38 Burst results for "Publisher"
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from World Data Products Int. (WDPI) achieves ITAD certification, Podcast
"This is Doug Green, and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller, and this is a special podcast for the ASCDI, and I'm very pleased to have with us today Neil Vild of WDPI. Neil, thank you for joining us today. Thanks, Doug. Great to be with you. Well, it's really wonderful to be able to do this podcast on behalf of the ASCDI. You're a very long -term, very active member of this association, a very prominent person and company within this industry and within this organization, so it's really a pleasure to have you here today. We're going to be talking about your recent certification, or really certifications, with ITAD and how that changes the game and why that's important to ASCDI members, to the community and to many technology companies, enterprise companies that might be just happy to be listening or watching. So we're going to dive into that in a second, but Neil, first of all, what is WDPI? So WDPI stands for World Data Products Incorporated. We've been in business since 1987 in the Minneapolis suburbs, currently in Plymouth, Minnesota. We started off as an independent hardware reseller, selling brands originally manufactured by companies such as Cisco, HP, Dell, and IBM. We're also an authorized reseller of Dell. Along the way, over those last number of years, we developed an internal repair business, which we can offer to clients as well, where we repair all of those items I mentioned that we can go down to the board level, repair power supplies, other devices such as laptops and Chromebooks. And then about 10 years ago, we acquired a company in the certified tape media business that basically goes out and acquires used tape media, those cartridges that everybody remembers, and we bring those back to our facility, fully eradicate the data and resell them. And that's the business that really got us into ITAT services about 10 years ago. That company, and we still do that, has a team of people that goes onsite and does IT hardware decommissioning, onsite audits, data sanitization, secure transport, and a host of other ITAT related services. So in fact, you guys had really been sort of in the ITAT market already, and this sort of solidifies that position. It does. And we decided to pursue these certifications for a number of reasons. One, our customers started to ask for them, both on the end user side and the wholesale side. We deal direct with end users, we also go through other resellers, and we work with other ITATs as a subcontractor. And as a number of them have been paying more attention to data security and the environment, they've been asking us about these certifications. So one of the reasons we pursued these was to really be responsive to our customer requests. Another is we view it as a differentiator. Those are really confirmation of the standards that we have. Not everybody has that certification out there. More people are getting it, which is great for business and for the environment. And thirdly, it really helped us improve our processes in certain areas and kind of raised the bar. So it was a win -win among all three of those elements. Let's dive a little deeper into ITAT. So first of all, can you explain to me what ITAT is? What does that mean? ITAT, IT Asset Disposition. It's a whole host of offerings and processes where, you know, starting if a company is looking to, you know, upgrade or refresh its data center or close something down, it needs to really find a responsible home for the used equipment, whether that's in a resale environment or in a recycling environment. Part of that involves onsite services, such as I mentioned, you know, data center decommissioning, data sanitization, whether that's onsite or at our site, the commitment to either resell these devices, which could be economically beneficial to the seller and to the purchaser, also making sure that the data is fully eradicated. But then in some cases, the data bearing devices have to be destroyed either logically or physically. And that leads us into working with responsible recyclers who can track these devices, provide certificates that they've been disposed of in an environmentally sound manner. So it's a whole host of services and processes. We don't have the time to go through that. That'd be a several day podcast, Doug, but I know we're a little bit time constrained today. Well, you know, as you can see behind me, it looks like beams of light are coming off my head, I think, but I'm actually reporting live from Las Vegas at the Mobile World Congress. Lots of carriers here, lots of enterprises, lots of interests. You know, this is a good example for this question. Why does it matter to the outside world? Why does ITAD matter to really everybody? Well, it matters, it's the biggest issue is really sustainability and protecting the environment. But there are also other elements within these certifications that are more internally oriented for the welfare of businesses and our employees. You know, if you go down the list, the R2 -V3 is really a phenomenal standard. You know, really stands for responsible recycling and reuse. Some really strict requirements on data sanitization and eradication and data security, which is a real differentiator. Part of these certifications involve several ISO standards, ISO 9001, which is a quality management standard, your world data had been ISO 9001 certified for about the last 10 years. So we renewed that one. ISO 14001 is environmental management. ISO 45001 is employee health and safety. And we're very proud of world data. We've been have a track record of over three years of accident free operation in our facility in Plymouth. And we intend to keep that going, God willing. And then the ASCDI ITED certified certification is also very important where, you know, in addition to the processes and the operational aspects that those other standards focus on, ASCDI adds to it the commitment to a code of ethics, which is unique in the industry. And every ASCDI member has to adhere to that. You know, we have stringent membership requirements for that association. And so as a long time member, as our company, a long time board member and former chairman of ASCDI, I am very proud to see our association going in that direction as well. So, you know, Neil, it sounds like this is also a great opportunity for the channels to go out there and sell a really amazing value added service. It is, Doug, you know, it helps the channel in a number of ways. One, you know, given and also end users in terms of the resale value that we can achieve for the equipment that is, you know, coming through the ITED process, you know, the highest and best use of a piece of equipment is to keep it in use. And, you know, the origin of our business was hardware resale. So our wholesalers or equipment traders know how to maximize the value of that equipment for the client, whether that's an end user client or a wholesaler or another ITED who has the end user relationship. So that is a huge advantage, I think, that World Data can deliver, given our history of being in that resale market. We're not just turning it around and flipping it on eBay or somewhere else. We can really maximize value. So, you know, Neil, it also sounds like, you know, channels should be really alert to this because if you're working with customers and you're in the course of sales and working with them, you're pulling out equipment, you are really not doing them a service if you're disposing of it incorrectly. That's correct. And so by virtue of the processes we've always had, plus now with the new certifications, you know, we're disposing of everything appropriately. You know, items that can be reused will be reused and resold at the maximum value we can get. Items that are no longer suitable for reuse will be recycled in a proper manner. And so, you know, channel partners can trust us as they've trusted us with, you know, other areas of business since 1987 to do the right thing and to uphold, you know, the environmentally sound and business sound practices. Another advantage we can offer is additional resources and feed on the street. You know, some of these ITAT opportunities are, you know, to use a technical term, lumpy. You know, they're not necessarily regular. And if a project comes up where a channel partner needs additional resources, whether that's feed on the street or processing capability, warehousing or logistics, we can offer that through our facility in Plymouth, Minnesota, from a facilities perspective. But we can also send our team, you know, anywhere in the country to help with onsite projects. You know, Neil, with regard to the end users of the enterprises, we're living at a time of great transition, hybrid companies getting rid of whole floors of office space and all the equipment on those floors. Sounds like enterprises need to be alert to this too. They do. And hopefully, you know, with the movement toward ESG and environments, you know, social aspects, governance, I think more enterprises are becoming aware of this. In fact, they're adopting goals along these lines. So we're here to help in terms of achieving those particular goals. And again, it's the right thing for the business. There are certain business objectives that can be met and environmental objectives that can be met. Does – you said when we were preparing for a podcast today that it even has some opportunities for the other ITAT companies. The benefit we could offer to other ITAT companies is, as a subcontractor, we can facilitate your broader reach, the processing capability that we have, the resale capability that we have to maximize value, relationships we have with responsible recycling partners, and also logistics. We have a facility in the upper Midwest that is very convenient to several major cities, can help reduce costs of transportation for this equipment. You know, we can't – if we can ship it via ground versus air, for example, or the closer it is, we can go pick it up with our own people on secure trucks and that sort of things. We can help reduce costs and increase their reach and provide a better service to the end -user enterprise customers that the other ITATs have. So Neil, you were telling me something very interesting that is unique about WTPI amongst the companies in the ASCDI, maybe in the – really most of the ICAT industry as well. Well, we were fortunate, Doug, to actually buy back the company from a private equity investor about 18 months ago. And now we are 100 % owned by nine employees and we're not an ESOP. You know, these ESOPs have different kinds of restrictions. But I think it's unique in our industry that we're a fully employee -owned company of that nature. You know, many times it's founders, founder and spouse, sort of an inner circle of owners. And I'm really proud that we've been able to offer this common equity ownership to a broader range of employees. And it is unique, I believe, in our industry. And certainly our people are very revved up about that. And I'm very happy to see that. Well, Neil, you know, we've talked in our conversation today about enterprises, about channels, about different types of companies. How does everyone do business? How can we learn more about your company and these services? Well, we have our website, which has extensive content on that and contact information. Feel free to email me, neil .ville at wdpi .com. That might be on the screen later, maybe not. But I'm in the ASCDI directory. I'm on LinkedIn. We have a great team of people, too, who I could direct anybody to for particular, more detailed advice on resale, valuation of products and that sort of thing. But certainly please contact us in whatever is easiest method for you out there. And we'd be happy to help. Well, Neil, I really want to thank you for joining me today. This has been really interesting. I hope you get to do one in a few more months and find out how everything's going. Update us on what you guys are doing. But for now, thanks very much. Thank you, Doug. Look forward to that. Appreciate the time. Thanks very much.
ACG - The Best Gaming Podcast
Fresh update on "publisher" discussed on ACG - The Best Gaming Podcast
"What about you guys? Johnny? Jim Ryan's on the phone right now. And he's like, sup, Johnny? Johnny plays live. I've been watching you for years, bro. You're the best streamer ever. I want you to run Sony for one day. Yeah, well, the problem is I have a clear conflict of interest between what would be good for Sony and what would be good for me as a consumer. Yeah, because I'm thinking straight away, open the doors to, you know, PC ports and multi platform. Open it up. Right. And play off your value, you know, because your games are amazing. People are going to want to play them wherever. And it's just more bucks for you. That's kind of that's like a whole different philosophy. Yeah. Yeah. So, Johnny, what do you do? What's your answer? He's like, you can make one big change. Would it just be console exclusivity? Day one is that would be my console day one CEO move. You know, people always say, oh, new CEO, you have to do something they want to. Yeah, right. Right. Make a difference. I would I really have a strong gut feeling that that would be a winning strategy because I don't think this day and age anybody is, what would you say? Tied to one device, if you think about it. And I know here, you know, fanboys, right, and wars and all this. But really, when it comes down to it, I think it's all because of game exclusivity. And I think that if you put, you know, Spider-Man or whatever on the Xbox and PC, you're saying roll it out to become a publisher. Yeah. In true form. Just open up the games. And my gut feeling is you would make a lot more money that way. Now I get that it's not just about money, too. They want to, you know, yeah, you know, have the market share right for the console sales and all that. So that's where I would just bid ignorance and talk to the numbers people. But that would be in my play. All right. That's a strong play. Somebody said you'd be fired the next day. Well, he only has tired. He doesn't care. He doesn't care. This is one day. Silver, do you have anything that like you would want to drive forward for Sony if you if you ran it for one day? Yeah, I mean, there. There are two sides of it, right? There's the there's what you would do for corporate and what you would do like morally or whatever, which would be akin to what you get. You get the one. What's yours morally? What's the one? I mean, that would be that would be akin to Johnny. I mean, that's something I think I've talked about before where I think Microsoft has sort of paved the way for that in terms of like the ecosystem that you have there across Xbox and PC and other platforms like devices with them, but the streaming and the cloud and stuff like that. I think that that that would be the solution going forward, like setting up a similar ecosystem, particularly because I think the Sony brand could could carry that across like Sony televisions and stuff. Right. That's true. Tied into that platform. I think that could be really, really beneficial. And I think there could be a lot of potential there and also Sony movie, like Sony pictures, Sony movies, Sony television tied all together into like an ecosystem that works and offers something and offers like an alternative to like Game Pass in that way, where maybe it's not just movies or maybe it's not just games, but you also get like a streaming service that also offers access to like movies and games and stuff on three Sony pictures or whatever.
Ethereum Daily
A highlight from Holesky Testnet Goes Live
"Welcome to your Ethereum news roundup. Here's your latest for Thursday, September 28th, 2023. Ethereum developers successfully launch the Holsky Testnet, Python Network releases a 2 .0 whitepaper, Espresso Systems and Caldera launch Vienna, and VanEck prepares to launch its ETH ETF. All this and more starts right now. The Arbitrum on Gitcoin Grants Round is now live. If you'd like to support this podcast, please consider donating by visiting ethdaily .io forward slash gitcoin. Ethereum core developers successfully launched the Holsky Testnet, a proof -of -stake testnet set to replace Squirrely. The testnet achieved finality after the 10 initial epochs. Holsky was deployed with an active validator set of 1 .4 million validators and a testnet ETH supply of 1 .6 billion at Genesys. Holsky operates on Chain ID 17000. Holsky allows anyone to join as a public validator. The initial infrastructure includes a faucet from Quicknode alongside support on the Etherscan and Beacon Chain block explorers and an RPC endpoint from ethpandaops .io. Developers can use the testnet for staking and protocol development tests. Ethereum testnets usually have a five -year lifespan. The Pythe Data Association released the Pythe Network Whitepaper 2 .0, a paper that outlines a new cross -chain model for price delivery. The paper introduces a pull oracle architecture, the PytheNet appchain for price aggregation, and describes how update fees, rewards, and governance responsibilities will be managed. The whitepaper serves as a guide for transitioning Pythe Network's implementation and status into a permissionless stage. It aims to create a self -sustaining network, attract high -quality data publishers, and compensate them with consumer -generated fees. Pythe Network provides off -chain price feed oracles with data input from participants such as exchanges and market makers. Espresso Systems and Caldera co -deployed Vienna Network, an OP -stack chain integrated with the Espresso Sequencer. The new rollup was deployed on Espresso Systems' Cortado Testnet and is publicly available for all users on the testnet's public homepage. The release also includes a bridge UI, a testnet faucet, and a block explorer. The Cortado Testnet provides fast pre -conformations and allows users to submit transactions for both the OP -stack and Polygon -ZkEVM chains. Cortado also features a catch -up mechanism. Espresso Systems plans to integrate verifiable information dispersal and a peer -to -peer fallback network in a future release. And lastly, VanEck announced plans to launch the VanEck Ethereum Strategy ETF, coined as eFute. Rather than investing directly in ETH, eFute will invest in cash -settled ETH futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. eFute itself will be listed on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The ETF is structured as a C -corp targeting long -term investors. The price of ETH rallied above $1 ,650 amid the ETF news and successful Holsky testnet launch. In other news, Optimism initiates the process of forming a security council, OP Labs outlines its dispute game design for the OP stack, and Coinbase receives regulatory approval for perpetual futures. This has been a roundup of today's top news stories in Ethereum. You can support this podcast by subscribing and following us on Twitter at ethdaily. Also subscribe to our newsletter at ethdaily .io. Thanks for listening, we'll see you tomorrow.
Mark Levin
Fresh update on "publisher" discussed on Mark Levin
"That's the way retail stores are supposed to oh the back it's in in about you know we just got it we just got it wow how many left -wing books are treated way this oh we just got it you go on barnes and noble you go to one of their shelves you see books with the fu word you know what on the covers you see all kinds of stuff on the covers you go into an library school you see books with graphics perversion point i see the marks book the democrat party hates america we can't tolerate that at barnes and noble again not every barnes and noble but too damn many of them and it's quite obvious my own barnes and noble in loudon county virginia my own barnes ten days after the book's released several days after it's announced it's number one it's in the back and let me explain something to you also when two things they come in boxes they have the title of the book and the name of the author in the box so don't you have to open the box to know what's in the box that's number one number two you'll hear people but they ordered ten thousand fifty thousand a hundred thousand copies so what you know what happens when they don't sell those publisher so it's no skin off their nose pays for that the publisher pays for that it's disgusting I'm just mentioning it to you got a lot more to cover I mean a book company a company that is is going to pretend the number one book in America doesn't exist and they're going to do more more than that when a company this big does that it's obviously trying to help other books at the same time I told you about the Musk book but the manager it's not just that is Cassidy Hutchinson's book in the back in boxes or we just got them of course not and it's not just me conservative authors have fight to this all the damn time all the time it it is amazing that I'm able to muscle through all this crap to get to number one it really is quite remarkable so many of you will go into local barns and oh yes yes it's here well where is it oh right here why isn't it over there they obviously decided that they have are more Democrats customers and who liberals than conservatives or Republicans that's it's that simple I'll be right back on this 77 WABC a is special alert to all Americans who own a vehicle with less than 200 ,000 miles with an auto warranty about to expire or no with warranty coverage at all due to a decline in the economy car shield is announcing a low -cost month to month vehicle protection plan that is now available to the public to save any driver out -of -pocket expenses on future auto repairs call now to find out how you can pay almost nothing for covered auto repairs yes you heard that correctly pay almost nothing for covered auto repairs an open phone line has been established for all drivers to call for a free quick quote call 800 -898 -6155 now drivers who are covered will not have to pay for covered repairs again this protection plan is at an all -time low drivers who activate this vehicle protection today will also receive free roadside assistance free towing and car options at no additional cost call this for your free quick quote today 800 -898 -6155 that's 800 -898 -6155 what do you have to lose call 800 -898 -6155 again 800 -898 -6155 at staples you can count on every print project being perfect and now get $50 off your print order of $150 or more offer ends exclusions and restrictions apply see an associate or visit staples .com slash print for details perfect prints guaranteed at staples. Life's full of changes and at Medical Hackensack Group Meridian we're ready for them our five -star doctors can treat everything from to chronic illness our pediatric and adult specialists are prepared for wherever you're at in life and if you're new to the
Coronavirus
A highlight from Holesky Testnet Goes Live
"Welcome to your Ethereum news roundup. Here's your latest for Thursday, September 28th, 2023. Ethereum developers successfully launch the Holsky Testnet, Python Network releases a 2 .0 whitepaper, Espresso Systems and Caldera launch Vienna, and VanEck prepares to launch its ETH ETF. All this and more starts right now. The Arbitrum on Gitcoin Grants Round is now live. If you'd like to support this podcast, please consider donating by visiting ethdaily .io forward slash gitcoin. Ethereum core developers successfully launched the Holsky Testnet, a proof -of -stake testnet set to replace Squirrely. The testnet achieved finality after the 10 initial epochs. Holsky was deployed with an active validator set of 1 .4 million validators and a testnet ETH supply of 1 .6 billion at Genesys. Holsky operates on Chain ID 17000. Holsky allows anyone to join as a public validator. The initial infrastructure includes a faucet from Quicknode alongside support on the Etherscan and Beacon Chain block explorers and an RPC endpoint from ethpandaops .io. Developers can use the testnet for staking and protocol development tests. Ethereum testnets usually have a five -year lifespan. The Pythe Data Association released the Pythe Network Whitepaper 2 .0, a paper that outlines a new cross -chain model for price delivery. The paper introduces a pull oracle architecture, the PytheNet appchain for price aggregation, and describes how update fees, rewards, and governance responsibilities will be managed. The whitepaper serves as a guide for transitioning Pythe Network's implementation and status into a permissionless stage. It aims to create a self -sustaining network, attract high -quality data publishers, and compensate them with consumer -generated fees. Pythe Network provides off -chain price feed oracles with data input from participants such as exchanges and market makers. Espresso Systems and Caldera co -deployed Vienna Network, an OP -stack chain integrated with the Espresso Sequencer. The new rollup was deployed on Espresso Systems' Cortado Testnet and is publicly available for all users on the testnet's public homepage. The release also includes a bridge UI, a testnet faucet, and a block explorer. The Cortado Testnet provides fast pre -conformations and allows users to submit transactions for both the OP -stack and Polygon -ZkEVM chains. Cortado also features a catch -up mechanism. Espresso Systems plans to integrate verifiable information dispersal and a peer -to -peer fallback network in a future release. And lastly, VanEck announced plans to launch the VanEck Ethereum Strategy ETF, coined as eFute. Rather than investing directly in ETH, eFute will invest in cash -settled ETH futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. eFute itself will be listed on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The ETF is structured as a C -corp targeting long -term investors. The price of ETH rallied above $1 ,650 amid the ETF news and successful Holsky testnet launch. In other news, Optimism initiates the process of forming a security council, OP Labs outlines its dispute game design for the OP stack, and Coinbase receives regulatory approval for perpetual futures. This has been a roundup of today's top news stories in Ethereum. You can support this podcast by subscribing and following us on Twitter at ethdaily. Also subscribe to our newsletter at ethdaily .io. Thanks for listening, we'll see you tomorrow.
