'They still want you to come in': Some workers, businesses disagree on what's 'essential'
Some employees disagree with employers who say their businesses are essential. Experts say the definition's gray area makes it hard for workers.
Some employees disagree with employers who say their businesses are essential. Experts say the definition's gray area makes it hard for workers.
The city of Indianapolis and the Indy Chamber announced a $10 million rapid response loan fund for small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.
The financial disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic are growing. April brings new challenges for renters, homeowners and small-business owners.
Indiana businesses operating during the coronavirus should follow certain sanitation measures. Guidelines vary based on a worker's risk of exposure.
Indiana officials have investigated several hundred complaints about businesses accused of violating state-mandated safety restrictions.
Here's what business leaders and economists say Indiana needs to do to reopen the state's economy and recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
Indiana businesses are receiving a second round of payroll protection loans to assist with the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic.
Gov. Mike Pence's Scott County order allowing a needle-exchange program is a welcome step. But it's just a start.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Syed Shah usually buys and sells stocks and currencies through his Interactive Brokers account, but he couldn't resist trying his hand at some oil trading on April 20, the day prices plunged below zero for the first time ever. The day trader, working from his house in a Toronto suburb, figured he couldn't lose as he spent $2,400 snapping up crude at $3.30 a barrel, and then 50 cents. Then came what looked like the deal of a lifetime: buying 212 futures contracts on West Texas Intermediate for an astonishing penny each. What he didn't know was oil's first trip into negative pricing had broken Interactive Brokers Group Inc. Its software couldn't cope with that pesky minus sign, even though it was always technically possible -- though this was an outlandish idea before the pandemic -- for the crude market to go upside down. Crude was actually around negative $3.70 a barrel when Shah's screen had it at 1 cent. Interactive Brokers never displayed a subzero price to him as oil kept diving to end the day at minus $37.63 a barrel. At midnight, Shah got the devastating news: he owed Interactive Brokers $9 million. He'd started the day with $77,000 in his account. To be clear, investors who were long those oil contracts had a brutal day, regardless of what brokerage they had their account in. What set Interactive Brokers apart, though, is that its customers were flying blind, unable to see that prices had turned negative, or in other cases locked into their investments and blocked from trading. Compounding the problem, and a big reason why Shah lost an unbelievable amount in a few hours, is that the negative numbers also blew up the model Interactive Brokers used to calculate the amount of margin -- aka collateral -- that customers needed to secure their accounts. "It's a $113 million mistake on our part," said Thomas Peterffy, the chairman and founder of Interactive Brokers, in an interview Wednesday. Customers will be made whole, Peterffy said. "We will rebate from our own funds to our customers who were locked in with a long position during the time the price was negative any losses they suffered below zero."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Uber lost $2.9 billion in the first quarter as its overseas investments were hammered by the coronavirus pandemic, but the company is looking to its growing food delivery business and aggressive cost-cutting to ease the pain. Tech Xplore reports: The ride-hailing giant said Thursday it is offloading Jump, its bike and scooter business, to Lime, a company in which it is investing $85 million. Jump had been losing about $60 million a quarter. "While our Rides business has been hit hard by the ongoing pandemic, we have taken quick action to preserve the strength of our balance sheet, focus additional resources on Uber Eats, and prepare us for any recovery scenario," said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in a statement. "Along with the surge in food delivery, we are encouraged by the early signs we are seeing in markets that are beginning to open back up." On Wednesday, San Francisco-based Uber said it was cutting 3,700 full-time workers, or about 14% of its workforce, as people avoiding contagion either stay indoors or try to limit contact with others. Its main U.S. rival Lyft announced last month it would lay off 982 people, or 17% of its workforce because of plummeting demand. Careem, Uber's subsidiary in the Middle East, cut its workforce by 31%. Uber brought in $3.54 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 14% from the same time last year. Revenue in its Eats meal delivery business grew 53% as customers shuttered at home opted to order in. Gross bookings grew 8% to $15.8 billion, with 54% growth in the food delivery business and a 3% decline in rides, on a constant currency basis. The report adds that rides were down 80% globally during the month of April. "But rides have been increasing for the past three weeks and bookings in large cities across Georgia and Texas, two states that started re-opening, are up 43% and 50% respectively from their lowest points," the report says.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
After coronavirus restrictions are lifted, Indianapolis bars and breweries will face challenges in terms of short-term staffing and long-term survival
Dave & Buster's is bringing its restaurant and entertainment complex to Greenwood in April, and the company plans to hire for more than 230 positions.
A show billed as "The Adventures of Kesha and Macklemore" resembles a summer popcorn movie at Ruoff Home Mortgage Music Center.
