INSTAGRAM Instagram Introduces A New Sticker In Support To Small Businesses
Instagram is introducing a new sticker for Stories to “Support Small Business” that lets you shout out your favorite small business.
Instagram has made a point in showing up to support small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most small businesses have been forced to close shop and have lost a huge amount of their revenue in light of stay-at-home and lockdown measures.
The announcement was made by Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram: “Today we’re launching a “Support Small Business” sticker in Stories so you can shout out your favorite small biz.” He added: “We want to make it as easy as possible to support amazing small businesses right now.”
The “Support Small Business” sticker is available in Stories. When you use it, your photo or video will be added to a shared story where friends can see which businesses you love.
Instagram has been very active during the pandemic. After launching the “Stay Home” and “Thank You” stickers, the company has also introduced stickers to make it easy to order from restaurants a few weeks ago.
Coronavirus continues to reshape everything that is familiar to us. This morning I learned that Atlanta’s iconic Peachtree Road Race has been moved to Thanksgiving Day because of COVID-19. Atlantans (native or transplants) know that the Peachtree Road Race, since 1970, is as synonymous with the 4th of July as fireworks. The road race joins another iconic sporting event, The Masters golf tournament, in moving to November because of the historic pandemic. As you can imagine, the weather is quite different in Atlanta during late November. Here is how the weather will be different?
The Peachtree Road Race is considered to be world’s largest 10-kilometer race. According to sources, approximately 60,000 runners participated in 2019. The race is very much a sports competition, but it has also become an annual summer ritual for amateur and professional runners. Every year I see friends proudly posting their registration credentials for a coveted spot in the race. The Atlanta Track Club posted the following message on its website this week: “Consistent with guidance we will receive from health experts in the fall, the 51st Running of the AJC Peachtree Road Race will take place on November 26, 2020.”
Terri Smith is a long-time meteorologist with The Weather Channel. Her post on social media sums up my initial thoughts as well, “Is it really the Peachtree without heat and humidity: Average low July 4th: 71.1 deg Average low Nov 26th: 41.2 deg.” Smith received the temperature data from Weather Channel colleague Jessica Arnoldy. The start times for the race are typically in waves ranging from about 6:25 am to 8:40 am according to WABE. Though the summer solstice (in June) represents the peak in receipt of energy from the sun, July is often the hottest month in Atlanta. The day before the 2019 race, CBS 46 Atlanta Chief Meteorologist Jennifer Valdez tweeted the forecast below and cautioned that it was going to be one of the hottest starts to the race on record. With humidity, temperatures felt like the low to mid eighties during the race.
Terri Smith is a long-time meteorologist with The Weather Channel. Her post on social media sums up my initial thoughts as well, “Is it really the Peachtree without heat and humidity: Average low July 4th: 71.1 deg Average low Nov 26th: 41.2 deg.” Smith received the temperature data from Weather Channel colleague Jessica Arnoldy. The start times for the race are typically in waves ranging from about 6:25 am to 8:40 am according to WABE. Though the summer solstice (in June) represents the peak in receipt of energy from the sun, July is often the hottest month in Atlanta. The day before the 2019 race, CBS 46 Atlanta Chief Meteorologist Jennifer Valdez tweeted the forecast below and cautioned that it was going to be one of the hottest starts to the race on record. With humidity, temperatures felt like the low to mid eighties during the race.
Weather conditions affect performance so it will be interesting to see how running times from the Thanksgiving race compare to previous years. Here are some ways, according to the Active.com website, that weather affects running performance:
Temperature: running pace is adversely affected as temperatures increase. The website notes that an increase in temperature from 60 degrees F to 80 degrees F can increase a mile pace by 12 to 15%.
Humidity: higher humidity increases heart rate significantly, and hydration is even more critical.
Family friend Tasha Allen is the Director of Accounting and Human Resources at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. She has run the Peachtree Road Race and told me, “The heat was always a problem for me….since I am not a real runner I would never receive an early wave time making my start time closer to 8am, and it’s usually 80-85 degrees by then.” At such a late start time, the temperatures are approaching or exceeding 90 degrees F by the end of the race for some runners. Allen went on to say, “Having the race on Thanksgiving hopefully will eliminate the heat issue. BUT this is Georgia and we could still have an unusual hot day on Thanksgiving (smile).”
I will put on my “meteorologist and Director of University of Georgia Atmospheric Sciences program” hat and point out an additional weather factor that Thanksgiving introduces, a somewhat greater possibility of rainfall than in July. November is a weather transition period for the state of Georgia. The jet stream is starting to return to the region and frontal systems are more active. During July, frontal activity is minimal, and the main threat of rainfall is from pop-up afternoon storms.