Mark Levin
Fresh update on "publisher" discussed on Mark Levin
"Coming up on six oh six on bob brown remember news news never stops at w abc radio dot com radio 77 w he's here now broadcasting from the underground command post deep in the bowels of a hidden bunker somewhere under the brick and steel of a nondescript building we've once again made contact with our leader mind the van the the here are number eight seven seven three eight one three eight one one eight seven seven three eight one three eight one one the propaganda from the media even from conservative quarters on the unquote quote government shutdown is a disgusting disgrace and i want to unravel all this with you for you so we can walk through it step by so i'm glad you're here and stick with it there's a lot to cover this evening on a friday this panel i also want to thank so many of you you who are out there involved engaged so many of you have gone into these bookstores i see the numbers at every one of these outlets from barnes amazon and to noble and costco and walmart and so forth how the sales are gone be brisk the largest book outlet in america barnes and noble now first of all you folks have bought about hundreds of thousands of copies just to my books let every time i have a book that's released we have a book signing at the barnes and tyson's corner mclain virginia person i'm a who loves to read history loves to dig into history spent a lot of time at barnes and noble that will stop immediately because i want to read something to you and now we can understand why the barnes and noble sales numbers are below way below what they should person to costco wal -mart historical trends even target books a million and all the rest i get this text from a good friend today about a barnes and noble at one loudon in loudon county virginia it's a large barnes and noble they have a ton of foot traffic times and this is what this person writes me i'm standing at the barnes and noble at one loudon in loudon county which is a very big popular barnes and noble and the democrat party hates america is nowhere to be found i'll keep something something in mind this is the number one book according to bookscan in america non -fiction and fiction in the whole country and the person writes i just spoke to the manager of the barnes and noble at one loudon in loudon county virginia who couldn't find the book anywhere the books not out front it's not on the table it's the new york times bestseller list which typically has number one two three four five the barnes and noble and other retail outlets in a specific order it's nowhere the manager of the barnes and noble literally wandered around looking for it i asked him if it was possible that it was due to the title of the book so this person went all around the barnes and noble and looked and couldn't find it anywhere not even on the back shelves let alone in the front with the new york times bestseller list or any other tables it was not in the store where the customers go nowhere nowhere i then asked him to go and look for it and he went into the back into the back and lo and behold now keep in mind the book came out september 19th this is september 29 10 days ago he went in in the back the and lo and behold he just happened to open a box and just happened to say that it just happened to arrive today now we know that's a lie this book ships weeks release date and it's supposed to be up put on the shelves the books didn't just show up they stuck him in the back he later came out with about seven books in his hand and he asked and i asked him where he was going to place the number one book in the united states fiction and non -fiction he kind of gave me a stare i said said i'm perplexed since the elon musk book is prominently displayed throughout the store he told me that it was quote a company initiative unquote to put the musk boot out there to which i responded that is it possible that the levim book and title also is a company initiative not to display i also share that i quite was disappointed that barnes and noble which should be all about free exchange of ideas not prominently display the number one book in the united states and perhaps they table he said nothing now now i have the chart in front of me these sales from all these retailers and of course amazon i see them daily the day after the sales day the first week pre -orders included we sold over a hundred and twenty nine thousand hard copies copies of the book less than eight thousand at barnes and noble less than eight thousand in what is the biggest retail bookstore not talking about warehouse stores bookstore in the united states so this explains a lot when i went to the book signing a barnes and noble at tyson's corner the first sunday after it was released it i turned to my wife and i said look at all these people how come the book isn't even in the front window and there was a sort of a desk towards the back which had all all the favorite books there and so forth displayed on on the it's hard to explain but in your mind's eye you can kind of figure out what i'm saying there was spoke there where was uh... but yet my books not there and i'm signing my book there and you ought to hear all the excuses people give me all that well through no they didn't no they didn't well each store manager makes the decision themselves apparently not always when they're getting directives about which books to promote ladies and gentlemen how the hell could the number one book in the united states of america fiction or non -fiction or combined cover and ebook not be found anywhere in the barnes and noble store the guy in goes the back he brings out seventy so we just got the box today how is that possible pop i think the book business and the numbers nationwide they don't lie that doesn't mean every barnes and noble is doing it but it means it's a significant number are the title of the book how dare you write this book the democrat party hates america so let me just say this i'm not to telling boycott you anything i'm telling you about me i am never walking into a never pen period ever and they can stick every one of books my up there you know what the amount of money that we have made for that company for us i don't give a damn what publishers think i don't give a damn what i don't care censorship yeah right i don't want to hear the lies oh it just arrived today liar oh these are local decisions well we just heard the musket book decision was a national decision liar and here's the great thing there's a lot of retail out there lot of stores amazon and who are breaking their asses to make sure this book is on the shelves i do understand i do understand that there are many who don't want you to read it i got it trust me and i do the biggest number one book in even so -called allies oh we're gonna interview this one we're gonna interview this one but not this the title's too hot the book's too hot the book's hot how about what's being done to this country that's too hot in my view i'm not telling you to do anything that's not what i do in regards to this sort of thing i'm telling you what i'm doing now once a week i go to costco why i like their hot dogs that's why my wife likes their power bars or whatever it is i go in there so i went in there today to get my hot dog there they are displayed nobody's riding nobody's boycotting free speech they're one big table there it is on the table it looks like it's selling pretty well there that's it
Game Dev Unchained
A highlight from 0332: Get Your Game Published with Jay Powell
"What's up everybody, welcome to another episode of Game Dev Unchained, the number one game development podcast about game development and the lifestyle thereof. I am your host, Brandon Pham, and with me, an old friend, Jay Powell. Hey Brandon, it's good to be back, man. All right, man. This is the part of the podcast where I ask our guests, which is yourself, a little bit about yourself, where you've been, where you're at, where you're heading before we get into it. So where I've been 25 years on the business side of games. So a bit of a background. I started out as an agent, did some of the very first publishing deals for Paradox and the People Can Fly, Starbreeze, did that for a little while. Then we transitioned that into a casual game publisher, which I ran the acquisitions and built the distribution network for, did that for about three more years and left to start what we would now call a production firm, but a production studio. But back then, no one knew what that was. So developers thought we were publishers and publishers thought we were developers, and we were truthfully just in the middle of coordinating everything. Did that for three years, and then I founded the Powell Group. And so there's two sides of my world now. One is the Powell Group consulting side, which we do everything from helping developers find publishers to scouting games for publishers and investors and doing audits on projects. Basically, if it revolves around the business side of the industry, we do something with it. But then my pride and joy is indie game business, which we started probably five years ago at this point. That just had years of frustration with no one teaching developers how to do business and finally just said, okay, never mind, I'll do it myself. And with the help of Dan, aka Indie, on Twitch, we started a small little Twitch channel that every week we sat down and did interviews or sessions or Q &A talking about the business, the marketing, the licensing side of things. And then that grew into a big Discord channel. We've got close to 6 ,000 industry professionals in that now. And we turned the Twitch channel into a podcast, which made everything even bigger. And so now we stream every week on YouTube, which LinkedIn and Facebook, plus it's live on our Discord. But the big thing is every single session we've ever done, every conference session, every podcast with experts in the industry, it's all 100 % free. We don't lock anything behind a vault or something like that. You just go to our YouTube page. And if you want to learn about business, marketing, licensing, how to build a pitch deck, all of that stuff is right there and it's free.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Whitepaper: The emergence of Automation and AI for Customer Service, Podcast
"This is Doug Green, and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller, and I'm very pleased to have with us today Blair Pleasant. Blair, thank you for joining us today. Thanks, Doug. Good to be here. I'm glad to see you again. And we also have with us Anna Baker of EnReach. Anna, thank you for joining me today. Hi, Doug. Thank you for hosting us. We're going to be talking about one of my favorite topics, actually two of my favorite topics, automation and AI. And we're going to be talking specifically about a new white paper that just came out a couple of weeks ago, the emergence of automation. And we're going to be sort of diving into this topic. What I like about what we're going to be talking about this morning is, you know, everybody, literally, everybody is talking about AI and automation nonstop. Here we're going to be talking about it in a practical manner. We're going to talk about how it actually can be applied in the field for contact centers and other applications as well. So before we dive into that, Anna, you know, I think our readers and listeners and so on see EnReach all the time, but tell us briefly what your company does. OK. Yeah. So EnReach is a unified communication provider in Europe. We're one of the biggest players there. And we provide our communication services through partners to the smaller and medium businesses. And on the other hand, we also have integrated communication solutions for for Salesforce or for Microsoft, which we provide to the bigger companies and my team as part of EnReach. We focus on the AI part. So we've built a conversational AI platform, which we're probably going to talk about a bit today. And the idea, basically, that you guys have been talking about for a while is actually using AI, making it work for companies, for applications and so on. Am I right about that? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. The thing we discussed with Blair is we showed some cases in which we use AI to fully automate certain conversations. I think one of the examples in the white paper is about a taxi company. You can imagine how narrow these conversations typically are about people ordering taxis and how AI can really help smoothen that process or even completely automate the process. So, you know, staying with that for a second and maybe before and after, how do businesses perceive AI? Is it still an unknown or is it becoming more known? I think it's becoming more known. I mean, if you if you open LinkedIn, you can't get away from AI. And most people have played with with things like chat GPT. So in that sense, it's known. I think the thing that is still unknown is what I can do once you connect it to the data of your company. So where in chat GPT, if you chat with it, you can ask general questions. Once you connect it to the data of your company, you can ask really specific questions and get specific answers. I think this is where you now see a lot of applications is pulling the generic AI conversational AI functionality into the company space and connect it with the company's data. So, Blair, you know, in starting to work on this, how is the digital world of social media smartphones and apps impacted customer service? Yeah, basically, customers want to be able to interact with companies and brands, you know, how they want and when they want. They don't want to have to go through multiple IVR menus before they can reach an agent or get the information that they want. And more and more people are using tools like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger for all types of things. And they expect to be able to use those channels for customer service as well now. And mainly, you know, people want to be able to get service when they need it, how they need it, you know, not just during business hours. And they're really tired of, you know, the IVR and they want more intuitive ways of interacting with organizations. And one thing is that, you know, we're finding the use of, you know, social media and apps and, you know, all these other things. It's going across demographics and generations. You know, people think, oh, you know, WhatsApp is just for, you know, 20 -somethings or 30 -somethings, but it's not. And so one thing I found is that, you know, regardless of age or, you know, whatever demographic, people want to use these tools and they are using these tools. You know, and staying with that for just a second, those tools are not just communication tools. They're emerging as basically a marketplace. They're the shopping mall. They're the place, especially in many parts of the world, where people transact everything from a haircut to buying a pair of shoes. Exactly. Yeah. So people are used to using these tools and these apps. So why shouldn't they be using it for customer service as well? And then and so, you know, businesses need to really think about this. They need to make that a part of their culture and not just something that's onto the side. Am I right about that? Oh, absolutely. And we're definitely starting to see it. You know, what used to be something kind of separate is now becoming part of organizations workflows and really the way that they do business. Santa, in customer engagement settings, how do you determine which processes are better suited for automation and which should be handled by live agents, which should be handled by live engines or maybe machine? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's all to do with whether customers allow these conversations to be automated. So if you're doing a really goal oriented conversation and it's short, you typically allow, they typically won't mind an automated process. And also from the other side, having short and narrow conversations are a lot easier to automate. And as the conversation gets longer, we see AI struggle with keeping consistent conversation and we'd rather have a human in the loop and an agent taking the conversation while the AI is supporting the agent in that conversation. Did I hear you say the word frustrate? Yeah, I think there still is a lot of frustration. I think there's frustration with the fact that the customers just want to get to an agent as quick as possible. On the other end, they're in the queue and there's many other customers trying to get to the agent. And our role is to make sure that those conversations that are, that can be automated, that can be routed more efficiently, are routed more efficiently so that we free up time for those lengthier conversations that do need agents. This sounds like it's a complicated thing. In other words, we have to make a number of important decisions if you're a company in applications about which calls go where. Yeah, typically it starts with kind of a routing. We ask people their intent, why people are calling or why people are reaching out. And based on that, we make a decision whether to see if we can help them by self service and automated service or whether we directly route to the to an agent. Because a certain conversation that doesn't make sense to try and automate you only frustrate. So let's stick with this frustration thing, because I think, you know, by the time someone's actually contacting a contact center, they're pretty frustrated sometimes. And so I need to I mean, Blair, I need to ask, is AI sometimes seen as a cost reduction tool? And can that be a problem? For some organizations, it is seen as a cost reduction tool. And down the road, I think more and more it will be. But I think right now, organizations are looking at it as a way to improve the service that they provide to customers. And you know, customers are demanding self service. You know, we know that, you know, again, across generations, across age groups, people want that self service capability and to be able to get what they need when they need it without having to, you know, wait in queue for an agent. So whatever organizations can do to help enhance self service is really seen as a benefit right now. And AI is really helping enhance those self service capabilities. And it's also helping agents be more productive when customers do talk to the agents. So I think it is seen as a cost reduction, but I think a lot of organizations are really seeing it as a way to provide better self service capabilities to customers and then also to enhance the agent performance and the agent's ability to answer and resolve the customer's issue when the customer does talk to the agent. You know, a lot of people talk about, you know, being able to replace their agents and saving money that way. But right now, it's really about agent augmentation. It's not about replacing agents and saving money that way. It really is about giving the agents the tools that they need to be more effective and to provide better service to customers. So down the road, yeah, we're going to see, you know, cost reductions based on lowering, reducing the number of agents. But right now, it's really about helping agents be more effective and helping customers get those self service capabilities that they want. Is it also about improving brand loyalty? Oh, absolutely. You know, if customers can get the information that they want, when they want it, how they want it, then that's definitely going to improve brand loyalty and customer loyalty. No doubt about that. But, you know, you were talking about frustration before. If it's a frustrating experience to customers and they can't get the information, then that impacts customer loyalty negatively. So that's why having the right tools that can really assist agents and assist customers is so important. So Blair, are consumers becoming more accepting of automated and self service environments? I'd say yes and no. You know, consumers really want to use self service and studies that I've done show that the large majority of customers will try self service before reaching out to a contact center. But that being said, a lot of people get really frustrated with automated and self service applications that can only answer specific types of questions and they don't always work as advertised. You know, I think the first generation of chatbots really didn't work very well. And customers got very frustrated, you know, frankly, personally, I hated using chatbots for the longest time because the experience was really bad. You know, it didn't provide the right answers. And half the time it didn't understand the questions. It didn't know where I was coming from. And a lot of people just gave up and stopped using this first generation. But I'd say in the past year or so, or maybe two years, the technology really has improved. And we have more conversational AI tools that do understand the questions and can provide better responses. And this is just going to keep getting better with generative AI that lets you ask questions in a more natural way and provide better responses that are easy to understand. So yes, it's been frustrating, but I think customers are becoming more accepting and will be as the technology keeps improving. So you know, Anna, you know, AI is usually perceived, I think, as a large enterprise solution. Is that correct? Can it be used with medium sized companies or even smaller companies? Yeah, I think the answer is yes and no. It's still a big topic. Integrating your data, integrating your system with AI is a lot of work. And enterprises spend a lot of money on that. And that's something that is hard for smaller businesses to replicate. On the other hand, providers like ourselves have already pre -integrated AI into the core of communication, which makes it the solution that is also achievable for those smaller players. Think about taking your IVR experience and upgrading it to a voice IVR, where instead of having to listen to the menu, you can just say, I have a question about my invoice, and the IVR system routes you to the right department. And this is something that we've basically built out of the box as a turnkey solution now. And with these large language models, it's also a lot easier to train and model for your company. So there are definitely solutions we see that are within reach for the smaller and medium businesses.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Intelligent Assistant to Manage Salesforce Orgs with AI, Launched, Metazoa Podcast
