Apple adds wizard, dinosaur and mermaid emoji in iOS 11.1

Hundreds more emoji are coming to your iPhone soon. Apple says it’s adding “more emotive smiley faces” as well as gender-neutral icons, more food and (importantly) mythical creatures — in time for Halloween, we hope. The series is coming to iPhone and iPad with iOS 11.1, which will launch next week, early, for developers and public beta testers. If the emoji additions sound familiar, that’s because Apple had teased these back in July. It appears the company is going beyond the 56 Unicode consortium-approved emoji, but that’s likely explained by skin color and hair variants — we haven’t glimpsed the entire set yet. But now that there’s a gyoza emoji, all is well.

Of course, for those waiting around for those animated emoji, you’ve still got some time on your hands: the iPhone X isn’t out until November.

Source: Apple

Google creates an online exhibit for contemporary art

Some artists actually like it when you say “my four-year-old could do that,” because it means you’ve a) questioned whether a work is art, and b) wondered why or why not. I just learned that from Google Arts & Culture’s brand new Contemporary Art digital collection, packed full of information on the notoriously opaque subject. It includes videos, explanations from experts at 180 institutions and, best of all, gigapixel-resolution images that let you experience the pieces as if you were at the MOMA.

Google introduces you to artists like Chris Ofili, known for working with elephant dung and creating works around black culture, Louise Bourgeois and her iconic giant spider sculptures and Douglas Coupland, the Canadian artist who coined the term “McJob” and calls failure “a pure state of being.”

The collection also explains the difference between modern and contemporary art, taps experts and artists to answer the “big questions,” ie, the most-searched ones on Google, like “what is the meaning of contemporary art.” It also lets you explore artworks and exhibitions, galleries, mediums and methods and issues like racism, poverty and global warming that shape art. There’s even a section called “Explaining Contemporary Art with Emojis,” and, near and dear to Engadget’s heart, “The Future of Art.”

In the collection, curator and luddite Ben Vickers ironically called Google itself “the most comprehensive gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’),” as it’s “attributable to no single author, contingent on a collective will and capable of altering our perception of reality on a daily basis,” which seems to apply doubly here. You can check it here and, by the way, don’t forget to catch the Engadget Experience, our immersive art and tech event happening at the Ace Hotel Theatre in downtown LA on November 14th.

Source: Google

Michigan’s manufacturing past is fueling its tech future

Michigan’s struggles have played out on the world’s stage. Just after the turn of the century began what’s referred to as the state’s lost decade, the economy faltered, oil prices skyrocketed and the housing market crashed. Nearly a million jobs left the state between 2000 and 2013, many of them in manufacturing and the automotive industry. For a state of just under 10 million people, the impact was devastating: Unemployment was higher than the national average by more than four percent.

Bailouts for Chrysler and General Motors were followed by Detroit’s record-setting municipal bankruptcy, but through grit and determination, Michigan started clawing its way back from the brink. Now multimillion-dollar investments in the city from tech titans like Amazon, Facebook and LG make headlines with startling frequency, and a host of tech startups have begun to fill the gaps left by plant closures.

On the state’s west side lies Grand Rapids, where 20 percent of the area’s residents are employed in manufacturing jobs, twice the national average, according to a recent report from the Los Angeles Times. The median wage for such workers? About $30,000 per year — enough for a single person but hardly enough to raise a family. A recent wage survey found machinists in the region averaged $41,710 per year, around half that of software and application developers.

Manufacturing is changing, and assembly line jobs are increasingly being handled by robots. Where humans were once doing the physical labor themselves, they’re now supervising several machines at a time or operating as quality control. As time goes on, more areas of low-skill labor will be taken over by artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation in what’s being labeled the fourth industrial revolution.

“When you walk through a plant, there are going to be very few humans on the floor, but there’s going to be hundreds of people that are high-tech [trained], maintaining all those systems, because they’re not stupid systems that are just stamping out metal parts,” said Tom Kelly, executive director of the Michigan-based nonprofit Automation Alley. “Michigan is poised extremely well to play in that space, because we know how to make things. We know how to make things high quality, cheaply, quickly. All the things you want, and at volume.”

The bottleneck is talent.

Motown was a different place when Damien Rocchi relocated from Australia eight years ago. Among regions with more than a million residents, Detroit’s unemployment rate ranked highest in the nation, with 16.7 percent of people in the metro area jobless. The city hadn’t replaced streetlights rendered useless by copper thieves during the Great Recession either, so many of Detroit’s pockmarked avenues and seven-lane roads were pitch black come nightfall. That September, the FBI reported Michigan’s violent crime rate was 10 percent above the national average. Things were desperate.

Damien Rocchi

Rocchi kept himself busy with consulting work and in time met folks from Detroit Venture Partners who introduced him to the Detroit tech scene and the investments Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert was making downtown. Like many others interviewed for this piece, Rocchi moved to Michigan because of preexisting ties (his wife wanted to be closer to her parents).

“The idea was to train Detroiters in some new economy skills, the skills that had become increasingly difficult for companies to fill.”

In early 2013, Rocchi launched Grand Circus to address the imbalance between talent supply and demand that plagued the region. “The idea was to train Detroiters in some new economy skills, the skills that had become increasingly difficult for companies to fill,” he recalled. Rocchi said it was absurd that there was a huge base of people in the area who were either unemployed or underemployed, considering the number of jobs that needed to be filled in the space. The hurdle was educating them in a way that was both efficient and expedient.

By July this year, the organization had trained 2,618 students via boot camps that cover a range of subjects, from software and web development to coding and software testing. Each 10-week class costs $8,500. Students in these micro-credential programs — which offer specialized training certificates — fall between 24 and 45 years old, with class sizes varying between 16 and 22 students per session.

