Tag: business brokerages

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

This viral TikTok perfectly explains how the COVID-19 vaccines work

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A few weeks ago, several epidemiologists and doctors who usually take to Twitter to share news articles, studies, and reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began sharing the same TikTok meme. The TikTok video is a short skit by an actor named Vick Krishna who turns the mundane process of vaccination into a good-versus-evil thriller to explain how the mRNA vaccine works. It’s been viewed 6 million times on TikTok alone, and has been shared on other social platforms and in text messages where it’s harder to measure its reach. I immediately sent the video to everyone in my life who had displayed even the slightest tone of skepticism in regard to the COVID-19 vaccine. Most people who show a little wariness toward the new vaccines are not anti-vaccine, per se, they just want to fully understand what it is they’re having injected into their body. Unfortunately, there are few resources that plainly explain vaccine technology . And in the absence of good and easily understood explainers , misinformation thrives. But Krishna’s video isn’t just a good explainer of how the technology works. It’s also entertaining enough to go viral, a rare achievement for wholesome health information on social platforms that are designed to promote salacious, outrageous, and enraging content—the very stuff that pandemic-related misinformation is made of. Last May, Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University and an expert on disinformation, eloquently laid out the problem : Algorithms enable COVID-19 misinformation to spread quickly and reach millions, while facts about the pandemic and health languish, seen by a only a few. “Do we need to have an enormous pro-vaccine movement waste tons of resources on that [content] just because social media has decided to preference the voices and positions of people who will go online and advocate for dangerous or mistaken points of view? What would be the value in that?” Donovan said. “Nevertheless, that’s one of the only solutions on the table.” More commonly, memes about the vaccine tend to play on negative tropes. For instance, there is a seemingly harmless TikTok meme, best identified as “me after I get the COVID-19 vaccine,” where people show videos of themselves rhythmically convulsing or barking like a dog or feigning other strange side effects. These are meant to be playful, but they actually play on anti-vaccine ideas that the shots are in some way harmful. This meme has been replicated and reposted an incalculable number of times on TikTok and Instagram Reels, then reposted on YouTube and Twitter Read More …

How the Tesla of chicken hit a ludicrous growth mode thanks to ghost kitchens

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Ben Pasternak had a problem. The founder and CEO of alt-meat startup Nuggs had seen plenty of initial buzz and success for his plant-based chicken nuggets, signing on investors that include AgFunder, McCain Foods, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and former Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb since its founding in 2019. But as of mid-2020, the company wasn’t yet in retail stores or sold in any fast-food outlets. Pasternak began brainstorming about how he could get Nuggs into people’s hands, beyond the company’s direct-to-consumer online sales. One idea was to have pop-up food trucks near college campuses, but he quickly realized that would be very tough to scale. “We were just thinking about the customer experience, and the A-plus experience would be to order Nuggs, it arrives 15 minutes later, you can spend $10, and it gets there with french fries and other sides, a drink, and some ketchup,” says chief operating officer Sam Terris. “So we worked backwards from there.” That’s when they landed on ghost kitchens. Euromonitor has estimated that ghost kitchens could be a $1 trillion industry by 2030. The concept has not only been used by established restaurant brands like McDonald’s and Chick-Fil-A experimenting with delivery and food prep efficiency, but it’s also launched a new wave of delivery-only restaurant brands in cities around the country. In Canada, Walmart is testing in-store ghost kitchens that offer restaurant meals from established brands like Quiznos, as well as items from well-known CPG brands like Beyond Meat and Ben & Jerry’s. [Photo: Simulate] Nuggs, however, doesn’t fit into any of those categories. It’s not a new or established restaurant, nor a well-known CPG brand. But the company launched its own ghost kitchen operation in San Francisco last September and has since seen explosive growth. Not only is Nuggs now among UberEats users’ 10 favorite delivery spots in that region, but its delivery orders have increased by more than four times. That’s consistent with everything we’ve been reading about ghost kitchens over the last year, particularly with a pandemic-fueled boost in app-based food delivery, but traffic to the company’s site is also up more than 300%. The company, which is now known as Simulate and whose mission is to develop “advanced nutrition technology,” has its products in retail stores around the country, most notably Whole Foods. Pasternak says the progression from DTC to ghost kitchens to retail gives the brand an advantage over brands trying to just launch in a single sales channel. “We got so much traction over the past year, now launching into retail, it seems that companies that don’t have their own platform first find it very difficult to find traction,” says Pasternak. “Whereas for us, with DTC and cloud kitchens, we have this existing user base, and retail is just another way for them to get the product they’re already familiar with.” Nuggs has now expanded its ghost kitchen options to Los Angeles (with New York coming soon), and both Pasternak and Terris say perhaps the biggest lesson so far has been how the ghost kitchen has emerged as a product-research platform and brand-awareness tool. “With retail and food service, the necessary evil is having these large distributors that aren’t agile at all, which doesn’t allow you to iterate quickly within their systems,” says Pasternak. Read More …

Could 13,000 smart thermometers keep Nebraska COVID-19-free?

