize a project in a special sector”.

The company, which he isn’t disclosing at this stage, is interested in “using Sailfish and then having selected Android applications running in Sailfish but no connection with the Google services”.

“We’ve been there for five years helping the European Union authorities [to build the case] and explain how difficult it is to create competitive solutions in the smartphone market in general,” he continues. “Be it consumer or be it anything else. That’s definitely important for us and I don’t see this at all limited to the consumer sector. The very same thing has been a problem for corporate clients, for companies who provide specialized mobile device solutions for different kind of corporations and even governments.”

While he couches the Android ruling as a “very important” moment for Jolla’s business last year, he also says he hopes the Commission will intervene further to level the smartphone playing field.

“What I’m after here, and what I would really love to see, is that within the European Union we utilize Linux-based, open platform solution which is made in Europe,” he says. “That’s why we’ve been pushing this [antitrust action]. This is part of that. But in bigger scheme this is very good.”

He is also very happy with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which came into force last May, plugging in a long overdue update to the bloc’s privacy rules with a much beefed up enforcement regime.

GDPR has been good for Jolla’s business, according to Pienimäki, who says interest is flowing its way from customers who now perceive a risk to using Android if customer data flows outside Europe and they cannot guarantee adequate privacy protections are in place.

“Already last spring… we have had plenty of different customer discussions with European companies who are really afraid that ‘hey I cannot offer this solution to my government or to my corporate customer in my country because I cannot guarantee if I use Android that this data doesn’t go outside the European Union’,” he says.

“You can’t indemnify in a way that. And that’s been really good for us as well.”

from Mobile �� TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2CdvXPh ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/

[toomanysinks]

The other smartphone business

With the smartphone operating system market sewn up by Google’s Android platform, which has a close to 90% share globally, leaving Apple’s iOS a slender (but lucrative) premium top-slice, a little company called Jolla and its Linux-based Sailfish OS is a rare sight indeed: A self-styled ‘independent alternative’ that’s still somehow in business.

The Finnish startup’s b2b licensing sales pitch is intended to appeal to corporates and governments that want to be able to control their own destiny where device software is concerned.

And in a world increasingly riven with geopolitical tensions that pitch is starting to look rather prescient.

Political uncertainties around trade, high tech espionage risks and data privacy are translating into “opportunities” for the independent platform player — and helping to put wind in Jolla’s sails long after the plucky Sailfish team quit their day jobs for startup life.

Building an alternative to Google Android

Jolla was founded back in 2011 by a band of Nokia staffers who left the company determined to carry on development of mobile Linux as the European tech giant abandoned its own experiments in favor of pivoting to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. (Fatally, as it would turn out.)

Nokia exited mobile entirely in 2013, selling the division to Microsoft. It only returned to the smartphone market in 2017, via a brand-licensing arrangement, offering made-in-China handsets running — you guessed it — Google’s Android OS.

If the lesson of the Jolla founders’ former employer is ‘resistance to Google is futile’ they weren’t about to swallow that. The Finns had other ideas.

Indeed, Jolla’s indie vision for Sailfish OS is to support a whole shoal of differently branded, regionally flavored and independently minded (non-Google-led) ecosystems all swimming around in parallel. Though getting there means not just surviving but thriving — and doing so in spite of the market being so thoroughly dominated by the U.S. tech giant.

TechCrunch spoke to Jolla ahead of this year’s Mobile World Congress tradeshow where co-founder and CEO, Sami Pienimäki, was taking meetings on the sidelines. He told us his hope is for Jolla to have a partner booth of its own next year — touting, in truly modest Finnish fashion, an MWC calendar “maybe fuller than ever” with meetings with “all sorts of entities and governmental representatives”.

Jolla co-founder, Sami Pienimaki, showing off a Jolla-branded handset in May 2013, back when the company was trying to attack the consumer smartphone space.  (Photo credit: KIMMO MANTYLA/AFP/Getty Images)

Even a modestly upbeat tone signals major progress here because an alternative smartphone platform licensing business is — to put it equally mildly — an incredibly difficult tech business furrow to plough.

Jolla almost died at the end of 2015 when the company hit a funding crisis. But the plucky Finns kept paddling, jettisoning their early pursuit of consumer hardware (Pienimäki describes attempting to openly compete with Google in the consumer smartphone space as essentially “suicidal” at this point) to narrow their focus to a b2b licensing play.

The early b2b salespitch targeted BRIC markets, with Jolla hitting the road to seek buy in for a platform it said could be moulded to corporate or government needs while still retaining the option of Android app compatibility.

Then in late 2016 signs of a breakthrough: Sailfish gained certification in Russia for government and corporate use.

Its licensing partner in the Russian market was soon touting the ability to go “absolutely Google-free!“.

Buy in from Russia

Since then the platform has gained the backing of Russian telco Rostelecom, which acquired Jolla’s local licensing customer last year (as well as becoming a strategic investor in Jolla itself in March 2018 — “to ensure there is a mutual interest to drive the global Sailfish OS agenda”, as Pienimäki puts it).

Rostelecom is using the brand name ‘Aurora OS‘ for Sailfish in the market which Pienimäki says is “exactly our strategy” — likening it to how Google’s Android has been skinned with different user experiences by major OEMs such as Samsung and Huawei.

“What we offer for our customers is a fully independent, regional licence and a tool chain so that they can develop exactly this kind of solution,” he tells TechCrunch. “We have come to a maturity point together with Rostelecom in the Russia market, and it was natural move plan together, that they will take a local identity and proudly carry forward the Sailfish OS ecosystem development in Russia under their local identity.”

“It’s fully compatible with Sailfish operating system, it’s based on Sailfish OS and it’s our joint interest, of course, to make it fly,” he adds. “So that as we, hopefully, are able to extend this and come out to public with other similar set-ups in different countries those of course — eventually, if they come to such a fruition and maturity — will then likely as well have their own identities but still remain compatible with the global Sailfish OS.”

Jolla says the Russian government plans to switch all circa 8M state officials to the platform by the end of 2021 — under a project expected to cost RUB 160.2 billion (~$2.4BN). (A cut of which will go to Jolla in licensing fees.)

It also says Sailfish-powered smartphones will be “recommended to municipal administrations of various levels,” with the Russian state planning to allocate a further RUB 71.3 billion (~$1.1BN) from the federal budget for that. So there’s scope for deepening the state’s Sailfish uptake.

Russian Post is one early customer for Jolla’s locally licensed Sailfish flavor. Having piloted devices last year, Pienimäki says it’s now moving to a full commercial deployment across the whole organization — which has around 300,000 employees (to give a sense of how many Sailfish powered devices could end up in the hands of state postal workers in Russia).

A rugged Sailfish-powered device piloted by Russian post

Jolla is not yet breaking out end users for Sailfish OS per market but Pienimäki says that overall the company is now “clearly above” 100k (and below 500k) devices globally.

That’s still of course a fantastically tiny number if you compare it to the consumer devices market — top ranked Android smartphone maker Samsung sold around 70M handsets in last year’s holiday quarter, for instance — but Jolla is in the b2b OS licensing business, not the handset making business. So it doesn’t need hundreds of millions of Sailfish devices to ship annually to turn a profit.

Scaling a royalty licensing business to hundreds of thousands of users is sums to “good business”, , says Pienimäki, describing Jolla’s business model for Sailfish as “practically a royalty per device”.

“The success we have had in the Russian market has populated us a lot of interesting new opening elsewhere around the world,” he continues. “This experience and all the technology we have built together with Open Mobile Platform [Jolla’s Sailfish licensing partner in Russia which was acquired by Rostelecom] to enable that case — that enables a number of other cases. The deployment plan that Rostelecom has for this is very big. And this is now really happening and we are happy about it.”

Jolla’s “Russia operation” is now beginning “a mass deployment phase”, he adds, predicting it will “quickly ramp up the volume to very sizeable”. So Sailfish is poised to scale.

Step 3… profit?

While Jolla is still yet to turn a full-year profit Pienimäki says several standalone months of 2018 were profitable, and he’s no longer worried whether the business is sustainable — asserting: “We don’t have any more financial obstacles or threats anymore.”

It’s quite the turnaround of fortunes, given Jolla’s near-death experience a few years ago when it almost ran out of money, after failing to close a $10.6M Series C round, and had to let go of half its staff.

It did manage to claw in a little funding at the end of 2015 to keep going, albeit as much leaner fish. But bagging Russia as an early adopter of its ‘independent’ mobile Linux ecosystem looks to have been the key tipping point for Jolla to be able to deliver on the hard-graft ecosystem-building work it’s been doing all along the way. And Pienimäki now expresses easy confidence that profitability will flow “fairly quickly” from here on in.

“It’s not an easy road. It takes time,” he says of the ecosystem-building company Jolla hard-pivoted to at its point of acute financial distress. “The development of this kind of business — it requires patience and negotiation times, and setting up the ecosystem and ecosystem partners. It really requires patience and takes a lot of time. And now we have come to this point where actually there starts to be an ecosystem which will then extend and start to carry its own identity as well.”

In further signs of Jolla’s growing confidence he says it hired more than ten people last year and moved to new and slightly more spacious offices — a reflection of the business expanding.

“It’s looking very good and nice for us,” Pienimäki continues. “Let’s say we are not taking too much pressure, with our investors and board, that what is the day that we are profitable. It’s not so important anymore… It’s clear that that is soon coming — that very day. But at the same time the most important is that the business case behind is proven and it is under aggressive deployment by our customers.”