"This is Doug Green, and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller, and I'm very pleased to have with us today Jennifer Mercer, who is the CEO of Metazoa. Jennifer, thank you for joining me today. Thanks for having me. So you guys are a pioneering Salesforce tool developer, and you have a very interesting AI announcement. Why don't you tell us about what you just released? Okay, so yes, we are a Salesforce ISV partner. We work with Salesforce's largest customers, Fortune 100, Fortune 500, and we've been around for a little while working with automation on technical debt cleanup, org splits, mergers, But recently, obviously, we've launched something with AI, it's very exciting, we're very excited about it. When as soon as ChatGPT released our developer version 3 .5, we just went heads down and started working on it with our product. It is all throughout our product. We work with Salesforce as org management, and it is very practical, it has very practical uses for that. It's just the nature of org management and the nature of our solution in general. It just works very well. So we launched our metadata studio, which is a, it has your intelligent assistant. And we have our prompt engineering platform, which has over 100 prebuilt prompts that can be edited, and Salesforce admins and developers can also create their own prompts and share them with their teammates. So, Jennifer, if you're using Salesforce, why do I need this tool? So, Salesforce orgs, it is well known that there's been a lot of development and innovation, which is great, but that left a very complex, messy org behind. And these customers are dealing with crippling amount of technical debt, they're hitting all their apex limits. They're struggling to even find the technical debt or detangle it, it's very difficult to do that. So when we launched Metazoa, we started tackling that problem. And we created, everybody's using the same set of APIs, except for we created our own dependency API. So we can see a lot more than Salesforce or any of the other partners or any of the GSIs where the customers can see. And we work with Salesforce customers to really get in there and find, for example, there's kept hitting their apex limits. And Salesforce raised the limit, they hit the limit, they raised the limit, they hit the limit, they're about to hit the limit again, Salesforce said no more, you got to figure this out. They have worked with the GSI for about two years, nothing was done, it didn't move the needle. They sent us in there, we were able to create a report to find all the forgotten assets of apex classes, find out which ones were being used, which ones hadn't been used in years, which ones were dummy classes. And our reports are actionable within the product. So you go in there and you find all that, then you can go and actually remove it in product. So it's not just giving you a report and then you go back into your org and try to do that manually. It's all automated. So our goal was to automate all of these services that these customers are trying to do themselves or use cobbled together products to do this for release management and DevOps, or they're going to a GSI or an SI partner to try to do it manually.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Beyond the dashboard: HumanFirst uses AI to offer a highly customized view, enabling better decisions, Podcast
"This is Doug Green and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller and I'm very pleased to have with us for the first time, Greg Whiteside, who's the co -founder and CEO of Human First. Greg, thank you for joining us today. Thanks, Doug. It's a pleasure to be on your show. Well, as I was just mentioning in our run up to recording this podcast, it's very rare for me to be able to do a podcast where the word human is anywhere in the title of even the podcast or the title of the company or anywhere. So that's a kind of refreshing new things. You're a relatively new company. You're in the AI field, but I think you're doing something very interesting and exciting in the AI world. So we're going to be jumping in on that and looking at that in just a second. But first, what is Human First? Human First is a data productivity suite for text and conversational data. So we help teams make sense of large amounts of unstructured data and turn it into very actionable insights that help drive their product and strategy, and also build AI projects faster by leveraging the data that they have. Now, you said something I haven't heard before in our discussion before we started our podcast, the search for use case zero. What's that all about? So I was talking about use case zero in the context of large language models and specifically how enterprise can leverage large models today in repeatable use cases. So since the since chat GPT came out, Human First, like all companies, looked at the impact that it would have on us and where things were moving. We had a lot of great insights already in terms of the conversational AI, and in general, text AI, and started really trying to understand what is the most repeatable high value use case that we believe any enterprise customer can apply large language models to today. We've heard from our customers and from a lot of other companies that this is a very high priority for them, their boards, you know, to show that they're embracing and that they're leveraging this technology. But a lot of the use cases that we saw were very experimental and hard to, you know, hard to do in a repeatable way. So we've been really focused on making sure that we understand what is the most repeatable high value use case. And this use case zero, we think, is really around using large language models today to make sense of large amounts of unstructured data in ways that weren't possible before with technologies like natural language understanding or, you know, even even more basic than that keyword search or semantic search. So you were telling me that your your major customers consist actually of enterprises, is that right? Yep, that's right. So we work with customers across all verticals from financial sector to medical sectors to telcos. And we work also with a lot of consulting management companies and agencies. So Greg, why did they turn to you? So our customers all share the same problem. They're interested in building and improving their customer experience with automations with AI. Some of them have deployed and productized some products, and they reach a certain point where they realize that the AI models are not the limiting factor anymore. It's the quality of the data that they're preparing and that they're using to train the AI that becomes a bottleneck. So our tool helps those teams really work efficiently on that unstructured data and make it very useful for training AI. Now with large language models, what we're understanding as well is that it's not just about training AI and building automation. If you can help organizations make better prioritization calls around what should be automated, what are the problems that can be solved with AI, and what is the best way to tackle those problems, you can see even bigger efficiency gains. So we're helping teams not only improve the quality and the speed with which they develop AI, but also make better decisions in terms of what should be automated by starting from the ground truth, which is in their voice of the customer and other conversational channels. So Greg, could you give me an example of maybe where you started working with an enterprise customer and sort of before and after kind of thing? Yeah, absolutely. So one of our customers is one of the largest last mile delivery companies, not only Canada, they're also working in the United States. So they're very strong partners with Amazon, do thousands of deliveries every day, and their contact center staffed by humans and with very little automation. So they came to us because they know that in certain periods of the year, there's a lot of influx of calls, and ultimately, they want to improve the customer experience and the automation levels. But they weren't sure, like a lot of call centers out there, exactly what the problems are, but mostly be able to prove out almost the business case for those and the ROI before even starting the project. So what we saw is they really wanted to have a data driven kind of approach to identifying what are the top opportunities for automation or product improvements, because it's not all about AI, it's also about identifying, you know, opportunities within the operations or product itself. So with Human First, we're able to ingest all of their contacts and all their call data, and very, very quickly build a very custom taxonomy of the call drivers, but also more deeply than that, the resolutions, actions taken by agents within the calls, you know, with the use of large language models, which allow us to do this analysis at a higher level than, you know, the raw unstructured data itself. And this allowed us to bring, you know, to surface some really, really key insights around some major blockers or friction points that affected, you know, over 30 % of the calls that they had, that with simple automation that we can show the functionality of, because we have all the flows and the edge cases in the conversations to show how you would solve it, you know, leads to a very big reduction in terms of time spent by the agents. So this is the type of project where, you know, with the right data -driven tools like Human First, you can start from the data and look for opportunities or problems to solve. And we did this really successfully with this last mile delivery company, and they're currently automating those flows that we brought to them and expect, you know, millions in ROI from that work. Now, was there an impact, let's go a little bit deeper on this, was there an impact on employee experience? Let's start there on EX. Yeah, so to be transparent, so the part of the project and what we bring is really this data -driven decision engine saying, here are the opportunities, here's the detailed, you know, analysis showing what are the different ways that you're going to need to be able to automate this particular, you know, within the contact center platform, which happens to be Amazon. So I'll be able to report on the, you know, end user experience from that particular project probably within a few weeks. Right. And that'll be the CX part, the customer experience part. Exactly. Yeah. You know, stepping back from that specific example, though, it sounds like this is the human part, that the human being that called in, the human being that's actually taking the call, the idea basically is everybody's having a better experience due to the automation. Is that the idea? Everyone is having a better experience if the friction points that can be, you know, within that conversation avoided, you know, lead to higher quality interactions afterwards. So to give an example, for this customer, I was talking about a really big part of the conversations was about figuring out the customer's ID and validating the user. And there's really, you know, much easier ways to do that than via human conversation. But it doesn't mean that the rest of the conversation can't be human to human. In certain cases, it's necessary. So, you know, Greg, how does this offer value to the enterprise at the end of the day? We're seeing enterprise really need to look at their data under a very custom lens. What we're solving in a sense is that a lot of the a lot of the products out there that help companies make sense of their data are very top down in black box, in a sense, they're really favoring speed and simplicity, kind of like a one click, put in your data one click, and will give you visualizations and dashboards. What we know is that that's not very actionable. And the reason is that those dashboards and insights are very hard to tailor automatically to your specific business and needs. So with a tool like ours, the real value prop is that we help build an extremely custom view into what's happening within the organization. And that in turn helps drive really data driven decisions and identify opportunities that you might not even have known you had. And we're really going from a lens where AI is a tool, but not every problem should be solved by AI. In certain cases, improving the product itself or parts of the operation will have a much bigger impact than automating the customer's requests later on. So what ultimately we want to help companies do is almost replace the customer support by fixing identifying and fixing problems upstream. And that's really done when you're able to have such a very custom understanding of what's going on and the data to back up the solutions to solve them. So that was very interesting that the ROI eventually is really maybe in the finding out of something you weren't even looking for. Exactly. And I think that's where our tool is very agnostic to the use case you apply it to. You can apply it to explore data, to improve AI training data, and to apply exploration to different types of data. And it's true that I think the biggest ROI you can bring to an enterprise is to help them tap into something like that data that they were never leveraging before. And that has a multiplicative effect, I would say, within the organization. And organizations that we're working with are building this data practice of centralizing their data and of disseminating kind of the value across different projects. And I think it's hard sometimes to measure the direct ROI of that. But clearly, we believe that it's this data that holds a lot of value for enterprise companies moving forward. Well, Greg, I really want to thank you for joining us and giving us a first look at Human First, and an interesting look at doing AI a little bit differently and approaching this challenge in a very different way. Where can we learn more about Human First? Yeah, I invite you to come to our website, www .humanfirst .ai, reach out to our team, there's a contact us button. And yeah, we'll be very, very happy to run you through the platform and to talk about your needs. Well, I hope to hear more good things from Human First in the future. I hope we do get to do this again and get an update on what you guys are doing. But for now, I want to thank you for joining us today. Thanks, Doug. It was a real pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Cybersecurity attack on MGM may have begun with a ten-minute phone call: How it happened, Special Mutare Podcast
"This is Doug Greenan, I'm the publisher of Telecom Resiller, and I'm very pleased to have with us once again Chuck French of Mutari. Chuck, thank you for joining me today. Doug, a pleasure. Thank you. Well, we're, you know, we have talked in the past about cyber security, and of course on this podcast series, we've been doing a lot of work on that all year long, but this time I think it's a little bit less abstract. We're doing this literally while, even as we're recording this, MGM hospitality company is being basically hacked. You can't make a reservation on their line. There's still many operational problems that they're having. So we have the spectacle of one of the world's richest and most well -prepared companies, you know, having basically an episode about which we've talked about many times in this program. So Chuck, we're going to be sort of diving into that to find out, you know, what that's all about. And if anything can be done by, you know, the rest of us who are maybe in companies that have fewer resources, less visibility and so on. But what is Mutari? Well, Mutari is a 30 -year -old, not just more than 30 years old, but we're an independent software vendor, been focused in business communication software for all those years. We're based in Chicago, 400 enterprise customers. We enjoy a pretty good reputation for building great software and supporting it in the way that our customers enjoy, very little turnover of our employees, our customers, our partners. And as an organization, we're buying the company right now through an employee stock ownership. And I tell people this every time I meet them, because I think it's important. We're aligned and we're the most aligned company you've ever spoken to, Doug. And we're aligned around buying the company, but with a specific purpose. We need to do it around solving a problem. And then for the last couple of years, we are focused on being the leader in voice threat defense, which is why this conversation is so timely. You know, before we get off the topic of your company's core identity, I understand Mutari is actually a Latin word. Yes, it means to change in Latin. So think mutant, mutate. I always have to remind myself of that to make sure I'm saying Mutari. Pretend you're an Italian person saying Mutari, right? It's Latin for to change. And at first, I didn't know what to make of the name because everybody has a hard time with it. But I really do think it's more apt today than ever because this world, by the day, changes faster and faster and faster. And we know how to respond to that. We're agile a company that still acts like a perpetual startup. Well, let's talk about today because as we were just discussing before we started our podcast, and I'm sure a lot of our watchers, listeners are paying close attention to this. I am really just dazzled as much as we've talked and talked with you and many other people about the cybersecurity threat. I think very few of us imagined that what you guys have been telling us in terms of, gee, guys, you know, this could be really bigger than anyone could imagine. Well, here we are. It's seven days. It's still unfolding. I welcome anybody to go to our website and look in the resources column for all the content we put out there around this specific topic. Long -form articles about all of this, statistics, everything you'll ever want to know about the voice. And I'll bring it back to voice, Doug, because you didn't mention it yet. But, you know, the MGM ransomware attack, the cybersecurity attack that's happened has really brought MGM to its knees. You mentioned people can't make reservations. People can't get into the rooms right now, right? You can't, machines are not working. You know, from some estimates, MGM right now, because their systems are all offline, is losing somewhere between $3 million and $7 million a day and $1 million in pure cash. So those would be revenue and a million in cash every day because of this. And why this is so interesting to our firm is because the catalyst for all of this was a voice call. It was a telephone call from someone into the IT area, the customer service area of the IT department at MGM that allowed the bad actors to get the credentials necessary to put their software in, to allow them to take control of all of MGM, a voice call. So how about that? Well, you know what, it's very interesting because for those of you who are movie fans and like the Ocean's Eleven series, not the original with Frank Sinatra, but the more recent one from 20 years ago, there was, for those of you who are telecom fans, there was a PBX hack in that. That was part of what they did. And that was still in the era when the PBX was mostly a non -integrated system, a separate system running alongside the rest of IT. And of course, in the last 20 years, that's been departed. And now, you know, that call presumably occurred on the same set of servers, I think, that a lot of this is happening. Yeah. So, you know, so let's dive into this. So this is exactly what happened. This apparently started with a phone call. And then you were telling me that once they got in, they were able to do sort of some sort of horizontal thing. Tell me more about that, what that means. Yeah. And so I'll provide a little context around that. These are not people who, you know, stumbled upon this and, oh, I was able to get the credentials and so forth. These are large, large, sophisticated organizations, virtual organizations that are all over the world. And when I say sophisticated, and I know I've mentioned this in the past, these are, they have HR departments. They have areas where they can adjudicate conflicts. They have health plans in these organizations and they have specialization. So oftentimes what happens, and if you were to go on the dark web, you know, you can actually purchase some of these things. You can purchase the software to be able to enact these things. But there's just like in a hospital, right? You might have people whose job is the anesthesiologist, then you have the physicians and you have the nurse. They have that regarding ransomware attacks. So are there things called initial access brokers, people whose sole job is to be able to get access to a system. And that might be where their job ends. They sell that, they sell that and they put that in the marketplace. Another group picks it up, say, we're going to be the group now harvests us. That means they take the credentials and they go laterally and they infiltrate systems throughout an organization. They don't do anything. They lay late for a little while. I want to make sure that if you're backing up the copies, they're in the backups, all of their software is there. They lay in there. And then ultimately there comes a day when they say we're going to attack. And that's when someone, and I'm sure you've seen these before the screen pops up, you know, someone, some administrator that, you know, we have your data. You know, here's the information. Send some, you know, so much Bitcoin to so and so. Well, the encrypt your files and destroy them and still proof of life, if you will, to that end, and then you can continue on your way. So, yes, to answer your question, they received through three socially and through social engineering, a customer service person. It's this organization and they this group they call swirly spiders. I forget. I forget the name of these. Yeah. Yeah. They they. Yeah, that's right. That's right. They went ahead and then got access and told MGM that they had their systems in and ultimately MGM ignored them. And guess what happened to MGM when they didn't take this group seriously, everything that we're talking about today.
VUX World
A highlight from Why messaging should be part of your content strategy, with Nick Martin
"Yeah, I would probably first just say I don't know that those are binary, and I don't know that they're black and white. It's one or the other. But forced to choose, I think we're much closer to the former than the latter in the sense of the experiences that we power and that we're continuing to invest in being able to build out are always starting from a place of how do we best take advantage of our publishers content, which is written by humans. And then we think that's a really important ingredient here and leverage what's happening around AI and make it really easy for the publisher to maybe convert their content, maybe augment their content, but in one form or another enhance it, make the experience more interactive, more user -friendly, more personalized, more relevant through chat as the interface that we're building around. And so in that sense, content is the core of it. It's about the stories you've written, the things your journalists have researched, the articles you're publishing, and the topics that your readers are already on your site for. You already have this audience, and certainly a big part of what we do is getting you a new audience by distributing these chatbots in other platforms where maybe you didn't have a presence before because these are chat endemic environments like this one. Again, things are moving so quickly here, and the opportunities are so broad. There is sort of a spectrum, I think, between example A and then this companion assistant version of my AI or Chashi BT or what like the promise I think of Siri and Alexa was back in the day. And I do think things can move that direction even for content companies. And we've assisted for their content a librarian that's personalized to every reader. We've gotten those analogies in sort of private meetings from publishers that we're working with and talking to, and there's ways to take advantage of our platform to deliver that experience. I do think it's still different than what you would see from my AI on Snap where it's more or less, and not to diminish it, I think they've done tremendously well despite some of the challenges that you alluded to. It's more or less the Chashi BT experience, right? It's a wrapper on an LOM. It's broad and horizontal. It's anything that was made available in training data from the public internet. We refine what we do to the publisher's content so it's specific and targeted and accurate. But we're also not trying to drive the I'm your best friend, tell me about your problems, let me recommend a restaurant to you. If you're chatting with a sports publisher, you're not going to ask them for where to go get pizza Friday night, right? But you can imagine over time, maybe that sports publisher does help you find the best sports bars to watch the game, and maybe there's a commercial opportunity underneath that by way of referral or advertising or otherwise. And so it'll continue to evolve. I think if you look at what's happening in the very, very early days around the agent behavior, that also becomes quite compelling and might put a task underneath it, which they're going to be able to do pretty quickly here. But that's not ready for prime time for all types of publishers, the world's biggest, most reputable brands just yet. Yeah, yeah. And so a lot of your publishers, the large publishers, they've got lots of different ways of monetizing what they do. Some of them are subscription based. You mentioned like ESPN and so they've got like TV channels and subscriptions and all kinds of stuff going on.
