Eureka native Sara Bareilles, already famous for Little Voice and other albums, has composed the music and lyrics for a Broadway musical, now in previews, based on the movie Waitress. Remember that one? With Keri Russell? The New Yorker describes it as “based on the 2007 film about a small-town waitress who enters a baking contest.” Maybe our other local luminary, Guy Fieri, should be involved. Tix are available tomorrow HERE and start at $150.
Let’s wish Sara a good long run. You go, girl!
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I’m talking about the GE ad that shows an Idea, in a costume that looks like it was recycled from the Farmer’s ad about “gaps in your insurance coverage”. The Idea is a scruffy, shaggy creature that no one wants around because it’s ugly and disturbing. It hangs out at coffee shops till they close. It’s homeless, living in a box in an alley. Finally a yuppie takes it in but by that time my eyes are filled with tears.
Cherish your ideas! Every business in this community started as an idea. Cherish your ideas- nourish them, love them, work on them, discuss them and above all be thankful for them.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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Amazon has announced huge changes in its Sacramento-area delivery scheme while, simultaneously, Walmart has applied to the FAA for permission to test home delivery by drones and Google is joining in.
Are we ready for this? Will a drone be able to tell the difference between a screened patio and open space? Who will be the first to get beaned , or lose an eye, to an errant drone? We do live in interesting times.
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From the Humboldt Area Foundation:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 1, 2015
Contact: Courtney Haraldson
Humboldt Area Foundation
(707) 442-2993
courtneyh@hafoundation.org
New Fund Established at Humboldt Area Foundation to Support Women in Technology
BAYSIDE,CA- StreamGuys, a leading international streaming media company based in Bayside, CA has established a new fund with Humboldt Area Foundation. The Women in Technology Fund was created to encourage young women in high school to pursue online training in the field of computer technology.
The mission of the fund is to engage and encourage stronger diversification in the field of computer technologies, and to focus young minds on the current and future job demand of many companies in the Humboldt County area. Jonathan Speaker, Jason Osburn and Kiriki Delany have made it a priority to help establish and grow the technology field in the local area to bring higher paying jobs, family and home ownership to the community. Their hope is to expand this fund in the future in response to need.
This is an annual award for students in grades 9-12 and nominations can be made by high school teachers and staff through the Humboldt Area Foundation. Recipients of this award will be encouraged to use the funding to take additional online courses in technology.
For more information about the Humboldt Area Foundation or this particular fund please visit the Humboldt Area Foundation online at hafoundation.org or call (707) 442-2993.
Humboldt Area Foundation is the community foundation of and for the citizens of the Redwood, Trinity, and Wild Rivers Region. Vera Vietor established the Humboldt Area Foundation in 1972 with $2.4 million. Since then, more than $67 million in grants and scholarships have been awarded. Humboldt Area Foundation promotes and encourages generosity, leadership and inclusion to strengthen our communities.
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Courtney Haraldson
Communications Manager
Humboldt Area Foundation
363 Indianola Rd. Bayside, CA 95524
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T | 707.267.9911
F | 707.442.9702
W | hafoundation.org
<WomeninTechnology.jpg>
“Dark Matter Digital Network, a burgeoning online radio network focused on science, paranormal and related topical radio shows, has selected StreamGuys to provide all content delivery network (CDN) and streaming services for its programming, including dynamic ad insertion.” according to a press release from StreamGuys.
It continues, “The appointment of StreamGuys as the network’s exclusive CDN and streaming partner coincides with paranormal radio legend Art Bell’s return to broadcasting. Mr. Bell’s new Midnight in the Desert program premieres this week, airing weeknights on Dark Matter Digital Network at 12 midnight ET.”
(Calls to KINS and to BiCoastal Media, formerly the local outlet for Bell’s late night show, established that they currently have no plans to carry his new show but a barrage of phone calls could perhaps change their minds. Bell fans are vociferous in their devotion. KXL in Portland, 101.1 FM, is carrying the broadcasts as are KNYE in Pahrump NV, 95.1 FM and four SoCal stations. Does anyone besides Art Bell really live in Pahrump NV?)
Here is an interview from RadioLink.
More from the release:
“Keith Rowland, owner of Dark Matter Digital Network and a longtime webmaster and engineer for Art Bell, has gradually built a live talent roster since launching the network in 2013. With the return of Art Bell and the addition of The Other Side of Midnight, a new show from Richard C. Hoagland airing immediately after Midnight in the Desert, Rowland sought to offload the growing responsibilities that come with a busier live streaming schedule—and a quickly growing audience.
A recommendation from TuneIn, the popular stream aggregator that will carry Midnight in the Desert via its mobile app, brought StreamGuys into the picture. StreamGuys quickly established a robust, cloud- based streaming architecture that can quickly scale up or down to accommodate audience sizes from show to show, along with redundant mp3 and AAC+ streams to accommodate most media players. Rowland also signed on for StreamGuys’ dynamic ad insertion service, ensuring a simple path to stream monetization without the burden of managing ad schedules and delivery.”