The main focus for the moment is on supporting deployments to ramp up in Russia, he says, emphasizing: “That’s where we have to focus.” (Literally he says “not screwing up” — and with so much at stake you can see why nailing the Russia case is Jolla’s top priority.)

While the Russian state has been the entity most keen to embrace an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS — perhaps unsurprisingly — it’s not the only place in the world where Jolla has irons in the fire.

Another licensing partner, Bolivian IT services company Jalasoft, has co-developed a Sailfish-powered smartphone called Accione.

Jalasoft’s ‘liberty’-touting Accione Sailfish smartphone

It slates the handset on its website as being “designed for Latinos by Latinos”. “The digitalization of the economy is inevitable and, if we do not control the foundation of this digitalization, we have no future,” it adds.

Jalasoft founder and CEO Jorge Lopez says the company’s decision to invest effort in kicking the tyres of Jolla’s alternative mobile ecosystem is about gaining control — or seeking “technological libration” as the website blurb puts it.

“With Sailfish OS we have control of the implementation, while with Android it is the opposite,” Lopez tells TechCrunch. “We are working on developing smart buildings and we need a private OS that is not Android or iOS. This is mainly because our product will allow the end user to control the whole building and doing this with Android or iOS a hackable OS will bring concerns on security.”

Lopez says Jalasoft is using Accione as its development platform — “to gather customer feedback and to further develop our solution” — so the project clearly remains in an early phase, and he says that no more devices are likely to be announced this year.

But Jolla can point to more seeds being sewn with the potential, with work, determination and patience, to sprout into another sizeable crop of Sailfish-powered devices down the line.

Complexity in China

Even more ambitiously Jolla is also targeting China, where investment has been taken in to form a local consortium to develop a Chinese Sailfish ecosystem.

Although Pienimäki cautions there’s still much work to be done to bring Sailfish to market in China.

“We completed a major pilot with our licensing customer, Sailfish China Consortium, in 2017-18,” he says, giving an update on progress to date. “The public in market solution is not there yet. That is something that we are working together with the customer — hopefully we can see it later this year on the market. But these things take time. And let’s say that we’ve been somewhat surprised at how complex this kind of decision-making can be.”

“It wasn’t easy in Russia — it took three years of tight collaboration together with our Russian partners to find a way. But somehow it feels that it’s going to take even more in China. And I’m not necessarily talking about calendar time — but complexity,” he adds.

While there’s no guarantee of success for Jolla in China, the potential win is so big given the size of the market that even if they can only carve out a tiny slice, such as a business or corporate sector, it’s still worth going after. And he points to the existence of a couple of native mobile Linux operating systems he reckons could make “very lucrative partners”.

That said, the get-to-market challenge for Jolla in China is clearly distinctly different vs the rest of the world. This is because Android has developed into an independent (i.e. rather than Google-led) ecosystem in China as a result of state restrictions on the Internet and Internet companies. So the question is what could Sailfish offer that forked Android doesn’t already?

An Oppo Android powered smartphone on show at MWC 2017

Again, Jolla is taking the long view that ultimately there will be appetite — and perhaps also state-led push — for a technology platform bolster against political uncertainty in U.S.-China relations.

“What has happened now, in particular last year, is — because of the open trade war between the nations — many of the technology vendors, and also I would say the Chinese government, has started to gradually tighten their perspective on the fact that ‘hey simply it cannot be a long term strategy to just keep forking Android’. Because in the end of the day it’s somebody else’s asset. So this is something that truly creates us the opportunity,” he suggests.

“Openly competing with the fact that there are very successful Android forks in China, that’s going to be extremely difficult. But — let’s say — tapping into the fact that there are powers in that nation that wish that there would be something else than forking Android, combined with the fact that there is already something homegrown in China which is not forking Android — I think that’s the recipe that can be successful.”

Not all Jolla’s Sailfish bets have paid off, of course. An earlier foray by an Indian licensing partner into the consumer handset market petered out. Albeit, it does reinforce their decision to zero in on government and corporate licensing.

“We got excellent business connections,” says Pienimäki of India, suggesting also that it’s still a ‘watch this space’ for Jolla. The company has a “second move” in train in the market that he’s hopeful to be talking about publicly later this year.

It’s also pitching Sailfish in Africa. And in markets where target customers might not have their own extensive in-house IT capability to plug into Sailfish co-development work Pienimäki says it’s offering a full solution — “a ready made package”, together with partners, including device management, VPN, secure messaging and secure email — which he argues “can be still very lucrative business cases”.

Looking ahead and beyond mobile, Pienimäki suggests the automotive industry could be an interesting target for Sailfish in the future — though not literally plugging the platform into cars; but rather licensing its technologies where appropriate — arguing car makers are also keen to control the tech that’s going into their cars.

“They really want to make sure that they own the cockpit. It’s their property, it’s their brand and they want to own it — and for a reason,” he suggests, pointing to the clutch of major investments from car companies in startups and technologies in recent years.

“This is definitely an interesting area. We are not directly there ourself — and we are not capable to extend ourself there but we are discussing with partners who are in that very business whether they could utilize our technologies there. That would then be more or less like a technology licensing arrangement.”

A trust balancing model

While Jolla looks to be approaching a tipping point as a business, in terms of being able to profit off of licensing an alternative mobile platform, it remains a tiny and some might say inconsequential player on the global mobile stage.

Yet its focus on building and maintaining trusted management and technology architectures also looks timely — again, given how geopolitical spats are intervening to disrupt technology business as usual.

Chinese giant Huawei used an MWC keynote speech last month to reject U.S.-led allegations that its 5G networking technology could be repurposed as a spying tool by the Chinese state. And just this week it opened a cybersecurity transparency center in Brussels, to try to bolster trust in its kit and services — urging industry players to work together on agreeing standards and structures that everyone can trust.

In recent years U.S.-led suspicions attached to Russia have also caused major headaches for security veteran Kaspersky — leading the company to announce its own trust and transparency program and decentralize some of its infrastructure, including by spinning up servers in Europe last year.

Businesses finding ways to maintain and deepen the digital economy in spite of a little — or even a lot — of cross-border mistrust may well prove to be the biggest technology challenge of all moving forward.

Especially as next-gen 5G networks get rolled out — and their touted ‘intelligent connectivity’ reaches out to transform many more types of industries, bringing new risks and regulatory complexity.

The geopolitical problem linked to all this boils down to how to trust increasing complex technologies without any one entity being able to own and control all the pieces. And Jolla’s business looks interesting in light of that because it’s selling the promise of neutral independence to all its customers, wherever they hail from — be it Russia, LatAm, China, Africa or elsewhere — which makes its ability to secure customer trust not just important but vital to its success.

Indeed, you could argue its customers are likely to rank above average on the ‘paranoid’ scale, given their dedicated search for an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS in the first place.

“It’s one of the number one questions we get,” admits Pienimäki, discussing Jolla’s trust balancing act — aka how it manages and maintains confidence in Sailfish’s independence, even as it takes business backing and code contributions from a state like Russia.

“We tell about our reference case in Russia and people quickly ask ‘hey okay, how can I trust that there is no blackbox inside’,” he continues, adding: “This is exactly the core question and this is exactly the problem we have been able to build a solution for.”

Jolla’s solution sums to one line: “We create a transparent platform and on top of fully transparent platform you can create secure solutions,” as Pienimäki puts it.

“The way it goes is that Jolla with Sailfish OS is always offering the transparent Sailfish operating system core, on source code level, all the time live, available for all the customers. So all the customers constantly, in real-time, have access to our source code. Most of it’s in public open source, and the proprietary parts are also constantly available from our internal infrastructure. For all the customers, at the same time in real-time,” he says, fleshing out how it keeps customers on board with a continually co-developing software platform.

“The contributions we take from these customers are always on source code level only. We don’t take any binary blobs inside our software. We take only source code level contributions which we ourselves authorize, integrate and then we make available for all the customers at the very same moment. So that loopback in a way creates us the transparency.

“So if you want to be suspicion of the contributions of the other guys, so to say, you can always read it on the source code. It’s real-time. Always available for all the customers at the same time. That’s the model we have created.”

“It’s honestly quite a unique model,” he adds. “Nobody is really offering such a co-development model in the operating system business.

“Practically how Android works is that Google, who’s leading the Android development, makes the next release of Android software, then releases it under Android Open Source and then people start to backboard it — so that’s like ‘source, open’ in a way, not ‘open source’.”

Sailfish’s community of users also have real-time access to and visibility of all the contributions — which he dubs “real democracy”.

“People can actually follow it from the code-line all the time,” he argues. “This is really the core of our existence and how we can offer it to Russia and other countries without creating like suspicion elements each side. And that is very important.

“That is the only way we can continue and extend this regional licensing and we can offer it independently from Finland and from our own company.”

With global trade and technology both looking increasingly vulnerable to cross-border mistrust, Jolla’s approach to collaborative transparency may offer something of a model if other businesses and industries find they need to adapt themselves  in order for trade and innovation to keep moving forward in uncertain political times.

Antitrust and privacy uplift

Last but not least there’s regulatory intervention to consider.

A European Commission antitrust decision against Google’s Android platform last year caused headlines around the world when the company was slapped with a $5BN fine.

More importantly for Android rivals Google was also ordered to change its practices — leading to amended licensing terms for the platform in Europe last fall. And Pienimäki says Jolla was a “key contributor” to the Commission case against Android.