Telecom Reseller
Major hotel property takes service to next level with E-Metrotel Galaxy Expand, Podcast - burst 1
"This is Doug Green, and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller, and I'm very, very pleased to have with us today Yash Gauda, who's the General Manager of Marriott Courtyard in Brampton, Ontario, which is in the Greater Toronto Area. Yash, thank you very much for joining me today. Pleasure, pleasure, Steve. Thank you. Well, you know, this is something I don't get to do that often. Instead of my usual interview of people that are professionals inside the telecommunications market and the IT market, this time we're bringing our listeners and watchers a special podcast of somebody very special who runs an organization, runs a hospitality organization in a major metropolitan area, and basically can give us some insight on the impact of how a change in the use of technology impacted the function of that technology itself and also helped the organization overall. So we're going to be getting into that in just a second. What we will be talking about specifically is how eMetroTel's GalaxyExpand replaced a previous Mitel product. So Yash, you're the General Manager of the Marriott Courtyard, and your hotel basically implemented this new phone system. Can you tell us a little bit about your Marriott facility? Yeah, sure, Steve. Again, my name is Yash, the General Manager at Marriott Courtyard, Brampton Hotel, and we are one of the biggest hotels in Brampton in terms of rooms or inventory. We have 160 rooms with a huge banqueting space. So we are one of the upscale hotels in Brampton. So that's very interesting. You're a very prominent property. It's something that people like to use and so on. So you know, what I want to understand a little bit to begin with is, why did you make this change? Oh, the moving over to eMetroTel? Okay, this is a pretty, like, how do I say it was a coincidence that got through Joseph. So eventually we had Mitel as our telecommunication system, and all of a sudden our voice messaging system went down in the hotel. So all the back office phones or even the guest phones, if someone had to leave a message to them. So yeah, the whole system went down and we had an old partner who used to service Mitel and I was trying to reach that particular gentleman, Myron, like several times a day. And like, I think nonstop, tried reaching him at least every day for a period of 15 to 20 days. And one day, but the irony was, his phone was ringing. And one day the phone was answered and it was answered by Joseph. So then I started talking to Joseph and then I told him that I need to get in touch with Myron and this is our situation. And then I came to know that Myron had passed away and Joseph took over his accounts. So then that is the time that where I established a connection with Joseph and I briefed him on our issues that was happening in the hotel. And he immediately put me on to his other colleague, Rakshith, started to helping me out in rectifying the current issue that we had. And this is how we got into e -metro rel and they tried to resolve it remotely, but it couldn't happen because the server was down and they never knew it. So Rakshith passed by the hotel. He had a look at the entire existing system. And then I think so he did try to reach out to Mitel and see what was happening. And again, the system, since it was outdated, Rakshith and Joseph came up with a new proposal with e -metro tel and that's how it started. So it literally sounds like a very interesting story of literally going from one generation to a new generation of product and thinking and outlook. So now you're talking to basically company representing e -metro tel. So how did you end up migrating to the e -metro tel system that you chose? The first when I started communicating with Joseph and Rakshith, even though they are not one of the key players in our industry, but their integrity, their honesty in helping me out, that is what influenced me to go with them, because that is one thing that I truly believe in, even though they are getting into new without any experience having done any prior work with hotels and so on. But what influenced me was their honesty and integrity to help the clients. So that is where it started. And they gave me a couple of proposals with the e -metro tel itself and then went through the proposals with our corporate office. And the best part was, again, for us, without even redoing a lot of wiring work, just working at the back end with the server room and changing the main equipment itself. That was awesome. The interruption was bare minimal. If you don't mind, take a closer look at that, because I think all those points are very interesting one by one. So to begin with, as a customer and as a non -technical person, did you expect that there was going to be sort of a physical replacement of the same thing, one with another? Was that initially what you thought would happen? I was thinking, yes, it was going to be a swap of the machines, but when they proposed me with the different equipments and so on and what each functionality would be, then I was like, yeah, I was able to understand it much better. So I think initially this is very interesting. There's no rewiring and you were able to keep basically your bell phone lines in place. Everything was intact. Only the thing that was moved was all the Mitel equipments was switched to e -metro tel, keeping all the wiring, everything intact. So that's a lot less disruptive, probably a lot less expensive in terms of actually implementation. And then I understand that the solution that ultimately came in is basically on one rack, just one box. Yes, just one rack. Yes. Okay. And is that actually like literally the footprint smaller than whatever was there before? Oh, yes. Before, like again, this was an old system and these were like a huge system. There were multiple of them, like four or five of them, but now everything is consolerated to one. And one. And then let's talk about what you've got there. So basically it has the PBX functionality that you had before. Correct. So that is, I think we have an Infinity 5010W console and expansion, I guess. And then actually it solves the problem that initially started this whole thing. The voicemail is operating. Correct. And there's a lot less space, probably a lot less heat and energy being used. So let's sort of bump that up to how it impacts your job. Your ultimate job, I take it, is to make the people that are staying at your hotel happy. Has it really impacted that? Has it impacted your ability to do that? Yes. The important thing is like we are a hotel and the phone has to be buzzing all the time. So if the phone doesn't buzz, that means something is wrong. So earlier we had the issues where the phone was not working and so on. And even the functionality of the new console and even the back office phones are all, it's amazing. We should stay on this point because as a hotel manager, you have the burden of being, it's not just like an office, people in a sense are residing there at least for an evening or two. And so there's all sorts of safety and other issues that are involved in making sure that the phone is perfect. Correct. So, you know, e -metro hotel is a network of certified resellers. Was the migration process that you're describing, was that difficult or hard? No, no, very, very easy. To be honest, like once the new system, the back office phones were shipped to the hotel, so it was like I could install it myself with the help of Rakshith and Joseph. Because they had programmed the phones prior, I guess, and when it was shipped to us. So then again, I was with them on the call and he was guiding me how to activate it and so on. It was easy. Like me not being a technical guy, like installing the phones at the back of the offices was easy. You know, yours is a very difficult job because you're literally running a 24 -hour business, 24 hours a day, 24 -hour desk, residents are coming and going and so on. So how fast, you know, how fast did this all happen? Like the downtime, I can say about the, see, I would say the important thing is the main console. So when that was being like 10 minutes, I guess. 10 minutes? Yeah, 10 to 15 minutes. That's it. And you know, you came in to the office one morning or one afternoon. Was it the same shift that you began and then later at the end of that shift, there was a new phone system in place? Yes, it's like it was Rakshith who was there in the property from his solution. So yeah, I was with him. So he came in the morning, started working one thing at a time. And then yeah, it was the same as I came in the morning. No interruption. As I said, when the telephone, the main console was being put in place, so it's about 10 to 15 minutes for it to reboot and restart and so on. So yeah, maximum. And since this has been working, has it actually worked better for you than the old system? Yes, Ali, in terms of options -wise, yes, this has been worked out much better. So, you know, you were mentioning earlier, you gave us a little bit of background how you ended up back with the ACE security services implementing the solution. And I was interested in understanding that, you know, there was a technological and there were product choices and so on. But I was fascinated by the fact that it ultimately came down to people. Correct, yeah. It is like, see, you need to give options to the new people who are getting into entrepreneurship and so on. Because again, they have the zeal, you know, to excel. So when you go with the bigger companies, what happens is then again, the same process. It's just that, okay, the code, the shipment and all that thing and the scheduling of the people and so on. But here is a new company, ACE solution. Again, as I told you, I was fascinated even before we could get into an agreement. As I said, once the voice messages was down, Rachit was already on top to help me out even without knowing. You know, your industry is so important to so many people. It's such a big employer. It's part of everyone's lives. It's a leading organization. You also work for a leading organization in the world. You know, with all that in mind, do you have any recommendations for people in the position that you're in when it becomes time for them to replace an old system? I would strongly recommend all my fellow colleagues within the same industry and who has outdated versions of a telecommunication system and trying to upgrade their systems to the newer versions to definitely reach out to a solutions and look into e -metro tel. Yash, it's been a real pleasure getting to know you and giving us an insight that we normally don't get the perspective of a person not in the telecommunications industry, but a person actually that uses these products and services and what the outcomes were. I really appreciate your time and I hope to encounter you again. I hope to stay over some time when I'm in Brampton. Sure, sure. Anytime, Steve. It will be great to host you. All right. Well, I'm looking forward to that, but for now, thank you very much. Thank you, Steve. You take care.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Major hotel property takes service to next level with E-Metrotel Galaxy Expand, Podcast
"This is Doug Green, and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller, and I'm very, very pleased to have with us today Yash Gauda, who's the General Manager of Marriott Courtyard in Brampton, Ontario, which is in the Greater Toronto Area. Yash, thank you very much for joining me today. Pleasure, pleasure, Steve. Thank you. Well, you know, this is something I don't get to do that often. Instead of my usual interview of people that are professionals inside the telecommunications market and the IT market, this time we're bringing our listeners and watchers a special podcast of somebody very special who runs an organization, runs a hospitality organization in a major metropolitan area, and basically can give us some insight on the impact of how a change in the use of technology impacted the function of that technology itself and also helped the organization overall. So we're going to be getting into that in just a second. What we will be talking about specifically is how eMetroTel's GalaxyExpand replaced a previous Mitel product. So Yash, you're the General Manager of the Marriott Courtyard, and your hotel basically implemented this new phone system. Can you tell us a little bit about your Marriott facility? Yeah, sure, Steve. Again, my name is Yash, the General Manager at Marriott Courtyard, Brampton Hotel, and we are one of the biggest hotels in Brampton in terms of rooms or inventory. We have 160 rooms with a huge banqueting space. So we are one of the upscale hotels in Brampton. So that's very interesting. You're a very prominent property. It's something that people like to use and so on. So you know, what I want to understand a little bit to begin with is, why did you make this change? Oh, the moving over to eMetroTel? Okay, this is a pretty, like, how do I say it was a coincidence that got through Joseph. So eventually we had Mitel as our telecommunication system, and all of a sudden our voice messaging system went down in the hotel. So all the back office phones or even the guest phones, if someone had to leave a message to them. So yeah, the whole system went down and we had an old partner who used to service Mitel and I was trying to reach that particular gentleman, Myron, like several times a day. And like, I think nonstop, tried reaching him at least every day for a period of 15 to 20 days. And one day, but the irony was, his phone was ringing. And one day the phone was answered and it was answered by Joseph. So then I started talking to Joseph and then I told him that I need to get in touch with Myron and this is our situation. And then I came to know that Myron had passed away and Joseph took over his accounts. So then that is the time that where I established a connection with Joseph and I briefed him on our issues that was happening in the hotel. And he immediately put me on to his other colleague, Rakshith, started to helping me out in rectifying the current issue that we had. And this is how we got into e -metro rel and they tried to resolve it remotely, but it couldn't happen because the server was down and they never knew it. So Rakshith passed by the hotel. He had a look at the entire existing system. And then I think so he did try to reach out to Mitel and see what was happening. And again, the system, since it was outdated, Rakshith and Joseph came up with a new proposal with e -metro tel and that's how it started. So it literally sounds like a very interesting story of literally going from one generation to a new generation of product and thinking and outlook. So now you're talking to basically company representing e -metro tel. So how did you end up migrating to the e -metro tel system that you chose? The first when I started communicating with Joseph and Rakshith, even though they are not one of the key players in our industry, but their integrity, their honesty in helping me out, that is what influenced me to go with them, because that is one thing that I truly believe in, even though they are getting into new without any experience having done any prior work with hotels and so on. But what influenced me was their honesty and integrity to help the clients. So that is where it started. And they gave me a couple of proposals with the e -metro tel itself and then went through the proposals with our corporate office. And the best part was, again, for us, without even redoing a lot of wiring work, just working at the back end with the server room and changing the main equipment itself. That was awesome. The interruption was bare minimal. If you don't mind, take a closer look at that, because I think all those points are very interesting one by one. So to begin with, as a customer and as a non -technical person, did you expect that there was going to be sort of a physical replacement of the same thing, one with another? Was that initially what you thought would happen? I was thinking, yes, it was going to be a swap of the machines, but when they proposed me with the different equipments and so on and what each functionality would be, then I was like, yeah, I was able to understand it much better. So I think initially this is very interesting. There's no rewiring and you were able to keep basically your bell phone lines in place. Everything was intact. Only the thing that was moved was all the Mitel equipments was switched to e -metro tel, keeping all the wiring, everything intact. So that's a lot less disruptive, probably a lot less expensive in terms of actually implementation. And then I understand that the solution that ultimately came in is basically on one rack, just one box. Yes, just one rack. Yes. Okay. And is that actually like literally the footprint smaller than whatever was there before? Oh, yes. Before, like again, this was an old system and these were like a huge system. There were multiple of them, like four or five of them, but now everything is consolerated to one. And one. And then let's talk about what you've got there. So basically it has the PBX functionality that you had before. Correct. So that is, I think we have an Infinity 5010W console and expansion, I guess. And then actually it solves the problem that initially started this whole thing. The voicemail is operating. Correct. And there's a lot less space, probably a lot less heat and energy being used. So let's sort of bump that up to how it impacts your job. Your ultimate job, I take it, is to make the people that are staying at your hotel happy. Has it really impacted that? Has it impacted your ability to do that? Yes. The important thing is like we are a hotel and the phone has to be buzzing all the time. So if the phone doesn't buzz, that means something is wrong. So earlier we had the issues where the phone was not working and so on. And even the functionality of the new console and even the back office phones are all, it's amazing. We should stay on this point because as a hotel manager, you have the burden of being, it's not just like an office, people in a sense are residing there at least for an evening or two. And so there's all sorts of safety and other issues that are involved in making sure that the phone is perfect. Correct. So, you know, e -metro hotel is a network of certified resellers. Was the migration process that you're describing, was that difficult or hard? No, no, very, very easy. To be honest, like once the new system, the back office phones were shipped to the hotel, so it was like I could install it myself with the help of Rakshith and Joseph. Because they had programmed the phones prior, I guess, and when it was shipped to us. So then again, I was with them on the call and he was guiding me how to activate it and so on. It was easy. Like me not being a technical guy, like installing the phones at the back of the offices was easy. You know, yours is a very difficult job because you're literally running a 24 -hour business, 24 hours a day, 24 -hour desk, residents are coming and going and so on. So how fast, you know, how fast did this all happen? Like the downtime, I can say about the, see, I would say the important thing is the main console. So when that was being like 10 minutes, I guess. 10 minutes? Yeah, 10 to 15 minutes. That's it. And you know, you came in to the office one morning or one afternoon. Was it the same shift that you began and then later at the end of that shift, there was a new phone system in place? Yes, it's like it was Rakshith who was there in the property from his solution. So yeah, I was with him. So he came in the morning, started working one thing at a time. And then yeah, it was the same as I came in the morning. No interruption. As I said, when the telephone, the main console was being put in place, so it's about 10 to 15 minutes for it to reboot and restart and so on. So yeah, maximum. And since this has been working, has it actually worked better for you than the old system? Yes, Ali, in terms of options -wise, yes, this has been worked out much better. So, you know, you were mentioning earlier, you gave us a little bit of background how you ended up back with the ACE security services implementing the solution. And I was interested in understanding that, you know, there was a technological and there were product choices and so on. But I was fascinated by the fact that it ultimately came down to people. Correct, yeah. It is like, see, you need to give options to the new people who are getting into entrepreneurship and so on. Because again, they have the zeal, you know, to excel. So when you go with the bigger companies, what happens is then again, the same process. It's just that, okay, the code, the shipment and all that thing and the scheduling of the people and so on. But here is a new company, ACE solution. Again, as I told you, I was fascinated even before we could get into an agreement. As I said, once the voice messages was down, Rachit was already on top to help me out even without knowing. You know, your industry is so important to so many people. It's such a big employer. It's part of everyone's lives. It's a leading organization. You also work for a leading organization in the world. You know, with all that in mind, do you have any recommendations for people in the position that you're in when it becomes time for them to replace an old system? I would strongly recommend all my fellow colleagues within the same industry and who has outdated versions of a telecommunication system and trying to upgrade their systems to the newer versions to definitely reach out to a solutions and look into e -metro tel. Yash, it's been a real pleasure getting to know you and giving us an insight that we normally don't get the perspective of a person not in the telecommunications industry, but a person actually that uses these products and services and what the outcomes were. I really appreciate your time and I hope to encounter you again. I hope to stay over some time when I'm in Brampton. Sure, sure. Anytime, Steve. It will be great to host you. All right. Well, I'm looking forward to that, but for now, thank you very much. Thank you, Steve. You take care.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Robotext surge can undermine your organization, but can be stopped, iconectiv Podcast.
"This is Doug Green and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller and I'm very pleased to have with us today Chris Drake, who's the Senior Vice President of Corporate and Business Development at iConnective. Chris, thank you for joining me today. Thank you, Doug. Thank you for covering this topic. Well yeah, I'm awfully glad we're going to be able to get some additional news and perspective on this important topic. We have been talking about the surge in robo -texting, what's happening and how this is really impacting the ability of corporations, organizations, government, all sorts of entities to communicate, including even very small companies and so on. We're also going to be talking very importantly about what iConnective is doing and some ideas on mitigation. So, you know, before we jump into that, could you just tell me a little bit about iConnective? Certainly. iConnective is a technology company. We are involved in data as a service. We provide information around numbering intelligence, what numbers are high risk if they're trying to reach you, what numbers would be high risk if you are a telephone operator and your customer tries to call them. They might be set up with a surprise premium message that costs $9 .99 a minute and not find out until a couple months later. This is actually a thing. So, we provide things like that and then other services that relate to data tuned to digital identity in various forms. We make, we provide solutions that enable legitimate companies to be verified, to have an identity, to do that, know your customer, vetting and allow them to engage the consumer base at large and be known that they're legitimate and who they are and maybe perhaps, depending on the technology, even why are they trying to reach that audience. And then the users can make informed decisions whether to accept the call or engage the techs, which is just fraudulent. If not spam and nuisance calls, then actually scams trying to steal identity and money from the general public. We offer the short code numbers, which is another form of identity for businesses that want to engage over text messaging. This is a special type of text message channel which uses a five or six digit number instead of a full number, full telephone number. This is supported by a set of technology companies that ensure it's secure and ensure that the users are well behaved and ensure that they are properly verified as legitimate companies when they join the ecosystem. So, much more secure, I have to tell your audience, than a 10 digit number sending you text messages, which could easily be a spam or scam, not so much on the short code. Let's go back out into that wild world and, you know, we hear a lot of numbers. Give me an understanding of how big a problem is, like how many robo texts happen out there a year.
Thinking Crypto News & Interviews
A highlight from Joshua Stone Interview - Bringing Books To Web3, Book.io Books on the Blockchain, Mark Cuban Investment, Cardano ADA
