Tag: business brokerages

The principal value of a business broker is to act as a buffer between the buyer and the seller

This iPhone app lets anybody mint an NFT for anything—for free

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Musicians and visual artists have long registered their work with the U.S. Copyright Office to prove it’s theirs. But doing so is really little more than a person in a government office “witnessing” that a creation is associated with a person’s name on a certain date. And the process takes weeks or months to complete. In the 21st century, creation happens on digital platforms. It happens far faster than ever before, and in many ways. Inspiration for a vocal line or a beat can happen spontaneously during a TikTok duet, for example. A GIF can be created on a phone and uploaded to social networks. It’s a good thing, then, that the blockchain can also “witness” the creation—and the creator—of a digital thing, and record it for perpetuity. A new, free app called S!ng lets pretty much anybody do this in a few seconds by minting an NFT ( nonfungible token ) of a work on the Ethereum blockchain. An NFT is a type of cryptographic token that signifies true ownership of a digital asset, such as a piece of digital artwork. Creators can upload images (JPEG, BMP, or TIFF files) or audio (WAV, MP3, MIDI, PTX, PTF, or M4A) to the S!ng app, or record audio directly via the phone’s microphone. Once creators have minted an NFT for their work, it can be sold or licensed to others online if there’s a market for it. Read More …

Why it’s the perfect time to learn to be an engineer or data scientist

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COVID-19 has led to widespread layoffs and job losses across industries, with hospitality, travel, and retail hit especially hard. After the pandemic, many of those jobs are not expected to come back. At the same time, hiring for technical roles in software engineering and data science has skyrocketed: Remote interviews for technical roles grew by 370% on HackerRank’s platform from 2019 to 2020 as companies pivoted business online. The shortage of talent to fill those roles continues in 2021—hiring managers are worried about recruiting enough developers this year. With the right infrastructure, these are ideal conditions for a unique, more diverse generation of tech employees to emerge and fill the open positions. This can come to fruition in two main ways: companies offering technical reskilling programs for their own employees and outside talent, and people embracing nontraditional technical education options such as coding boot camps and self-teaching. Internal reskilling programs thrive in a remote-first world During COVID-19, most companies have found themselves needing more software developers and fewer employees on the ground or in service roles. They can use remote training tools to transition nontechnical employees into technical roles. With intuitive virtual tools, companies can still assess and train workers remotely during the pandemic. Amazon’s Tech Academy is a great example. The program, part of Amazon’s $700 million investment in upskilling , is open to any nontechnical employee (such as truck drivers and warehouse maintenance staff). It provides intensive reskilling with the goal of hiring students as Amazon software developers Read More …

The company behind the NBA’s NFT trading cards is now valued at $2.6 billion

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NFTs, or nonfungible tokens , have exploded in both the financial markets and the zeitgeist at large. Simply put, NFTs use blockchain technology to authenticate digital assets, which can then be bought and sold—sometimes at staggering sums. Much of the hype around NFTs has been fueled by headline grabbing sales, such as the artist Beeple’s recent $69.3 million payday for a single digital artwork, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hawking his first tweet for $2.9 million, and the original GIF of the internet’s favorite Pop-Tart cat going for nearly $600,000. While some analysts worry that NFTs are a speculation bubble primed to burst, Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of blockchain company Dapper Labs , is planning for the long haul—and he just received a major round of funding to meet that goal. Announced today, Dapper Labs, the company behind the National Basketball Association’s (NBA’s) digital collectibles platform Top Shot , closed $305 million in funding led by investment management company Coatue, with additional backing from Michael Jordan, Kevin Durant, Andre Iguodala , Will Smith and Keisuke Honda’s Dreamers VC, Andreessen Horowitz, The Chernin Group, and more. Dapper Labs came out of beta last fall and is now valued at a $2.6 billion. ????ALL HAIL THE KING???? @YoDough scooped up this Legendary LeBron James Moment from our Cosmic Series 1 set for $208,000‼️ This Moment is from our first Legendary set ever minted ???? The top acquisition for any NBA Top Shot Moment … so far. Congrats on the nice pickup! ???? pic.twitter.com/rFLMzbwXN7 — NBA Top Shot (@nbatopshot) February 22, 2021 Founded in 2018, Dapper Labs is on a mission to make blockchain technology mainstream. Its first product, CryptoKitties (which Gharegozlou launched in 2017 under venture studio Axiom Zen), gamified the blockchain experience by allowing users to collect and breed digital cats as NFTs. But its partnership with the NBA has been one of the most notable cosigns in making blockchain more accessible. Launched last October, NBA Top Shot, powered by Dapper Labs’s own blockchain system Flow, allows users to buy and sell Moments, i.e. digital trading cards that feature a clip of an NBA player’s best shots or plays. A video of LeBron James dunking on Nemanja Bjelica during a 2019 matchup between the L.A. Lakers and the Sacramento Kings sold on Top Shot for $208,000. New Orleans Pelican Zion Williamson’s epic shot block in a game against the Denver Nuggets Read More …

The Google Nest Hub offers the perfect sleep tracker for lazy people

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Google’s newest Nest Hub is the tech giant’s best attempt yet to be all things to all people. The device so far has made a name for itself as a modern picture frame , the perfect kitchen assistant, and even a cool tool for makeup tutorials . Now, the Nest Hub can function as a sleep tracker, providing a better reason for you to let Google into your bedroom. Nest Hub’s sleep tracking is built for anyone who is on the fence about using technology to assess how well they’re sleeping. It’s a very stripped-down experience compared with popular sleep trackers like Oura Ring or even the Apple Watch, but it won’t make you feel judged for your bad habits. And, if you do feel ashamed of your sleep statistics, you can easily delete them at any time in the Google Fit app (oddly, you can only delete your data on the Nest Hub itself within two hours after you wake up). That makes the Nest Hub a great addition to the roster of available sleep trackers. In the week I spent trying it out, I found the Nest Hub to be extremely low maintenance. You don’t need to wear it, you don’t need to check it every day, and you don’t need to remember to charge it—it’s always plugged in. The tracker works in the background on its own. The sleep tracking is enabled by Google’s motion-sensing Soli technology, which also powers the device’s new gesture-control feature, a user favorite that was previously available only with the Nest Hub Max . With gesture control, users can pause music simply by air-high-fiving the screen or move to the next step in a recipe with a wave. (Soli, which uses radar to detect motion , first launched in the Pixel 4 smartphone.) [Photo: courtesy of Google] In order for the sleep-tracking feature to work, the Nest Hub has to sit on a night table that is the same height as the top of your mattress (my side table is a few inches higher, though I don’t think it affected my results). Read More …

Break out your computers. Rebuilding post-pandemic requires more than hammers and bulldozers

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As we start to emerge from the pandemic, it’s tempting to daydream about all the ways our lives will go back to normal. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Too many lives were lost. Too many businesses were disrupted or bankrupted. Too many aspects of the infrastructure that we take for granted every day, and which were already weak, have been fundamentally transformed or even destroyed by the impact of COVID-19. What we need to focus on is rebuilding that infrastructure. I’m not talking about bridges, roads, and power plants (although we certainly need to focus on physical infrastructure too). I’m talking about the basic foundation of trust, communication, and interaction in our modern world. I’m talking about code Read More …