European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, on April 15, 2015 in Brussels, as the Commission said it would open an antitrust investigation into Google’s Android operating system. (Photo credit: JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images)

The new Android licensing terms make it (at least theoretically) possible for new types of less-heavily-Google-flavored Android devices to be developed for Europe. Though there have been complaints the licensing tweaks don’t go far enough to reset Google’s competitive Android advantage.

Asked whether Jolla has seen any positive impacts on its business following the Commission’s antitrust decision, Pienimäki responds positively, recounting how — “one or two weeks after the ruling” — Jolla received an inbound enquiry from a company in France that had felt hamstrung by Google requiring its services to be bundled with Android but was now hoping “to realize a project in a special sector”.

The company, which he isn’t disclosing at this stage, is interested in “using Sailfish and then having selected Android applications running in Sailfish but no connection with the Google services”.

“We’ve been there for five years helping the European Union authorities [to build the case] and explain how difficult it is to create competitive solutions in the smartphone market in general,” he continues. “Be it consumer or be it anything else. That’s definitely important for us and I don’t see this at all limited to the consumer sector. The very same thing has been a problem for corporate clients, for companies who provide specialized mobile device solutions for different kind of corporations and even governments.”

While he couches the Android ruling as a “very important” moment for Jolla’s business last year, he also says he hopes the Commission will intervene further to level the smartphone playing field.

“What I’m after here, and what I would really love to see, is that within the European Union we utilize Linux-based, open platform solution which is made in Europe,” he says. “That’s why we’ve been pushing this [antitrust action]. This is part of that. But in bigger scheme this is very good.”

He is also very happy with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which came into force last May, plugging in a long overdue update to the bloc’s privacy rules with a much beefed up enforcement regime.

GDPR has been good for Jolla’s business, according to Pienimäki, who says interest is flowing its way from customers who now perceive a risk to using Android if customer data flows outside Europe and they cannot guarantee adequate privacy protections are in place.

“Already last spring… we have had plenty of different customer discussions with European companies who are really afraid that ‘hey I cannot offer this solution to my government or to my corporate customer in my country because I cannot guarantee if I use Android that this data doesn’t go outside the European Union’,” he says.

“You can’t indemnify in a way that. And that’s been really good for us as well.”

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/09/the-other-smartphone-business/

[fmservers]

The other smartphone business

With the smartphone operating system market sewn up by Google’s Android platform, which has a close to 90% share globally, leaving Apple’s iOS a slender (but lucrative) premium top-slice, a little company called Jolla and its Linux-based Sailfish OS is a rare sight indeed: A self-styled ‘independent alternative’ that’s still somehow in business.

The Finnish startup’s b2b licensing sales pitch is intended to appeal to corporates and governments that want to be able to control their own destiny where device software is concerned.

And in a world increasingly riven with geopolitical tensions that pitch is starting to look rather prescient.

Political uncertainties around trade, high tech espionage risks and data privacy are translating into “opportunities” for the independent platform player — and helping to put wind in Jolla’s sails long after the plucky Sailfish team quit their day jobs for startup life.

Building an alternative to Google Android

Jolla was founded back in 2011 by a band of Nokia staffers who left the company determined to carry on development of mobile Linux as the European tech giant abandoned its own experiments in favor of pivoting to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. (Fatally, as it would turn out.)

Nokia exited mobile entirely in 2013, selling the division to Microsoft. It only returned to the smartphone market in 2017, via a brand-licensing arrangement, offering made-in-China handsets running — you guessed it — Google’s Android OS.

If the lesson of the Jolla founders’ former employer is ‘resistance to Google is futile’ they weren’t about to swallow that. The Finns had other ideas.

Indeed, Jolla’s indie vision for Sailfish OS is to support a whole shoal of differently branded, regionally flavored and independently minded (non-Google-led) ecosystems all swimming around in parallel. Though getting there means not just surviving but thriving — and doing so in spite of the market being so thoroughly dominated by the U.S. tech giant.

TechCrunch spoke to Jolla ahead of this year’s Mobile World Congress tradeshow where co-founder and CEO, Sami Pienimäki, was taking meetings on the sidelines. He told us his hope is for Jolla to have a partner booth of its own next year — touting, in truly modest Finnish fashion, an MWC calendar “maybe fuller than ever” with meetings with “all sorts of entities and governmental representatives”.

Jolla co-founder, Sami Pienimaki, showing off a Jolla-branded handset in May 2013, back when the company was trying to attack the consumer smartphone space.  (Photo credit: KIMMO MANTYLA/AFP/Getty Images)

Even a modestly upbeat tone signals major progress here because an alternative smartphone platform licensing business is — to put it equally mildly — an incredibly difficult tech business furrow to plough.

Jolla almost died at the end of 2015 when the company hit a funding crisis. But the plucky Finns kept paddling, jettisoning their early pursuit of consumer hardware (Pienimäki describes attempting to openly compete with Google in the consumer smartphone space as essentially “suicidal” at this point) to narrow their focus to a b2b licensing play.

The early b2b salespitch targeted BRIC markets, with Jolla hitting the road to seek buy in for a platform it said could be moulded to corporate or government needs while still retaining the option of Android app compatibility.

Then in late 2016 signs of a breakthrough: Sailfish gained certification in Russia for government and corporate use.

Its licensing partner in the Russian market was soon touting the ability to go “absolutely Google-free!“.

Buy in from Russia

Since then the platform has gained the backing of Russian telco Rostelecom, which acquired Jolla’s local licensing customer last year (as well as becoming a strategic investor in Jolla itself in March 2018 — “to ensure there is a mutual interest to drive the global Sailfish OS agenda”, as Pienimäki puts it).

Rostelecom is using the brand name ‘Aurora OS‘ for Sailfish in the market which Pienimäki says is “exactly our strategy” — likening it to how Google’s Android has been skinned with different user experiences by major OEMs such as Samsung and Huawei.

“What we offer for our customers is a fully independent, regional licence and a tool chain so that they can develop exactly this kind of solution,” he tells TechCrunch. “We have come to a maturity point together with Rostelecom in the Russia market, and it was natural move plan together, that they will take a local identity and proudly carry forward the Sailfish OS ecosystem development in Russia under their local identity.”

“It’s fully compatible with Sailfish operating system, it’s based on Sailfish OS and it’s our joint interest, of course, to make it fly,” he adds. “So that as we, hopefully, are able to extend this and come out to public with other similar set-ups in different countries those of course — eventually, if they come to such a fruition and maturity — will then likely as well have their own identities but still remain compatible with the global Sailfish OS.”

Jolla says the Russian government plans to switch all circa 8M state officials to the platform by the end of 2021 — under a project expected to cost RUB 160.2 billion (~$2.4BN). (A cut of which will go to Jolla in licensing fees.)

It also says Sailfish-powered smartphones will be “recommended to municipal administrations of various levels,” with the Russian state planning to allocate a further RUB 71.3 billion (~$1.1BN) from the federal budget for that. So there’s scope for deepening the state’s Sailfish uptake.

Russian Post is one early customer for Jolla’s locally licensed Sailfish flavor. Having piloted devices last year, Pienimäki says it’s now moving to a full commercial deployment across the whole organization — which has around 300,000 employees (to give a sense of how many Sailfish powered devices could end up in the hands of state postal workers in Russia).

A rugged Sailfish-powered device piloted by Russian post

Jolla is not yet breaking out end users for Sailfish OS per market but Pienimäki says that overall the company is now “clearly above” 100k (and below 500k) devices globally.

That’s still of course a fantastically tiny number if you compare it to the consumer devices market — top ranked Android smartphone maker Samsung sold around 70M handsets in last year’s holiday quarter, for instance — but Jolla is in the b2b OS licensing business, not the handset making business. So it doesn’t need hundreds of millions of Sailfish devices to ship annually to turn a profit.

Scaling a royalty licensing business to hundreds of thousands of users is sums to “good business”, , says Pienimäki, describing Jolla’s business model for Sailfish as “practically a royalty per device”.

“The success we have had in the Russian market has populated us a lot of interesting new opening elsewhere around the world,” he continues. “This experience and all the technology we have built together with Open Mobile Platform [Jolla’s Sailfish licensing partner in Russia which was acquired by Rostelecom] to enable that case — that enables a number of other cases. The deployment plan that Rostelecom has for this is very big. And this is now really happening and we are happy about it.”

Jolla’s “Russia operation” is now beginning “a mass deployment phase”, he adds, predicting it will “quickly ramp up the volume to very sizeable”. So Sailfish is poised to scale.

Step 3… profit?

While Jolla is still yet to turn a full-year profit Pienimäki says several standalone months of 2018 were profitable, and he’s no longer worried whether the business is sustainable — asserting: “We don’t have any more financial obstacles or threats anymore.”

It’s quite the turnaround of fortunes, given Jolla’s near-death experience a few years ago when it almost ran out of money, after failing to close a $10.6M Series C round, and had to let go of half its staff.

It did manage to claw in a little funding at the end of 2015 to keep going, albeit as much leaner fish. But bagging Russia as an early adopter of its ‘independent’ mobile Linux ecosystem looks to have been the key tipping point for Jolla to be able to deliver on the hard-graft ecosystem-building work it’s been doing all along the way. And Pienimäki now expresses easy confidence that profitability will flow “fairly quickly” from here on in.

“It’s not an easy road. It takes time,” he says of the ecosystem-building company Jolla hard-pivoted to at its point of acute financial distress. “The development of this kind of business — it requires patience and negotiation times, and setting up the ecosystem and ecosystem partners. It really requires patience and takes a lot of time. And now we have come to this point where actually there starts to be an ecosystem which will then extend and start to carry its own identity as well.”