"Welcome back to the Thinking Crypto podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. With me today is Joshua Stone, who's the CEO and co -founder of Book .io. Joshua, great to have you on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me here. Appreciate it. Well, Joshua, I think it's timely that I'm speaking with you because I'm in the process of writing a book. And so I'm very curious about Book .io and what are the other options for me as a soon -to -be author where I can publish my book on the blockchain and get some additional benefits. Before we get into all that, though, tell us about yourself, where you're from, where you grew up. Yeah, for sure. So I grew up in Oklahoma. When I'm traveling, I like to tell people I grew up in Indian territory and, you know, kind of encapsulates this sort of free spirit, unregulated environment that I just kind of grew up in. And my dad was an electronics engineer. My mom is a really incredible amateur artist. So I grew up in a very left brain, right brain kind of background. And what was your professional career before founding or co -founding Book .io? Yeah. I got online. Like I said, my dad with the electronics engineering, I got online really, really early and kind of got fascinated with this intersection of graphic and engineering kind of where they cross over. So I really gravitated more towards like a product design and user experience strategy side of things. So I actually got my first large job out of school. I went to Oklahoma State University and worked on the very first version of Fandango for Subark. And that was back in 99 and then worked at some larger internet companies that did a bunch of stuff for AT &T, led the product group for hotels .com with Expedia, and then kind of got more into the startup scene, was in a social media startup that sold. And that kind of got my interest into the book publishing industry. So I actually previously had co -founded an ebook company that we specialized in bulk distribution of eBooks to universities and really large organizations. And we sold that back in 20, I think we sold in 2015, I stayed till 2018. And so, I had kind of approached the book industry from a technologist sort of standpoint. And yeah, and then took some time off after that, really got just super deep into crypto and tried to kind of determine my next startup. I wanted to be a Web3 based company. That's awesome, man. Because you have a Web1, well, you have experience in Web1 and Web2, and now you're building in Web3. That's pretty incredible. What was your first encounter with Bitcoin? I'm always fascinated by folks' different stories, and what was your aha moment? Yeah, I feel like a lot of the story is always like a story of frustration of, I wish I would have. And so, I read the first white paper pretty quickly after it came out, just because I was in a social media startup. So that stuff like circulated quickly of like, oh, there's this internet money thing. And I talked to some engineers and I'm not heavy engineer. I've done some engineering stuff, but at that time, I wasn't capable of studying, I guess I could have really went and stood up a stack and tried to figure out how to mine it, but I tried to convince some engineers to mine it. And that happened a couple of different times. And it was a kind of classic argument of like, hey, this will cost us more in electricity than we'll ever make. And in hindsight, it's like, dang it, I should have just put them in a headlock and made them do it. So, it wasn't really until 2017 that I came around and jumped back in where I could actually start to buy from exchanges easily. I think at that time, maybe Coinbase only had like four coins listed. And so, I spent a lot of time on like foreign based exchanges and just really like diving super, super deep and through all the kind of ICO crazes of 2018 and the crash and yeah, I think I really was becoming more obsessed with what does blockchain mean at like a bigger level from a, just like a decentralized nature and like how, my entire career up to that point, just like sort of thinking like what all would need to be re -architected in this way of like a decentralized blockchain based way. Oh yeah, for sure. So, tell us about book .io, how did that idea come about and what are the different services? How does it work and so forth? Yeah. So, Yeah. you know, one of the biggest hindrances in crypto in my mind has always been just like mass adoptability, right? Like making it accessible to the masses. A lot of times, like I pick on my mom and just say, you know, my mom's not going to use this, you know? Yeah. So, you know, it occurred to me at some point that, you know, all books could be decentralized, like the actual contents of them and be blockchain based. So, you know, a big issue in the book industry, which you'll definitely experience now that you're working on a book is, you know, if you buy an ebook or an audio book from Kindle or Audible or iBooks, you're not really buying the book. You just buy a license to view the content. So, you don't actually own anything, which is why you can't sell it or give it away when you're done reading it. So, making it a book, a blockchain based asset actually changes from a digital licensing to a digital ownership model and that allows you to resell the book. So, you know, when you look at the entire landscape of crypto, there's like, you know, less than a hundred million total wallets, but there's over a billion people that buy digital books every year. So, like by far and away, like digital books are the biggest digital asset that people currently buy on like an a la carte basis since most of music and movies are streaming. So, you know, we have a focus that's very, you know, targeted at true mass adoption and, you know, experiencing the tech benefits. So, really more of a, you know, web two usability, but with a web three functionality. And then even in, you know, inside of that current licensing model, what's really radical, you know, once you buy a book, of course it's stuck on your shelf, but then it also gives the retailer, the author, the publisher, anybody, the right to remove that book from you. It's like literally coming in your house and just like taking a book off your shelf that you bought or changing any of the contents inside of it. So, our mission really became two things. One is to decentralize all of human knowledge and put all books on the blockchain so they can't be changed or taken away. And then second is incentivizing reading. So, really, you know, the core kind of the process of how it works is like we take any media asset could be, you know, a book or a music or video, we break it into a bunch of shards and we encrypt all those and store them in decentralized storage. Then we have a DAP web based reader and we also have mobile apps, mobile reading apps that basically stream those contents in, reassemble and decrypt them and then allow you to read it. So, we sort of, you know, while we use an NFT and decentralized storage and like, you know, smart contracts to program and royalties and all that, we sort of summate all that into an asset that we call a decentralized encrypted asset. So, then you truly own it. You could lend it out. You can give it away. Has huge impact, you know, not just for the end user, but also for the creators, because as you know, you'll experience with your book, you know, once, you know, the traditional model on the payment side is very, is very archaic, you know, like you, if you go the traditional route, you're going to be looking at, you know, you might get some small advance. It's not nearly what the old advances were. And, and then it's going to be probably a year to 18 months before you see anything, you know, from that book. Whereas, you know, when it's blockchain based, it's immediate, it's instant, it's paid out. So yeah, we launched the platform a little over a year ago. We've already sold over 160 ,000 books. And, and we've had some books trade as high as like $10 ,000 for like really unique books. Wow. That's pretty incredible. So, and I want to make sure I emphasize the benefits because I know there's going to be people who are new to blockchain crypto and say, oh, so what I get my book on Amazon, but, um, as the author, uh, there, this feature creates a secondary market, right? For the book is let's say, um, Joe down the street buys my book. He has on a blockchain, he finished reading it. He's like, oh, you know what? I'm going to sell this. Now, if he sells it, he's making a return. And then I, as an author also getting a royalty there. Yeah, absolutely. So that, I mean, that really is the big difference, right? It's like on a traditional print side, you know, I have the freedom when I buy a print book, I can take it to a secondhand, you know, resell bookstore, but I don't even really know what it's worth, you know, and then they're giving me, you know, pennies on the dollar and I'm happy to take it. Cause I have no way to substantiate if that's what that book is worth versus if it's digital, then I can see, you know, multiple global marketplaces and see what the trading, you know, what the actual trading price for that book is right. And then every time it sells and resells and continues, like it's giving you the creator, you know, royalties back, which is really cool from a social side too. Right. So, you know, current kind of, you know, opaque kind of wall with, with an Amazon and iBooks is that, you know, publisher author doesn't have any connection to their audience. So they can't see who owns their books. They can't market to those people. So with this, it's like, it's all on chain, right? Like we couldn't hide it. If we wanted to hide it, they can see who has their book. So then as an author, right. You could go airdrop like, you know, an extra chapter of a book to everybody that has your book, or you could allow them, you know, if they have that book, then in their wallet, they could, they could get a discount on the second book. Like you can begin to merchandise and do things that are just like impossible in the traditional version. Wow. So that's pretty incredible. You said you can airdrop like additional chapters or I don't know, additional information or anything attached to the book. That's, that's pretty incredible. Yeah. It can be a short story or, you know, extra behind the scenes type stuff, like how the book was created. It could be video stuff, author interviews, like all kinds of additional content that you can't get or deliver in a traditional method. Plus, you know, like a social interactivity of, you know, we're building out a structure for, for book clubs as well. Right. So, you know, there's not, there hasn't really been a good solve for like online book clubs. And like, part of the problem is you get so many trolls that come in and you see this on Amazon, like with reviews, right. It's like a book hasn't even come out and all of a sudden it's got, you know, 8 ,000 negative reviews in our system. We can see and verify if you've actually read it. So not only would you have to own a book, but we could, we could put it in place where you have to own it and you would have had to read it in order to get access to a book club and maybe the authors in there participating as well. Right. So it creates a richer, like, you know, environment for discussion. Oh yeah. I was going to bring up the reviews thing and verifying users because that is a game or something that is gained, I should say, with ratings and reviews and it could be manipulated. Now you mentioned that there's a lending feature. So let's say once again, Joe down the street buys my book, he, that person, he or she can lend the book out. And tell us how that, how that works. Yeah. So a lot of times what we say is, you know, everybody's a bookstore, everybody's a library. Right. Because if I, if I have the ability, you know, globally to lend out my book or to sell it, like then you could come and you could rent it for a particular price. Right. And we put that in a smart contract. You could either pay it or it could just be like a free thing. And, you know, one party's covering the transaction costs or, you know, in our method, like we haven't really talked about yet, but we have a token, you know, the person reading it could earn the token that the person that owns it could read the token that somebody else is who's, who's borrowing it is, is reading it. Like there's a ton of different ways to, to construct it, but it really changes the, the idea of, you know, it almost like makes micro libraries of everybody. Right. Then I could borrow from anyone. That's great. Yeah. Because I think about that sometimes I see different books and I'm like, I don't know if I want to buy this or necessarily, and I don't want to have a ton of books in, in, in my home. I do appreciate physical books, but I do have some digital books, but to be able to rent something and then just go see, you know, is this, is this good or whatever, and, you know, I actually want to own this. That makes sense. So tell us about the incentivization of getting folks to read. Is that how the token plays a part in the ecosystem? And if you can tell us about the book token. Yeah, definitely. So it really, it really does like an issue inside of, of the publishing industry, really. And when you start to look at the statistics behind it, it's like, you know, people do buy books and the publishing industry in general is hoping that people read those books, but a lot of times it becomes like just very commoditized. And it's like, they're just trying to sell you the next book and selling the next book. And so when you look at the stats on like how many people per year are reading and like averaging down, and it's like, what we're trying to do is build in an incentive program. So people actually consume this knowledge because very clear data, you know, supports when people read books like society, like definitely progresses, there's less crime, there's more, you know, GDP. So the, you know, that kind of secondary part outside of decentralizing the incentivizing portion of it is we have a read to earn system. So whenever you get a book, you read it, you're earning tokens while you're reading it. And we have kind of a whole distribution schedule and like how the mechanics of all that work. We just released a new white paper that details in kind of great detail, like how all that functions. And then we actually have a initial token offering going on right now as well. We waited a long time to do that. Like we launched the product, we launched all the apps. We started selling books before, you know, and a lot of it was just like from a regulatory reason of wanting to do things exactly the right way. Oh yeah. Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Now there was news that Mark Cuban was collaborating with book .io to release an NFT ebook on the Polygon blockchain. Can you tell us about that and how that partnership came about? Yeah, for sure. So Mark was actually one of our earliest investors and came on board. And at the time we were Cardano based. So we argued back and forth a lot about other chains, which we had always had a very multi -chain strategy, which I'll say real quick too. Like our, you know, we deployed to four different blockchains. We deployed to Ethereum, to Polygon, to Cardano and to Algorand. But yeah, Mark was one of our first investors in. And so we worked through his publisher as well with him, created a bunch of different, the way that our construct kind of works is, we don't limit a book to like a single book cover, like it can have tons of different book covers. So that makes those different covers collectible for different reasons. So with him, I think we did about 400 different covers. Some of those were like rendered pictures of like him fighting sharks and stuff, like all kinds of fun stuff. And he actually thought it was really, really cool. So it just gives you a whole lot more flexibility. And I'll say too, like on the investor side, like Mark's been a great investor, like great advisor, lots of great like networking. I think I was a little hesitant, like just from all that, you know, what you see on Shark Tank, but like his group's fantastic. You know, we really only have two other investors. We have Ingram Content, which is the world's largest book distributor, and they actually distribute and warehouse all the books for Amazon. And then we also have Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House, and they're the largest trade publisher. So we've tried to really be selective about our investors and working within the industry. But yeah, Mark's been great and all the guys at Polygon, the Polygon team has been great to work with as well. That's awesome. Are there other publishers that you're targeting and trying to work with and, you know, what's your strategy? Is it getting them to integrate book .io as another option? Tell us about that. And I don't know how much you can, you know, tell us about your strategy. Yeah. Yeah. So we've I think we, you know, we're somewhere around 20, maybe publishers or so that we've we've had sign up. You know, the publishing industry is very splintered. There's there's basically five main, you know, the big five publishers and they own a bunch of imprints and then there's a bunch of kind of mid tier and smaller ones. And so, like, you know, some total like our last publishing company, like we had close to 200000 different publishers signed with us. You kind of have to go like some of them you get like in big and big batches, right? Some of them are just like one on one. So like a lot of it right now, and especially over the last kind of beginning or last year was just a lot of experimentation, right? So it was going to publishers that we've worked with before in the past and saying, Hey, let's do like a test project together so we can like see what happens and gather some data and make some choices. So like this year's like much more on like the scale up side. We're going to be releasing audio books as well. And delving so into that and like how we do more mass ingestion. But, you know, ultimately, it's like what we're introducing back in is not necessarily say, you know, you know, we think we'll just dominate Amazon and it goes away or anything like that. It's more of a both end, right? Like you could, you know, I see that as like licensing and like streaming almost. And this is like ownership, right? So for the for the audiences and the authors and the people creators that care about ownership, like we provide like that mechanism and all the benefits that go with it. And it reintroduces the, you know, um, just the law of supply and demand, right? When it's digital licensing, there's, there's an infinite supply. It drives down, uh, you know, the price when there's a limited supply, then the price actually makes a difference. So then I can buy a book, you know, for $20, I can read it and maybe it's gone up in value and I can sell it for, you know, 25 or something. Even if I could sell it for half of what I bought it for, I still get more back than, than I do. If I buy that as an, you know, a licensed book. Yeah, no, that's great. And I love the secondary market options that open up with this new world of blockchain and tokenization. So Joshua, you know, you mentioned Amazon, uh, you guys are certainly a disruptive platform. Uh, if I could put it that way, let's say Amazon comes knocking on your door and saying, Hey, we want to acquire you. We want to integrate book .io into our, because we got the biggest marketplace, you know, what would be your thought process? And would you say yes, depending on the number? Yeah. I mean, you know, we get that question sort of semi often, which is kind of funny. Um, you know, I, I think that, uh, if, if this, if the situation was right and an Amazon was, you know, if, if we, if it was functioned in a way that like it kept the core model, right. So like if they didn't, uh, if, if the idea was to integrate and like expand what currently exists into digital ownership, right. Like, I think that makes sense. And some of the stuff they've done with like avalanche and, you know, some of the integration stuff, it's like, I think they, they see that, I think they're a bit more hesitant just from the regulatory perspective to like jump in to that kind of thing. And what we're doing is definitely, you know, quite, quite a bit different, but like, you know, we're, we're doing great. Like the team's grown in a bear market. Like we're adding employees and we're, you know, we're right at profitable. So we don't have any like reason to, to try to rush out and sell. And I think we're going to continue to grow. And I think we're, you know, we have an, you know, community that's, that has materialized behind it that just really agrees with the ethos of, you know, you really should own the things that you buy. So I don't see us, um, selling anytime soon. And even if we did, it would only be to like expand and, um, you know, continue the mission not to, to, uh, to end it or have it just shelved, you know? Oh yeah. I mean, I certainly, I think you and I being in this space, we can certainly agree. This is the future with block tokenization and fractionalization, secondary markets, and much more. It's just the adoption curve. And, uh, just like web one had its adoption curve web two, and now web three has its time. Um, you know, you mentioned Algorand, uh, polygon, Cardano and so forth. Are you planning to expand to other chains as well? Uh, yeah, we probably will. We don't have any plans to expand to any others. Right. Right now, um, we've done some interesting things with, with a few of the chains. Um, we gave a book away at consensus with Algorand to all the attendees. Like we're, we're doing some other expansion stuff or we'll be announcing some, some really cool stuff we're about to do with polygon as well. Um, so just trying to work with, with the chains that we have right now. And, you know, a big issue for publishers is really, uh, you know, I mean, when you get down to it, it's like they chop down trees to make print books. Right. So they, at first were very adverse to, um, to anything blockchain based, right. Especially when it was, you know, like when Ethereum was proof of stake. Um, so they, some of them have had corporate mandates where they would only work with it with a proof of work and they would only work with a proof of stake chain. So, you know, the ones that we've selected, I think, uh, encompass like a, a, a decent size portion of the market, not to say we won't integrate, but like, you know, kind of a thesis on being a multi -chain company is that we really want to be a platform. So creators could deploy to other chains. So we've talked to a couple of others as well. We just haven't put anything official on the roadmap yet. Hmm. Now more of a personal question for me and maybe other authors who are going to watch and listen to this, we'll have this question. So like I'm already in the process. I'm, I'm signed with a publisher. The book is right on tentative date launch next year. Could I go that traditional route, but also integrate with book .io and, you know, have you guys thought about a strategy for authors like myself who, you know, we would want to do both and how would that work? Yeah, for sure. So I think today, like of the hundred something books that we've done, like, um, a little over a third of them have been with, um, with publishers or with, um, with authors. So, you know, basically the way it works is, um, you know, you would just connect this with your publisher and then we work through like exactly what kind of program you would want to do. Right. So, um, we just kind of define those details. Um, we walked through with the publisher, what, you know, exactly how it works most of the time. Like, you know, we're doing limited quantity sort of collectible type stuff right now, but we have the capability to do like a mass, like we actually just, uh, sold a book yesterday that, you know, wasn't necessarily a collectible. It had just a regular singular cover. That's the same cover that's on the print book. Um, and, uh, you know, and it's sold out in like 20 seconds or something. Right. So the publisher's super excited because they've never seen anything like that in publishing. Um, and so it's a great way to drive, like kind of viral traffic and like excitement. So what we found too, is what ends up happening. We've seen this like multiple times in a row is like, we would do something with an author and then it will directly correlate to an increase in print sales because people get that book, they're excited about it. Then they would go and they're like, Hey, actually, you know, I want to own both. And so that's actually one of the things we're working on with our, our, um, uh, partnership with, with Ingram is what we call mint and print so that you could just buy the digital and automatically get the physical, uh, dropshipped to you at the same time. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's really cool. Um, so walk us through the user experience. Um, let's say someone's listening to this and like, you know, I want to go check out book .io. Maybe they have some books that I'll be interested in. Is there, obviously you have a website, is there an app and with purchasing, um, is it crypto and Fiat or both? Yeah. So, uh, so, I mean, we're trying to make it, um, very much, like I said, you know, web to functionality. So it's very easy to sign up. Um, we do take credit cards. So, um, on, uh, you know, you can, you can buy a book with a credit card. It's easy to set up an account. And actually like the, uh, the, the giveaway things that we're doing, the promotional stuff, like you don't even have to have a wallet. Um, we're getting to the point where you won't, you won't even have to have a wallet. You don't have to store seed phrase. You don't have to do any of that. All of it's like self -driven kind of in the background. Um, and so you don't have to buy with crypto. You don't have to know anything about crypto, um, and just making it real easy onboarding process for like, you know, the billion plus people that are honestly just not going to go take the time to learn crypto. Yeah. I've been talking a lot about that recently. With a variety of folks. Um, how do we make it easy for the next billion people? And like you, I've kind of used my mom, my dad as an example. Right. Cause like, they don't know that, like they see the wallet addresses. They're like, what the hell is that? They're scared of it. Right. It's intimidating. I still have to show my mom how to do certain things on her smartphone. So I, you know, but certainly like she's interested in, in crypto and blockchain and, you know, I've invested some of her funds in it, but yeah, to your point. How do we make it easy for the next billion people have the capabilities, but make it make the gooey easy for them. Right. Yeah. One of the funniest comments I got recently, which I won't say who it came from. Um, somebody within my family, um, was like, wait a minute, there's more than one blockchain. Cause like they thought blockchain was like internet, you know, thought it was one big blockchain, you know, which like from the outside, it was like, I never really thought about that, but it's like, if you really didn't know anything about it, you might think like, blockchain is just like internet. And they're like, you know, maybe there's only one and it's like, it's just, it's such a barrier. And so I feel like a lot of times, like in the crypto side, like we're in this bubble where it's like, you know, we're really excited about the technology and stuff, but other people just don't, they don't have the, it's not like, you know, intelligence thing. It's just like, they don't have the time to like onboard and figure all that stuff out. So like, how do we, how do we meet them where they are, bring the solutions and like the benefit of web three and what it actually provides to them, like directly to them. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think more, more companies building in a space need to think about that. Not just for the crypto native folks here, but yeah, like you said, the next billion people who, you know, they've heard about it in passing, they don't, they haven't used any type of crypto or done anything and we got to make it easy for them. So what's on the remainder of your roadmap for 2023? We do have quite a bit of stuff planned. So a lot of it, you know, like I said, you know, we launched like a year ago, so we're really trying to kind of scale up in a lot of different spots. So you know, at the top of that list right now is, is definitely audio books. And then we have a marketplace also that we're launching. And actually on the audio book side, we have one of the larger audio book companies that we just signed with, which is super exciting to have some like celebrity read audio books. And that's like a real growing market segment as well, just in general within publishing, which is very exciting. We have a lot of AI tools and development that are maybe more focused on publisher author, like, you know, helping them out you know, continue updating the reading apps. And then we have some really big author launches coming up that are going to be like, they're pretty massive, like celebrity level authors that are going to be launching some projects with us, which is super exciting. No, that's awesome. Well, I certainly after this conversation, you and I need to chat because of my own book. But yeah, that's exciting, man. And I love the idea of well, you know, you mentioned it's a growing part of the market of celebrity read books. Yeah, I certainly would want to listen to Morgan Freeman read a book.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Viirtue and Teammate partnership deliver best of both worlds, UCaaS functionality and Teams collaboration tools, Podcast
"This is Doug Green and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller, and I'm very happy to have with me again, Dan Rosenrauch of Virtue, Dan, thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Doug. Always a pleasure. And Eric Hernáez of TeamMate. Eric, thank you for joining me today. Yeah, glad to be here. Thanks, Doug. Well, we're very excited to do a podcast where we're going to be talking to everybody about a brand new partnership between TeamMate Technology and Virtue. We're going to be talking about the details of that exciting alliance in just a moment. But Dan, could you just tell us briefly what Virtue is all about? Yeah. So Virtue, we're a wholesale white label unified communications as a service provider. Our real differentiator is our platform vibe, which is essentially a quote to cash platform for our resellers that is completely built in -house by our development team to account for all the complexities of our industry. And as you'll hear about today with Eric and TeamMate, our initiative is moving forward or add more suppliers for our ecosystem so our partners can take advantage of the upsell cross -sell opportunities out there. And Eric, what is TeamMate Technology? TeamMate is a software company, and we make a connector that allows service providers to utilize Microsoft Teams as a soft phone with their own call control. So really, we're a very specialized vertical in the sense that our whole purpose in life is to be able to allow our partners, and we're a channel only partner company, to utilize Microsoft Teams and take advantage of really the great capabilities that are inside Teams as part of their own service.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Data sanitization for the data nation, Verity ES Podcast