For comparison, two full-time semesters at Detroit’s Wayne State University cost $9,533 while Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids is $11,994. Here’s the difference that helps justify the expense: Within three months of graduating, 93 percent of Grand Circus alumni have jobs in their respective fields of study. That might explain both why enrollment numbers have climbed steadily and why Grand Circus expanded 160 miles west to Grand Rapids, operating out of the Start Garden startup accelerator.

“We want to become the one-stop shop for technical talent in Michigan,” Rocchi said. “We think we have what it takes to train people and take them from zero [skills] to entry-level software development jobs.”

These micro-credentials will shape the future of work, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center and Elon University. Pew says that within a decade, education systems “won’t be up to the task” of adapting to train or retrain the most prized skills for the future. And while a four-year degree will still be important, tangible proof of competency like a portfolio of completed projects and “alternate credentialing systems” — like the ones Grand Circus offers — may be just as accepted.

“Three-dimensional materials — in essence, job reels — that demonstrate expertise will be the ultimate demonstration of an individual worker’s skills,” Marilyn Krieger, a career specialist from Indiana University Bloomington, said in the report. “The educational and training programs of the future will become (in their best incarnations) sophisticated combinations of classroom and hands-on training programs.”

Facebook approached Rocchi earlier this year after hearing about the workforce development that Grand Circus was doing around Detroit. Like these things tend to, the conversation stalled and then before the announcement this June, ramped up quickly. Before Rocchi knew it, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was standing in his office telling a crowd that the social network would offer scholarships for 25 Michiganders to pursue training certificates. Rocchi said that it’ll be a traditional boot camp, with students split between Grand Rapids and Detroit, and it’ll feature some customized curriculum to incorporate Facebook-specific activities. The partnership also involves Digital Promise, a tech nonprofit with a focus on education, which will help train 3,000 Michiganders in social media marketing. All told, it’s a $25.5 million investment in Michigan’s workforce.

“When we can find a great local partner like this that we can partner with to help provide the training people need and we can bring them what we know,” Sandberg told Crain’s Detroit Business, “it’s just a great opportunity for us to develop people who will go to do great work with Facebook and other local companies.” The scholarship is the first of its kind from the social network.

During Michigan’s lost decade, Quicken Loans’ billionaire founder Dan Gilbert took advantage of Detroit’s empty builds and low land costs. He began buying property in and courting talent to downtown Detroit before moving Quicken Loans’ headquarters and 1,700 employees from nearby Livonia to downtown in 2010.

Gilbert-related companies now control 90 buildings downtown, and the mogul has thrown over $2 billion at real estate and tech ventures. These include the M-1 Rail streetcar system (“Gilbert’s little choo-choo,” one source joked), which weaves through the burgeoning business district; an online stock market for sneakers; a symmetrical fiber-optic internet service that’s half the price of Comcast’s; and Rocchi’s Grand Circus. This February, Gilbert convinced Microsoft to leave the suburban location it had occupied for 30 years for his One Campus Martius building. People have begun referring to the sections of downtown he’s rebuilding in his own image as Gilbertville.

Along with the late Mike Ilitch, founder of Little Caesar’s and former owner of the Detroit Red Wings and Detroit Tigers, Gilbert has been one of the biggest driving forces in Detroit’s recovery. Not everyone is happy with his influence on Detroit though. “He just went further and harder than everyone else,” said a person from the tech community who wished to remain anonymous.

The source described a recent Detroit Demo Days hosted by Quicken Loans, with $1 million in capital up for grabs. If a company took first place from a field of 20 finalists, it would get a 48-month, $200,000 interest-free loan to move to downtown Detroit. The two teams that ended up winning were already located downtown: upscale barber shop The Social Club and vocational-education outfit the Detroit Training Center. “They’re essentially vendors that would raise Gilbert’s property value,” the source said.

“It’s kind of a spur for Detroit people to actually put their money to work in Detroit.”

That’s not to say Gilbert isn’t doing good in Motown. Sources said that Gilbert’s monopoly on downtown real estate is having a ripple effect that’s beneficial to the city. “It’s kind of a spur for Detroit people to actually put their money to work in Detroit instead of sitting in a hedge fund somewhere,” the source said. While Gilbert may be acting in self-interest, his interests often align with those of the city.

He’s a firm believer in technology’s ability to help Motown rise from the ashes. One example of this is the Cheese Factory, a Quicken Loans skunkworks program where employees pitch everything from new salad dressing for the cafeteria to wiring Detroit for ultra-high-speed broadband.

Rocket Fiber is a fiber-optic internet service that offers gigabit speeds. It’s “a story of not waiting for it to happen, not waiting for someone else to come here and hope they build it,” according to founder and CEO Marc Hudson. “It’s really a story of a Detroit, Michigan-based organization doing it on their own.”

Rocket Fiber founder Marc Hudson

Hudson pitched the idea via the Cheese Factory in Jan. 2013 after reading how Google Fiber was attracting tech companies to Kansas City. After graduating from Michigan State University, he worked on his own web development startup and fell in love with downtown Detroit before working at Quicken Loans as a user interface engineer.

After the initial pitch Hudson got in contact with Gilbert directly, formed a team and began working on Rocket Fiber on nights and weekends before getting enough internal support to make it his full-time job. After a “long, two-hour meeting,” pitching the financial model and viability to Gilbert and his quasi Shark Tank, he got the green light.

