All posts tagged: companies

We have other options – POLITICO

We have other options – POLITICO

Published by Sam

4. BTW, we are still into this globalization thing. At a time when Trump is touting trade tariffs and “America First,” von der Leyen’s speech seemed designed to send the opposite signal: We’re open to doing business with anyone. Von der Leyen addressed potential trading partners directly, saying: “If there are mutual benefits in sight, we are ready to engage with you.” Indeed, a key message from the speech was that Europe wants to diversify its trading relationships away from America.  While Trump is declaring an emergency on America’s southern border and gearing up for tariffs against Mexico, von der Leyen gave special mention to EU trade relations with Latin America. At a time when Trump is touting trade tariffs and “America First,” von der Leyen’s speech seemed designed to send the opposite signal. | Morry Gash/AFP via Getty Images And while acknowledging the economic threat from unfair Chinese trading practices, she also said Europe had to “engage constructively” with Beijing. 5. America? Who? Tellingly, von der Leyen spoke about Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, China …

Hindenburg Research, a short seller that targeted tech and EV companies, is closing up shop

Hindenburg Research, a short seller that targeted tech and EV companies, is closing up shop

Published by skeptic

When Hindenburg Research posts a blog on its website, it often means a company’s final days are near. Today, that company is Hindenburg Research. Nate Anderson announced Wednesday he has shut down short-selling firm Hindenburg Research after a seven-year run issuing damning reports about high-profile companies, including many of the technology world’s giants and buzzy startups. “As I’ve shared with family, friends and our team since late last year, I have made the decision to disband Hindenburg Research,” Anderson wrote in a blog post. “The plan has been to wind up after we finished the pipeline of ideas we were working on. And as of the last Ponzi cases we just completed and are sharing with regulators, that day is today.” Hindenburg’s reports gained a reputation over the years for their prescient investigations and thorough research into overlooked and ignored corners of public markets. In many instances, the firm’s reports predated SEC investigations, criminal indictments, and massive stock drops around the companies it targets. Anderson said there’s no specific reason for disbanding Hindenburg today. He …

Two Indian companies indicted in US for importing ingredients used in opioid fentanyl

Two Indian companies indicted in US for importing ingredients used in opioid fentanyl

Published by Sam

NEW YORK —  Two Indian chemical companies have been indicted for allegedly importing ingredients for the highly addictive opioid fentanyl into the United States and Mexico, the U.S. Department of Justice said Monday. Athos Chemicals and Raxuter Chemicals, both based in Gujarat, were each charged in Brooklyn with distributing the ingredients and conspiring to distribute them. Raxuter and senior executive Bhavesh Lathiya, 36, were also charged with smuggling, and introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce. Lathiya was arrested on Saturday in New York and ordered detained pending trial, after prosecutors called him a flight risk and a substantial danger to the community. “The Justice Department is targeting every link in fentanyl trafficking supply chains that span countries and continents and too often end in tragedy in the United States,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. A federal public defender representing Lathiya declined to comment. Athos and Raxuter did not immediately respond to similar requests outside business hours. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid about 50 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times …

Health Insurance Companies Pull Down Information About Executives After Assassination of CEO

Health Insurance Companies Pull Down Information About Executives After Assassination of CEO

Published by José

Image by Getty / Futurism These are scary times to be a multi-millionaire insurance bigwig. The fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, has c-suites across the country quaking in their boots. As 404 Media reports, with the killer still at larger, major health insurance companies are now taking down their leadership pages and scrubbing any information about their top brass. Almost immediately after Thompson’s assassination, a link to UnitedHealthcare’s “about us” page was changed so that it no longer directs to a list of the company’s executives, 404 found. Similarly, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield replaced links to its leadership page with a generic “about us” one with no specific information on its executives. This may be because of the ire it received for its plan, announced around the time of the shooting, to cut off anesthesia coverage for medical procedures that went longer than expected, prompting outrage and viral gallows humor that the assassin’s job wasn’t over yet. (Blue Cross Blue Shield now says it’s axing the proposed anesthesia plan in …

The Chainsmokers want to bring a different kind of value add to B2B companies

The Chainsmokers want to bring a different kind of value add to B2B companies

Published by skeptic

The potential value a celebrity investor can bring to a consumer company, beyond just writing a check, is obvious: marketing and promotion. But that value is less clear when it comes to backing B2B startups. Alex Pall and Drew Taggart, also known as the Chainsmokers, think their VC fund Mantis VC can bring a value add traditional VCs can’t. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 alongside one of their founders, Dan Lorenc, the co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity startup Chainguard, Pall said that the group initially got into B2B investing because they got tired of feeling like the QVC of startups working with consumer companies that just wanted to work with them for promotion. The duo became increasingly interested in B2B due to the strong market opportunities in that space despite not having much experience with those types of businesses. “It felt like a market opportunity to kind of stand out and maybe provide, you know, a different perspective or different type of value back to those types of companies,” Pall said. “Our strategy and the way …