In further signs of Jolla’s growing confidence he says it hired more than ten people last year and moved to new and slightly more spacious offices — a reflection of the business expanding.

“It’s looking very good and nice for us,” Pienimäki continues. “Let’s say we are not taking too much pressure, with our investors and board, that what is the day that we are profitable. It’s not so important anymore… It’s clear that that is soon coming — that very day. But at the same time the most important is that the business case behind is proven and it is under aggressive deployment by our customers.”

The main focus for the moment is on supporting deployments to ramp up in Russia, he says, emphasizing: “That’s where we have to focus.” (Literally he says “not screwing up” — and with so much at stake you can see why nailing the Russia case is Jolla’s top priority.)

While the Russian state has been the entity most keen to embrace an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS — perhaps unsurprisingly — it’s not the only place in the world where Jolla has irons in the fire.

Another licensing partner, Bolivian IT services company Jalasoft, has co-developed a Sailfish-powered smartphone called Accione.

Jalasoft’s ‘liberty’-touting Accione Sailfish smartphone

It slates the handset on its website as being “designed for Latinos by Latinos”. “The digitalization of the economy is inevitable and, if we do not control the foundation of this digitalization, we have no future,” it adds.

Jalasoft founder and CEO Jorge Lopez says the company’s decision to invest effort in kicking the tyres of Jolla’s alternative mobile ecosystem is about gaining control — or seeking “technological libration” as the website blurb puts it.

“With Sailfish OS we have control of the implementation, while with Android it is the opposite,” Lopez tells TechCrunch. “We are working on developing smart buildings and we need a private OS that is not Android or iOS. This is mainly because our product will allow the end user to control the whole building and doing this with Android or iOS a hackable OS will bring concerns on security.”

Lopez says Jalasoft is using Accione as its development platform — “to gather customer feedback and to further develop our solution” — so the project clearly remains in an early phase, and he says that no more devices are likely to be announced this year.

But Jolla can point to more seeds being sewn with the potential, with work, determination and patience, to sprout into another sizeable crop of Sailfish-powered devices down the line.

Complexity in China

Even more ambitiously Jolla is also targeting China, where investment has been taken in to form a local consortium to develop a Chinese Sailfish ecosystem.

Although Pienimäki cautions there’s still much work to be done to bring Sailfish to market in China.

“We completed a major pilot with our licensing customer, Sailfish China Consortium, in 2017-18,” he says, giving an update on progress to date. “The public in market solution is not there yet. That is something that we are working together with the customer — hopefully we can see it later this year on the market. But these things take time. And let’s say that we’ve been somewhat surprised at how complex this kind of decision-making can be.”

“It wasn’t easy in Russia — it took three years of tight collaboration together with our Russian partners to find a way. But somehow it feels that it’s going to take even more in China. And I’m not necessarily talking about calendar time — but complexity,” he adds.

While there’s no guarantee of success for Jolla in China, the potential win is so big given the size of the market that even if they can only carve out a tiny slice, such as a business or corporate sector, it’s still worth going after. And he points to the existence of a couple of native mobile Linux operating systems he reckons could make “very lucrative partners”.

That said, the get-to-market challenge for Jolla in China is clearly distinctly different vs the rest of the world. This is because Android has developed into an independent (i.e. rather than Google-led) ecosystem in China as a result of state restrictions on the Internet and Internet companies. So the question is what could Sailfish offer that forked Android doesn’t already?

An Oppo Android powered smartphone on show at MWC 2017

Again, Jolla is taking the long view that ultimately there will be appetite — and perhaps also state-led push — for a technology platform bolster against political uncertainty in U.S.-China relations.

“What has happened now, in particular last year, is — because of the open trade war between the nations — many of the technology vendors, and also I would say the Chinese government, has started to gradually tighten their perspective on the fact that ‘hey simply it cannot be a long term strategy to just keep forking Android’. Because in the end of the day it’s somebody else’s asset. So this is something that truly creates us the opportunity,” he suggests.

“Openly competing with the fact that there are very successful Android forks in China, that’s going to be extremely difficult. But — let’s say — tapping into the fact that there are powers in that nation that wish that there would be something else than forking Android, combined with the fact that there is already something homegrown in China which is not forking Android — I think that’s the recipe that can be successful.”

Not all Jolla’s Sailfish bets have paid off, of course. An earlier foray by an Indian licensing partner into the consumer handset market petered out. Albeit, it does reinforce their decision to zero in on government and corporate licensing.

“We got excellent business connections,” says Pienimäki of India, suggesting also that it’s still a ‘watch this space’ for Jolla. The company has a “second move” in train in the market that he’s hopeful to be talking about publicly later this year.

It’s also pitching Sailfish in Africa. And in markets where target customers might not have their own extensive in-house IT capability to plug into Sailfish co-development work Pienimäki says it’s offering a full solution — “a ready made package”, together with partners, including device management, VPN, secure messaging and secure email — which he argues “can be still very lucrative business cases”.

Looking ahead and beyond mobile, Pienimäki suggests the automotive industry could be an interesting target for Sailfish in the future — though not literally plugging the platform into cars; but rather licensing its technologies where appropriate — arguing car makers are also keen to control the tech that’s going into their cars.

“They really want to make sure that they own the cockpit. It’s their property, it’s their brand and they want to own it — and for a reason,” he suggests, pointing to the clutch of major investments from car companies in startups and technologies in recent years.

“This is definitely an interesting area. We are not directly there ourself — and we are not capable to extend ourself there but we are discussing with partners who are in that very business whether they could utilize our technologies there. That would then be more or less like a technology licensing arrangement.”

A trust balancing model

While Jolla looks to be approaching a tipping point as a business, in terms of being able to profit off of licensing an alternative mobile platform, it remains a tiny and some might say inconsequential player on the global mobile stage.

Yet its focus on building and maintaining trusted management and technology architectures also looks timely — again, given how geopolitical spats are intervening to disrupt technology business as usual.

Chinese giant Huawei used an MWC keynote speech last month to reject U.S.-led allegations that its 5G networking technology could be repurposed as a spying tool by the Chinese state. And just this week it opened a cybersecurity transparency center in Brussels, to try to bolster trust in its kit and services — urging industry players to work together on agreeing standards and structures that everyone can trust.

In recent years U.S.-led suspicions attached to Russia have also caused major headaches for security veteran Kaspersky — leading the company to announce its own trust and transparency program and decentralize some of its infrastructure, including by spinning up servers in Europe last year.

Businesses finding ways to maintain and deepen the digital economy in spite of a little — or even a lot — of cross-border mistrust may well prove to be the biggest technology challenge of all moving forward.

Especially as next-gen 5G networks get rolled out — and their touted ‘intelligent connectivity’ reaches out to transform many more types of industries, bringing new risks and regulatory complexity.

The geopolitical problem linked to all this boils down to how to trust increasing complex technologies without any one entity being able to own and control all the pieces. And Jolla’s business looks interesting in light of that because it’s selling the promise of neutral independence to all its customers, wherever they hail from — be it Russia, LatAm, China, Africa or elsewhere — which makes its ability to secure customer trust not just important but vital to its success.

Indeed, you could argue its customers are likely to rank above average on the ‘paranoid’ scale, given their dedicated search for an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS in the first place.

“It’s one of the number one questions we get,” admits Pienimäki, discussing Jolla’s trust balancing act — aka how it manages and maintains confidence in Sailfish’s independence, even as it takes business backing and code contributions from a state like Russia.

“We tell about our reference case in Russia and people quickly ask ‘hey okay, how can I trust that there is no blackbox inside’,” he continues, adding: “This is exactly the core question and this is exactly the problem we have been able to build a solution for.”

Jolla’s solution sums to one line: “We create a transparent platform and on top of fully transparent platform you can create secure solutions,” as Pienimäki puts it.

“The way it goes is that Jolla with Sailfish OS is always offering the transparent Sailfish operating system core, on source code level, all the time live, available for all the customers. So all the customers constantly, in real-time, have access to our source code. Most of it’s in public open source, and the proprietary parts are also constantly available from our internal infrastructure. For all the customers, at the same time in real-time,” he says, fleshing out how it keeps customers on board with a continually co-developing software platform.

“The contributions we take from these customers are always on source code level only. We don’t take any binary blobs inside our software. We take only source code level contributions which we ourselves authorize, integrate and then we make available for all the customers at the very same moment. So that loopback in a way creates us the transparency.

“So if you want to be suspicion of the contributions of the other guys, so to say, you can always read it on the source code. It’s real-time. Always available for all the customers at the same time. That’s the model we have created.”

“It’s honestly quite a unique model,” he adds. “Nobody is really offering such a co-development model in the operating system business.

“Practically how Android works is that Google, who’s leading the Android development, makes the next release of Android software, then releases it under Android Open Source and then people start to backboard it — so that’s like ‘source, open’ in a way, not ‘open source’.”

Sailfish’s community of users also have real-time access to and visibility of all the contributions — which he dubs “real democracy”.

“People can actually follow it from the code-line all the time,” he argues. “This is really the core of our existence and how we can offer it to Russia and other countries without creating like suspicion elements each side. And that is very important.

“That is the only way we can continue and extend this regional licensing and we can offer it independently from Finland and from our own company.”

With global trade and technology both looking increasingly vulnerable to cross-border mistrust, Jolla’s approach to collaborative transparency may offer something of a model if other businesses and industries find they need to adapt themselves  in order for trade and innovation to keep moving forward in uncertain political times.

