Friday, August 21, 2020

Eukaryotic Cell Anatomy Review

Eukaryotic Cell Anatomy Review This cell life structures survey is intended to test your insight into eukaryotic cell life systems. Cells are the fundamental unit of life. There are two essential sorts of cells: prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. Prokaryotic cells have no evident core, while eukaryotic cells have a core that is encased inside a layer. Microbes andâ archaeans are instances of prokaryotic cells. Plant cells and creature cells are eukaryotic cells. Organelles There are a few contrasts in the sorts of cell organelles that can be found inside plant and creature cells. For instance, plant cells contain cell dividers and plastids, while creature cells don't. Cell Shapes All cells don't appear to be identical. They come in differing shapes and measures and are appropriate for the jobs they fill in the best possible working of a living being. For instance, nerve cells are stretched and slim, with projections that reach out from the cell body. Their remarkable shape assists neurons with speaking with each other. Other body cells, for example, red platelets, have a circle shape. This encourages them to fit into small veins so as to ship oxygen to cells. Fat cells are round fit as a fiddle and become augmented when putting away fat. They contract as the put away fat is utilized for vitality.

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Branch Metrics

Branch Metrics INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hello, today we are in Palo Alto in the Branch Metrics office. Hello Alex, who are you and what do you do?Alex: My name is Alex. I am the CEO and co-founder of Branch. I can go into a lot of background about myself and where I was born. I am local, I havent really ever left California. I grew up about an hour south up here in a place called Carmel, beautiful town. It is my favorite vacation. I highly recommend making a trip at some point if you have never been.I always wanted to be an engineer. And growing up just like a little ways away, I knew that the best place to be an engineer was in Silicon Valley. I knew since I was probably 5 or 6 thatâ€"as soon as I came to college, move here and never leave. My goal has been to slowly make my way towards the hills as far as I possibly can and then die comfortably in bed in Partola Valley at a ripe old age at some point. I am almost there but not there yet.I have always been building things since a very early age. Studie d engineering, actually didn’t study software engineering, focused on electrical engineering I studied primarily device physics. So this whole software thing that we work on today is actually very different than my educational background. But I think engineering is an absolute requirement when it comes to building a company or really addressing any type of problem, and they train you to really solve problems.So while studying I fell in love with school in undergrad and almost made education my career. I started a PhD in electrical engineering here at Stanford with the full intention to actually go into research and be a professor but through that process, I kind of I saw a lot of friends working and doing really successful things in the industry and then had an offer to join a startup in Santa Clara right at the same time when I started that program and said, “Why not?”I actually decided why not just do the best of both worlds, get some education while trying to do the masters and the PhD full time and then work full time. For about two years I actually did seven days a week school and work non-stop. Until I said I can’t do this anymore, got the masters and just decided to focus entirely on the startup. The startup was in Santa Clara. The reason I joined was the incredibly awesome promise that we were going to build up a manufacturing facility from scratch. They had really an idea for the technology we need to figure out first how to build it and then manufacture it.I joined when there were like about 20-ish people or so. The company grew to about 700 and we raised half a billion dollars at the time and ultimately failed. It was a very sad story. The company’s assets were sold to a Chinese conglomerate for the technology, which I had built.After that I said, “I want to build my own company” and now I blame a lot of the folks that were in charge of the product and some of the strategic decisions for the failure of this startup and I don’t want t o make names. I blame a lot of the strategic decisions that were made on the reason that we failed. I think I know we could have been a lot more adequate and prepared for the market changes that occurred. And so I said I am going to do it myself this time. I want to make those decisions so I quit and said, “My turn.”I fell in love with software over the course of that startup, I built a bunch of different tools, completely self-taught and just started writing apps so I knew I wanted to get into mobile software. The promise that I could write a piece of functionality and software and push it out to a distribution platform that potentially will touch billions of people and run on a really powerful computer in their pocket was more exciting than anything that I could possibly dream of. So I just started writing consumer apps.My first version was this wild idea that I had an I won’t go into details but I realized quickly that it wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought to build u p a company. And so I applied to the business school at Stanford as a fall back plan that if all else fail I can never build a successful company what so ever at least I would get a piece of paper that would say like “I didn’t just spend three years of my