The 1Gb service launched in May 2014 for $70 per month, with no service agreements or equipment-rental fees. Ten Gb service is $299 per month. The idea is that in its admittedly smaller service area, customers will be happy enough with their connection that they don’t need a contract to stick around. Comcast charges $139.95 per month without a contract or $70 per month with a three-year service agreement for speeds of up to 1Gbps.

Hudson wouldn’t go into specifics about subscriber numbers, but as of July he said that there were “several thousands” across 200 commercial and residential buildings downtown. Rocket Fiber is dubbed Detroit’s technology partner on billboards around the city. It’s providing internet service to the QLine streetcars and WiFi for the 65,000-capacity Ford Field, and it installed 10Gb service at the revamped Cobo Center convention hall. The latter is a bid to draw esports events and virtual reality exhibitions to the convention center, according to Crain’s Detroit Business.

“We want to fundamentally change this industry and make it more scalable and more automated so that companies like Rocket Fiber can compete with the larger entrenched companies,” Hudson said.

“It’s cool to say we’re not some company from out of state, from another city.”

He said that the idea was to be a “moonshot for Detroit” and that there was never an idea of going to another city. For him and his team, comprised of CTO Randy Foster and COO Edi Demaj, there wasn’t any interest in doing this anywhere outside the D. “It was always about taking care of our hometown and doing something really cool and fun here,” he said. “It’s cool to say we’re not some company from out of state, from another city. We’re a Detroit-headquartered company creating jobs in the city, employing Detroiters and building an internet infrastructure that exists in few other places.”

All of Rocket Fiber’s team members live in the metro area, and a “good number” of the company’s contractors do as well. Hudson has even managed to get local senior-level talent who had moved to Silicon Valley to come back home. Outside network engineers, designers and biz-dev folks poached from competitors, most of Hudson’s employees don’t have a background in telecommunications and are trained on the job.

Hudson described a new hire who’d never touched an Ethernet cable in his life but had a great attitude and was a good fit for Rocket Fiber’s culture. “Put me to work and I’ll learn,” the new hire told Hudson. He had started as an apprentice, shadowing experienced residential installers during his first week on the job. “They’ve been teaching him, and he’s just been soaking it up like a sponge,” Hudson said. Now he’s doing service installations.

For Hudson, it’s about creating opportunity, something the Motor City hasn’t always done. That doesn’t mean Rocket Fiber will open its doors and invite thousands of the city’s displaced automotive workers to start installing internet service; the company isn’t ready for that yet. But it can help on a smaller scale. “[We’re] trying to play a small part in creating opportunity here, because when opportunity is not equal, it leads to issues that I think Detroit is a pretty good case study of,” he said.

Jacques Panis, president of luxury watchmaker Shinola, agreed. For someone with no prior skills, it takes between two and four weeks to go from the first application to being an entry-level Shinola employee. One employee was a security guard in a past life. Now he’s leading the company’s movement-assembly team.

“The walks of life here are something that are absolutely incredible and really speak to what we have and why we have it,” he said. “It’s not just about you coming in here and having a specific skill set. It’s about you coming in here and having the ability to work with people and be a part of a team at a bigger picture and aligning with everyone here.”

Timothy J. Seppala

Out west, the tech and startup scene is a little different. While Henry Ford was dreaming up assembly lines and the Model T, Grand Rapids, a quarter the size of Detroit, was a hub for the logging and furniture industries. The latter still holds sway in town; Herman Miller, Steelcase and Haworth all have headquarters there. The metro area also has a rapidly expanding medical-research scene, a number of well-regarded craft breweries and Amway’s global headquarters. Rather than assembly-line jobs, many of the automotive plants in town focused on stamping or tool-and-die making, like the 1,500-employee stamping plant that made sheet metal parts for GM trucks and SUVs that was shuttered in 2009 or Riviera Tool, which was acquired by Tesla in 2015.

Unlike Detroit, the city is incredibly conservative, both socially and fiscally. The former comes from a predominant Catholic and Christian Reformed culture, with a combined quarter of residents identifying as either denomination in 2010. There’s a distinct irony in tourism boards calling the nearby Lake Michigan shoreline “Michigan’s West Coast” when the region is anything but liberal. In Detroit, Weedmaps billboards dot the highways; in Grand Rapids, it’s hospital advertisements with a photo of a Dutch wooden shoe on a prosthesis under “Keep on klompin!” Alcohol sales are restricted before noon on Sundays, when plenty of local businesses are closed all day. Finding anything to do after 10 PM that isn’t sitting at a bar is close to impossible. As in many Rust Belt towns, mom-and-pop shops reign supreme.

When Detroit fell, Grand Rapids merely stumbled. In 2009, unemployment hovered near 10 percent, a little over half of Detroit’s jobless rate. Even with its fiscal conservatism and diversity of businesses, though, numerous businesses downsized and closed, just not at the rate they did on the east side of the state.

This January, unemployment in Grand Rapids dropped to 3.1 percent.

Grand Rapids’ battles following the economic downturn were different than Detroit’s, Tim Mroz, vice president at The Right Place, said. “Our biggest challenge in 2012, 2013 and 2014 was that there was so damn much cash in the bank for these manufacturers that it was just sitting, waiting for something to do with it.”

That’s where Start Garden, the incubator founded by Amway heir and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ son Rick DeVos, comes in. The accelerator works to match tech startups with established local businesses like Steelcase as a way of marrying tech ideas with manufacturing. From its outset in 2012 until 2015, Start Garden offered $5,000 per week for a good startup pitch. On monthly Update Nights, previous winners would compete for an additional $20,000 in funding. One of its biggest early successes? Boxed Water Is Better, the purified tap water that comes in minimalistic paper cartons.

“That [funding system] was almost like us teaching ourselves what would really work here,” Start Garden Director Paul Moore said. Now Start Garden’s business model has changed.