Antitrust and privacy uplift

Last but not least there’s regulatory intervention to consider.

A European Commission antitrust decision against Google’s Android platform last year caused headlines around the world when the company was slapped with a $5BN fine.

More importantly for Android rivals Google was also ordered to change its practices — leading to amended licensing terms for the platform in Europe last fall. And Pienimäki says Jolla was a “key contributor” to the Commission case against Android.

European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, on April 15, 2015 in Brussels, as the Commission said it would open an antitrust investigation into Google’s Android operating system. (Photo credit: JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images)

The new Android licensing terms make it (at least theoretically) possible for new types of less-heavily-Google-flavored Android devices to be developed for Europe. Though there have been complaints the licensing tweaks don’t go far enough to reset Google’s competitive Android advantage.

Asked whether Jolla has seen any positive impacts on its business following the Commission’s antitrust decision, Pienimäki responds positively, recounting how — “one or two weeks after the ruling” — Jolla received an inbound enquiry from a company in France that had felt hamstrung by Google requiring its services to be bundled with Android but was now hoping “to realize a project in a special sector”.

The company, which he isn’t disclosing at this stage, is interested in “using Sailfish and then having selected Android applications running in Sailfish but no connection with the Google services”.

“We’ve been there for five years helping the European Union authorities [to build the case] and explain how difficult it is to create competitive solutions in the smartphone market in general,” he continues. “Be it consumer or be it anything else. That’s definitely important for us and I don’t see this at all limited to the consumer sector. The very same thing has been a problem for corporate clients, for companies who provide specialized mobile device solutions for different kind of corporations and even governments.”

While he couches the Android ruling as a “very important” moment for Jolla’s business last year, he also says he hopes the Commission will intervene further to level the smartphone playing field.

“What I’m after here, and what I would really love to see, is that within the European Union we utilize Linux-based, open platform solution which is made in Europe,” he says. “That’s why we’ve been pushing this [antitrust action]. This is part of that. But in bigger scheme this is very good.”

He is also very happy with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which came into force last May, plugging in a long overdue update to the bloc’s privacy rules with a much beefed up enforcement regime.

GDPR has been good for Jolla’s business, according to Pienimäki, who says interest is flowing its way from customers who now perceive a risk to using Android if customer data flows outside Europe where they cannot guarantee adequate privacy protections are in place.

“Already last spring… we have had plenty of different customer discussions with European companies who are really afraid that ‘hey I cannot offer this solution to my government or to my corporate customer in my country because I cannot guarantee if I use Android that this data doesn’t go outside the European Union’,” he says.

“You can’t indemnify in a way that. And that’s been really good for us as well.”

Via Natasha Lomas https://techcrunch.com

[owens99burton-blog]

What Does Every Son Want To Find Beneath The Christmas Tree?

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[sending-the-message]

It's Sunday and You're Probably Watching Football, You Shouldn't Be... by Dudefromevanston

For seven years, I served as the Chief Scientist of a biotech company known as Augmentech. Our founder, Earl Stevens, envisioned a world where all people lived a better life, augmented by machines. Earl was a pragmatist, and understood achieving his utopian ideals required capital and influence, so he sought out to make a fortune.

Augmentech’s first major contract was with the NFL, a deal years in the making — I personally suffered through hell to make it happen. The league was desperate to limit head injuries, as negative publicity had seriously impacted profit margins and viewership — the health of the athletes was a mere afterthought. Our pitch to them was simple yet effective, “The Future of Football.”

Earl convinced NFL executives that protective gear would never be enough, but via bioaugmentations, major injuries could all together disappear. Despite their initial skepticism, after several live demonstrations with primates, they couldn’t sign on the dotted line fast enough.

Our first human clinical trials subjects were semi-pro football players, who were promised a flat fee and a tryout with an NFL team upon conclusion. Under my watch, they underwent a variety of surgical enhancements: their skulls were encased in a special blend of titanium alloy and organic matter; joints were reinforced with protective shielding and extra shock absorbers, as well as spring mechanisms; and vital organs were injected with nanobots that sent real time data to our lab.

To our delight, the trials were a smashing success, exceeding even our own expectations. Subjects seemed almost impervious to damage, and their overall athletic ability had greatly increased. Data showed little to no structural or neural damage despite repeated and vicious blows, in fact, their vital signs were better than ever.

We invited the NFL commissioner to watch a scrimmage between our subjects and a group of top college prospects, all of whom were paid handsomely (and secretly) to participate. From the start, the bioaugmented athletes dominated the competition, easily overpowering opposing players. Running backs lowered their head like a charging bull and blasted through tackles, knocking men twice their size flat on their ass.

In the end, our team had won easily and suffered no injuries, although the same couldn’t be said for the opposition. Several of their players tore ligaments, while one other was concussed. The nondisclosure agreements we had them sign ensured the cause of their injuries would never be revealed to the public, and until this day, they never were.

Soon after, we reached an agreement with the NFL to augment fifteen randomly selected players, although participation would be voluntary. Of the fifteen chosen, nine agreed to proceed with the surgeries — primarily aging veterans and unproven rookies.

By the time the operations began, we had vastly improved upon our initial designs and techniques; if I wasn’t more modest I’d say we perfected our craft. Along with the enhancements the original test subjects received, the NFL players were equipped with neural amplifiers that improved their hand eye coordination and motor skills, ocular implants that increased their field of vision and tracking ability, and full body alloy shielding. Per our agreement with the NFL, everything was to be kept a secret, even from coaches and other players.

The bioagumented NFLers dominated the following season, setting numerous records in the process. Most impressively, a struggling veteran quarterback, thought long past his prime, led his team to a suprise Super Bowl win — his resurgence was hailed as a miracle.

At Augmentech spirits were high, we felt we were on the precipice of a revolution, or to quote Earl, “The next major step in human evolution, crafted by the hands of man.” As Chief Scientist, I felt especially prideful, much of the technology was based on my research and these experiments represented a lifetime of work.

All of that changed one fateful afternoon, the summer after the Super Bowl win we had helped engineer. I received a hysterical email from the mother of one of our original subjects, who had found my contact information in a unmarked folder on her son’s personal computer. For weeks, the test subject’s behavior had grown increasingly erratic and violent, spiraling quickly out of control. This all culminated in the brutal murders of his pregnant wife and brother-in-law — I was horrified.

Not willing to jump to conclusions, I made inquiries into a handful of the men from the original clinical trial. My face contorted into disbelief as I scrolled through news article after news article, each detailing gruesome acts committed by our subjects: a baby thrown thew a plate glass window into a busy suburban street, a store clerk brutally beaten with a hammer, an elderly woman shoved into an icy river, a babysitter drowned in a bathtub — the list goes on.

Immediately, I contacted Earl, hands shaking as I dialed his number. I stuttered my way through a brief re-telling of my discovery, unsuccessfully trying to hold back tears. Earl remained silent for a moment, pausing for what seemed like an eternity. Once he spoke, his words were sympathetic and comforting, as they always were.

Soon after our phone call, Earl entered my office, quietly closing the door behind him. As soon as the door closed, his entire attitude shifted. He began to pace slowly back and forth, a menacing scowl plastered on his face.

“What do you think we should do Susan?” The words were dry, emotionless.

Unsure how to answer, I stared off meekly into the distance, never meeting his eyes.

“Susan, I asked you a question dear. What the FUCK do you think we should do?” His voice seethed with anger.

“Well — uhhh — I don’t exactly know, but how can we continue Earl? We’re responsible for so much…death.” Tears rolled down my cheek as I spoke.

“No Susan, you’re wrong. We are not responsible for death, we are responsible for life, an entirely new type of life — how can you not understand that?” His voice rose with intensity, taking on the cadence of a preacher. “If a few must suffer for the betterment of humanity, so be it — sacrifice is necessary in such a momentous pursuit. We are on the edge of a revolution, and I will not allow you to poison the world against me!”

Earl’s words shocked me, this was a side of the man I never dreamed existed — he was truly mad. Never one to be intimated, I regained my composure and replied, “Earl, I’m not sure what you are implying, but there is nothing you can do to stop me. I never signed an NDA, and even if I did, I wouldn’t give a flying fuck. Now please stand aside.”

A sinister smile spread across his face as he stepped aside, hand extended in an invitation to leave. Earl’s behavior was unnerving, but I suppressed my emotions and walked briskly towards the door.

“Do you remember your first day of work?” Earl’s joyful tone returned.

“Somewhat.” I replied in a monotone.

“Well I do. Can you guess my favorite part?”

“Earl, I’m really not in the m—”

“My favorite part was when we vaccinated you, or so we said,” a maniacal laugh escaped his throat, “Would you like to know what was in that needle Susan?”

Hand dropping from the doorknob, I turned around to face him. His face was contorted into a ghastly smile, chilling me to the bone. An intense rush of anger washed through me, I felt like a cornered animal ready to lash out.

“What did you do to me Earl!” My lip trembled as I spoke

“Tell me right now you fucking lunatic, what did you put in me?” The words came in between heavy sobs, I could no longer hold it in.

“Simply put, an insurance policy, but don’t worry, you’re far from the only one.” He sat on every word, relishing in it.

“You’re lying, you’re a fucking liar!”

Snatching a paperweight off the desk, I rushed towards Earl, letting out a primal scream. He grinned mightily as I approached, not a care in the world. Eyes never breaking contact with my own, Earl withdrew a small device from his pocket and switched a small dial on its exterior.