life doing nothing.” Fortunately, that was a really good decision because it is where I met my co-founders for Branch and the company Branch came out of that whole story. I can go in to a lot more detail about what Branch is and all that at some point. That is a little bit of background on me.Martin: Did the basic idea for Branch come when you collaborated at Stanford university?Alex: I met my classmates like very early on. It is a two year program. I came there basically because Ive heard that school was very easy and I can work on my own stuff and like barely go to class and just keep working. Then I took a paper at the end which was true although attendance seemed to be the biggest requirement for business school.I met my classmates very early on. I recognized them as fellow engineers that were very entrepreneurial. They had actually applied for internships over the summer. I convinced them to leave those and join me to build this other wild app idea that I had which was a new type of photobook that we would produce and sell via app. We built that out of the first to second year, launched it officially at the beginning of our second year, saw actually quite a bit of success and operated that business all throughout our second year. We got to be about a million a year in total revenue.After graduation we entered an incubator with this printing app and all of these companies in this incubator saw this tool that we had built primarily to give us an edge in user acquisition. It was a linking tool. They said, “I want to use that too” and I have never built a product in my life that people would see and say, “I want to use it”. So I knew there was something there. By the end of the incubator we had actually sold all of the assets to the printing business and decided to focus on this linking tool explicitly because it was basically growing more organically. People who would use it would tell their friends etc., etc.The tool itself is really a platform for app developers. It is a linking tool and the core premise is very simply and I don’t want to go into too much detail. But the core premise is like in the web links are very standard. Every web page is filled with. Let’s look at Amazon as an example, they have millions of products that you can buy, each one of those products has a unique link. In the transition to apps links disappeared. When you build an app you say, “Here is the first screen, here is a second screen”. It is a completely self-contained story board of functionality. You don’t have the same linking mechanism. Whereas marketing and all sorts of features that were built sharing, as an example, you can’t share a page in an app. It just doesn’t make s ense. You can share an app but you can’t share a page unless you create links that allow you to do it. So we brought that linking concept and applied it to apps so that individual products inside the Amazon app for example could have a link. They didn’t necessarily link to the website.So we wanted every page, every object like news article, product, photo, video etc. to have a link in an app just like they do on the web. And with that it unlocks a whole mountain of really cool functionality and things for app developers.That is the Branch platform. It is really a linking solution for app developers and they use it for pretty much everything â€" marketing, advertising, building features, etc. Anything you can imagine, basically every link that points to an app should be a Branch link is the goal because we do linking for apps much better than they ever could.BUSINESS MODEL OF BRANCHMartin: What is interesting, for me the idea is very obvious. Of course you should say like deep li nks in an app. Why wasn’t nothing else out there?Alex: The biggest thing we introduced was primarily using these links as a method of user acquisition. There was a study published that around 20 percent of the top 200 apps had set up deep linking for their app, where we created and allowed developers to start using deep link when users didn’t have the app.So let me describe a little bit of the difference here. Let’s say you already have Yelp installed, somebody sends you a link to the Yelp website, Yelp has already set up deep linking where they can open up their app and show you that thing. That technology had been available since the first version of Android and iOS, the ability to open an app and load a specific page. The problem comes when it is a new app you don’t have installed. There was no way to say, “I want you to install the Yelp app and then have this page open up afterwards”, so they carry trough that context and expectation through the install, just the tec hnology does not exist outside of what we offer.User acquisition and growth is the most important thing when it comes to building an app business because it is so hard. It is impossible to get your app discovered and so everybody is so focused on growth in UA. When you actually have the ability now to market your app or promote your app based on the content inside, you can drive much more growth in terms of new users adopting it as well as new users like activating, signing up or buying something in the app.A shift towards content when it comes to app promotion and instead of promoting an app, whereas when you look at the current state of app marketing you still see people buying installs. You will see like you are browsing your Facebook news feed and they have a ton of advertising that is for apps. There is no advertisement for like articles or products or that type of thing when it comes to apps. So deep linking unlocks that.We are now at the point where nobody wants a dumb app an ymore. They want to watch a video or they want to read an article or buy a product