Former Arsenal and England striker Ian Wright says women's football deserves more support and backing.
Defying shelter-in-place orders over coronavirus, some Napa Valley businesses have reopened.
It's not much, but Los Angeles County has announced the first steps in easing stay-at-home rules that have slowed the spread of the coronavirus.
The mask rule comes after Metro bus drivers said they were scared for their health and for the well-being of essential workers on board.
California allows some retailers to open with curbside service, including bookstores, florists and toy stores. Many parks will reopen Saturday.
California's tepid reopening amid the coronavirus sparked a mix of excitement, confusion and uncertainty.
We should not use the blanket approach that government took in shutting down the economy to reopen it.
Until we have a vaccine, the road to opening is through a health care system which can handle the infection, a letter to the editor says.
New measures being introduced at Shanghai Disneyland could be a blueprint for firms restarting operations.
Fordham University business students are using virtual reality to prepare them for boardrooms.
Leasing activity in New York City's multi-billion-dollar commercial office market has dropped precipitously as the coronavirus has battered the market and raised questions of when — and even if — tenants can return to the workplace in a post-Covid world.
Amid the growing concerns the crisis will smother what had been robust demand for office space, eyes in the city's real estate industry have turned to a pending blockbuster deal on the West Side that could offer a signal of confidence to the market.
Facebook is in talks to take over 700,000 square feet of space in the Farley Building, a block-long property across Eighth Avenue from Penn Station.
"If that deal happens, then this market will be just fine," said Peter Riguardi, the New York area chairman and president of JLL. "If the deal happens but it's renegotiated, it will be fine, but it will be a trend that every tenant can follow. And if it doesn't happen, I would be very concerned about the market."
Last year, Facebook signed on for 1.5 million square feet in the Hudson Yards mega-development just west of the Farley Building, taking space in three new office towers at the project.
For months the $600 billion Silicon Valley-based social media giant has been in negotiations for even more space at the nearby Farley Building, whose interior landlord Vornado Realty Trust is redeveloping to include newly built office and retail space.
Vornado had originally expected to complete the deal with Facebook in early March, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. The talks have continued on as the virus pandemic has brought commerce and social life to a virtual halt. The source expected the lease, which will commit Facebook to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in rent for the space over the life of the lease, to soon be completed.
In a conference call with investors and analysts on Tuesday to discuss Vornado's first-quarter earnings, the company's CEO Steve Roth also hinted that the Facebook deal was still on track.
"There's another large tenant that has been rumored to be that we've been in dialogue with," Roth said, not directly naming the company. "That conversation is going forward aggressively and hopefully maybe even almost complete."
Recent real-estate decisions by Facebook and other tech companies have worried real-estate executives that they may reconsider their footprint after years of dramatic growth. Facebook on Thursday revealed that the bulk of its over 40,000-person workforce will be asked to work remotely for the remainder of the year, a timeline that appears to show the company is using caution in returning to its footprint.
Real-estate executives have expressed concern that tenants may become accustomed to offloading a portion or even the bulk of their workforce to a remote-working model, leading them to drastically reduce their office commitments.
At a minimum, the economic upheaval has appeared to spur a newfound sense of caution in tech companies that have grown rapidly in recent years. Alphabet called off negotiations to expand its San Francisco offices by over 2 million square feet in recent weeks, according to a report from The Information.
In recent years the tech industry had become one of the most voracious takers of space in the city, helping to push up commercial rents and spur the construction of new office space.
In 2019, tech firms accounted for 24.5% of the 31.6 million square feet of leasing activity in Manhattan, eclipsing the financial industry as the city's biggest space-taking sector for the first time, according to data from the real estate services and brokerage firm CBRE.
In 2010 tech leasing comprised just 4% of the 24.2 million square feet that was leased in the Manhattan market that year, CBRE said.
"Nothing has buoyed the confidence of landlords more in recent years than tech tenants," said Sacha Zarba, a leasing executive at CBRE who specializes in working with tech firms. "It didn't matter where your building was. If it was attractive to tech, you would stand a good chance to lease your space. If that industry retrenches a bit, it removes a big driver of demand."
The Manhattan office market has slowed rapidly in recent weeks as the virus crisis has battered the economy and shut down daily life.
About 844,000 square feet of space was leased in Manhattan in April, according to CBRE, 64% lower than the five-year monthly average. In the first four months of the year, nearly seven million square feet was leased, a decline of 30% for the same period a year ago.
So far, however, there are signs that tech continues to snap up space.