"This is Doug Green, and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller. And this is a special podcast for the ASCDI NTR publications. And I want to welcome Glenn Jacobson of Verity ES. Glenn, thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Doug. And I also want to welcome Kevin Enders, also of Verity ES. Kevin, thank you for joining us. All right. Thanks, guys, for coming. And we're going to be learning a lot about ITAD today. We're going to be learning a lot about data erasure. We're going to be talking about some of the issues facing not only the ITAD and reseller community, but actually the broader reseller, possibly carry community, really everybody who has to manage or dispose of products that have had been exposed to data. So we're going to be diving into that in just a minute. But first of all, what is Verity ES? So Verity ES is a data erasure software application that was born out of a parent company called Revert Inc. Revert has been a, it's a company, the core competency is data sanitization and it's founded in 2007. They've been doing these types of services since then. And a primary foundation of that service was to perform onsite services because data sanitization is really about protecting customer information, personal, personal identifiable information. And one of the best ways to mitigate the risk of a data breach is to do everything on site. So Revert got its start doing, delivering services to large financial services companies, healthcare organizations, telcos, and other highly regulated industries that have to perform the erasure of data to meet specific standards. So for financial services, it would be something like Sarbanes -Oxley or FISMA from a healthcare perspective, you've got HIPAA high tech, and you have the various PUC rules and regulations around utilities. And by doing this on site, and over the 20 some years that Revert has been doing this, they're not only doing data sanitization, but they're also doing ITS at this position at the enterprise. So they're handling assets that go all the way up and down the information stack. So all the way from tablets and mobile phones, which are really important now in our environment after coming out of the pandemic with bringing your own device, you've got a lot of hybrid working environments, but we're hybrid cloud, public, private cloud, and how are you managing the data and the assets that are within all these different disparate data processing environments. And over these 20 years, what Revert did in doing data sanitization is again, doing this across the information stack, all the way from the desktop, laptop, all the way to the enterprise storage system, even including virtual tape libraries. And one of the things that was found is that with the proliferation of storage media, you've got spinning disk, you have flash disk, you have solid state disk. Even in printers, you have hard disk drives, you have solid state disk drives. In network devices, you have SD cards or compact flash cards. Smart TVs have built in storage, and even cell phones. So smartphones, Blackberries, they have SIM cards. All of these different storage mediums store personally identifiable information. They can store TCP IP addresses, they can store customer information. They can store account numbers, billing information. And all of this is wrapped into how do you protect this data across different industry regulations. We talked about HIPAA and high tech, but there's also European regulations, GDPR. California's new data privacy laws are based on the EU GDPR regulations. And so our business to go and sanitize those assets and either prepare those for the customer to either return to the vendor, if it's like a lease return or something like that, a technology refresh, or to pass down to an ITAD to perform their activities, we found that not one single data sanitization application worked for every single situation, every single storage medium. So what Revert ended up having to do is literally take a toolkit of all different types of commercial off -the -shelf data sanitization applications, all different types of downloadable applications, tools, utilities, methodologies, even the use of low -level SCSI and ATA commands to be able to sanitize various different types of storage media. And so again, about five years ago, the company said, you know, rather than having all these different disparate tools and processes and procedures, wouldn't it be great to develop an internal tool that could do it all itself? And that's how Verity ES was born. So Verity ES was developed to be able to handle all types of different storage media, all different types of IT assets, again, from the laptop, desktop, all the way to the enterprise storage array. It can handle disk drives coming out of printers and fax machines. It can handle smartphones and tablets and things like that. So that again, doing it on site, the assets are sanitized before they ever leave the four walls of the facility. Again, part of our business is also ITAD. So in doing the work that an ITAD does in terms of performing data sanitization, being able to, for example, grade assets based on their marketability. How do you refurbish it, remarket, resell it to maximize the residual value recovery of that asset when it's being sold? One thing that's very important is the storage media. If you're not able to sanitize the storage media that comes out of, say, a five drive server, you automatically, without those drives, the resale value of that asset automatically drops anywhere from 25 to 35%. So if you're able to sanitize the drive without doing anything else to the drive, without impacting the firmware or the specific configuration associated with that server, it maximizes the residual value recovery for the ITAD. It makes it easier for them to be able to resell those assets at its highest value. And that allows an ITAD to do that. The other thing we find with enterprises is that some of them want to do it themselves. And so Verity ES is able to actually be that one application that they can use for all of their information lifecycle assets throughout the enterprise to do it themselves. So that's where Verity ES comes from. So Kevin, it sounds like there's a sort of known unknown, as they say, and there's almost even the unknown unknown. And it's not just for ITAD. It's not just for the people in the reseller community. Glenn brought up very significantly that lots of other companies, especially enterprises, might be disposing of equipment. I was fascinated by learning how many things could be exposed. Monitors, something that was used basically for TV or videos. Printers, fax machines, possibly, I guess. It could be, or even phones. A lot of stuff that's basically... And the reason I'm bringing this up is we live at a moment when a lot of large enterprises are reconfiguring basically their office spaces, are rethinking what they need and don't need. So I know that there's a lot of stuff out there, and it sounds like there may be some landmines people could easily step on. You know, there's a lot of old, and we could spend a long time talking about those. But the overarching challenge, I think, that a lot, especially the enterprise spaces, and the ITAD to a certain degree, is this is something they have to do. Legally, they're obligated to do it. It's not really sexy. They don't really want to. They only do it because they're legally obligated to do so. We always think about when we go into the data centers, they're really obligated to do that. So if you're replacing a device with something cool and new, nobody really wants to deal with the one that's going out. So as these companies are dealing with this, they don't want to be experts on this. They don't want to know all the details associated with it. So what they need to do is to partner with somebody that does. So they need to look for a company that can provide them not only with software, but with the knowledge of what those blind spots really are. Like I said, again, they don't want to be good at this. It's really not something that's in their core wheelhouse. It's not something they can define as a differentiator to their customers. So one of those things they need to do is have a higher expectation for the companies that they're engaging with. So those companies can help them understand what those blind spots are, and either execute to close those blind spots, or help them understand how to close those blind spots themselves. Now, Kevin, with that said, this is the IT market, right? And it's filled with IT people who love doing it yourself. A lot of our readers and listeners probably started a long time ago going to Radio Shack and getting a whole bunch of components and putting together their own computer. So they're going to go out there, and they're going to do this on their own. So both you guys are basically telling me that, well, I guess you could kind of do that, but it may not be such a great idea, and you might not really be doing yourself a favor. Actually, it can be. You can execute it yourself. The challenge then becomes, right, you need all the devices, you need all the know -how. So really, if you're going to do it yourself, when you're out there engaging with a company that's going to provide you with the software to execute the process, the expectation is you should be looking for a company that can through how to execute that process. Historically, the software companies in the space will dump software on you and say, go ahead, it's yours. Let me know when I can start billing them. The expectation of those enterprise companies in the IT edge should be, listen, I need more than that. I need software, yes, but I need somebody that's going to help me understand the nuances and help me understand the things I don't know right now. Because like you said so eloquently, there's a lot of blind spots, and only one blind spot can screw you over. So again, we don't want to dissuade people from doing it themselves, but I would make the argument have an expectation of the companies you engage with that help you do it yourself, that they're going to be there to help you with the nuances associated with it. Yeah, I can just add on to that. Why that's important is because as the software was built, a lot of the expertise and know -how in having to comply with data center policies, processes, and procedures in how you perform a process and have transparency throughout the entire workflow from receiving the asset all the way through to disposition the asset, that's all built into how the software and the solution is performed. So as Kevin said, it's not only software, but it's also 20 plus years of data center experience in putting together a process and methodology and workflow that allows not only an enterprise to communicate this to their auditors, but also an ITAD to communicate to their customers who then communicate to their auditors. And then with the ITADs that have auditors themselves, whether it's R2 or e -Stewarts or ISO, et cetera, that they can have that womb to transparency and view throughout their entire workflow exactly what asset, if a drive is associated with a server, where that goes throughout the process and the standards from the data standardization that it's complied with, that's all built into the solution. And what Verity also provides is this analytics dashboard that allows commercial enterprises and ITADs to make educated decisions on what makes sense within their process to spend time on versus not. So, for example, if you have a high failure rate on a specific drive type, hey, maybe it doesn't make sense to continue to try to sanitize that. It may make sense just to shred those instead of putting more time and effort and resources and sanitizing them. That's the kind of process that we've built around the solution. So Kevin, who needs Verity ES? One of the target markets that needs Verity ES is the ITAD space. The software was developed, like we said before, around our services business. And that is very much a we got to get in, we got to get out. That maintains our markets. So with the software, we built in a lot of functionality to improve the overall performance, not only with the speed of the erasure, but the yield that the software can get. That's very critical to the ITAD space. They don't really want to do this. They want to get it done. They want to get going. They want to get the residual value out of it. The other thing that we really built into it was a big wrapper around it to help ITADs with the transparency challenges that they're seeing right now. A lot of companies that they're engaging with are demanding more transparency of the overall process. And so ITADs are being forced to think about developing an overall front to end process that they can then share with the customers from which they're taking the gear and then returning whatever they do, either the residual value or demonstrate that they've taken care of those assets once it's done. So we've built a lot of that functionality into the software, viewing it far more as a business tool than just a, this software erases hard drives, it erases solid state disks. It is really a wrap business tool. So Glenn, you know, having heard all this, I still have sort of the same question for a lot of people. Why can't I just go off and do this on my own? The beauty of Verity ES is it now enables you to do just that. Verity ES is able to you provide with a process that's been vetted in doing this type of service in the data center for over 20 years. So you now have a process that's going to enable you to not only save money because you're going to be able to optimize the amount of drives that you're going to process. It's going to allow you to optimize the number of drives that are successfully going to be sanitized and according to the standard. It's also going to allow you to make more money because if you sanitize more drives faster, you can get more assets qualified and re -marketed and resold out the door. It's going to, from a drive perspective, you're going to have more drives available to you, not only to replace in the assets that you're selling, but also that gives you a spares pool so that you don't have to go out on the open market or to the vendors to buy spare drives in case drives, assets are coming to you that need drives replaced. But the biggest thing is it's having a auditable process and the reporting and all of that information available to you through that transparent workflow. It's going to prevent a data breach, which is the biggest thing that we're trying to do is we need to ensure that person identifiable information is not compromised. It's not accessed from any unauthorized parties. The first step is to do it in the four wells of your facility. So that's why it makes sense to do it yourself. The second part of it is to make sure that software, the and it should be a given, the software actually does what it says it's going to do. It's going to sanitize those drives. It's going to erase the drives to meet a specific data sanitization standard so that you know for certain, and it's audible, it has an audit trail that supports it, that every drive that you sanitize using Veri ES in this process and workflow protects your company and your customer from a data breach, which again, it's going to protect your reputation. It's going to protect not only your company's reputation, but the reputation of your industry as well. Well Glenn and Kevin, thank you for joining me today. This has been very interesting. It's been a very nice introduction to Verity ES. I hope we're going to do more. I know we're going to do more podcasts. We're going to sort of maybe over the coming months break down some of the issues we've opened up, but for now I want to thank you. Where can we learn more about Verity ES? www .verityes .com v -e -r -i -t -y -e -s dot gov. Well again guys, thank you for joining me today and I'm looking forward to the next one. Hey, thanks a lot Doug. I really appreciate it.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Phone Design lets channel partners market, sell and manage all the services and tools of a recording studio, SaaS-licensed digital tools, CCA Opportunity Podcast
"This is Doug Greenan, I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller, and I'm very pleased to have with us for the first time, Elie Delahaye, who's the International Business Manager of Phone Design. Welcome to our podcast. Thank you. Very glad to be here. Well, first of all, I want to congratulate you and welcome you to the Cloud Communications Alliance and tell everybody this is a special podcast, is our first on behalf of the CCA and also to your publications. So we're going to be getting a real big tour about phone design and what you guys do and what you're hoping to do, especially in the US, Canada markets and also in other places. But first, what is phone design? The phone design, don't get our name wrong, we don't design the latest phones on the market. But we design companies sound identity because we're a recording studio specialized in telephone greeting messages. So how are greeting messages relevant today for companies? Well, today, telephone remain the number one media used worldwide to communicate. And unfortunately, lots of calls are still missed, like 60 % of callers hang up and 30 % never call back if the telephone reception of a company doesn't provide useful information at the right time. So if they do get that right information at the right time, as simple as please wait, we'll take your call shortly or please call back during our opening hours, blah, blah, blah, rather than a continuous beep or an annoying music that we considered that feel more considered, and that this percentages would probably drop and telephone messages are taken for granted. When they're a true part of the company's entire communication strategy, they're also very affordable to for a company image. So that's why they're relevant. So who can benefit from your services, who do you sell to? We choose to offer our services in an indirect way, meaning that it and telecom professionals, as well as managed service providers are the one offering our services to their clients. So by adding the services of a professional recording studio, telecom actors can reach their offer, stand as true telecom experts, and take on a great business opportunity. Because the update possibilities of telephone greeting messages are endless. So who can benefit from your services? So like I said, it, telecom and telecom professionals, and the way they can do that, our solution is 100 % white label, digitalized and customer oriented. If a telecom actors wants to work with us, you can do so by subscribing to a SaaS contract. That way we can open him a studio department, meaning he'll have a studio website in his name and colors, dedicated customer space for each of his clients, as well as an extranet, that way he can manage all of his orders and have access to his invoices, track the satisfaction of his NPS score as well, lots of tools for him to have a very productive studio department. So yeah, that's how. So do you sell through channel partners or do you sell direct? So we only sell through partners, through channel partners only. And our solution is 100 % white label, digitalized and customer oriented. And so that's a great opportunity for the channel partners to partner with you and so basically they get to brand on their own. Yeah, exactly. So they would have to, if they want to work with us, they can subscribe to a SaaS contract. And since we're 100 % white label, they would get a studio website in their name and colors, dedicated customer space for each of their clients, as well as an extranet so that they can manage all of their orders, access their invoices, get an NPS score. So all of that in their colors and only for their customers. So, yeah. So you get a lot of control over what you're doing and how you're doing it. Exactly. They're very independent. Why did you guys decide to expand into North America? We're pretty convinced of our product and the way we're selling it only through channel and using white label. Almost 800 companies are already thrilled by our partnerships. So why not more countries? Why not more? Continue the success. Yeah. And we're pretty proud of our expertise from France. We've been working for 20 years offering our haute couture solution and offering it to other also markets means challenging it. So we'll definitely have more feedbacks and grow from it. So, yeah. So why did you become a member of the CCA? Good question. Well, being surrounded by experts in fields related to us is very important to us because we like to understand the market from its core, adapt ourselves and also share our knowledges. So we're also part of the CDRT. It's a renowned club in France that brings together IT professionals facilitating networking and stuff like that. We're convinced that strength is what makes us united. So that's why it makes sense. Well, Milly, I really want to thank you for joining me today and giving us a brief overview and a brief introduction to phone design. Welcome to the Cloud Communications Alliance. I hope we're going to be doing another podcast soon. But for now, where can we learn more about phone design? Well, feel free to go on our website. You can also follow us on LinkedIn. Well, if you like Moliere's language, our posts are mostly in French, but hopefully soon to be more in English. Yeah, just follow us. Subscribe to our front page or my profile and our website. Sounds like a great opportunity for everybody. I hope everyone in the CCA checks it out. I hope everyone in the TR market also. So, but for now, thanks very much for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you.
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
A highlight from What is VRA and Will It Moon? - Verasity DeepDive
"Is Veracity a dud or altcoin gem that will pop during the bull run? I'm going to take a look at its fundamentals. It's time to discover crypto. Veracity is an open ledger ecosystem bringing trust and transparency to digital advertising and payments. Never heard of it? Perfect. Because crypto winner is the best time to educate yourself and learn as much as you can so you can make sure you're ready for the next bull run. Let's kick things off with a little token overview. Veracity is currently trading a shade over four tenths of a cent and is sitting at a deep value market cap of about $42 million. This puts it deep in the pink sheets way down at number 422 on CoinGecko at the time of shooting. I've always wondered if the GeicoGecko and the CoinGeckoGecko knew each other in gecko business school. Speaking of which, make sure to check out the BitLab Academy and find the courses that are right for you so you can learn from the pros and take your crypto education to the next level. Anyway, as you can tell right off the bat, Veracity has a pretty low market cap even by most degen standards like mine. Now, I know it's a deep bear market and the market cap of all the projects in crypto are down bad right now, but any project with a market cap of less than a billion dollars, I would personally consider to be a small cap. Small cap means that there's a greater potential of returns if the project catches major adoption, but this also usually means increased risk as well. Two of the biggest things that can be a concern are trading volume and liquidity. If you take a look at which exchanges currently list Veracity, you'll see that some of the more popular ones are like Gate .io, KuCoin, OKEx, Crypto .com and Uniswap. By the way, you can sign up for a KuCoin account using our affiliate link in the description. Now, it is important to note that you won't find Veracity listed on the big boys like Coinbase or Binance just yet. It's still very early days for this project, so please do your own research and invest in trade responsibly. If you appreciate me coming at you with some clear -eyed crypto caution, go ahead and drop a like, subscribe to the channel and turn on channel notifications so you'll be around for when I finally cut loose and go full DGen DZ mode on everyone in the next bull run. Taking a look at the price history, we can see that Veracity's native ERC777 token VRA hit its all -time high in November of 2021 and peaked out about 8 .6 cents. Since then, it's been on one of them big bad bear market slides that most projects in the altcoin market have also followed. One final thing to call out about the tokenomics on this one before we dive more into the history and fundamentals, the current circulating supply is around 10 billion 305 million, and the max supply will be around 110 billion. The reason for this is that this project is holding 90 % of their supply in reserve until their platform fully launches, which makes sense, but ordinarily, a difference of max supply versus circulating supply that is that big would be a huge red flag. So keep your eyes out for things like that when you're doing your own awesome altcoin research. Okay, enough about the token price. What's Veracity all about? Veracity was founded in 2017 by entrepreneur and pensive -looking technologist RJ Mark. Veracity offers a unique patented Proof -of -View system through which it plans to solve the problems of video advertising and NFT fraud. Veracity's product lines range across multiple industries but are all built with the Proof -of -View system and the VerView's platform as their backbone. It offers a Veril wallet on its blockchain network on which the VRA token is used as the main currency for participating in the online variety and video game economy. It also offers staking rewards to users. It's a protocol and product layer platform for eSports, video entertainment and digital content management. Its products include an ad stack and the VRA reward system, which has been integrated into SDKs for YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo and all major video platforms. Okay, so what's the problem this project is solving in plain English? Well, if you ever spend any time on social media, I'm sure you've noticed that there are a ton of bot armies out there, and the interwebs are getting into all kinds of shenanigans, spamming, trolling, fishing and just generally mucking it up for all of us human beings. This is a problem for advertisers because they have no way of knowing if their ads are actually reaching real humans or if they're just serving up impressions up to the lifeless bots. It's been estimated that by 2025, advertisers' total losses due to ad fraud could shoot up to $100 billion. So it's clear this is a big problem. Veracity leverages blockchain technology and their unique consensus algorithm Proof of View to ensure every view captured on the ledger is authentic and ultimately provides stakeholders within the video ad space a trusted single source of truth for capturing verified human views in real time. Oh, and just a reminder, they filed a lot of patents to protect their tech as well. Pretty cool, right? Personally, I think things like this are the key to mass adoption. Quality projects using crypto to solve real world problems that can't be tackled without the blockchain. Veracity has two major branches of the project, the VRA token and the Vera wallet which allows users to spend VRA tokens, earn VRA rewards via staking or earn VRA by participating in activities on the network and the Vera Views platform along with everything being built on it. On November 8, 2021, Veracity announced that they would be rebranding an esports platform to Vera Esports in order to establish their vision for how their feedback cycle of watch to earn value creation should work. The cycle has four key elements. First, Vera Esports secures broadcast rights to exclusive tournaments. They offer access to streams from some of the biggest names in gaming with tournaments hosted by the likes of Valorant, Riot Games and Axie Infinity. It's also teased an upcoming NFT marketplace with both in and out of game content for its users. Next, their content is made available on the Brightcove media player with the Vera Views ad stack built in. Third, Vera View protects publishers against fake views who then come to realize it's a superior solution for preventing ad fraud across all of their content and is consequently much more profitable. Fourth and finally, Vera Views adoption is increased and Veracity's revenues are used for operating expenses and their VRA buyback program. Sounds complicated, I know, but the gist of it is by building a system that is better for viewers, advertisers, content creators and really just all the stakeholders in the system, Veracity is able to incentivize all participants and then share the value they are creating with all of the users because that's how we do it in Web3, baby. For more details on the history of what they're currently working on, I recommend checking out their roadmap. They have a very detailed roadmap that lays out every step of development they've taken along the way since launching in 2017. They have well -defined and specific goals to achieve their business cases in each market. Today, Veracity has met all of their quarterly roadmap goals, and some recent achievements include updates to the Vera Wallet, referral integrations, exchange listings, growing ad campaigns, running eSports tournaments and launching a revamped tournament site. These guys really have been busy this bear market. Okay, I think I'm going to leave it there for the time, obviously, there's a lot more to this project than what we've covered here today, and I definitely recommend taking a closer look at some of the patents they filed on things like rewarded video because as the Web3 internet of value grows and gains market adoption, there's going to be a lot of new projects like Veracity rising up to challenge the dominance of the Web2 companies as well as other Web3 rivals like Theta. None of us can predict the future, so it's impossible to say for sure what's going to happen, but Play to Earn, Watch to Earn and you name it to earn are all going to be pretty exciting crypto niches in the next bull run, so you have to subscribe to the channel. Make sure you stick around and watch what happens. Let me know down in the comments what you think of Veracity and whether or not you think that VRA token is destined for a new all -time high in the next bull run. And let me know if you have a favorite Watch to Earn platform you think we should check out as well. That's all you got from Deezy. Thanks for watching Discover Crypto. Hit that like button on your way out. We'll see you at the top. It's a colorful story. It's a one of a kind story. It's a story that spans 8 ,000 majestic acres of Blue Ridge Mountain beauty bathed in shades of orange and crimson. It's a story of four -star evenings, locally sourced cuisine and award -winning wines. Of warm fires, crisp mountain air and old world charm. It's a story of 1 ,000 men and the six years they spent creating America's largest home, with 250 rooms, each with its own stories to tell. But all this can't begin to tell the full story of autumn at Biltmore. Come walk in the footsteps of the Vanderbilt family and experience the fleeting magic of the season before it slips away. Because as wondrous as the story of autumn at Biltmore may be, it can never be complete without you.