or something like that so it is an absolutely required transition in the mindset of building an app to set up all these links to point back to these products.It is crazy that it wasn’t more recognized but I think the biggest problem was you couldnt use deep linking for user acquisition, therefore it wasn’t solving a problem that everybody had. It was solving sort of a small edge case that was like a tier 1 type problem, so barely anybody adopted it. Now you can use it for everything and now it solves everybody’sproblem. I think that is the difference.We estimate that we now have about 10 percent of the total deep linkable app market, using Branch. The remaining 90 percent do not use anything else. They don’t use another tool, they just haven’t heard about us yet. A lot of what we do is education in things like “Why should this be the top priority in your product roadmap for next quarter or tomorrow and why don’t you add this today.” A lot of that is like our entire focus from a company and growth perspective as this sort of storytelling in order to convince all of the rest of the ninety percent why it is the most important thing for them to use today.Martin: So imagine, I am an app developer, walk me through the process of getting ready to have my app deep linked.Alex: Sure. The biggest challenge when it comes to setting up deep linking is that apps aren’t structured to support it. As an example, Apple designed XCode as the platform where you build an app. XCode has you layout the story board and it even have you indicate an arrow that says “This is the entry point”. Often developers will put like a splash page as their entry point and then they will have.Let’s just say it is a very simple app either a splash page or screen and then you have list of products and maybe there is a product detail page. So you have a single entry point which is the splash pag e. The next entry point is a login page, like you need somebody to log in and then they could see the products. There is no way to actually in XCode structure your app and say, “The user can click a link and then enter the product detail page.”Often, if you try to open up the product detail page before you go to the splash page or even the product list page the Apple crash. It is just the way that people have been building apps since mobile apps were actually the thing you can build. What is required is to say: “Forget about all that stuff that you have learned about how to build an app. There isn’t a single point of entry. Every user can be dropped in at every single point in that storyboard level.” You as the developer need to say “Ok, drop him on Branch, Branch will tell you right when the app first opens up what the user is expecting to see, what link they just clicked, what page have you load now that you know that information.So let’s say it is a list of shoes yo u can buy, the user just clicked on the pair of red shoes with this ID. Load the product detail page for the red shoes. And the developer says, “Ok, awesome. I will do that.” And they will bypass and make sure that everything Is all set up so when the user sees that red shoed they can click buy or done and go back to the product listing.It is basically re-architecting the traditional structure of an app to support multiple entry points. That is the bulk of the work like adding Branch is actually adding one line of code. It is super, super simple to add us. It is just like changing the mindset of the developer to say, “It is more complicated than a single point of entry and now I need to support multiple entries.Fortunately, the story is very compelling. We have shown that if you go through that process you can see up to a 2x conversion rate to buy that thing, that pair of red shoes. You can see on average across network of thousands of apps that use us now. If a user gets a de ep linked experience as their first experience to the app they are twice as likely to stick around after 30 days. So a 30 day retention doubles if you offer them a deep linked experience because it is so compelling that they are likely to keep using it again and again. It is a good story so the one day in terms of restructuring the app is totally worth it.Martin: I totally get the point that share- ability is key and also that we have multiple entry points and I see another parallel. When the internet was first born, you had first search engines. Then you had Yahoo structured search and had 1000 links or so. If I am looking now at the apps I maybe have downloaded 30-40 apps. I can’t download a million of them or look for them but maybe there are some apps which include some interesting content , which is helpful to me and I would like to find them. But currently no every app is indexed and those kind of deep links. How should I find them? I wouldn’t need to install all of them a nd this Is I believe the pain that you are trying to solve.Alex: Our core mission when it comes to building So we give this tool for free, we believe that the world that will exist on top of the technology that we have created and given to everybody is something that will benefit users and developers so much more and it will create an opportunity for us to monetize far more than we would if we tried to charge some sort of service fee. The core problem that we’ve faced as an app developer and I still consider myself an app developer Like I built an app for my fiancée for Christmas where I aggregated all of the hikes in the Bay area and then indexed them by keywords. So when Sunday morning I feel like I say “Let’s hike”, we want to see flowers and a field and an ocean view and it will tell us exactly which hike we should go on. I didn’t publish it because I know that publishing to the app