EU foreign policy chief warns French energy giant on human rights violations – POLITICO

EU foreign policy chief warns French energy giant on human rights violations – POLITICO

Published by Sam

TotalEnergies contracted a Mozambican security unit to defend the plant despite warnings that some soldiers had allegedly carried out human rights abuses.  The energy company told POLITICO it had “no knowledge of the alleged events described” nor “any information indicating that such events took place.” The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, responding to written questions from members of the European Parliament, said Wednesday that he and the Commission had “taken note of the article” and “the alleged actions of the Mozambican army against civilians.” He said that EU legislation going into effect in 2027 would make European companies accountable for the impact of their operations on human rights and the environment inside and outside Europe and require EU countries to “ensure that any victims receive compensation.”   “As such, TotalEnergies will have to comply with the directive should they decide to resume their operations in Cabo Delgado,” Borrell said. The directive, adopted in July, compels companies to safeguard the environment and human rights in their supply chains. The revelation of alleged atrocities at TotalEnergies’ …

The human factor: How companies can prevent cloud disasters

The human factor: How companies can prevent cloud disasters

Published by skeptic

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Large companies work very hard to make sure their services don’t go down, and the reason is simple — significant outages will hurt your brand and drive customers to competing products with a better track record.  Building a reliable internet service is a hard technical problem, but for company leaders it also presents a human challenge. Motivating your engineering teams to invest in reliability work can be difficult, because it is often perceived to be less exciting than developing new features. At scale, incentives dominate. The top tech companies employ thousands of employees and operate hundreds of internet services. Over the years, they have come up with clever ways to ensure their engineers build reliable systems. This article discusses human engineering techniques that have worked at scale across the most successful tech companies in history. You can apply these to your company, whether you’re an employee or a leader. Spin the wheel The AWS operational review …

How your online world could change if big tech companies like Google are forced to break up

How your online world could change if big tech companies like Google are forced to break up

Published by skeptic

The US Department of Justice may be on the verge of seeking a break-up of Google in a bid to make it less dominant. If the government goes ahead and is successful in the courts, it could mean the company being split into separate entities – a search engine, an advertising company, a video website, a mapping app – which would not be allowed to share data with each other. While this is still a distant prospect, it is being considered in the wake of a series of rulings in the US and the EU which suggest that regulators are becoming increasingly frustrated by the power of big tech. That power tends to be highly concentrated, whether it’s Google’s monopoly as a search engine, Meta’s data gathering from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, or by small businesses becoming dependent on Amazon. But what would a breakup of these tech giants achieve for consumers? Those in favour of shaking up Silicon Valley in this way argue that it would lead to more competition and more choice. And …

‘Our product went viral on social media – but nobody wanted to make it’

‘Our product went viral on social media – but nobody wanted to make it’

Published by Sam

Ms Trinder avoided putting pictures of herself in marketing material for her hotel for two decades: “I focused on running a small, niche business and wasn’t necessarily out in larger circles where I might have encountered direct bias. Nevertheless, I always felt conscious of the potential for discrimination and often worked behind the scenes rather than stepping into the spotlight.” But her mother served as a role model, having built her own successful business in the 1970s despite overt racial discrimination. For Mr Dalgety, he faced a struggle to secure funding, so signed up for a credit card that got the business off the ground before launching an aggressive sales strategy and negotiating cash on delivery payment terms. When Flake Bake sought to expand after winning Channel 4 Aldi’s Next Big Thing, Mr Williams encountered a new challenge: finding a manufacturer to help it scale up.  “It was a difficult pill to swallow,” he says. “We had created a huge demand after going viral on social media with over two million views in four days …

2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Pano AI and its fire-detecting AI

2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Pano AI and its fire-detecting AI

Published by skeptic

When blazes are confirmed, Pano alerts fire monitoring agencies, providing images and location data that help them respond quickly. As firefighters battle the blaze, the company continues to provide up-to-date, highly zoomable images of the shifting conditions, along with satellite imagery, weather information, and additional data feeds assembled from other sources. Key indicators Industry: Wildfire detection  Founded: 2020 Headquarters: San Francisco, California, USA Notable fact: Pano is helping several agencies monitor and control flames that wildfire specialists intentionally set to clear out brush and reduce risks in forests and grasslands, standing ready to send the alert if the fire should break out beyond the designated boundaries. Potential for impact The risks of devastating wildfires are growing, in part because we continue to build communities on the edge of wildlands, many of which we’ve allowed to become overgrown. Meanwhile, climate change is also making many areas hotter and drier, turning trees, shrubs, and grasses into kindling. As the economic and human toll of fire rises, it’s become increasingly critical to develop better ways to prevent or extinguish them before they turn …