Almost immediately, I collapsed to the ground, quivering in agony. Excruciating waves of pain pulsated through me, contorting my body in unnatural positions. At that moment, I prayed for death, I practically begged for it.

“You were injected with nanobots of my own creation, nanobots that serve a highly specific purpose. You see, those tiny robots have bonded with your central nervous system and neural passageways, giving me complete control over you — mind, body, and soul.”

Tears streamed down my cheek, unable to cope with this terrible revelation. I attempted to speak, to scream — but I was unable. All I could do was watch as Earl approached with menacing intent, a smile never leaving his face.

“You’re going to leave now, drive to your little suburban enclave and sleep beside your adoring, oaf of a husband — because I said so. And if you ever even so much as say the name Augmentech again, you might just find yourself holding a bloody knife, staring down at the gruesome remains of your family. Goodbye forever Susan, for what it’s worth, I’ve always thought you were fantastic at what you do.”

With a final wink, he flipped his fingers over the device’s touchscreen, sending my world into darkness.

Some time afterwards, I awoke in my bed, fingers caressing a small box, wrapped with a red satin bow. Confused and questioning whether the whole thing was a terrible dream, I slipped the lid off of the box. Inside, was a faded polaroid photo of Earl standing over me whilst I slept, a grim expression cemented on his face — that shattered any doubts I harbored, it was real.

For years, I’ve stood by and allowed this madness to continue, fearing for my safety and that of my loved ones. Countless acts of extreme violence have occurred, although many incidents with professional athletes have been successfully swept under the rug. Football ratings are through the roof, and the game is more exciting than ever — I believe the NFL has become complicit in the coverup.

Shortly after this is published, I will suffer a horrible death — of that I am certain. I pass on this information so that you can ring alarm, unite our citizens against this terrible evil. Earl will not stop until we are all augmented, and he will achieve this goal by any means necessary — we can not allow that to happen.

Goodbye and godspeed.

[jakehglover]

Medical Board Ordered to Pay Millions for Harassment

By Dr. Mercola

Over the years, it's become increasingly evident that medical licensing boards are misusing their considerable power over doctors to impede free speech and maintain the status quo of the medical industry, which in large part is dictated by drug company interests. Any doctor who "steps out of line" can easily be reined back in by the threat of having his or her license revoked.

In this way, medical boards ensure that "standard practice" is maintained — even when standard practice does more harm than good, or goes against a doctor's sense of integrity or medical expertise. This has happened to me several times. I had to defend my license to the Illinois State Medical Board for frivolous charges leveled at me by skeptic organizations.

None of these were for patient complaints but for statements I made on my website on topics like breast cancer and thermography. Initially the board ruled against me and I had to sue them in court. Aside from all the wasted time and effort, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees required to defend myself against these complaints, my statements were ultimately ruled as protected speech under the First Amendment.

In 2012, a large National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded study presented evidence in support of chelation therapy for people with cardiovascular disease.1 The trial to access chelation therapy (TACT), demonstrated that by removing heavy metals from patients with coronary disease, incidence of death, heart attacks, stroke, coronary revascularization and angina was lowered, occurring at a rate of 26.5 percent in the treatment group compared to 30 percent in the placebo group.

Interestingly, diabetic patients, which made up one-third of the participants, benefited the most. Chelation therapy has been a controversial topic for many years, and its popularity among alternative health practitioners has been widely criticized as unscientific, unnecessary and potentially dangerous. The results from TACT were therefore highly unexpected. It was the kind of "inconvenient" evidence that gave alternative practitioners the ammunition they needed.

The Case of Dr. Geier

Enter Dr. Mark Geier, a medical doctor with a Ph.D. in genetics, who spent 10 years of his scientific career at the NIH, wrote more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers and worked as a professor of genetics at Johns Hopkins University. In the video above, Geier discusses some of his work and his involvement in the effort to make vaccines safer. Over his three decades' long study of vaccine efficacy and safety, Geier came to believe mercury was a liability.

More specifically, he argued for the idea that mercury binds to testosterone, and the treatment protocol he developed involved the use of the testosterone-suppressing drug leuprolide (Lupron) and chelation. Lupron is used in the conventional treatment of precocious puberty.

Off-label, the drug is also used to chemically castrate sex offenders. While I had some personal disagreements with his use of dangerous drugs loaded with side effects, like Lupron, in his detoxification protocol, he was certainly correct in identifying mercury as a pernicious toxin.

As reported by The Washington Post,2 Lupron is "considered dangerous for young people and not known to alleviate symptoms of [autism]," and in 2011, the Maryland Board of Physicians suspended his license over his continued use of the treatment.3 Over the next two years, all 12 of his medical licenses were suspended, and several were revoked altogether, including his Maryland license.

The story might well have ended there, had it not been for the Maryland Board of Physicians' decision to continue to pursue and humiliate Geier, and Geier suing the board for harassment — and winning.4

Medical Board Sued for Harassment 

In 2012, the medical board claimed Geier was prescribing drugs for himself and his family even though his license was suspended. A public cease-and-desist order posted online included a list of the specific drugs Geiger had allegedly prescribed for himself, his wife and his son — a serious violation of the health insurance portability and accountability (HIPAA) law, which protects patients' privacy and health information.5

The Geiers say they were "horrified" when they realized their private medical details were on show for all the world to see, and critics indeed seized the opportunity to bring even more public attention to it by mocking their use of the medicines in various blog posts and online forums. During a 2014 deposition, Geier's wife Anne said, "How would you feel if somebody put your medical records up and then they laughed at you and made fun of you? They humiliate you. The whole thing has just ruined my life."

While the medical board claims the inclusion of such private details was "an honest mistake," the Geiers sued the board, arguing the publication of their health information was an act of vengeance, aimed at punishing Geier for advocating unconventional ideas, specifically the idea that thimerosal-containing vaccines may play a role in autism.

Making matters worse, an administrative law judge determined the allegations against Geier were meritless to begin with, as Geier was not the prescribing doctor; his son, David Geier, was.     

Ruling: Maryland Medical Board Ordered to Pay $2.5 Million

As reported by The Washington Post February 3:6

"… Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Ronald B. Rubin sided with the Geiers, awarding them $2.5 million in damages. He called the order a significant breach of medical privacy and accused the board and its staff of failing to preserve emails related to the case and pleading ignorance about the order on the witness stand.

'If their testimony were to be believed, which the court does not, it is the worst case of collective amnesia in the history of Maryland government and on par with the collective memory failure on display at the Watergate hearings,' Rubin wrote in a December opinion.

He ordered 14 board appointees, the board's lead attorney and the lead investigator on the Geier case to pay half of the damages out of their own pockets, between $10,000 and $200,000 apiece, depending on their net worth."

The fact that the board members are being held personally liable is a first. Normally, taxpayers foot the entire bill when government officials are caught in wrongdoing. But as noted by The Bolen Report,7 "[W]hat the officials of the Maryland Board of Physicians did was not in pursuit of the people's business. It was for pharma profit." Fortunately, this time the scheme backfired, delivering a very real sting.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Medical boards have gained tremendous power over doctors' ability to practice medicine that is outside the standard of care, and while standards are certainly needed to protect patients, one could easily argue that medical boards have taken to misusing that power. As the saying goes,8

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Geier's case is just one among many examples showing that license revocation and other career-ending punishments are being used to stifle not only free speech but also free thinking and, indeed, the open-minded investigation that should be a cornerstone of science itself.

Doctors who question or even express an interest in having an open discussion about vaccines are particularly vulnerable to harassment and intimidation. For example, last year Dr. Daniel Neides, medical director and chief operating officer of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute, was fired after publishing an article in which he questioned the safety and efficacy of the flu vaccine — questioning triggered by his own experience of getting violently ill after receiving a flu shot, even though it was thimerosal-free.

"Within 12 hours of receiving the vaccine, I was in bed feeling miserable and missed two days of work with a terrible cough and body aches," he wrote.9 Four other administrators who received the same vaccine had the same reaction. Puzzled by these coincidences, he decided to investigate vaccines a bit further, and he didn't like what he found. But this vaccine anecdote was not the main gist of the article.

Neides was actually speaking about the "constant toxic burden that is contributing to the chronic disease epidemic" in broader terms, urging people to take matters into their own hands and do what's necessary to protect ourselves from the constant onslaught of toxins in our air, water, food and, yes, medicine. Neides was publicly shamed and branded as an anti-science, "anti-vax" quack, and was let go shortly thereafter.

The Case of Dr. Neides

Neides spoke out about his career-ending article at a recent Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom meeting, and what inspired him to start incorporating a functional medicine approach into his medical practice.

He also talks about Dr. Paul Thomas, author of "The Vaccine-Friendly Plan," a physician who opened his eyes to understand what one of the core problems with excessive vaccinations is, namely the fact that some people are unable to effectively detoxify the poisonous adjuvants and preservatives used in the vaccines, be it aluminum, mercury (thimerosal) or formaldehyde.

Neides also frankly admits he had "absolutely no idea" the hepatitis B vaccine, which is injected into babies on the first day of life, contains 250 nanograms of aluminum. "I didn't personally do my due diligence on vaccination," he says, noting that inflammation and inability to detoxify are two hallmarks of chronic disease. "Nothing was off the table in that article," he says, and that is why vaccines were included among the many sources of toxic exposures discussed in the article.

The only thing critics saw, however, was an attack on vaccines from a person who should know better. Some also questioned his integrity by pointing out that two years earlier, he had strongly advocated for vaccinations. "I did!" he says, "but I'm not the same person two years later. The whole idea of continuing education is to learn, and then take those principles and adopt them into your practice. As I began to see with my own eyes what was going on, I changed my point of view."