store is a completely fruitless effort. There is absolutely no point to push in an app into the wild now because discovery is impossible. You will never be found in the app store because there are so many other apps on top of you that have already locked up every single keyword, you will never be found.The only other alternative today is to go to Facebook and then give them a massive amount of money and say “I want users.” It is so bad that Facebook is monopolized, like the single control point to the users to an app that they now are charging like 5 dollars and 50 cents on average for install. There is no world where a five dollar and 50 cents cost of a customer will ever make sense. That means that LTV for a used has to be more than 5 dollars and 50 cents which is crazy. We are selling things with our e-commerce app and barely make like 6 dollars LTV which means there is nothing left to pay ourselves. Anyways, it is like a house of cards, like completely unsustainable.The problem that we face that we want to solve with what we do is discovery. We want to fix ap p discovery. And the way that we can do it is with data that the developers give to us by using the tool. The data that they give to us are the links. They have created links to pages that were previously unlinkable.If you think about an app like Dubsmash, they create a single link that points to every single video that is watchable in the app and they give us all the company metadata. It is basically like the equivalent of a web crawler. When Google set out and all the other companies that have built sites before that, they had to write a page crawler that would crawl all of the text and figure out when somebody types in a query to say looking for their friend’s video. Videos were a big thing back in the early days of the web but to say search for your friends video they would try to match that text to whatever page they previously scraped. We have indexed the Dubsmash app where no crawler, no web crawler can actually get all of the information.The other really important piece of data is that we see how popular each individual video is. So we know at a video level how many times is has been watched, shared clicked on and etc. So we can see that this video is actually more popular that that video. So when you are looking to find something entertaining on your phone, Branch has a single index on everything that is actually watchable let’s say, plus we know exactly of the watchable things, what is the most popular and trending video today in the mobile ecosystem. So when it comes to showing you things that you haven’t seen in an app before but definitely should no other company can surface that information but us. We are going to use this to build an app discovery engine, where we don’t promote apps; we promote the content that resides with them.Our goal is just to create an alternative discovery mechanism that allows people to find things that they are looking for and developers to connect with those users who are looking to interact with them. I just w ant to look back in three years. If we can say that thousands of developers, thousands of businesses were only successful because of the channel that we created then we have built a successful product. That is my goal. I just dont want anyone ever getting in the situation where they poured years of their life trying to create a product or a business in mobile but they fail because they didn’t have access to something to deliver them users. Whereas in the web you can actually invest in SEO and get a substantial number of users just through search queries on Google. And like tons of businesses that have been built purely on that organic channel by pushing content that people actually want to find. We need to create that same mechanism for apps. That is our core driving mission. How that will look will change over time.Martin: And what type of customer segments are you currently targeting because in the first phase you said the big apps, they have already deep links for themselves so therefore I would assume you would rather target the long tail apps.Alex: When you think about there is a difference and this is often confused but there is a difference between reengagement and discovery. Discovery is finding something new that you have never seen before, finding a new business or video or an app that you would have never found otherwise. Whereas for the head of the market, you already have interaction, you have some relation, like you have Yelp installed on your phone. If you want to find a restaurant you are going to go to Yelp. That is the restaurant finding app. You don’t need a tool to surface you restaurants when you are looking for Thai food. What you don’t have is something to push you things that you should see but have not yet seen.So when it comes to solving discovery the mid-tier and the long tail is really where we can shine. We can say this particular video maybe it is on a Dubsmash or one of the other thousand apps that also allow user generated content. We can push you to the thing that you should seevery similar to the things that you have seen in the past but having not seen. In that case it is really around like the long tail and the stuff that you would never find otherwise. We want to try to find things like diamonds and just surface them, that is discovery. When it comes to pushing new content that will be the type of thing we focus on.However people want to see the types of things that are being shared very frequently across the head of the market like Fandango or Zappos. Where you have heard of the brands, we can surface the things within those that you should see and also haven’t seen yet. So it is a discovery within an existing