“What started to become really clear was that we had these large enterprises that really needed to make a bridge into the startup community, [and] startups that wanted to bridge to them,” Moore said. “A small startup isn’t going to build up the capacity to build 30,000 pieces of furniture and ship them around North America from a facility every month, and that company that’s 100 years old isn’t going to just suddenly turn itself into a tech company overnight.”

Local investors don’t see the value in something that isn’t tied to manufacturing in some way. “If a young person were pulling together a Snapchat-like app, I don’t think this is the place for that,” Moore said. Michigan is known for making things and, for better or for worse, probably always will be. Local firms aren’t excited about an app for sending photos; they want something that’s tangible and plays to their logistic and production strengths.

“The whole concept of a unicorn is pretty lost on our culture.”

“We find that, oddly enough, that’s a really hard sell in a place like the Valley,” Moore said. That’s because the cultures are different. When someone in San Francisco dreams up a piece of hardware, the first thing that comes to mind are the year-plus shipping and production bottlenecks of dealing with China or Korea. Hence a focus on software. Michigan is the exact opposite. “The whole concept of a unicorn is pretty lost on our culture,” Moore said, laughing. “[Grand Rapids startups] aren’t like ‘ship it in three months to the cloud and you’re up and running’ kind of things.”

Here, industrial designers and engineers are familiar with the timeline and process of getting a manufactured good to market. Rent is going up, but compared to San Francisco, Boston or even nearby Chicago, it’s cheap enough that waiting a year or more for your product to come to market might not drain the bank account.

Start Garden director Darel Ross II

In addition to Grand Circus, Start Garden also hosts Seamless IoT, which describes itself as “the nation’s leading multi-industry, multi-channel proof-of-concept laboratory.” Seamless finds manufacturing and testing partners for low-energy Internet of Things gear — things like sensors that detect when a fire truck is near and deliver an alert to internet-connected cars and motorcycle helmets or sensors for tracking air quality. It’s something Darel Ross II, another director at Start Garden, thinks is a way for tech to help rebuild communities and serve the marginalized.

This June, Start Garden and Seamless announced a partnership with the city government to develop sensors and software for monitoring air quality. It could be seen as a response to the Department of Human Services and Environmental Protection Agency labeling a corner of the city’s low-income Madison Square neighborhood a Vapor Intrusion site. Last year the regulatory bodies found “dramatically higher than allowable” levels of probable carcinogens tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and trichloroethylene (TCE) after the gasses seeped through cracks in foundations. The sensors will be made by Grand Rapids’ Open Systems Technologies and mostly placed on light poles in neighborhoods and near highways. The data will be open-sourced so apps like Breezometer can access it and give everyone a better idea of air quality in their neighborhood. It isn’t particularly sexy, but it’s essential for building a smart city.

“Tech has a unique way of solving a lot of community issues,” Ross II said.

Timothy J. Seppala

Not everything tech-related in Grand Rapids involves Start Garden, and not everything in Detroit involves Dan Gilbert. The Right Place, a West Michigan business accelerator, recently lured data center company Switch to set up its $5 billion Eastern US data center in the confines of a nearly 660,000-square-foot, cement-and-glass pyramid. The quirky space served as Steelcase’s research-and-design headquarters for over two decades until the Great Recession forced the office-furniture manufacturer to sell it in 2010. The first-phase rollout began earlier this year, and the center is expected to employ up to 1,000 people within the next 10 years. The location currently handles data for Activision, Amazon, eBay, Google, Sony and others.

“Simply by making that decision [to locate in Grand Rapids], it raised the tech landscape several levels that would have taken a decade or two to build on our own,” Mroz said. “We got a free ‘skip ahead 20 years’ card.” The possible ripple effect of Switch’s investment can’t be understated. There will be at least 150 full-time jobs there, and over 700 Michigan construction workers will be retrofitting the building over the next five years. “Almost 99 percent” of the workers on-site are Michiganders, a Switch representative said.

Everyone needs to eat and get to work, too, so restaurants and gas stations are bound to pop up as well. So far, Mroz said that a hotel has already been planned for the area. That’s in addition to the tech jobs that may be created from Switch’s mere presence. “If you’re a growing IT company and you’re going into data-managed services, what better thing to put in your marketing materials than to say, ‘We’re co-located X amount of miles from Switch’s East Coast data center?’” Mroz asked.

“Hopefully it’s a real attraction for tech companies and industry players to say they want to have their equipment there,” Michigan Governor Rick Snyder said.

This week Switch raised over $530 million for its IPO.

Finji co-founder Adam Saltsman

Adam Saltsman didn’t need a data center to get him to move from Austin, Texas, to Grand Rapids. What he needed was lower cost of living and a house where he could raise his young family. “We needed someplace that was more stable and less terrifying on as many axes as possible, because what we wanna do is make games,” he said. “That was more important than the admittedly extremely good breakfast tacos you can get there.” Saltsman is the director at Finji, an independent game studio and publisher with remote workers all over the globe. His most recent game is Night in the Woods, a coming-of-age tale about the way your hometown can change drastically while you’re away at college.

“We needed someplace that was more stable and less terrifying on as many axes as possible, because what we wanna do is make games.”

In 2016, before his eldest daughter started kindergarten, Saltsman; his wife, Rebecca; and their two kids made the 1,300-mile trek north. Saltsman and his wife are both from Michigan originally and wanted to be closer to family. He cited Austin’s rapidly changing housing market and cultural landscape as the key reasons for relocating after a dozen years. Since moving, he’s noticed that aside from avocados, everything in Grand Rapids is between 30 and 40 percent cheaper.