“StreamGuys developed a strong combination of hardware and streaming infrastructure that covered everything from dynamic user numbers to ad delivery,” said Rowland. “They built a redundant server backbone to handle thousands of connections seamlessly, with automatic failover to backup systems as needed. It’s an intelligent configuration that can determine which server and data center location is best equipped to handle each connection. And the ad insertion service happens entirely server-side, which means we simply have to send a toe down the audio chain to trigger ads. They do all the heavy lifting, which removes the headaches of manual ad management from the client side.”
The monetization angle is especially important for Dark Matter Digital Network as a quickly growing streaming network. While 22 over-the-air radio stations in North America have signed on to pick up Midnight in the Desert from a relay stream, Rowland emphasizes that his operation is primarily an internet streaming network—a vision that he sees quickly gaining momentum.
“Increasingly, broadcasters who leave the corporate market recognize independent internet streaming as the next logical step,” said Rowland. “Even when Art Bell was on terrestrial and later satellite radio, more listeners were switching to a concurrent internet stream with each passing week. This was the next natural step for Art, and it’s exactly where we want to be as Dark Matter Digital Network. We can control everything we do, and streaming is a more exacting technology when it comes to financials. We understand our demographics, we know our audience numbers and we can monetize everything easily compared to the surveys and averages of terrestrial radio. StreamGuys is helping us achieve our monetization goals.”
About StreamGuys, Inc.
In business since 2000, StreamGuys is an industry-leading service provider of live and on-demand streaming, podcasting delivery, and SaaS toolsets for enterprise-level broadcast media organizations. The company brings together the industry’s best price-to-performance ratio, a robust and reliable network, and an infinitely scalable cloud-based platform for clients of any size to process, deliver, monetize and playout professional streaming content. StreamGuys supports many of the world’s largest Podcasts, global TV and radio broadcasters, video and audio production companies, houses of worship, retail and hospitality businesses, government organizations, medical and healthcare services, and live venues for sports and entertainment. The company excels in developing and deploying technologies for business growth and revenue generation, including dynamic ad insertion, mobile streaming and detailed business and data analytics.
Finally, here is an interview with The Man himself from Dark Matter, including a link for those who wish to sign up for Midnight in the Desert. Enjoy!
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Bill Maher’s show “VICE”, which is an excellent documentary series, just ran a segment called “Hire A White Guy”. It’s about the propensity of Chinese corporations to hire white folks to dress up their corporate headquarters as ushers, greeters, even masquerading as Western doctors. They interviewed one fellow who said he regularly gets five or six job offers a DAY. Plus if you stick to Shanghai, the city is so vast you can impersonate Western doctors all over the place and never get caught. We all look alike to them, remember.
This sounds like a job even I could do, but the word “women” wasn’t uttered even once during the show. So I asked my Shanghai-born friend if there was a market for women. He didn’t think so. Even so, I wonder if some of the single men languishing in the homeless camps couldn’t be employed for the price of a new suit and a plane ticket. Food for thought, anyway.
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Just returned from the Bay Area and found this message in my in-box. Came as quite a shock since I closed my PayPal account a year ago, mostly because I was tired of all the emails and warnings about mischief with PayPal accounts. All they wanted was for me to update my credit card details. Yeah, right.
IF you receive something like this, go to the PayPal website and click the “Contact Us” button. PayPal will ask you to forward the bogus message to them so they can investigate.
The world is full of dreadful people, isn’t it?
PART ONE: Imagine there were a company that offered on-line shopping, business-to-business sales, online payments, wholesale trade and cloud computing- in other words a combination of eBay and Amazon that is actually bigger than eBay and Amazon combined. Welcome to Alibaba.
Started by a schoolteacher named Jack Ma on his kitchen table in Hangzhou in 1999, the company, now based in Hong Kong, is about to launch what may be the biggest initial public offering in history, one which could easily surpass Facebook’s fumbled IPO of $16B in 2012. Why will be the biggest beneficiary? Yahoo, which owns 24% of Alibaba and will probably use the infusion of cash from the IPO to continue its buying spree of smaller tech companies. To give you an idea of the scale, Alibaba processes $248B in retail sales yearly. Here’s a description from the Mercury News:
‘”Nearly 8% of all Chinese online shopping goes through Alibaba sites; on Singles Day last year, a popular holiday in China for online shopping, the site processed $5.8B in in purchases. By comparison, eBay’s total sales on its online marketplace for all of 2013 were $6.8B.”