brand and category. If you want to buy shoes you want to go to Zappos directly but we can show you other shoes because everybody loves them. There is discovery you can do within those existing brands but when it comes to locking up new things it is the mid-tier and long tail that we wan t.Martin: Alex, if you look at Google, they have Google Analytics on desktop and I believe they have also some kind of SDK on the mobile. What keep them from going in the same direction of deep linking?Alex: So they have a bunch of initiatives that try to index apps. They have this thing called the app indexing initiative and the goal for them is their product is search. So you type in a query and you will get a result. The goal for them is to take their existing index of web results and deliver the user to the app if they have it. Surfacing peer app content for them is actually no that of the great user experience.If you would search for, let’s stick with the Dubsmash example and they surface Dubsmash and you did not have the app installed on your phone, they have to send you to an app store when you click on the link which is from a user experience perspective just awful. You click on a video, you go to the app store. Nobody wants that.So their focus is let’s take all the stu ff the great stuff that we have on the web and deliver a compelling search result and if the app is installed we will send the user there. So app indexing is primarily a tool that allows the developer to list what their web content indicate to google that it is also on a corresponding app page. But unfortunately a lot of folks have not yet adopted deep linking. So the subset of those app links is actually pretty small.But for their use case it doesn’t make as much sense for you to index pure app content. Because of a search user experience it is poor. So it is just not their key focus. It is possible that some of the thing they are doing around Google now could start to overlap when they want to recommend you apps that you haven’t seen yet that you should that are related to something you are doing on your phone but so far they haven’t gone in that direction.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM ALEX AUSTIN In Palo Alto (CA), we meet CEO and Co-Founder of Branch Metrics, Alex Austin. Alex talks about his story how he came up with the idea and founded Branch Metrics, how the current business model works, as well as he provides some advice for young entrepreneurs.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hello, today we are in Palo Alto in the Branch Metrics office. Hello Alex, who are you and what do you do?Alex: My name is Alex. I am the CEO and co-founder of Branch. I can go into a lot of background about myself and where I was born. I am local, I havent really ever left California. I grew up about an hour south up here in a place called Carmel, beautiful town. It is my favorite vacation. I highly recommend making a trip at some point if you have never been.I always wanted to be an engineer. And growing up just like a little ways away, I knew that the best place to be an engineer was in Silicon Valley. I knew since I was probably 5 or 6 thatâ€"as soon as I came to college, move here and never leave. My goal has been to slowly make my way towards the hills as far as I possibly can and then die comfortably in bed in Partola Valley at a ripe old age at some point. I am almost there but not there yet.I have always been building things since a very early age. Studied engineering, actually didn’t study software engineering, focused on electrical engineering I studied primarily device physics. So this whole software thing that we work on today is actually very different than my educational background. But I think engineering is an absolute requirement when it comes to building a company or really addressing any type of problem, and they train you to really solve problems.So while studying I fell in love with school in undergrad and almost made education my career. I started a PhD in electrical engineering here at Stanford with the full intention to actually go into research and be a professor but through that process, I kind of I saw a lot of friends working and doing really successful thi ngs in the industry and then had an offer to join a startup in Santa Clara right at the same time when I started that program and said, “Why not?”I actually decided why not just do the best of both worlds, get some education while trying to do the masters and the PhD full time and then work full time. For about two years I actually did seven days a week school and work non-stop. Until I said I can’t do this anymore, got the masters and just decided to focus entirely on the startup. The startup was in Santa Clara. The reason I joined was the incredibly awesome promise that we were going to build up a manufacturing facility from scratch. They had really an idea for the technology we need to figure out first how to build it and then manufacture it.I joined when there were like about 20-ish people or so. The company grew to about 700 and we raised half a billion dollars at the time and ultimately failed. It was a very sad story. The company’s assets were sold to a Chinese conglo merate for the technology, which I had built.After that I said, “I want to build my own company” and now I blame a lot of the folks that were in charge of the product and some of the strategic decisions for the failure of this startup and I don’t want to make names. I blame a lot of the strategic decisions that were made on the reason that we failed. I think I know we could have been a lot more adequate and prepared for the market changes that occurred. And so I said I am going to do it myself this time. I want to make those