Art Beauty
A highlight from Get Ready for Laser Season: Dr. Macrene Alexiades on Everything You Need to Know
"This is the RPD podcast where we are always reaching for truth and beauty. Remember, the brands on the show are not paying to be here, so we get to ask the questions you want answered because you deserve to be informed so you can make the best choices for yourself. And with that said, I'm Amber, and today my fabulous cohost is Dr. Makreni Alexiadis. I hope I got that right. She is a fabulous Greece native. By the way, Greece is one of my favorite places in the world. But a Greek name, so I'm hoping I'm pronouncing that right. She also holds three degrees from Harvard, is a practicing dermatologist in New York City and an all -around amazing, brilliant woman. I'm so honored to have you on the show today, Dr. Makreni. How did I do with the pronunciation? Like a native. Like a fellow Greek, I'm so honored. I mean, so, you know, prior to this, you know, when we were just chatting a minute ago, Greece is one of my favorite places in the world. I've been there three times now. Never to skiros where you are, but it is just magical. Are you? You were actually born in Greece. I wasn't born in Greece, but I'm a dual citizen. I spent half my life here, half my life in America, back and forth. And so that has really inspired me and given me a worldly view and a balanced view. And the Greeks, we were taught the Socratic method from birth, which is to question and to probe and to find the meaning of life. So it has really benefited me as a physician and a scientist and a creative and an artist. And I'm grateful to be able to bring that kind of global viewpoint to everyone. I love that. And again, I find that the Greeks of all the places that had been were the most familial, the most warming, the most, you know, come on into my house, come do this. And also the best tomatoes I've ever had in my entire life. Like it's just the best food ever. Thank you. Well, it's sun and believe it or not, not that much water in the summer and soil makes for fruits fantastic and vegetables. So delicious. You know, so listen, full disclosure, we are recording this. It is still summer, but this will air in September. So with that said, you know, I'm so excited to have you here because you are truly an expert in everything lasers. In fact, you told me you were writing a second textbook while you're there in Greece. Yes. I usually take this time when I'm not seeing patients to work on my academics, which is particularly textbook writing, which requires undivided attention. My first textbook is Alexiadis's cosmetic dermatologic surgery that was published by Walters Kluwer. You can get it on Amazon and it is the first of its kind. It's a disorder based text that takes the reader down an algorithm of the best medical cosmetic, which includes injectables, heels and lasers and surgical treatment options. And it's good for both patients as well as colleagues, dermatologists, plastic surgeons, physicians, who really need to know what the gamut is, the panoply of treatment options that are available. And then my second textbook is on photodynamic therapy. That is with the publisher of Selvia. That is the book that I'm finishing right as we speak. And that is an area of specialty of mine as well. In addition to lasers, it's the use of light to cure disease. Oh, I love that. We've been talking so much about different light therapies, red light therapy, blue light therapy. But I'm hoping that today, that you are really known as a laser expert. And since, by the time this airs, last weekend will have been the unofficial end of summer, even though summer doesn't end for like another few weeks, this is a really great time for people to start thinking about different sort of laser therapies that they can do, right? And so I'm just wondering, when we hit the fall, what are some of the most popular things that you were seeing in your offices? Great questions. And you are right. My patients are planned out months in advance. So I do my fall laser planning in the spring. So patients come in the spring, they start to complain about the things that start to present themselves when we start to get sun exposure, such as brown spots, melasma, hyperpigmentation. And those are not conditions you want to treat in the summer, particularly with lasers, because lasers kick up the heat in the skin, and you can get a tanning like result from that. So we pause on the use of lasers for pigment until the fall. So it starts back up pretty much end of September, beginning of October. And the other is, is that lasers against pigment are not as effective in the summer when you're getting all your sun exposure. So it may actually be working, but it looks to the patient as if it's not working because they're tanning in the summer. So all my laser cases are already fully booked all the way through to the holidays. I mean, yes. And you do have, I don't know, are we allowed to name drop? Can you tell any of the celebrities? Well, I think it's like public knowledge. I leave it to my celebrities. If my celebrities want to mention me and give me some love, and some of them do like Sienna Miller, Brooke Shields, and those guys, it's wonderful, Nikki Hilton. But I really adhere very, very, very strictly to HIPAA. And I know like, I mean, people have called me a billion dollar box office success, which I cherish that title. But my lips are sealed and I just, but I derive a great deal of satisfaction, pride and joy actors at keeping and models in their business, in their work, well until their elder years, which is really a source of pride for me. So on that, do you feel like there are certain things that you recommend kind of everybody does? Of course, we all have different skin types. We all have different conditions, but are there certain procedures now that you were loving, especially coming into the fall, clearly we are too late to book with you, sad, sad, but are there things that you are kind of loving out there for people to be doing this time of year? And are there certain treatments that you love for this time of year? There is no end to what I can do. I mean, I have to say, I was at a dinner party that night and one of the ladies was saying how plastic surgeons or dermatologists told her there was like nothing to be done for her. I have to say, I mean, I am fortunate that I have the embarrassment of the riches of knowledge and experience in both injectables and devices, but really there is no end to what I can do. I can treat in the summer. I am just saying that there are certain devices you do not want to do in the summer, such as fractionated devices, Q -switch devices, picosecond technologies, those are better done in the fall, but I have great treats for everyone all summer long. One of my current favorites is radiofrequency microneedling, which I am honored and acknowledged as, single -handedly, the dermatologist, scientist, and laser specialist who brought this whole genre to market. I sought and attained the FDA approval between 2006 and 2010 for the prototype radiofrequency microneedling device. That one was called the Profound. And since then, we have had a huge crop, a whole generation of devices, such as Morpheus is one that people know about. But there are many different types of genius, infamy, intensive, they are utilized in a way that is safe for all skin colors, all skin types, and can be used in the summer months. So that is one of my all -time favorites for skin tightening, wrinkle reduction, rejuvenation, all summer long, with no risk of downtime or hyperpigmentation. Okay, so let's go back to the fall now, right? So because that's what we're kind of, the season we're coming into, good to know though that radiofrequency can be done year -round, what are your fall -specific treatments? What are the things that you're starting to address now, you know? Okay, so come September, you're done with your summer, Labor Day is over, now we're in the saddle, we're looking at this rung of treatment that is really dedicated to this time of year. When you're in September, be aware that there's still this delayed what we call seasonal lag. You can get this first week in October that's very sunny and warm and it really helps you to be outside. So please delay a little bit in treating your brown spots and hyperpigmentation with devices until October, however, in September, I do start to do some rejuvenation on people who I trust and know are really not going to go out in the sun, so that might include intense pulse like IPL, that is great for getting the summer off. All the sun damage you've accrued over the summer, you can start treating in September and if you're somebody who really is not going to go out in the sun, whether it's because you have kids in school or you yourself are working and you know that even if it's an Indian summer, you won't be outside, then you can treat with rejuvenation lasers such as fractionated resurfacing known as Fraxel, picosecond lasers such as Picogenesis or its predecessor, Genesis laser. These are all devices that are great for rejuvenation, for getting rid of sun damage, which you've accrued over the summer in short order so that especially if you can do a trio, which a lot of times these devices are done three months in a row, a month apart, three treatments. If you do September, October, November, you're ready for holidays. You're ready for Thanksgiving and winter holidays. Now I have to ask you, and I don't want to put you on the spot because do you have a lot of these devices in your office? Oh yeah, I have over 50 lasers and devices in my office. So here's where I'm going to put you on the spot then. Is there one that's like kind of your favorite? It's like asking who is your favorite child. Oh no. No, I mean, you know, my girls will tell you, like they're all my favorites. For example, I have specific devices that are my go -to and my favorite for eyelid tightening. So my claim to fame is that I replaced the plastic surgery with devices and injectables, right? And I'm replacing cosmetic procedures with active ingredients through my macrine actives. So that's been kind of the progression of my career over the last, and I have to say I've been in science for over 40 years, so I've been working really hard for many decades, but the progression was initially replacing plastic surgery with devices and injectables. And I go through phases of what my favorites are and then taking all that knowledge and translating it into active ingredients. So ultimately we can do all this at home, but I will just give you some of my highlights. All right, so if you don't want plastic surgery, be on the lookout for skin laxity, in my opinion, other than like having brown spots and sun damage, which of course does, you know, make you look not so great. I think it is equally important to keep an eye out for jowls and loss of the beautiful like elasticity of the skin that you want, especially in the jawline and neck. If you start to see jowls, if you start to see laxity, intervene earlier with non -surgical alternatives so that you don't end up needing surgery. Give you an example, I've been taking care of a classmate of mine from Harvard undergrad that we were class of like 89 and she doesn't look any different than when we were in college. Why? I have her face memorized and she believes in me so much and in the science and what I've done. She comes every four months like clockwork for all these years, 20 years, getting skin tightening with me with radio frequency devices, infrared light. She doesn't have any jowls, of course, a little bit of filler. And then she uses my actives. So if you were to really prioritize devices in my practice, I would say you want to keep on top of two classes of devices. One are the skin tightening technologies, whether it's around the eyes, jawline or neck or body, if you're down to body now. And then the rejuvenation technologies that we just talked about, IPL, fractionated technologies, genesis type devices to keep the sun damage and wrinkles at bay. And then if you need something more aggressive, you can always go to a CO2 laser, which I'm a specialist specialist in that as well. And that really is in my hands, an art form. I tailor the carbon dioxide and the erbium lasers, which are really our Cadillac devices for those who have more significance on damage in most cases or wrinkles and aging. But honestly, even people who have very light skin that starts to wrinkle a little bit prematurely in their 40s, maybe candidates already. And that, too, prevents the need for, say, blepharoplasty, which is eyelid surgery. It may prevent the need for a facelift because it'll give you enough of a strong rejuvenation.
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"Where do we go from here. Yup so there are few things were working on. One is a medicare immigration. I will get too far. Reads on this big of complicated but we have finally gotten agreement with puzzle service in the unions to integrate medicare into the retirement system of the us. Postal service the puzzle service had been paying medicare along but many of their retirees were choosing private health plan so that will save the puzzles a lot of money and put a lot of pressure on hopefully on raising raising prices. Because you know what are the big problems we face now is just bit that we have increasing prices strongly increasing prices with declining service. So i sort of make the jump. They're charging more and more for less and less until they are going to charge us. Everything for nothing. And then they're going to become fettes you know. I mean because they're so obsessed with a with a package delivery that i think the rest of us who are paying the bills are getting squeezed out and let me say that. I don't personally blame Postmaster general detroit for this. I blend congress because if you're serious about universal service which members of congress should be serious about universal universal service day should take responsibility for making sure that puzzle sisters adequately funded. This should not be a. Let's drive everybody out of business and then figure it out later wretched. I get yelled at because people. Tell me my podcast go too long as you've got one more question one more advocacy issue. Fun question i've always been reporting on a publishing a news specifically for about twenty five years now and i know firsthand that we're not great in newspapers it sort of tooting our own horn if you will and that's largely because of the nature of our job we we tell other people's stories and we're not great at telling our own story and i was reading. How the washington post recently started a brand campaign and even had a primetime television ad recently. Which i haven't yet seen. But i understand it's pretty compelling. Should we across the industry bread. Be thinking about our branding and an end. Tooting our own horn if you will absolutely and this has been a problem in the industry that were shy because we we think what we do is important that we don't want to treat it like a some kind of a marketing gimmick. And so. i think there's been hesitation about that but listen if we don't tell our story no one else and one the things that we're focusing on. We've begun to see on this month. Actually will continue. All of next. Year is an effort to tell our story to federal agencies. Because what we're finding is that federal agencies are spending a lot of advertising dollars In ways that do not reach community newspapers. And we're trying to figure out why we had several meetings on this issue. And i think that the education aspect to this community. Newspapers are out there that you know. We're the right kind of is for federal advertising dollars. And i think that there's a education standpoint of You know we're out there. We can help you do this. And so We've committed to making this project for the entire year. I hope we success with that. I i was so offended. And we have this. We can do it. vaccination and not a single united states. At least that i could helpfully someone will call me and say well. You're wrong. i got one all right. Well thank you brett. Thank you and once again. This is a critical time for us to get out there be active. Let's let our readers know anyway. We can how important local journalism is so we can brand ourselves better than let's lot. Let's see what we can do to get Brett some morning line from sixty percent maybe sixty five to seventy conversation. Thanks so much for everyone. Stay well in please. states stay on our website subscribed. We'll keep you up to date as this moving. Changing target is just so important. We'll just make sure you're constantly reporting on this gretchen. Thanks for your time..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"They not you wanted to go out. Can also add that. We found a sponsor to underwrite business cards size at all of our small businesses and the local market also did a business expo for free alowed vendors and then we also did podcast with them on facebook. Live what. I was gonna second one what he was saying that it's the difficulty. Not only that. I'm sure you all face and finding qualified talent banal add to that a second language in the second culture but going back to the comment. Not only do we learn. And that's where the lab is doing in the keyword being a consultant. I like the way in which we have to consult with our clients but then we also have to really motivate them because sometimes they get stuck in their own waste too so we part of an ecosystem so great that we're learning is great moving on but we still gotta bring a client to offer digital services above and beyond your own content and your own products..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"I think everybody. I'm strong advocate of continuing education. I mean i think it's in the publishing industry. We have to keep ourselves informed where keep ourselves briefed with technology. Now you can create sites where people can go. Get the information if they miss something. There's a place where whereas archived where they can go so what we associates. We try to make sure that we keep our constituencies informed in real time. And sometimes you know. Everybody's sometimes doesn't read the emails so we text all. Yeah you have to be consultants for them you have to be consultants for your clients. They because they don't understand the new technologies they don't understand how they can be more effective and they don't understand how to look at metrics. And i say general last forum but talked about the mama places. That's one thing and then also be you know what we've done specifically as we went on a whole campaign through the coveted crisis which is not over by any stretch but in the heart of it to give special discounts to the mama places including for a period of time just letting them run ads for free. There you go things like that so you gotta meet them and bring them for and then if somebody can comment on this other thing. I think that we've gone from local to newswire. Which a lot of latino press has been caught in like you got on the news wire and it was great because you couldn't afford staff so you get on the news wire and now we're seeing that the need to be hyper local and i think that's a challenge that i know latino media wrestles with is especially online where you need constant content. There has to be a mix and it's tough..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"And there's an appetite for that now that's massive but i wouldn't say that we should print for more crisis that what we found out is that when people became isolated because cove it when things went virtual. I don't think the new normal is not going to be the own adventure. New nominee is going to be much more virtual. Much more digital and was providential that we have been working on this and i think that even after colbert when colbert which an act like covert is over with yet. It's not over with now. By the way. When i spoke in sarasota last week it was over. Okay in florida. We have no pandemic okay. Well that's sorry that's why we have to have local news. Report the truth i but but my point going back though is Quite frankly the is changing how we relate to one another in america in this democracy is changing and as som- who wanna go back to the old novel which. I consider the old abnormal. 'cause me is not normal to treat people differently based on their race or their language ethnicity or sexual orientation that's not non chattel and i think that we have an opportunity at least in this democracy to reshape into refrain an importance of news. Actually even though some of the major dailies reducing stay up and in some cities closing shops. There's the demand for local news is on increase total increased so that puts cincinnati real. I think unique space to respond. But i think we should always learn from the past not necessarily repeat to pay but one of the advantages of this room. Correct me if i'm wrong. Is we do much more in depth coverage a lot of stories. I mean if you agree that our mission is to be the final check truth to power correct. The founding fathers were very imperfect people who created a perfect document they put us in the mix. And what i love about the fact that you say something what..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"Color right now in two hundred twenty one and a merck who's to basically than the agencies demographic soda accent which we worked together is extent to which we provide not only great information to our member publications..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"I mean they have a revenue. Google has revenue or. They have a goal that i believe is one where they get something and publishers. Get something so we have to just be honest about that and recognize it. But i would say the thing that i saw and learned not just myself but with all the publishers together is that they were willing to teach you how to fish and or give you fish. There were people who needed some fish right now and they help those publishers in that situation. Get that but then they showed you the how to. And i thought that was important and i'll give you two examples The concept of digital. I was something that many publishing houses were not considering. Because you come from a print your generations of print. That's what you've done your whole life but with the rise of it's not a rise. It's already here but at least if you're new to it you have to begin to organize your editorial department in the digital first framework or at least that has to be a substantial portion that requires a massive change a sea change in how you're organizing things. I won't go more into that. But the second part is k. This was a revenue lab but part of the conversation was. What do you invest in if this is a serious if you're taking this choice seriously. How do you invest..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"And i think the only thing i'd add to that is valuing the existing audience. You already had understanding. Exactly what you've got in front of you and then maximizing. Was there any marriage between first party data and third party data. If anyone knows what i'm talking about is looking at any data you own internally and then checking against programmatic world to see who these people are where you're experimenting in that world. Even though that rumor has it that google's going to shut down third party data eventually in some way Not as such. I guess the most of our publishers were actually getting up to speed. Just google ad manager russo if they already had a programmatic partner or if they already had since accounts. We're integrating that into what they were doing. But you know one of the other things. We identified here which i have found. Very interesting is a lot of a lot of publishers. Throughout the years have had to rely on some sort of outside consultant who would come in and do their web work for them and those consultants are not always privy to best practices publishers. They may be very good at what they do. Building a wordpress site or building something but they don't understand what we need and what we're trying to do so even something as straightforward as being in google news search. You know when you hit the news tab and your stories come up is something that these publisher struggled with and they've been there for a long long long time. It's just their seo wasn't set up correctly for that so some of those basics making those things happen lead me back to the hope that what we ended up with with the help of google are consultants and other digital specialists about the country who can help local publishers with best practices. All that stuff. If somebody wanted to go learn it today is on the web a through g and i you can become certified and a whole bunch of different things right now and And.