Divorcing China: The West’s Return To Ideology And Its Impact On Global Business
Privacy, freedom of expression and transparency are becoming essential currencies in international business. These values are reshaping the global trade landscape into distinct ideological blocks that will dictate corporate behavior—as well as accelerate the West’s decoupling from China.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the tech-sector, where the tensions between socio-political values and the application of leading-edge technologies have become entangled.
This outcome has fueled a specific aspect of techno-nationalism, from a Western societal perspective, which seeks to prevent the use of technology to suppress people’s right to privacy and freedom of expression. This has resulted in an increasing number of laws that block the sale of products and technology to autocratic governments, if these technologies would enhance their surveillance and censorship capabilities.
For international business, this cuts three ways: more backlash and barriers to transactions between Western and Chinese entities; more ideologically-driven standards in international frameworks; and, higher corporate governance standards regarding transparency.
On its 75th anniversary, the United Nations needed a global videoconferencing platform to broadcast and capture millions of conversations for an initiative called “What the World Should Look Like in 25 Years.” The agency chose to partner with China’s Tencent, the digital giant that owns WeChat, the social media app with some 1 billion users.
But this decision produced an immediate backlash from Western governments and human rights groups, on the grounds that the UN was effectively validating the Chinese Communist Party’s state surveillance and censorship apparatus.
Tencent has been a key player in Beijing’s digital surveillance systems. And like all Chinese tech companies, Tencent must turn over data to the central government under the country’s Cyber Security Law, if asked to do so.
Ironically, the UN chose the WeChat platform because it was the only one that would enable communication behind China’s internet firewall, which has kept Western companies like Facebook locked out because of the CCP’s strict censorship practices.
Facing intense ideological backlash from both state and non-state actors, the UN promptly backed out of its partnership with Tencent.
Another example of techno-ideological backlash involves Zoom, the American video-conferencing app, which has seen its value skyrocket during the coronavirus pandemic. It was revealed that Zoom had been transmitting the keys for encryption and decryption of data from its virtual meetings through its servers in China, where the company maintains an R&D operation of 700 people.
Unencrypted data sent to China came from, among others, global meetings involving NASA, SpaceX and the government of Taiwan, which subsequently banned the use of Zoom for all Taiwanese businesses. Many other organizations have since dropped Zoom as a service provider.
Technology and human rights
Ideological backlash in the form of public condemnation and shaming is one thing, but passing laws prohibiting technology transfer, based on human-rights criteria, is an entirely different matter.
In October of 2019, the United States placed 28 Chinese entities on a blacklist for enabling the surveillance and electronic monitoring of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang autonomous region of China’s far West.
Chinese tech firms on the list included HikVision—42% owned by the Chinese state— and Dahua Technology, which are the world’s two largest makers of video surveillance and facial recognition technology. Also included were SenseTime and Megvii, two massive Chinese AI companies immersed in surveillance-tech.
U.S. technology restrictions, however, affect a much broader range of companies: HikVision’s suppliers of microchips and other core technology, for example, include U.S. companies such as Intel, Nvidia, Western Digital and Seagate, all of which must get special permission from the U.S. government to continue selling to restricted Chinese companies.
For Amazon, the American tech giant, these technology controls present a dilemma. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Amazon desperately needed to temperature-screen its employees, but had no other alternative than to turn to Dahua Technology— which dominates the thermal imaging niche—and purchase $10 million worth of thermal imaging technology. Dahua, of course, is now a U.S. restricted entity.
Amazon’s predicament will serve to further galvanize political efforts in the U.S. to re-shore the manufacturing of strategic technologies—from civilian drones to pharma. Meanwhile, Chinese companies have already been de-Americanizing their supply chains and accelerating de-coupling to avoid exposure to further American export controls.
Ideological frameworks and corporate governance
Differing ideologies are shaping the emergence of global trade blocks with uniquely Western rules and standards. These are increasingly manifest in free trade agreements.
Various tones of the European Union’s privacy standards, for example, embodied in the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) are baked into the EU’s free trade agreements with the likes of Singapore, Japan and Vietnam. Similarly, the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), originally led by the U.S., was designed not only to protect data privacy but had transparency standards baked in to alienate the behavior of Chinese state-owned enterprises.
All of this raises the bar for corporate governance. From a transparency angle, organizations will need to have much more sophisticated processes to be able to peer into extended value chains and assess the behavior of suppliers, customers and product end-users.
Are a company’s partners selling or buying technology that is enabling censorship and loss of privacy? The costs of ascertaining this will be high, but the reward will be come in the form of less uncertainty and a stamp of approval from partners adhering to these standards.
These questions will be playing out even as China and the West undergo a more fundamental and irreversible decoupling.