“If we paid off our mortgage, which was one of our biggest expenses, the rising cost of homes and property values would make the property taxes be as much as the mortgage we had just paid off,” he said. “You’re just signing up to be a renter there forever.” The house he bought for $330,000 in Grand Rapids doesn’t exist in Austin. Considering location and build quality, it would’ve cost around six times more in Texas, a financial planner estimated. But again, you’re more likely to run across a jackalope in Austin than find a house like this. “It’s just a really, genuinely well-made building,” Saltsman said. “It’s a house that was built to be lived in by a family, not be resold at a margin with some sort of weird, arbitrary features that the housing market currently favors.”

Next to its workforce and culture of innovation, comparatively inexpensive housing and cost of living are one of Michigan’s strongest selling points. Almost everyone interviewed for this piece said the same thing: The state isn’t doing enough to market itself. The Pure Michigan TV spots with Tim Allen voice-overs work to promote tourism outside the state, but there aren’t a lot of efforts being made to attract talent from the coasts for permanent residence. Once people get to Michigan and see what the state has to offer in terms of quality of life, their minds start to change. It’s getting them to consider Michigan that’s the hard part.

“The best way you can get somebody here is to have warm referrals,” Governor Snyder said. “People that have had experience here.” Shinola’s Panis agreed and has seen that in action himself. He described a New York couple who visited him over the Fourth of July weekend. The man holds a degree from Harvard, the woman a degree from Brown. “There are people that are highly successful, highly educated, highly in tune with the environment around them, and this is where they want to be,” he said.

People mistakenly think the state is under multiple feet of snow for half the year. Cindy Brown from Hello West Michigan, a nonprofit that works to educate and attract talent to the area, said that the biggest misconception she hears is that there’s nothing to do during the Mitten State’s infamous winters. “Every state has an indoor season,” Brown countered. “You’ll hear people in Arizona say that you can’t go outside until late at night because it’s so hot during the day; we are no different.”

“Get over it. Go build a snowman.”

“Make a fire in the house on the weekend rather than going out to the lake,” Panis said. “Get over it. Go build a snowman.” He relocated to Detroit from Texas in 2012 and said there’s nothing he can think of that’d make him want to leave Michigan.

Hello West Michigan started in 2010, but because of its nonprofit status, its reach is bound to a limited marketing budget. Brown stressed that Hello isn’t an employment agency; rather, it connects candidates with employers, specifically targeting spouses who may be moving with someone poached from the coasts. The companies it works with and receives funding from are the biggest employers in the 13-county region, but even then, money only goes so far and Brown has to be careful where she spends it. Billboards didn’t offer much of a return five years ago, so those stopped. Now the organization advertises at Grand Rapids’ Gerald R. Ford International Airport and on Facebook and LinkedIn.

The former hits people when they’re arriving and leaving while the latter offer inexpensive ways for her company to target the specific job seekers that local employers are looking for. Currently Brown is targeting IT professionals who’ve left for jobs in California to get them to rethink the area. If you’re considering coming back home, Brown said it’s her job to make sure you know you’re welcome and aware of how West Michigan has changed since you’ve left. “There’s nothing wrong with leaving, just as long as people know there’s an open door,” she said. “Try new things, but always know you can come back.”

This summer was one of the busiest Brown has seen in her six years with the company.

Grand Rapids and Detroit are the two biggest metropolitan areas in the state, so people naturally gravitate toward them. Tech can’t save small manufacturing towns that were devastated when industry left for cheaper climes like Mexico or China. Saginaw spent nine years as the most violent city per capita and has been wracked with hardships following closures of GM-related shops during the Great Recession. In July 2009, the 18-square-mile city’s unemployment topped that of Detroit’s, with nearly a quarter of the workforce out of a job. Unemployment has since dropped to 5.3 percent, but its population also fell by around 6,000.

And then there’s Flint, which needs no introduction. The city is still reeling from a lead-poisoned water supply, and unfiltered tap water won’t be safe to drink for more than two years. Lead levels recently dropped below the federal action level of 15 parts per billion, but there are still 20,000 lead and galvanized pipes carrying water in the city. Until those are replaced, filters will be a way of life. Or can tech fix that? Flint has pitched itself as one of the cities where Amazon could locate its second headquarters, and that $5 billion investment would go to a city that couldn’t need it more.

But the competition is fierce. Gilbert is putting together a pitch for Detroit, and his prowess at landing huge deals could be more attractive than what Flint could offer. Would Amazon set up shop in a city where its employees couldn’t drink or bathe in tap water?

Michigan is in the process of rebuilding itself. Again. Chrysler paid off its government debt in 2011, with GM following suit in 2014. That same year, Detroit exited bankruptcy in record time. Motown flipped the switch on 65,000 new streetlights last December. As of this April, statewide unemployment dropped to 4.7 percent. On paper, everything sounds like it’s on the upswing.

The low unemployment numbers don’t tell the whole story, however. Unemployment stats only count those who are out of work and either seeking a job or are enrolled in training or education. If you aren’t looking or have a part-time job (or multiple part-time jobs), you aren’t counted as being jobless. Another factor is the workforce’s inability to pass drug tests and the growing opioid epidemic. Last year Michigan doctors wrote more opioid prescriptions than there were men, women and children in the state.

Where does the state go from here? Grand Circus’ programs continue to expand, but Rocchi said that classes are the size they are because it’s how the company keeps from flooding the market. If more people are graduating than can find jobs, his programs lose their appeal and the sizable investment from students becomes harder to justify. But Michigan will need more than his boot camps and Start Garden’s tech partnerships.