Alibaba is also moving into mobile commerce in a big way, investing in American companies like Mountain View -based Tango Me and in Lyft, the San Francisco -based ride sharing app, while attempting to consolidate its position amidst its nearest rivals, Baidu and TenCant, which is already rolling out its own IPO. (Google and eBay have departed the China market). Alibaba’s IPO was scheduled for August 8 (eighth day, eighth month- the Chinese like “8”s) but may be delayed due to last-minute glitches involving SEC approval of some of their subs which are based in the Cayman Islands. Ma, who is worth over $8B, has stepped down as CEO but remains as Chair of the 21.000 employee firm and is devoting his time to a charitable trust.
It’s a global economy for sure, and becoming more so every day. Wonder how long it will be before we start seeing Singles’ Day promotions? That ‘s too good an idea to skip.
PART TWO: The Analects of Jack. The early history of Alibaba is set forth in a documentary and a book (Alibaba, by Liu and Avery, 2009) which describes how at one time in the early days, Ma was literally kidnapped and held hostage in a Malibu mansion at gunpoint until he talked his captor into going into business with him). Ma only got into college on his third entrance exam but his English major has definitely been put to good use in the following phrases which were compiled by American City Business Journals from various interviews and an appearance on Charley Rose that I’m sorry I missed. Here’s a sampling.
Why he likes small businesses and tries to help them through Alibaba: “I’ve seen people make a fortune by catching shrimps, but I’ve never seen anyone make a fortune by catching sharks and whales. It’s like Forrest Gump.”
On putting customers first: “It’s customers No, 1, employees, two, and shareholders, three. It’s the customer who pay us the money, it’s the employees who drive the vision, and it’s the shareholders who when the financial crisis comes, these people ran away. My customers and my people stayed.”
On technology: “I know nothing about technology. I use the computer to browse the Internet and receive email. That’s it.”
On developing a business: “If you want to be a great company, think about what social problem you could solve.”
On money and Alibaba’s large cash reserves: “When you try to solve problems with money, that is when your real problems start. A company’s assets are like a country’s armed forces.You cannot use it lightly, but if you ever need to mobilize it, you must win.”
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I tend to think of Umpqua as a small, local bank but it’s not. Since the early 90’s it has grown from six branches to 364, including those that were acquired from Sterling Bank in April of this year. They have 5000 employees in branches in Washington, Oregon, California , Nevada and Utah and are looking to open more, while consolidating for efficiency.
How do they distinguish themselves from all the other banks and credit unions seeking your money? By a folksy approach that includes including displays of local products in its branches, and handing out chocolates with each cash withdrawal. Each Umpqua branch has a telephone direct to Ray Davis, the president, whose approach to growing the bank has been to build a $22B bank while still operating small.
Umpqua has four branches in Humboldt now but has announced that 27 branches will be closed before the end of the year- 13 in Washington and seven each in Oregon and California. No specifics available yet, but Umpqua has attracted the attention of no less a news source than the Economist. That’s bigtime.
I usually deal with credit unions, with the exception of my mortgage with NVB, so I have no experience as an Umpqua customer. Do you deal with them? What have been your experiences? We’d love to hear from you.
Saturday the 14th was my cousin’s kid’s graduation day from UC Santa Barbara. I wasn’t expecting much aside from heat and chaos so I was pleasantly surprised that the graduation speaker actually had something to say that was memorable.
His name is Jose Hernandez and he was born in French Camp. If you’ve ever known anyone from French Camp, you know it is a migrant labor settlement. He spoke of following his parents as they moved from job to job picking strawberries, lettuce, whatever. Finally a teacher took an interest in the family and convinced the parents to settle near Stockton so that the kids could get a real education.
One night in 1972, the family watch Gene Cernan walk on the moon. Jose told his father, “That’s what I want to do”. His father told him that he could do it but he needed to make himself a roadmap to follow. “And don’t skip any of the steps.”
Jose graduated from high school in Stockton although he had not learned English until he was twelve. He earned a BSEE from the University of the Pacific and then an MS from UC Santa Barbara. He joined the Johnson Space Center and held a number of assignments while applying for the astronaut program. He applied again, was rejected again. NASA let it be known they would like their personnel to know some Russian (for space station work). He learned Russian. He pursued every avenue they suggested. Finally, after TWELVE TIMES, he was accepted into the 2004 astronaut class and on August 28, 2009 he achieved his dream: two weeks on the Space Shuttle Discovery. He sent the first tweet from space in Spanish.
Since then he has run for Congress, unsuccessfully. Clearly we haven’t heard the last from him. His “Reach for the Stars” foundation encourages kids to explore careers in space. The gloom and doom which was underlying the ceremony due to the recent murders in Isla Vista could have taken over, but didn’t have a chance after Jose finished speaking. It was a good day, and he didn’t skip any of the steps.
FOOTNOTE: The road from the Bay Area up here is an AWFUL ROAD which seems to get worse every year. I kept thinking how much it would be to be riding a bus or a nice relaxing TRAIN. Talk about reaching for the stars!