Three Pillars of Heavy Metal Detoxification

Getting back where we started, to the issue of chelation therapy, it's important to realize that it has its downsides. According to Chris Shade, Ph.D., one of the foremost experts in the world on the subject of heavy metal detoxification, the best and safest route for most patients is to upregulate certain aspects of your biochemistry to optimize the natural mobilization of toxins.

Inorganic mercury and cadmium are two heavy metals that cause significant damage to your kidneys. They tend to build up there, causing a downward spiral where the more damage there is to the proximal tubules, the more metals accumulate and the more damage is created. Chronic renal insufficiency is a potential and very serious side effect.

For many, chemical chelation isn't really necessary. If you do choose to use it, make sure you're working with a highly skilled clinician in this area. Shade's work has led to treatment strategies that are far safer and more effective than earlier detox methods. Shade's suggestions, which you can learn more about in this previous interview, are divided into three steps:

1. Optimize your filtration mechanisms. Detoxing involves moving the toxin out of the cell into your blood circulation, and then filtering out the metals through your kidneys, liver and gastrointestinal (GI) tract. However, you need to begin by assessing your filtration capacity before you start moving toxins out of your tissues.

If you're feeling awful when detoxing, it means toxins are building up in circulation faster than they're being filtered out. To ensure your filters are working properly, begin by supporting your kidneys, liver and GI tract, and use binders to capture and eliminate metals and toxins in your GI tract. Overlooking this step and going straight to mobilizing heavy metals with a chelating agent will tax your kidneys, potentially causing more damage.

2. Address detoxification biochemistry. Next, you need to optimize the metabolic biochemistry needed for detoxification. This involves glutathione and the enzymes and transporters that work with it, such as the enzyme glutathione S-transferase. The most well-known and reliable nutraceutical that helps accomplish this is R-lipoic acid (sometimes also called R-alpha-lipoic acid). Nutraceuticals that upregulate Nrf2 are also very helpful. These include haritaki, broccoli seed extract and garlic.

If everything is working well in your body, you can simply use precursors to glutathione, like N-acetylcysteine (NAC), which will support glutathione production. If things aren't working well, a direct delivery of glutathione in the form of nanoliposomal glutathione that absorbs under your tongue is recommended.

Whether you can make do with precursors or need direct delivery of glutathione has a lot to do with how well your glutathione system is working, and your current state of health. Poor immune function is a sign of glutathione insufficiency, and a tipoff that a precursor might not be enough.

3. Pulsed chelation, if absolutely needed. The chelating agent EDTA is a powerful biofilm breaker. When taken systemically it opens up biofilms throughout your body, revealing various organisms to your immune system. As a result, you may experience immune reactions. In many such cases, you may need some type of antimicrobial.

Avoid indiscriminate chelation for lead, and always work with a qualified physician. If you go through the glutathione system upregulation discussed above, you're getting mercury, cadmium, arsenic, lead and a whole host of other toxins out, including fluorinated, brominated, chlorinated hydrocarbons and pesticides. Start low and keep pulsing on and off. Over time, the toxic manifestations of lead will cease as your body becomes better able to mobilize it. 

from HealthyLife via Jake Glover on Inoreader https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/02/20/medical-board-sued-for-harassment.aspx

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The Top Benefits Of Cash Flow Banking With Life Insurance

By Joyce Sullivan

At current day, a frequent concern for women and men is availing and procuring of an encircling insurance program that can pay for the remainder of their lives. In this modern era, the expenses of living has gotten more costly in contrast to previous generations and procuring services such as financial demands that become far more difficult to get. Obtaining a fantastic supplier and strategy will offer many advantages which not only rewards the man that has it, but also the secondary and primary beneficiaries also. One of the things that can be paired up with this kind of service is obtaining a good banking plan with the current bank you have an account with. For instance, those that offer cash flow banking services allows you to examine the present opportunity cost of certain currencies, allowing you more profit and lower interest rates. To learn more about applying this financial strategy, continue reading the following paragraphs to discover the top benefits of cash flow banking with life insurance. Any person who chooses to execute this technique will get a dual win situation particularly if paired with whole life insurance. This is particularly true for people who want to keep on caring for the family members or loved ones even after passing, at a more fiscal aspect. But not a lot of people avail of the service due to the care it takes and also because of elevated levels of all premiums. Even though the payments are really expensive, its long-term effects don't wind up going to waste, particularly when implemented correctly. For all those not familiar with the notion, availing this type of method is fundamentally the same as procuring a savings account by the regional banking choices. Following this logic, it involves securing a continuous and steady rate of returns or cash, obtaining liquidity, as well as garnering some tax advantages. For this reason, a great deal of investors, entrepreneurs, as well as fiscal specialists see it as a precious asset to have. In reality, many successful and notable figures such as Walt Disney and Alice Walton avail those services since it impacts their own entrepreneurial pursuits. Money circulations are extremely important and vital possessions that is important for different reward repayment approaches. Because of this, it assists in advertising a smoother capital that could be carried out in many sectors as well as applications. Home owners could profit from this since it reduces down the rate of interest prices for paying home mortgages and also offer lots of actual estate financial investment possibilities. When applied at an ongoing price, it builds up and lending could be gotten via the procedure of utilizing existing excellent credit scores to obtain a great building equity line. A common concern for individuals is the fact that many traditional investment options causes them to lose their savings or gains as more time passes by. This commonly occurs because it pertains to many penalties and strict rules when it comes to premature withdrawals from their account. Furthermore, the value of their savings decreases because it requires payment methods through dividend paying, which has many other restrictions and makes the amount inaccessible or locked in for a certain time frame. However, this is not a problem for this method because loans are accessible and you have more control over existing accounts. Additionally, the normal policy holder frequently pays a high number of premiums because of its own upkeep. The excellent thing about procuring life insurance together with a present bank accounts is the fact that it covers several long-term advantages and reduces the number of expenses. This not only happens to private gains, but might translate into several companies also. The earnings gathered can help in participating in fresh investments, obtaining loans that are safe, and also reduces the prospect of breaking up policies. Moreover, it leads to availing many tax advantages. In fact, a lot of individuals prefer this method because they know they no longer have to pay for taxes after retiring. Even when withdrawing the amount later on after death, it will not contain any tax fees or policies, leading to a higher value. To sum up it, said above would be the many advantages of this service. It provides many benefits not only to the individual possessing the accounts, but for their nearest and dearest too. By studying more about this, the reader may then make their own decision based upon truth.

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Cashing in on a Structured Settlement

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If you have agreed to acknowledge a structured settlement, it is likely that you felt a perception of reduction that your economic uncertainties have been being resolved, and that you would have the cash important to pay out your bills, assist your loved ones and go on with your lifetime. When you agreed to the phrases of the settlement, hopefully with the support of a economic advisor, you acknowledged a sequence of economic payments that built perception for you at that time.

Possibly you would endured personalized injury in an auto or other incident, you have been awarded damages in a products liability scenario, or you have been the target of professional medical malpractice or have been even the plaintiff in a wrongful death match. You agreed to a periodic (normally month-to-month) payment, maybe in the form of a life span profits stream, that seemed to be the response to spending your ongoing residing fees and maybe your professional medical fees. You built the very best selections you could at the time, with the info you had - centered upon how lifetime was then, and what you predicted for the foreseeable future.

But lifetime seldom works out as we expect. Perhaps you're on the highway to recovery from the incident or other celebration for which you received the settlement, and want to transfer and acquire a residence, get married, go to faculty, or acquire a business. Perhaps professional medical bills or high interest personal debt is an undue stress on you that you need to have to resolve now. Or, if your loved ones has developed, and your small children no lengthier need to have for you to offer for their training or other fees, you might want to shell out far more of the revenue you have coming to you now, as a substitute of afterwards.

What can you do to match your funds - precisely your structured settlement - with the lifetime you now have or want to have? You ought to often consult with an lawyer or a economic advisor, but here is a essential overview of your rights and possibilities in assigning your structured settlement:

Settlements are funded by single premium annuities, issued by insurance policy firms. As an alternative of spending you a lump sum sum, the get together discovered liable for injury or damages to you has compensated a a single-time lump sum to an insurance policy organization, which has, in transform, invested it. The insurance policy organization has projected the interest amount or securities dividends they will receive on the lump sum, and centered upon the size of time and selection of payments you chose or have been supplied for the structured settlement, they calculated the periodic payment sum you're now receiving.

So who owns what? The insurance policy organization owns the annuity, and you, as the beneficiary, are entitled to an profits stream, or the sequence of periodic payments. For the reason that you will not individual the underlying asset, the annuity, you thus are unable to provide the annuity agreement to a further get together to receive your revenue. Even so, under federal and condition law you can, with courtroom acceptance, provide all or a portion of the payments you are entitled to receive in the foreseeable future. In performing so, you can receive a lump sum cash payout now.

What are your possibilities? As an annuitant, or the beneficiary of the structured settlement annuity, you are, in most scenarios, ready to assign to a third get together the payments you are entitled to receive in the foreseeable future. Some Structured Settlement Agreements condition that payments are unable to be assigned, and your legal counsel will recommend you of possibilities and possibilities if yours is created with this sort of a clause. Fortuitously, condition regulations and current scenario law have rendered contracts created with this sort of provisions unenforceable, though other polices might utilize.