Around 14 percent of new jobs in the state come from the auto industry, but Start Garden’s Ross II argues that the likes of Ford, Chrysler and GM are transitioning from purely automotive companies to mobility companies. You can see this at the sprawling 500-acre driveline-assembly plant at Willow Run in Ypsilanti, which began life cranking out B-24 bombers during World War II under Ford’s control and is now being transformed into an autonomous-vehicle-testing complex for the likes of AT&T, Ford and Toyota. The facility broke ground late last year, and autonomous testing will start in December.

The missing piece is people.

This new, tech-driven manufacturing also involves vendors outside the usual suspects, like LG for lithium-ion batteries made along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Holland or the planned $25 million EV-parts plant that will employ almost 300 in Detroit suburb Hazel Park.

The missing piece is people. People to help fill Detroit’s seven-lane city streets. People who will take the forward-looking manufacturing jobs being created. People willing to move from Austin to pursue their game-development dreams. People who start companies to fight Comcast head on for customers. People who will set up shop and train locals in new crafts. People working night and day to attract new talent to the state. People turning Michigan into a 21st-century manufacturing powerhouse. The kind of people who pulled the state through its lost decade.

“When things get hard, you reinvent yourself,” Start Garden’s Ross II said. “If I was a betting guy, I would bet on Michigan anytime.”

Image credits: Grand Circus (Damien Rocchi portrait); Timothy J. Seppala (all other images)

AOL Instant Messenger is shutting down on December 15th

It’s the end of an era. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is officially shutting down on December 15th, Oath announced this morning. AIM started out as the built-in chat application in America Online’s desktop client, but it really took off after it was broken out as a separate application in 1997. The app, and it’s iconic messaging sound, were staples for anyone who spent too much time on the web in the 90’s and early 00’s. Really though, the writing was on the wall for AIM since AOL laid off most of the division in 2012. AIM also started cutting off third-party access earlier this year, which was a big sign the service was on its way out.

Oath — the new Verizon company that includes AOL, Yahoo, and yes, Engadget — isn’t saying what, exactly, will be replacing AIM. For now, though, Yahoo Messenger seems like the best possibility.

“AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift, but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed,” said Oath VP of communications Michael Albers. “We are more excited than ever to continue building the next generation of iconic brands and life-changing products for users around the world.”

All good things come to an end. On Dec 15, we’ll bid farewell to AIM. Thank you to all our users! #AIMemories https://t.co/b6cjR2tSuU pic.twitter.com/V09Fl7EPMx

— AIM (@aim) October 6, 2017

Source: AIMemories

America’s cash-free future is just around the corner

Shake Shack’s next burger joint at Astor Place in NYC doesn’t want your money — at least not the physical variety. In an effort to reduce the “friction time” between paying for your meal and eating it, the company plans to replace human cashiers for automated kiosks which won’t accept actual bills and coins, only cards. This move is part of a global trend away from cash-based economies and towards Star Wars-style credits. But could such a monetary revolution actually benefit all Americans? Don’t bet on it.

Paying with cash isn’t nearly as popular as it used to be here in the States. According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent study, consumers used cash for 32 percent of the retail transactions in 2015, that’s down eight percent from 2012. Credit and debit cards accounted for 48 percent of the total transactions in 2015. And while the demand for cash remains relatively steady, especially for small, in-person purchases (cash is used for 60 percent of purchases under $10), the rise of online shopping has fundamentally altered how we pay for goods. Online transactions have risen from six percent of the total in 2012 to 10 percent in 2015.

The US government keeps nearly 1.3 trillion dollars of currency in circulation — $4,000 for every man, woman and child in America — at a cost of $200 billion annually. A vast majority of those bills (78 percent of them, in fact) are of the $100 denomination. That’s more than 30 Benjamins per person while $10, $5 and $1 denominations only account for four percent of the bills we use.

This trend towards digital payments is not exclusive to America — plenty of other nations are exploring going cashless. In China, for example, more than two-thirds of all online transactions in 2009 were cash-on-delivery. By 2016, digital payments accounted for more than 70 percent of those orders, thanks to the mobile wallet wars between Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent at the beginning of this decade. This is, in part, due to the massive popularity that smartphone shopping enjoys in the country. According to a 2016 report by CNBC, nearly half of all ecommerce transactions completed in China — worth $505.7 billion in total — were made on smartphones in 2015. In the US, barely a quarter of all online sales were completed on a mobile device.

Nearly half of all China’s e-commerce sales, totaling $506 billion, are made with mobile devices, versus roughly one-quarter in the U.S., according to eMarketer. By 2019, China’s mobile sales will account for 71 percent of those sales. 2013 Bank of Canada survey found that 44 percent of transactions in that country involved the exchange of hard currency, down 10 percent from just five years prior.

“It’s the convenience and the speed,” Norman Shaw, an associate professor at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Retail Management, told Global News. “The banks and the payment companies have done a very good job of putting tap-and-pay terminals everywhere, and consequently, it’s very easy to go with your credit card and just tap and pay.”

Dr. Susan Athey, the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, echoed these sentiments. “It reduces friction and is more convenient,” she said. “As people get more used to carrying just their phone, they’ll be more likely to make small purchases with it.”

“My kids recently set up a lemonade stand,” Athey continued, “and when they accept Venmo and Paypal, they sell a lot more lemonade. Literally, they doubled their receipts from one week to another,” by accepting digital transactions. The lesson here: when you make payments faster and easier for your customers, you’re going to do more business.

A cashless economy can also benefit both the government and taxpayers. It helps tax collection by making more businesses part of the “official” economy, ensuring everybody pays their fair share. When every transaction has a digital fingerprint, businesses won’t be able to underreport their earnings or cook their books with the same ease as with cash. This can lead to an overall reduction in the tax rate since those that are paying their taxes aren’t covering for those who don’t.