decisions so I quit and said, “My turn.”I fell in love with software over the course of that startup, I built a bunch of different tools, completely self-taught and just started writing apps so I knew I wanted to get into mobile software. The promise that I could write a piece of functionality and software and push it out to a distribution platform that potentially will touch billions of people and run on a really powerful computer in their pocket was more exciting than anything that I could possibly dream of. So I just started writing consumer apps.My first version was this wild idea that I had an I won’t go into details but I realized quickly that it wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought to build up a company. And so I applied to the business school at Stanford as a fall back plan that if all else fail I can never build a successful company what so ever at least I would get a piece of paper that would say like “I didn’t just spend three years of my life doing nothing.” Fortunately, that was a really good decision because it is where I met my co-founders for Branch and the company Branch came out of that whole story. I can go in to a lot more detail about what Branch is and all that at some point. That is a little bit of background on me.Martin: Did the basic idea for Branch come when you collaborated at Stanford university?Alex: I met my classmates like very early on. It is a two year program. I came there basically because Ive heard that school was very easy and I can work on my own stuff and like barely go to class and just keep working. Then I took a paper at the end which was true although attendance seemed to be the biggest requirement for business school.I met my classmates very early on. I recognized them as fellow engineers that were very entrepreneurial. They had actually applied for internships over the summer. I convinced them to leave those and join me to build this other wild app idea that I had which was a new type of photobook that we would produce and sell via app. We built that out of the first to second year, launched it officially at the beginning of our second year, saw actually quite a bit of success and operated that business all throughout our second year. We got to be about a million a year in total revenue.After graduation we entered an incubator with this printing app and all of these companies in this incubator saw this tool that we had built primarily to give us an edge in user acquisition. It was a linking tool. They said, “I want to use that too” and I have never built a product in my life that people would see and say, “I want to use it”. So I knew there was something there. By the end of the incubator we had actually sold all of the assets to the printing business and decided to focus on this linking tool explicitly because it was basically growing more organically. People who would use it would tell their friends etc., etc.The tool itself is really a platform for app developers. It is a linking tool and the core premise is very simply and I don’t want to go into too much detail. But the core premise is like in the web links are very standard. Every web page is filled with. Let’s look at Amazon as an example, they have millions of products that you can buy, each one of those products has a unique link. In the transition to apps links disappeared. When you build an app you say, “Here is the first screen, here is a second scree n”. It is a completely self-contained story board of functionality. You don’t have the same linking mechanism. Whereas marketing and all sorts of features that were built sharing, as an example, you can’t share a page in an app. It just doesn’t make sense. You can share an app but you can’t share a page unless you create links that allow you to do it. So we brought that linking concept and applied it to apps so that individual products inside the Amazon app for example could have a link. They didn’t necessarily link to the website.So we wanted every page, every object like news article, product, photo, video etc. to have a link in an app just like they do on the web. And with that it unlocks a whole mountain of really cool functionality and things for app developers.That is the Branch platform. It is really a linking solution for app developers and they use it for pretty much everything â€" marketing, advertising, building features, etc. Anything you can imagine, basical ly every link that points to an app should be a Branch link is the goal because we do linking for apps much better than they ever could.BUSINESS MODEL OF BRANCHMartin: What is interesting, for me the idea is very obvious. Of course you should say like deep links in an app. Why wasn’t nothing else out there?Alex: The biggest thing we introduced was primarily using these links as a method of user acquisition. There was a study published that around 20 percent of the top 200 apps had set up deep linking for their app, where we created and allowed developers to start using deep link when users didn’t have the app.So let me describe a little bit of the difference here. Let’s say you already have Yelp installed, somebody sends you a link to the Yelp website, Yelp has already set up deep linking where they can open up their app and show you that thing. That technology had been available since the first version of Android and iOS, the ability to open an app and load a specific page. T he problem comes when it is a new app you don’t have installed. There was no way to say, “I want you to install the Yelp app and then have this page open up afterwards”, so they carry trough that context and expectation through the install, just the technology does not exist outside of what we offer.User acquisition and growth is the most