Tag: business brokerages

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

This virtual team-building guide is the cure for Zoom happy hours

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As many companies have seen employees working from home for more than a year thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, they’ve been searching for ways beyond conference calls and purely work-focused Zoom meetings for workers to connect online. Naturally, that’s led to an influx of online team-building activities , often replicating the types of activities companies would once engage in for in-person bonding, from wine tastings to virtual escape rooms. But while there’s no shortage of potential Zoom-based social activities for companies to book to entertain employees or clients, it can still be a lot of work for managers to find activities that are right for a particular audience. That was the experience of Healey Cypher, chief operating officer at the venture studio Atomic , who said he found himself spending substantial amounts of time looking for better alternatives to the oft-dreaded Zoom happy hour . The experience led Cypher and his team to experiment with reaching out to vendors offering online experiences and to companies that might be in need of quality group entertainment in order to help pair them together Read More …

The Gmail-enhancing superpower you didn’t know you needed

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For a service that’s all about interacting with other (alleged) humans, Gmail does a curiously poor job of putting people front and center. Sure, the Gmail inbox is all about communication—but have you ever found yourself staring at an email and struggling to remember what you know about the person who sent it or exchanges you’ve had in the past? If you interact with enough mammals over email, it’s bound to happen. And Gmail just doesn’t have particularly powerful tools for providing the on-demand context you need to successfully navigate your way out of that situation. Up until a matter of months ago, in fact, Gmail didn’t have any real form of integration with its companion Google Contacts service. Late last year, Google added a Contacts panel into the website’s sidebar, which was a significant step—but the information in that panel is still pretty limited and lacking. You can see basic contact info for people who emailed you and a list of past emails involving them, and that’s about it. If you want any additional details, you’ll have to stop what you’re doing, click away from the message, and move over to a whole other page to find it. Read More …

How the online echo chamber gave us the Arizona election audit

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Reporting on the audit of the 2020 presidential election now going on in Maricopa County, Arizona, National Memo’ s Steven Rosenfeld writes that one floor observer was overheard saying, “I hope they are fake ballots, because I am seeing so many Biden.” After the November 7 election, Trump supporters wondered how Biden could possibly have won when all they’d seen for months were reports of packed Trump rallies, yards filled with Trump signs, and excited Facebook posts about Trump and his upcoming win. They were honestly shocked when Trump lost. They simply couldn’t connect up their own experience with the result of the election. They live within a right-wing echo chamber where opposing viewpoints are rarely heard. They saw the widespread support for Biden only through the lens of right-wing misinformation and disinformation. They dismissed Biden’s continual lead in the polls as “fake.” Facebook, the go-to social media platform for Trump supporters in 2020, did a lot to contribute to the echo chamber. When the social network’s algorithms pick up on a user’s interest in right-wing content, it serves them more and more of it, and filters out other opinions. All through the campaign, many Trump supporters saw nothing but news posts and shared memes about Trump’s achievements as president, his huge rallies, and his mockery of Joe Biden and the Democrats. And right-wingers were, and remain, the most energized group on Facebook, even as Donald Trump remains expelled from the platform after he helped incite an insurrection on January 6. The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from: 1. Dan Bongino 2. Franklin Graham 3. Read More …

How ‘Zoom’ became the ‘Kleenex’ of video calling

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What’s in a name? For Zoom, it’s quite a lot. One of the reasons why Zoom became so popular, and the reference point for virtual meetings and video conferences amid a yearlong pandemic, is because the brand name itself is a strong selling point. It’s helped Zoom become the “BandAid” of pandemic life. An early pioneer in the video conferencing market, Zoom employs the sound symbolism onomatopoeia , which is when a word describes a sound by imitating the actual sound. According to the field of linguistics, sound symbolism is a theory which hypothesizes that there is a relationship between sound and meaning in multiple forms. By definition, zoom means: (for a person/thing) to move or travel very quickly, (2) (of a camera or user) to change smoothly from a long shot to a close-up or vice versa, or (3) to express sudden fast movement. Hence, the word itself takes on the meaning of “fast” and “sudden” and lends itself to the action of changing the focus of a camera. The brand name directly connects with the meaning of the word. Plus, brands with names that symbolically fit their purpose—like through onomatopoeia—are more memorable, according to a 2017 study by Colby College psychology researchers Melissa A. Preziosi and Jennifer H. Read More …

Citizen’s dystopian new feature is mass surveillance disguised as public safety

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O n October 26, 2020, police killed Walter Wallace Jr. in West Philadelphia, as his mother stood on the sidewalk, pleading for his life. Over the next few days, the neighborhood erupted in protest, and my phone lit up with alerts from Citizen, a public safety app. Writers for the app monitor and transcribe police scanner chatter, which is then converted into push notifications. There was a break-in at Rite Aid, a burglary at a nearby liquor store, a dumpster fire one block over, a trash fire 900 feet away. As local news has been decimated by budget cuts and layoffs, apps such as Citizen and Nextdoor have ascended to fill the void. Citizen in particular has increasingly positioned itself as a news organization. “We act fast, break news, and give people the immediate information they need to stay safe,” reads an overview on the company’s LinkedIn profile . Citizen often ranks higher than The New York Times among news apps in the Apple App Store. In theory, the platform democratizes reporting; it allows anyone with a smartphone to post comments and videos to a neighborhood network. But in practice, these alerts and the neighborhood commentary attached to them often read like police stenography and amplify existing biases Read More …