Kenneth S. Rogoff, the Thomas D. Cabot professor of public policy at Harvard University and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, argued a similar point to the Wall Street Journal in September.

“For the government, the cashless society makes tracking and collection of taxes much easier whilst committing fraud much harder,” he wrote. “Whereas cash payments can be made ‘invisible’, every cashless (digital) transaction has a digital footprint, making it much harder to ‘accidentally’ misrepresent revenues. For consumers, the benefits of paying with plastic or bytes lie in its ease of use and safety, despite the continuing trade-off between ease of use and anti-fraud and identity theft measures.”

The problem, however, lies in the inability of some Americans to participate in such an economy. Digital payments require, at the very least, a bank account, a mobile device and an internet connection. Even in America, not everybody has reliable access to these services. The 2013 US Survey of Consumer Finance found that 7.5 percent of Americans didn’t have a bank account. And while mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous, they are not universal.

In fact there are a number of population segments that would be disadvantaged should the government quit circulating cash. The homeless, the elderly and the very young, none of whom might have bank accounts; day laborers and other workers paid under the table; cabbies, waiters, valets and anybody else who rely on tips to supplement their wages. Small businesses, bodegas and other independent retailers would also be squeezed by the high processing fees necessary to pay with cards.

“Cleary you’re going to need a way to get everybody into the system if you’re going to get rid of cash,” Athey explained. “One of the things the government will have to do is ensure banking access to everyone.” She expects that a new class of banking institution, offering low cost services like zero-interest checking accounts will emerge as a result. For those who don’t have reliable access to a phone, Athey believes that physical debit cards could be used as a stand-in for digital currency, with a biometric verification system preventing thieves from extracting value from stolen ones.

But despite the potentially massive upheaval of modern banking institutions, Athey is confident that we’ll see a cashless America within our lifetimes. “Some economies are most of the way there already, other economies are a little further behind,” she said. Athey figures that consumers will begin regularly leaving their cash behind when shopping within five years.

“You already don’t really need cash anymore right now,” she continued. And once the trend reaches a critical mass of consumers demanding digital payment options, businesses will have no choice but to concede. Granted, most retailers already allow you to pay with a debit or credit card but this would make the service effectively mandatory.

So what would a completely cashless America actually look like? Probably not a whole lot different than it does today. Digital wallets and fund transfer apps like Venmo, Google Wallet and Apple Pay will become even more prevalent as people begin to use them for everything from paying friends for rounds of drinks to contributing to the Sunday Services collection plate. The flip side of that, of course, is that physical currency will become increasingly rare — don’t expect to find money lying in the street for much longer.

Cryptocurrencies will also play a larger part in daily life, especially for America’s immigrant and migrant communities. As Forbes contributor Jacob Tellez argued last December, “It is costly and time consuming for immigrants to send money across borders. A borderless currency such as Bitcoin allows distant families to access funds within mere minutes using only a 2 percent transaction fee instead of the 10-20 percent banks generally charge.”

We could see the diminishment of conventional banks as well. The Millennial Disruption Index study, a three year survey of more than 10,000 millennials conducted by Viacom subsidiary Scratch, found that 73 percent of respondents trusted online services like Square and PayPal more than national banks. This is likely due to how those institutions screwed over average Americans during the 2008 financial crisis before receiving massive bailouts from the government. What’s more, a full third of people surveyed didn’t anticipate needing bank accounts at all within the next five years.

Of course, the mandatory nature of a cashless system does raise privacy concerns. Since every transaction has a digital fingerprint that ties it back to your account, the government would have record of your entire purchase history. Literally, every single thing you’ve purchased throughout your life. As such, stringent privacy protections would have to be implemented. Athey suggests an opt-out option for small ticket items. “Something where we could choose to not record personal information ‘cash-like’ transactions are made,” she said.

Still, that’s a lot of faith being put in the hands of the government to not misuse the data to target or harass its citizens. And if the recent DACA controversy is any indication, the US government hasn’t shown much willingness to behave itself when given added powers over its people. So while the march of technology brings us ever closer to a digital-currency economy, don’t expect cold hard cash to disappear entirely any time soon.

Images: Flickr (Shake Shack); Getty (China mobile); Flickr (UK Mobile); Getty (tithe plate)

Truphone’s Apple SIM Data Plans for iPad Will Be Available to Buy in Over 30 Countries Later This Year

Truphone today announced that its Apple SIM data plans for iPad are now available to purchase in Australia, Ireland, Portugal, and the Netherlands, with an additional 31 countries to follow by the end of 2017.

Truphone’s Apple SIM plans provide iPad users with access to its data network in over 40 countries, including the United States, Australia, Hong Kong, and much of the European Union. Each plan lasts 30 days, with 500MB, 1GB, and 3GB allotments available at up to 4G speeds. Prices start at £6 in the UK and vary elsewhere.

Apple SIM enables iPad users to easily switch between different short-term data plans from select carrier partners without needing multiple SIM cards. Apple SIM can be used in more than 180 countries and territories around the world, making it convenient for staying connected while traveling.

Apple SIM is embedded in the latest cellular iPad Pro models, and compatible with the fifth-generation 9.7-inch iPad, iPad Air 2, iPad mini 3, and iPad mini 4, sold in the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the UK.

Apple SIM is also available for purchase separately at Apple retail store locations in those aforementioned countries. Keep in mind that not all carriers support Apple SIM, and it is not available to purchase or use in China.

Truphone data plans can be purchased or topped up on compatible iPads by tapping Settings → Cellular Data → Set Up Cellular Data. In some countries, these settings may be labeled as Mobile Data.