important thing when it comes to building an app business because it is so hard. It is impossible to get your app discovered and so everybody is so focused on growth in UA. When you actually have the ability now to market your app or promote your app based on the content inside, you can drive much more growth in terms of new users adopting it as well as new users like activating, signing up or buying something in the app.A shift towards content when it comes to app promotion and instead of promoting an app, whereas when you look at the current state of app marketing you still see people buying installs. You will see like you are browsing your Facebook news feed and they have a ton of advertising that is for apps. There is no advertisement for like articles or products or that type of thing when it comes to apps. So deep linking unlocks that.We are now at the point where nobody wants a dumb app anymore. They want to watch a video or they want to read an article or buy a product or something like that so it is an absolutely required transition in the mindset of building an app to set up all these links to point back to these products.It is crazy that it wasn’t more recognized but I think the biggest problem was you couldnt use deep linking for user acquisition, therefore it wasn’t solving a problem that everybody had. It was solving sort of a small edge case that was like a tier 1 type problem, so barely anybody adopted it. Now you can use it for everything and now it solves everybody’sproblem. I think that is the difference.We estimate that we now have about 10 percent of the total deep linkable app market, using B ranch. The remaining 90 percent do not use anything else. They don’t use another tool, they just haven’t heard about us yet. A lot of what we do is education in things like “Why should this be the top priority in your product roadmap for next quarter or tomorrow and why don’t you add this today.” A lot of that is like our entire focus from a company and growth perspective as this sort of storytelling in order to convince all of the rest of the ninety percent why it is the most important thing for them to use today.Martin: So imagine, I am an app developer, walk me through the process of getting ready to have my app deep linked.Alex: Sure. The biggest challenge when it comes to setting up deep linking is that apps aren’t structured to support it. As an example, Apple designed XCode as the platform where you build an app. XCode has you layout the story board and it even have you indicate an arrow that says “This is the entry point”. Often developers will put like a spl ash page as their entry point and then they will have.Let’s just say it is a very simple app either a splash page or screen and then you have list of products and maybe there is a product detail page. So you have a single entry point which is the splash page. The next entry point is a login page, like you need somebody to log in and then they could see the products. There is no way to actually in XCode structure your app and say, “The user can click a link and then enter the product detail page.”Often, if you try to open up the product detail page before you go to the splash page or even the product list page the Apple crash. It is just the way that people have been building apps since mobile apps were actually the thing you can build. What is required is to say: “Forget about all that stuff that you have learned about how to build an app. There isn’t a single point of entry. Every user can be dropped in at every single point in that storyboard level.” You as the develop er need to say “Ok, drop him on Branch, Branch will tell you right when the app first opens up what the user is expecting to see, what link they just clicked, what page have you load now that you know that information.So let’s say it is a list of shoes you can buy, the user just clicked on the pair of red shoes with this ID. Load the product detail page for the red shoes. And the developer says, “Ok, awesome. I will do that.” And they will bypass and make sure that everything Is all set up so when the user sees that red shoed they can click buy or done and go back to the product listing.It is basically re-architecting the traditional structure of an app to support multiple entry points. That is the bulk of the work like adding Branch is actually adding one line of code. It is super, super simple to add us. It is just like changing the mindset of the developer to say, “It is more complicated than a single point of entry and now I need to support multiple entries.Fortunately , the story is very compelling. We have shown that if you go through that process you can see up to a 2x conversion rate to buy that thing, that pair of red shoes. You can see on average across network of thousands of apps that use us now. If a user gets a deep linked experience as their first experience to the app they are twice as likely to stick around after 30 days. So a 30 day retention doubles if you offer them a deep linked experience because it is so compelling that they are likely to keep using it again and again. It is a good story so the one day in terms of restructuring the app is totally worth it.Martin: I totally get the point that share- ability is key and also that we have multiple entry points and I see another parallel. When the internet was first born, you had first search engines. Then you had Yahoo structured search and had 1000 links or so. If I am looking now at the apps I maybe have downloaded 30-40 apps. I can’t download a million of them or look for them but maybe there are some apps which include some interesting content , which is helpful to me and I would like to find them. But currently no every app is indexed and