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The vast majority of Nebraska is composed of rural territory: wide swaths of land occupied by pockets of roughly 2,500 people. Despite the state’s diffuse populous, it, like others, has struggled to contain the spread of COVID-19 over the past year. School officials are especially wary, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recently released guidelines that reduce social distancing for students to 3 feet. Towns in rural Nebraska and several other regions around the U.S. are investing in new measures to keep schools safe from COVID-19 and future viral outbreaks. To finance these initiatives, they’re turning to local government organizations as well as corporate sponsors. A health tech company called Kinsa has sent some 21 school districts and six private schools in Nebraska 13,000 of its smart thermometers to help keep better track of sick students. School principles and nurses get a digital dashboard where they can view students’ anonymized symptom and fever data, broken down by grade. Parents are encouraged to take their children’s temperature before coming into school, where students are also required to wear masks. “Nebraska is very independent,” says Burke Harr, a former state senator who now counsels the Nebraska Cooperative Government, a group that ensures 93 small counties and towns in the state have the funding for roadway repairs and other common local infrastructure. “We were trying to find the least intrusive way to help predict where COVID may or may not be and to stop its spread or to at least alert us of where there was an issue.” In May 2020, Nebraska saw a small spike in cases, a significant portion of which were coming from meatpacking plants. Then in November, the state saw a steep incline, reaching a peak of 3,500 new cases per day. Some of the most high-risk areas were also some of the least populated. Boone County, for example, currently has one of the worst rates of COVID-19 infection in the state and has a population of only 5,200. “It hit rural Nebraska because there were less precautions taken,” says Harr, noting that in some parts of the state you’d be hard-pressed to find someone wearing a mask. “There isn’t the compactness of the cities, but there were spreader events Read More …

The NSFW future of OnlyFans, where celebs, influencers, and sex workers post side by side

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Vex Ashley began working as a cam girl to pay her way through art school. Whatever reservations she had about being a “little weird goth kid” doing porn melted away as she met other performers online who also had a more alternative approach to mainstream adult content. “I thought that to do porn, you had to fit a very rigid stereotype,” Ashley says. “I never was interested in fitting into that mold.” Ashley wanted to infuse porn with a higher level of aesthetics and concepts, using it as a medium to explore ideas rather than purely for viewing pleasure. And if ever there was a tenet of the creator economy, it’s that niche interests can always find an audience. Ashley uploaded experimental videos to Tumblr and quickly gained a following that she took to Patreon in 2014 to better monetize her art and support her production company, Four Chambers . At the height of her success on Patreon, Ashley had more than 3,000 subscribers and was pulling in around $25,000 per month. But after the platform changed its policies in 2018, she effectively lost it all. Vex Ashley [Photo: courtesy of Four Chambers] Like many other adult content creators whose Patreon revenue was decimated, Ashley migrated to OnlyFans in 2018. And like many of her peers, she’s now wary of meeting the same fate on the platform. OnlyFans, which allows creators to charge users a monthly or pay-per-view fee to access content, launched in 2016 with the intention of being for all types of creators but has become a nexus for adult entertainment. Amateur and professionals alike have flocked to OnlyFans as a safe haven to monetize NSFW (not safe for work) content, becoming the key drivers of the platform’s early growth. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated that momentum as more creators looked to OnlyFans as a source of income during record rates of unemployment. Between March and April of last year, OnlyFans experienced a 75% spike in new user and creator registrations. To date, OnlyFans has more than 120 million users and 1 million creators who have earned more than $3 billion collectively (the company takes a 20% cut). Read More …

Why anti-vaccine propaganda still runs rampant on Instagram

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This story is part of Doubting the Dose, a series that examines anti-vaccine sentiment and the role of misinformation in supercharging it.  Read more here . It takes about three taps on Instagram to find numerous sources of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines. The problem has been well-reported. And Facebook, which owns Instagram, has made several rounds of changes to discourage the spread of vaccine misinformation on its platforms. Facebook says it’s already removed millions of Facebook and Instagram posts containing false information about COVID-19 and the vaccines. But anti-vaccine content remains a pervasive presence on one of the most popular social networks. Vaccine misinformation that spreads on social platforms like Instagram is one component of the ongoing “infodemic,” a dimension of the crisis that’s impacted how people think about the pandemic and the public health initiatives combating it. Currently almost a third of Americans do not plan to get vaccinated , as a Pew Research study from early March shows. And in order to reach herd immunity— when 80% to 85% of the population carries antibodies— a significant segment of the fearful, doubtful, and paranoid will need to be convinced to get their shot, for the good of everybody. “The more people who remain unvaccinated, the more opportunity the virus has to take hold in a community and create an outbreak,” says Summer Johnson McGee, dean of the School of Health Sciences at the University of New Haven. “As populations reach herd immunity, less social distancing, greater social mixing of groups, and larger-capacity events should be possible without fear about major outbreaks and lockdowns.” As the numbers of willing-yet-unvaccinated people go down in the next few months, a new phase in the information war may begin. If curbing misinformation’s spread has been the focus so far, then actively changing the minds of vaccine doubters may soon become a pressing priority. Read More …