Other Apple SIM partners around the world include AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Three UK, EE, AlwaysOnline Wireless, GigSky, SoftBank, and au by KDDI. As a pricing comparison, rival global network GigSky offers data in over 140 countries for between 1 and 10 cents per MB depending on the region.

Tag: Apple SIM
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Ming-Chi Kuo Says iPhone X Supercycle Won’t Really Happen Until 2018

For months, many Wall Street analysts have predicted the iPhone X will drive a significant number of existing iPhone users to upgrade. The latest word from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, however, suggests the so-called “supercycle” won’t truly gain momentum until 2018 due to multiple factors.

Namely, Kuo said the TrueDepth camera system’s reported production issues will be “significantly addressed” in 2018. He also believes new iPhone models launched in 2018 will enjoy a longer sales period than those unveiled in 2017, with next year’s lineup likely to retain many of the iPhone X’s appealing features.

Here’s the excerpt from Kuo’s research note obtained by MacRumors today:

The market generally refers to 2017 as the super cycle of the iPhone, but we think the real super cycle will be in 2018 for the following reasons: (1) TrueDepth Camera’s production issues will be significantly addressed in 2018F; (2) new models launched in 2018F will enjoy a longer sales period than those unveiled in 2017; and (3) the product mix, specifications and designs of new iPhone models from 2018F will be more competitive. We estimate that for 2017, iPhone shipments will come in at 210-220mn units, which should grow to be 245-255mn units in 2018.

Kuo estimated that once iPhone X’s production issues are solved in the fourth quarter of this year, shipments will “pick up strongly” in the first half of 2018.

Related Roundup: iPhone XTags: KGI Securities, Ming-Chi Kuo
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AOL Instant Messenger Officially Discontinuing This December After Twenty Years Online

Twenty years after launching as a download for Microsoft Windows computers in 1997, AOL Instant Messenger will be officially discontinued from December 15, 2017. AOL parent company Oath announced the end of AIM in a blog post earlier this morning, celebrating with a nostalgic recollection of how big the messaging platform was in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

All good things come to an end. On Dec 15, we’ll bid farewell to AIM. Thank you to all our users! #AIMemories https://t.co/b6cjR2tSuU pic.twitter.com/V09Fl7EPMx

— AIM (@aim) October 6, 2017

According to Michael Albers, VP of Communications Product at Oath, the reason behind the discontinuation is how “profoundly” the ways we communicate have changed over the years, leading many to abandon AIM for mobile apps like Apple’s iMessage, Facebook’s WhatsApp, and more.

If you were a 90’s kid, chances are there was a point in time when AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was a huge part of your life. You likely remember the CD, your first screenname, your carefully curated away messages, and how you organized your buddy lists. Right now you might be reminiscing about how you had to compete for time on the home computer in order to chat with friends outside of school. You might also remember how characters throughout pop culture from “You’ve Got Mail” to “Sex and the City” used AIM to help navigate their relationships. In the late 1990’s, the world had never seen anything like it. And it captivated all of us.

AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift, but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed. As a result we’ve made the decision that we will be discontinuing AIM effective December 15, 2017.

There are still plans to “continue building the next generation of iconic brands and life-changing products,” Albers said, similar to what AIM did for instantaneously messaging friends in the early days of the internet. No further specifics were given as to what the company might launch next.

Last month, AIM was also removed as a chat option from Apple’s Messages app in macOS High Sierra, providing another hint that many users no longer logged into the service. Over the years, there have also been AIM apps for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

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Sphero’s R2-Q5 ‘Star Wars’ droid is basically a goth R2-D2

Sphero just announced a new app-controlled robot a few days ago, the Mini, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have anything else in the works. The company has now revealed the latest member of its Star Wars family, R2-Q5, the Empire’s version of the beloved R2-D2 character. As is the case with all of Sphero’s toys, you can take charge of R2-Q5 via its Droids app for iOS and Android, where you’ll be able to drive it, hear it make sounds and use it to play various mini games. You’ll need to act fast if you want one for yourself: Sphero says the number of R2-Q5 numbers made is in the “low thousands,” and Best Buy has an exclusive on it in the US, while John Lewis has that honor in the UK. Pre-orders are open now for $200/£200, with shipping expected to happen around October 27th.

FDA approves first Zika test for blood donations

While the Zika virus is primarily transmitted by mosquito bites, it could also be passed through blood transfusion. To ensure that nobody who needs transfusion in the US gets infected, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved the first test that can screen Zika in blood donations. The cobas Zika test can detect the virus’ RNA in plasma taken from donated whole blood and blood components. It can’t be used to diagnose infection, but it can keep the country’s blood supply Zika-free.

The FDA actually allowed some clinics to use the technique as an experimental method to screen blood donations back in 2016 when the virus started spreading in Puerto Rico. Thanks to that testing period, the FDA was able to prove that the test can indeed effectively and accurately spot the virus. According to additional tests in five external laboratories, its clinical specificity (or the frequency in negative results in uninfected subjects) is 99 percent. Now that it’s officially been approved, clinics and hospitals around the country can use it to make sure their blood supply won’t infect anyone with the virus.

FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research director Peter Marks said in a statement:

“Today’s action represents the first approval of a Zika virus detection test for use with screening the nation’s blood supply. Screening blood donations for the Zika virus is critical to preventing infected donations from entering the U.S. blood supply. Today’s approval is the result of a commitment by the manufacturer to work rapidly and collaboratively with the FDA and the blood collection industry to respond to a public health crisis and ensure the safety of blood in the U.S. and its territories.”

Source: FDA