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"Why are they so focused on advertising digital revenue. These things are going downhill but from for for us most of those revenues zero so we need to catch up just to get some of that. But you're in charlotte. You must have had some demand driven for your audience. You must have this year in a major market. Show wasn't a major market for for for the tino population. Probably let's call it emerging market okay. Sometimes they'll look so you don't have a lot of agency business coming in. You don't have a lot of demand driven business coming in. You got to beat the bushes to find. The revenue is what you're saying correct so how. Okay now that you at least have. The analytics analyzer. Audience you're picking up some programmatic revenue would've decent cpm. How did this help you. A local sales level. But did you. What were you able to do training your sellers to talk the talk and walk the walk. What happened what transformation. The key thing that we learned is that magical funnel that everyone shows we realized. Actually it is true. You have to have something to sell before you go so the larger audience that want everything they wanna mix and in order to have enough scale even within your market. You're going to have to hit some outside of your go to dana for a second day and you are a major market washington and book. Your publication covers both washington and baltimore. But aren't you more of a national publication or you hyper local or both a little bit of both but we're more local more local okay. Because i want to your website this morning and you also looked like a national presence as well but obviously coming out of dc would be perceived that way. Were you getting any demand driven business before how did this help you. Where does the revenue you see the revenues coming from for your publication. Well i think what was most helpful for us is when we mentioned collaboration..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"You should do this based on whatever software that you're developing. do this. Do this do this and this will put you on a path to where you need to go. So i thought that was extremely. I was surprised. And i came away with a different different view. Given the fact that they're still you know there's still things people will have questions people out there. We'll have questions if you get invited to a lab of this sort. John they we keep saying they. Google had human beings paid google in this in this team or did they just throw you the cash. No typically when my understanding is when google news initiative runs labs for groups of publishers. They usually work with kind of a small group of providers who then submit our ps. And we were. We were involved in that selection process. We reviewed the rfp's as three associations and Were involved in that conversation about Hiring the project manager for the lab which is a company called ten up which is an outstanding technology company super helpful great project managers. They've got all the expertise Did an outstanding job with this. But we were able to set even some of the boundaries in that engagement. And so g and i was very much like. Hey this lab is for you. We want you involved with it. And we knew that we would have everything ranging from. I barely have a website too. I have you know. i'm commanding. A twelve dollar plus. Cpm programmatic to i've got my own proprietary thing and i'm not gonna go follow the usual path but there's a lot to learn and share here. Doctor you seem to want to add something. The key word is collaboration. It works and unfortunately a lot of times with local media in small media. We made thank to protect intellectual property that collaboration. May you may lose your identity. But what we found. Google news initiative it enhance one's add entity in enhanced one's purpose in the marketplace marketplace is changing and..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"What gimme the group's converters transformers and optimize deserters transformers. What's convert. A converter. Was on wicks. Or i mean they were doing some sort of static website and they were moving to wordpress just so they could be optimized better content can flow back started yet and start to figure out what their traffic look like what their analytics look like. What could they even think about in terms of generating revenue. Wordpress is pretty much a standard. Now where you can always get a plug in to do anything. I think one hundred eight percent of websites aren't wordpress. Now it's remarkable what all right according to them. According to them. That was a that was a converter converted. Means they were in the dark ages. I'm not trying to label and you brought them the light saying that correctly. I didn't but yes thanks. So what's the next level at the media transformers and the transformers were moving. Just they may already been a wordpress but they could have been using a lot of Entirely too many plug ins. They may have been doing their ad. Serving outside of google ad manager many transformers. In fact many of the first two in i levels of the cohort either can't get ads. Since accounts or needed to get up to add sense. They could do a bare minimum programmatic and then the optimized many of them large markets of have a lot of traffic and one of the things that they were realizing that they could get much higher. Cpm's some of the some of these publishers were selling for way too little of course. Yeah and so once. They started to look at those numbers and ask themselves why. What's the real mix here. The just a change in the way they sold or going back to some folks and saying you know you can't have every single page view. The programmatic revenue was automatic. revenue or demand-driven revenue. You're basically just making sure. They're out there in the programmatic sphere able to capture these dollars..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"We've been around since eighteen hundred seven hundred twenty seven one hundred twenty twenty one one hundred four years of the black press over america and if you go back and look at the front page of freedom journal and not sixteen eighteen twenty seven you would have thought that was publis in july of two hundred twenty one because we're still talking about Equality was there talking about. Freedom was talking about challenging Systemic racism and oppression but also talking about the importance of publishing news publishing the truth man. Eighteen twenty seven wasn't debate about fake news versus real news. It was a more of about getting news to people with technology that exists fast forward. What john mentioned We all saw that. One of the incapacities to generate revenue was the lack of having the infrastructure to transform our print publications into digital distribution channels that required training that required staffing democrat budget required revenue. And most of our papers. Keep a man. Colbert has had a devastating impact on a lot of local media particularly manado media so in the context of already history of somewhat exclusion. But then you put the disproportionate impact. Kobe on top of that. And then we say we want to transfer to digital. That was a big challenge. But i'm pleased to report to you. Over one hundred papers applied got twenty eight accept it and most of them are going to get a certificate in a couple of weeks of completing the first digital transformation workshop and even votive completed the project. I want to tell you that they are already generate additional revenue as of the training from google news initiative. Danai see. you're not in your head you work. One of the selected publications to be part of this incubation. Tell me what your life was before you joined into the project and where it is today. I think like most other local newspapers..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"This billion dollars committed to saving local media. That said they cared about underrepresented audiences but didn't seem to care as much about underrepresented publishers. And together we work to bring google news initiative to the headquarters of the npa in washington dc. The thurgau marshall center powerful building. Just steeped in history being in this place And spend a day together talking about who were what we did and how we could work together and that then launched a weekly call that the three associations had and a biweekly call that we started with google news initiative team And that took on a new importance when the pandemic hit in our three associations help lead a conversation among all the national associations of local media as well as the major funders about what is happening in the local media sector and you can see the fingerprints of that conversation that we met weekly for about five weeks there. In april in the emergency relief funds that both facebook and google announced probably may june in that timeframe were i think close to eighty million between the two of them in direct support went to publishers hundreds of publishers. So you know we kind of knew. Hey this working together you know. It's getting even better in Working with japan. I'd they're very familiar with the lab process in really brought the idea of an ad. Transformation lab Four of black and hispanic and other bypass publishers. And that was kind of the launch of that would have been kind of towards the end this last year. And i think we're just wrapping up that portion like phase one or the one point over the one point twenty eight newspapers byproduct a publications participated in this lab and it was focused totally on a transformation of the digital presence of the paper. This this this includes advertising and audience my correct and why would buy pock group of publishers. Need this help. Who wants to help me with that question. Yes sir idea of the of the project was to bring the these publishers that have been around for very for great number of users but and have their their their publications that were primarily pranks and google at some point said we. We'd like to for example for them to be more digital but they need the tool so they're going to have set up a website and that's why this lab is called the ad lab it's about the monetization of our public digitally and i think that was kind of the step forward that we all needed to kind of bring the bring that average for everyone everybody up so this is this like you said. It's the version one point. Oh to continue this and grow it all right but a bypass publisher is not all the same all over the country. Am i right. Dr. yes you're right. But although there's a lot of diversity and differences we all have one common interest. Which is we need to generate more revenue. But we all say and vaca crandell ical. Said that I really want salute a lot of tech companies out. There are a lot of tech platforms. Some of them been criticized today. for the lack of diversity equity and inclusion. But i have to give google credit for taking an initiative with a national associated spent publications them in the national newspaper publishers association to black press. And i've just since. I have the floor. I won't be long. You mentioned that Editing in publishers. Been around since eighteen hundred four eight hundred eighty four eight hundred eight four. Yes sir the black press of america..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"One association of alternative news media's annual conference at the boston park plaza hotel with a very distinguished panel and we were able to record this one hour program. I interviewed live in front of an audience. John huston the publisher of pioneer publishing vice president of a n and aboard alternative. The national association of hispanic publications with it was todd. Stafford the publisher of the jackson mississippi free press and a digital specialist. That was working for the am. As part of this ad. Transformation lab we also had our guardia vp. Flato kista vice president of the board of directors of the national association of hispanic publications and the treasurer of the local independent online news association. Also in the panel was dr benjamin f shabbat president. Ceo of the national newspaper publishers association. The black press of america and on the board of the national association for equal opportunity in higher education also was dana pack director of digital solutions for afro. American newspapers and brian taylor. Vp of publishing of meghan media inc. So with your permission. I'm i'm going to take you to boston as this episode of emp reports. Look at helping. Black and latino publishers maximize their digital assets to achieve maximum revenue. How did this all start. And how did you put this together and are we at the end of it or does it have some more life coming to okay l. Try and hit those points. This really goes back. Probably oh five. Seven eight years. When the national association hispanic publications in the national newspaper publishers association formed a strategic alliance. Dr chavez was there and when that happened and how that was kinda ford so when i started working within. Hp in service The strength of this alliance And got a chance to meet the leadership of both of the associations Discovered in twenty nineteen that there was..
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"This is n. P. reports are thought cast from editor and publisher since eighteen eighty four via authoritative voice of news publishing and this episode sponsored by iq audience plus by town news. Consumer revenue has never been more important digital leaders at media organizations worldwide understand the need to accelerate its growth now plus traditional one-size-fits-all pay whilst aren't the answer. There blunt instruments that treat off visitors the same way i q audience. Plus is a smart dynamic metering solution that empowers media companies to maximize revenue by identifying key audiences cd engagement and growing membership and subscriptions supercharge or consumer revenue grow engagement and bolster your advertising income now with audience plus visit town news dot com ep. Today to learn more. And hi. I'm mike blender publisher of enp magazine if you're listening to this weekly vodka series on the various podcast platforms. We place on. Please follow us right now. If you're watching the video version on our youtube channel right below the screen is a subscribe button to the direct right of that. Isabel if you click that. I promise you you'll get an update. Each and every time we upload a new episode of emp reports back in january of twenty twenty one the google news initiative along with association of alternative news media the national association of hispanic publications and the national newspaper. Publishers association started a g. And i add transformation lab which basically was a six month program to help black and latino news publishers maximize their digital assets. Now over twenty five media companies took advantage of this program and i was personally honored to host a panel at the june twenty twenty.
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"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"And <Speech_Female> <SpeakerChange> <hes> <hes> <Speech_Male> <Silence> <Speech_Female> of course <SpeakerChange> things like <Speech_Female> branded content <Speech_Female> are part of it <Speech_Female> <hes> and <Speech_Female> <hes> <Speech_Female> and that's <Speech_Female> a that's a <Speech_Male> big interest to <Speech_Male> to a lot of the <Speech_Female> startups. We we <Speech_Female> talked to. But some <Speech_Female> of the companies are <Speech_Female> are interested in sampling. <Speech_Female> They're are interested <Speech_Female> in sending something <Speech_Female> out with the print product <Speech_Female> and having it show <Speech_Female> up in people's homes <Speech_Female> so <Speech_Female> anything anything <Speech_Female> that you can imagine <Speech_Female> of <Speech_Male> is possible <Speech_Male> and even <Silence> more than that. I think <Speech_Female> <Speech_Female> it stands to reason <Speech_Female> that we we see <Speech_Female> this is a creative exercise <Speech_Female> too. I mean <Speech_Male> if our <Speech_Male> companies are <Speech_Male> are fully <Speech_Male> accompanies <Speech_Female> <Speech_Male> spark <Speech_Female> any ideas that our <Speech_Male> media partners have <Speech_Female> ways to market <Speech_Female> them <Speech_Female> of. <Speech_Female> We want to have that conversation. <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> Because this isn't <Speech_Female> just <Speech_Female> executing <Speech_Female> a m b. and see <Speech_Female> this is about <Speech_Female> figuring out <Speech_Female> what dna are <Speech_Female> so <SpeakerChange> that we can benefit <Speech_Male> the industry. <Speech_Male> How big is <Speech_Male> this is my final <Speech_Male> question. How <Speech_Male> big does the media <Speech_Male> company have to <Speech_Male> be in order to approach <Speech_Male> guys <Speech_Male> zach <Speech_Male> and <Speech_Male> asked to be <Silence> part of your <SpeakerChange> fund. <Silence> <Speech_Male> Yeah so <Speech_Male> we're <Speech_Male> working with companies <Speech_Male> that are <Speech_Male> really any size <Speech_Male> Media partners <Speech_Male> that are any <SpeakerChange> size so <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> Everything <Speech_Male> from the <Speech_Male> newspaper <Speech_Male> that serves <Speech_Male> ten thousand <Speech_Male> residents <Speech_Male> and has one <Speech_Male> publication <Speech_Male> to you know. <Speech_Male> I mentioned <Speech_Male> some of the bigger <Speech_Male> groups. Were working <Speech_Male> with So <Silence> <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> we are happy to have <Speech_Male> Anybody <Speech_Male> <hes> <Speech_Male> that is interested <Speech_Male> in this model. Talk <Speech_Male> to us <Speech_Male> Because <Speech_Male> it can really benefit <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> media <SpeakerChange> groups of <Speech_Male> any size. <Speech_Male> Well the <Speech_Male> two gentlemen we're <Speech_Male> chatting <Speech_Male> with today. <Speech_Male> Zach and. <Speech_Male> Jeremy definitely have <Speech_Male> incan their veins. There's <Speech_Male> no question. 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"E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"That that is really been all star and that is now your mission with this new foundation. What do you really are not. We are not a foundation. We we are a nonprofit we. We aspire to have our own funds so in fact when i leave colorado on friday and will be going on a fundraising spree to ask social impact investors to step up and help us do this in other communities around the country. But you know we really see ourselves. As kind of catalysts for creating these new kinds of ownership structures getting the financing in place and really you know ensuring the long-term of of local and community news and it doesn't matter if it's an existing brand that you're propping backup assuming that let's assume a big daily Gets bought by an entrepreneur or local business. Group gets together and says. Let me make this paper hours again. That's an awful thing to say isn't it. Larry but i guess i just said it. So go ahead. If you're if you're if you're a fan of alden and you can send me bad texts or or or or tweets but if it doesn't really matter whether it's an existing brand or startup like the colorado sun is that what i'm hearing elizabeth as well. Oh you know our so. Our initial focus is really on those existing brands with existing audiences existing relationships with their communities. Because you know we feel like there are. There's all kinds of interest and support and other amazing organizations that have grown up over the last decade to support digital first news. And what we've seen is that there's this gap In support and catalytic funding an an advising for those legacy papers. So we're really starting With those folks in our sights because we feel like that's where we can make the biggest impact And yes you know part of what we wanna do is put the pieces together in local ecosystems in different ways so where it makes sense to connect up with digital first sight like the colorado sun. We'll do that where it makes sense to connect up with the public. Broadcaster will do that where it makes sense to set up. A length fest institute type structure will do that But we're really focused on these Legacy titles that really need a. They need a nature conservancy. And that's that that's what we do not know. I looked at your background hope. You don't mind elizabeth. I'm not stalking you swarthmore. Right i'm from town pennsylvania's. My mom taught art there but you majored in latin. You're the first person. I've ever known that majored in latin. He did some deep history their job. Well done mitch but then you went to harvard and you did the next eight years at harvard so you may have run into a guy named ken. Doctor does that. Ring a bell to you neiman. Kennedy's been on this program. Three times. And i and the first two times he was teasing his new buffet of the perfect news environment. Larry you're nodding your head. You know where. I'm going outlook now. Look out look out look on. This should never say. That's microsoft. And i and i got a little angry with him when he told us he was going to do it as a digital startup rather than help an existing brand. Do you see i. I took over. Emp it's only what one hundred and forty years old and. I'm putting polish on our brand. I think brand still has value. So i'm gonna ask elizabeth the same question larry. I discussed off lying once that. I think i'd like to pose it to you in. This'll be my final thought. Are those brands spinning out of control. Elizabeth can they be saved. Is there a moment of truth where you say. Gee the buffalo news was really cool in the good old days. But i'd rather start up with a new name after the way it's i mean. Do you feel positive about those brands or is it all individuals of what was a given given that. You're just reek. Recapitulated my academic history. Now now i feel authorized to give the academic answer. Which is it depends. It depends and so part of why were were looking for strong local partners because we wanna look to our partners to help us figure out for any given brand you know what what's worth quote unquote saving here like. What's the relationship with the community. What's the history. Who are these people in context and you you. You can really only figure that out by working with people who've been in place for a long time so So i would say it depends and we're gonna go and find out larry the denver post. You've said you have no ill. Will you still know people that. Are there correct. Although i'm sure you get a few resumes every now and then yes we do. Lincoln profiles cannot brand be saved. Do you think is it. Slowly but surely spinning. When does it come to a point where there's just not a lot of equity left there. Look i will say it again. i. I'm rooting for my friends and former colleagues at the denver post. I hope that That the post can survive. It's been around for a long time. It's got a proud history many pulitzer prizes. You know it's been a it's been a great paper in its history but it has a horrible owner. everybody knows it You know it's it's it's been tough. I think there are a lot of people that unfortunately even inside the denver post who expect one day all will simply turn out the lights and that would be a tragedy really colorado. Frankly one of the reasons that i left that You know i wasn't gonna just sit around and wait for a hedge fund to turn out the lights Want to be part of that. I didn't want to wait and see if that's what happened I thought there had to be a better way. We struck out to to do it. I i would be thrilled if all in sold the denver post and put it into other hands I don't really have any hope that that's going to happen. Unfortunately all right so Larry you mentioned three times now. You're looking you're hiring. I have a feeling right now. There's there's thousands and thousands of lincoln profiles and resumes. That are gonna come your way. How did they get a hold of you. How did they find you larry. I'm really easy to retake. Just larry at colorado sun dot com. Larry colorado sun dot com elizabeth. Mazing thing here. You're putting a lot of. I guess you're putting your money. Where your mouth. Is you been teaching about journalism. Now you're forming a group that can help these brands find the solutions. They need if someone wants to. Learn more about your newest venture. How did they get a hold of you elizabeth. Well they can go to our website and t. l. n. national for news dot org or you can reach me Elizabeth at ntn dot org. You guys are doing great work. I didn't know. I caught you. Still in colorado lisbeth so you must be enjoying the Mile high city you. Are you based out of boston. Where you currently. I am based out of lexington massachusetts the birthplace of liberty. I thank both of you. Please stay healthy and well larry. We're going to check in with you in a little while. Maybe a few months and see how things are turning that with the brand new expanded venture in colorado. Thanks to both of you for your time. That sounds good. Thank you so much..
"E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"publisher" Discussed on "E & P Reports" from Editor & Publisher Magazine
"For the colorado sun. Yeah absolutely so So the national dress for local news we. We are a nonprofit. We ourselves as tiny staff of three. Have some seed funding from the google initiative and the knightfoundation. So that's that's our team the way we put this deal together. is a really innovative structure. That's been used actually in public broadcasting for the last two decades and so we're really kind of bringing it over into this space. What we did is work with. Fjc foundation which is a set of donor advised funds and they make loans to nonprofits. So there are a nonprofit lender they land for housing projects. You know your local community center. And so they said to us. We will loan you the funds to make this acquisition. This sounds amazing and right on your mission But we need you to find some local funders who will back that loan. It will cosign essentially Because you know there's no assets there's no hard assets in the deal right There's no buildings. There's no heavy equipment so we went out to the incredible funders of colorado and said we can do this acquisition. We have a funder. Just need you to cosign with us and take a chance with us on this incredible opportunity to preserve local news and keep it in local hands. And you know we had The gates family foundation step up and the colorado trust step up and then we also had really catalytic support from the american journalism project. So those three those three funders the american journalism project the colorado trust and the gates family foundation backed this loan to the national trust. They co-signed on the loan for us so that we could make this acquisition so it really larry. It's really alone. you'll be paying back over time. Correct to take the acquisition colorado community media. Yes so the the new entity that we've created jointly with the national trust that the colorado sun created with the national trust is called the colorado news conservancy and the colorado news. Conservancy is a money making operation. They're doing great work and They have been profitable and our mission. Number one is not to break anything and as a company thrives. We aim to pay down the loan and pay off the principal as quickly as we can and The of the national trust can go on and Replicate this sort of partnerships and collaboration elsewhere around the country so important. I know gerry healy. I've known him for over. A decade i know is is wife. It's a husband and wife team And they have a to say there. They have ink in their veins in other words they the quality of journalism they were doing for all those towns they served. I call it. That ring around denver was very important to them. I mean of course profit. I mean they're not communists but it was more about delivering a quality product. 'cause i know these. These people are now getting the money in order to offer those assets to you larry. Those papers were making some money from advertising. Are you shutting that down or are you gonna continue those advertising channels in those print products in around the city of denver. We are definitely not shutting. Anything down okay. Well here we're all about as i said let's not break anything. Juryman built an impressive company. And they've got twenty. Four newspapers doing great work. They've got great advertisers great relationships in the community. We wanna maintain those and you know find Improvements inefficiencies where we can. But now we're we are. We are happy to continue the The amazing machine that they have built over the past Several years elizabeth. These were print products. These are weeklies. That's still you know they tree has to be cut down in the pulp has to be made and then they have to be. You know you remember what print is right. It's still. I'm sorry for being a little. Sorry i'm a print subscriber to too many papers larry's colorado sun project was complete disruption by taking on a print newspaper in an online only space. How is that culturally. He was that good that. Make it easier for you to find these funds. Would it have been just as easy if if there was no existing print product service communities. What do you think will elizabeth. I mean as as as larry said these are. These are profitable papers. They have deep relationships with the business community with their readers. There's an incredible amount of of goodwill in these in these businesses for me coming at this from having studied worked with digital newsrooms. I know how hard it is to build a digital business. As of course does larry to build a digital brand. And so what's incredible in the story we were able to tell to. Our funders is like you know these are these are profitable cherish titles that have incredible brand equity with their readers with their advertisers. We cannot let this We cannot let these papers died. This is this is amazing there so many news outlets out there that are trying to build exactly exactly this. And you know the as i've said over and over again a weekly print product is just a totally different animal than a daily print product. The economics are different. The journalism is different. The businesses different. And so you know. We've we've we've had to do a lot of education. But i think opened a lot of is In our under networks around the importance and uniqueness of these these kinds of local news outlets when the healy's Told the team that this was going down. Larry were you there. Were you in the room. Did you come in wave and say. Hey i'm larry. I'm the new boss sir. How did that go down. Elizabeth and i along with some others came into the newsroom. Right after jerry in an had told her folks that this ownership change was taking place you know. they've built a real a great culture As well as a great company and it's a family run operation and We wanted to make sure that they wanted to be sure to tell their people directly and to to share that moment together but then we came in immediately afterwards met the staff and i will say that several people came up to me and probably others. And and we're just thrilled to hear that No jerry dan. we're going to be able to go into retirement but also that these papers are going to You know remain in local hands and the people at at these newspapers no the colorado sun. We know them. We've worked together on journalism projects in the past and I think they're fired up about working with us and we're fired up about working with them. Loves about to say you're you're not You're not a brand new entity in denver use. You've you've cut your chops at the denver post for over a decade right. You were there for a long time so you. You must've known these journalists and known the power of these these weeklies surrounding the city so.