How can you establish modern lump sum price of your structured settlement payments? This relies upon, in portion, upon the sum of every single payment and when it is due. The payment sum and plan will be outlined in your Structured Settlement Agreement. It is also impacted by the economic toughness of the issuer of your annuity, mainly because the superior the economic position of the issuer, the far more likely it is that the purchaser of your cash stream will be compensated. The existing economic climate, as well as interest rates will also have an affect on your cash-out sum. Your funding organization will clarify these calculations and assumptions to you.

What measures do you need to have to acquire?

- To start with, you genuinely need to have to acquire a really hard seem at whether or not receiving your cash now will certainly be very best for you and your loved ones. This is a large economic action, not to be taken evenly. That stated, your instances might have modified sufficiently so that a lump sum or partial payment in the form of a lump sum tends to make perception, and is superior for your family's existing and foreseeable future lifestyle and economic balance.

- Future, make contact with a responsible funding organization that buys structured settlement profits streams. They can guide you through the process and support you look at possibilities, this sort of as the sale of a portion of your structured settlement profits stream, if this very best fulfills your needs.

- The funding organization will aid you by selecting an lawyer skilled in structured settlement assignments. The lawyer will clarify to the courtroom your wish to improve your settlement, and any modifications in your lifetime that have brought on you to make this decision. For the reason that the lawyer will be petitioning for judicial acceptance, he will need to have to comprehend your existing funds, obligations and wishes.

- Possessing all your documentation and agreements, and furnishing them instantly to your advisors and prospective funding resources is vital to receiving a cash payout in the shortest probable time. For the reason that courtroom acceptance is required, the time from the initiation of the ask for to the ultimate acceptance is usually 45-ninety days. So, just as with other massive economic selections, this sort of as obtaining a home finance loan or refinancing, it is in your very best interest to start the process with a small time to spare, in advance of you truly feel a time crunch. You ought to have an equitable offer, as rapidly as is probable, not just the offer you can make in the very the very least sum of time.

- What can you expect now? The moment you have decided on a finance organization and lawyer, the courts will set you on the docket and hear your petition for receiving your cash in a lump sum. They are going to want specifics of the foreseeable future payments due you, the proposed sum of the lump sum distribution, and any fees you will incur as a result of restructuring your settlement. Their basis for granting you an acceptance is fulfilling them selves that the assignment of your payments to a further get together and receipt of existing cash will be in your very best interest and in the very best pursuits of any dependents you might have.

- The moment you have agreed upon a lump sum sum with your finance organization, and received courtroom acceptance, you can expect to receive a wire transfer or a cashier's examine for your lump sum sum. You can now have the cash you need to have - proper when you need to have it most.

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Murder case highlights property money trail from China to US

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Sign up By signing up you confirm which you have studied and agree to the terms and conditions, cookie policy and privacy policy. Tiffany Li is a Chinese-American heiress accused of ordering successful on her ex-boyfriend in San Mateo county, a leafy suburb of San Francisco where Teslas are extra not unusual than violent crime. In April she published $4m in cash and $62m in California assets as bail — many of the maximum ever posted within the US.

The desirable amount has drawn undesirable attention to her family’s enterprise, a complex net of actual property hobbies whose origins can be traced to construction partnerships with the Chinese military. It indicates how guanxi, or connections, in China can translate into wealth in America.

California property markets have boomed as China’s newly wealthy are searching for havens distant places. Chinese homebuyers spent more than $28bn on US residential real estate in 2015, the most among foreign shoppers, according to the Asia Society.

Ms. Li’s mom, Li Jihong, made her initial fortune in Beijing in the Nineteen Eighties through getting into joint ventures with production businesses at once owned by means of the powerful General Logistics branch of the People’s Liberation Army, according to corporate facts and court cases. By the 1990s, the elder Ms. Li’s assets improvement corporation had snapped up suited plots inside the high-hire commercial enterprise district around the China World Hotel.

She owned a house in California as early as the past due Nineteen Eighties, unusual for a mainland citizen of China inside the early days of u . S . A .’s marketplace reforms.

The younger Ms. Li, now 31, studied at the University of San Francisco

Like many funeral, or offspring of the nouveaux riches, she embraced an ostentatious way of life. “There turned into quite a few bling,” said a person close to her. “They utilized the wealth extra than [the mother] did.” The mansion where Tiffany Li lived in Hillsborough, California © AP Along the way she met Keith Green, an aspiring chef, however, they later separated. Mr. Green had been combating for shared custody of their two babies in April 2016 whilst his body was discovered dumped in the woods with a bullet through his head.

The Murder of a Writer

She turned into lying over the footpath and searching at her very own shadow within the mirror of time

Her entire adventure appeared like a pursuit of the mirage on the lookout for water. She had struggled and for some crumbs of bread, she had written a few pieces as a ghost writer. Others had used her writing talents to the advantage of the organizational needs and paid her most effective sufficient to maintain her going from yr to year. She had labored diligently in the direction of logo activation day in and time out with all of her intellectual schools. But each time she asked for a enhance, she was denied.

3 years down the line and she or he understood that she had the insight that the location changed into now not going to be making any cheese for her and it changed into time to explore more modern ventures, so she did. Another area and he or she were happy, wondering that this became now an area where she would be profited even though the tiny bit. But the lobby systems in most advertising and marketing companies are something the actual writers cannot address. So she suffered even greater. Money flowed in a bit, she should store something for destiny at remaining, however, the inner craving of a writer to be diagnosed for the writing saved death inside until she became decreased to the size of a trifling proofreader, editor, and technical creator.Chicago police officer murder charge.

Writers are born with some incredible courage as that is what their occasions intend for them to have

So she stored her head high while internal she changed into all damaged and loss of life in conjunction with her vanity. 5 years down the line and she had forgotten the taste of a muse and the trance of pleasantly tasteful creative phrases and mind in her mouth. The words that danced to her liking and the mind that got here uninvited left her by myself amidst all of the taunts, teasing and demoralizing remarks of her seniors.

7 years down the road and she or he misplaced all the confidence in her desires to fly. Eight years down the line and she take up any other activity in a specific discipline forgetting all about her strength inside the writing. But the extinguishing spark still fails to exist absolutely.

Nine years down the line she has stopped considering writing in any respect

In this phase of existence, she writes best when she is completely damaged and for herself to examine alone inside the nights and to consolation her soul that she has now not died as yet.

Over subsequent 5 years, she forgets all approximately writing… The eagles of her desires that soared high have exhausted for an unmarried fleck of appreciation and reputation and nothing has become her manner… Because here absolutely everyone needs simply wishes to get a process finished and nothing else. Job achieved and her paintings are over too. Then there is no that means to her brainchildren and their connection with her. Who is she? A passing phantasm of the fading sunlight, on the specks of sands of time, which does now not prevent for all of us.

Objectives of Property Management

Managing a assets have to have the desires and targets

There are two types of organizational goals which are the fast time objective and the long time objective. The brief time goals are considered to be within 12 months and the long term goals are more than one 12 months.

The short term objective is also referred to as-is operational targets as it will remain each day operation. Property control sports which can be daily are together with rubbish disposal, housekeeping or gardening. The manpower who been appointed to perform the paintings such as repairing pipes must be a person who has the capabilities and know-how. The manpower needs to be the qualified person. Besides, the control structure ought to were organized and constantly up to date. Necessary records as an example agreement or carrier wish to test to make certain that the carrier is continually available for the owner or need to be terminated. Property information which includes taxes needs to be paid and monetary records such as condo fee need to be recorded. The day by day tracking on work of the employee is required to make sure the performance dimension is good and have the first-rate. All the things which have been cited above are underneath the quick time goal.Public record ownership property.

The long term goal is also referred to as-is strategic control. It is more on the coverage making and interpretation. It is likewise approximately programmed system, implementation, and activation. The proprietor seeks for the outcomes. For example, the task of a lodge proprietor is to improve a 3 big name hotel to five megastar lodges in 5 years time. Hence, the assets supervisor will make sure and video display units all of the important works to ensure the undertaking can be performed within the time.

Money Saving Tips for Halloween Party Supplies

Halloween party materials are ideal for the fun get occasions and spooky costumes come in all shapes and sizes. Children can effortlessly be entertained with the proper trick or treating dress of the scariest creatures, amusing video games, pull-string pinata, unique birthday party meals, and plenty more. Here are some money-saving tips for Halloween birthday celebration elements:

Costumes

A simple, but effective manner to shop at the cost of a spooky gown is to save early or out of season. If shopping on-line, use the evaluation purchasing sites to assist locate the most appealing charges. Also, through shopping early there is less alternate of having a dissatisfied child as it wasn’t possible to locate the proper costume.Money in the bank 2015 predictions.

Other alternatives include hand-me-down costumes from friends or circle of relatives contributors. Also, in case you nonetheless have closing yr’s gown, it could be possible to swap it with any other own family who’re looking for something specific and unique. This sort of costume is simplest used sometimes in keeping with the year, so must be smooth to keep in a terrific swappable circumstance.

For the innovative discern’s there is constantly the possibility of creating the kid’s costume at domestic. This can be reasonably-priced, memorable and amusing. But, it is able to be pretty time-eating, so it is worth planning ahead.

Candy

A first-rate way to fill bowls and jars with spooky sweet is to buy in bulk. Use the bargain shops or keep online to get the best expenses. Try to avoid the pricier name brands and alternatively go for the greater common sweet.

Trick-or-treat site visitors will experience the sweet no matter who it is made by using. Also, make certain at hand out the candies to prevent the youngsters grabbing handfuls, this may cause the sweet walking out sincerely speedy.