After scuttling plans to develop a 25,000 person second headquarters space in Long Island City last year, Amazon purchased 424 Fifth Avenue, a former flagship department store for Lord & Taylor, for nearly $1 billion in March. That property totals about 660,000 square feet. Late last year, before the pandemic hit U.S. shores but had flared in China, Amazon also leased 335,000 square feet at 410 Tenth Avenue.
The commitments of major tech companies absorb millions of square feet in the city, but they also help fuel a larger ecosystem of tenants that occupies an even larger footprint. That means that a decrease in the real estate of just a few big tech players could be multiplied across the market as smaller players in the sector follow suit.
"Those big tech firms do a fantastic job of training and credentialing tech talent on the city," said Matt Harrigan, a co-founder of Company, a space incubator at 335 Madison Avenue that provides offices and community for both startups and more established tech firms. "Google and Facebook spin off talent who start or join other tech ventures that take space. That's what's so important about having the large presence of those companies here."
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Numéricable has selected the Calix E7-2 Ethernet Service Access Platform and gigabit passive optical network technology to upgrade its service delivery platform in Belgium and Luxembourg. Calix, along with optical specialist Arcadiz Telecom, will work closely to roll out Numéricable’s new high-speed broadband networks to deliver business services across the region. The new platform will enable Numéricable’s customers to take advantage of advanced voice, video, and data services at symmetrical speeds ranging from 30 megabits per second (30 Mbps) up to 1 gigabit per second (1 Gbps).
Numéricable serves over 150,000 customers in Brussels with triple-play services for residential subscribers. Owned by Coditel and with a close relationship to the French Numéricable organization, with whom it shares a range of resources, Numéricable Belgium is a long-established operator with a highly dispersed coax cable network. The company has traditionally delivered triple-play residential services over its hybrid fiber coax infrastructure, but in recent years has moved increasingly towards using its fiber to connect businesses and has developed a number of specific niche markets. The company is now looking at ways to maximize the potential of its fiber infrastructure in Belgium and Luxembourg and deliver revenue-generating advanced services to its business customers.
One of the biggest mistakes a business owner can make today is ignoring social media marketing or treating it as an afterthought. This is even more so in an increasingly competitive space like the web design niche where small businesses have to strive to leave the shadows of more established brands with years of history […]
The post How to Use Instagram To Grow Your Web Design Business appeared first on SpyreStudios.
I know from talking to many of my clients that most have read Jim Collins’ book ‘Good to Great’. I have also been inspired by his research into what makes great companies great. Many of you will recall an article …
SEO is one of the best channels to invest in right now to attract new customers and reinforce the loyalty of your existing client base.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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As a digital company, your business is not bound by conventional borders and has the freedom and opportunity to reach customers anywhere in the world. And just as you look outward for new markets, customers are also looking beyond their physical borders for their goods and services. As a study by KPMG shows, online buyers […]
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Hear about travel to Columbus and central Ohio as the Amateur Traveler talks to Matthew Caracciolo from matthewcaracciolo.com about what to do in the Buckeye State.
If you’re a big business and you abused the Small Business Association’s new Paycheck Protection Program, you’re getting very close to the deadline for you to pay the government back. If you don’t, that means the government is going to be coming after you — and you can definitely be ready for an audit. That’s…
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As the coronavirus crisis built to pandemic levels in early March, a relatively unknown tech company confronted a defining opportunity. Zoom Video Communications, a fast-growing enterprise videoconferencing platform with roots in both Silicon Valley and China, had already seen its market cap grow from under $10 billion to nearly double that. As the coronavirus began … Continue reading "New Research Shows Why and How Zoom Could Become an Advertising Driven Business"
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Every successful business expecting high returns should have investment projects. Just like any other advertisement plan, a business card is crucial. It links up your company and the potential customers easily. It’s cheaper to design and distribute the cards. However, for a startup business which is low on budget and high on initial expenses, designing […]
The post Expand Your Brand Using Business Cards appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Haven’t we all been there? Going from being frazzled and all over the place to being efficient and feeling like a super-woman, then back down again? I’ve been through my fair share of daily vicissitudes that have left me in shambles plenty of times. Being a mom of two kids or having a professional career […]
The post How To Be Efficient As a Busy Mom And Still Chase Your Dreams appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
May 6, 2020 (New York, NY) – “Insider Intelligence†is being announced today as the brand name of the newly-formed parent company of eMarketer and Business Insider Intelligence (BII), both […]
In this livesteam, David and I answer audience questions about how to work remotely. At Basecamp we’ve been working remotely for nearly 20 years, so we have a lot of experience to share. This nearly 2-hour video goes into great detail on a wide variety of topics. Highly recommended if you’re trying to figure out… keep reading
School bus drivers in the Upper Grand District School Board are transporting school work instead of students.