those kind of deep links. How should I find them? I wouldn’t need to install all of them and this Is I believe the pain that you are trying to solve.Alex: Our core mission when it comes to building So we give this tool for free, we believe that the world that will exist on top of the technology that we have created and given to everybody is something that will benefit users and developers so much more and it will create an opportunity for us to monetize far more than we would if we tried to charge some sort of service fee. The core problem that we’ve faced as an app developer and I still consider myself an app developer Like I built an app for my fiancée for Christmas where I aggregated all of the hikes in the Bay area and then indexed them by keywords. So when Sunday morning I feel like I say “Let’s hike”, we want to see flowers and a field and an ocean view and it will tell us exactly which hike we should go on. I didn’t publish it because I know that publishing to the app store is a completely fruitless effort. There is absolutely no point to push in an app into the wild now because discovery is impossible. You will never be found in the app store because there are so many other apps on top of you that have already locked up every single keyword, you will never be found.The only other alternative today is to go to Facebook and then give them a massive amount of money and say “I want users.” It is so bad that Facebook is monopolized, like the single control point to the users to an app that they now are charging like 5 dollars and 50 cents on average for install. There is no world where a five dollar and 50 cents cost of a customer will ever make sense. That means that LTV for a used has to be more than 5 dollars and 50 cents which is crazy. We are selling things with our e-com merce app and barely make like 6 dollars LTV which means there is nothing left to pay ourselves. Anyways, it is like a house of cards, like completely unsustainable.The problem that we face that we want to solve with what we do is discovery. We want to fix app discovery. And the way that we can do it is with data that the developers give to us by using the tool. The data that they give to us are the links. They have created links to pages that were previously unlinkable.If you think about an app like Dubsmash, they create a single link that points to every single video that is watchable in the app and they give us all the company metadata. It is basically like the equivalent of a web crawler. When Google set out and all the other companies that have built sites before that, they had to write a page crawler that would crawl all of the text and figure out when somebody types in a query to say looking for their friend’s video. Videos were a big thing back in the early days of the web but to say search for your friends video they would try to match that text to whatever page they previously scraped. We have indexed the Dubsmash app where no crawler, no web crawler can actually get all of the information.The other really important piece of data is that we see how popular each individual video is. So we know at a video level how many times is has been watched, shared clicked on and etc. So we can see that this video is actually more popular that that video. So when you are looking to find something entertaining on your phone, Branch has a single index on everything that is actually watchable let’s say, plus we know exactly of the watchable things, what is the most popular and trending video today in the mobile ecosystem. So when it comes to showing you things that you haven’t seen in an app before but definitely should no other company can surface that information but us. We are going to use this to build an app discovery engine, where we don’t promote apps; we promote the content that resides with them.Our goal is just to create an alternative discovery mechanism that allows people to find things that they are looking for and developers to connect with those users who are looking to interact with them. I just want to look back in three years. If we can say that thousands of developers, thousands of businesses were only successful because of the channel that we created then we have built a successful product. That is my goal. I just dont want anyone ever getting in the situation where they poured years of their life trying to create a product or a business in mobile but they fail because they didn’t have access to something to deliver them users. Whereas in the web you can actually invest in SEO and get a substantial number of users just through search queries on Google. And like tons of businesses that have been built purely on that organic channel by pushing content that people actually want to find. We need to create that same mec hanism for apps. That is our core driving mission. How that will look will change over time.Martin: And what type of customer segments are you currently targeting because in the first phase you said the big apps, they have already deep links for themselves so therefore I would assume you would rather target the long tail apps.Alex: When you think about there is a difference and this is often confused but there is a difference between reengagement and discovery. Discovery is finding something new that you have never seen before, finding a new business or video or an app that you would have never found otherwise. Whereas for the head of the market, you already have interaction, you have some relation, like you have Yelp installed on your phone. If you want to find a restaurant you are going to go to Yelp. That is the restaurant finding app. You don’t need a tool to surface you restaurants when you are looking for Thai food. What you don’t have is something to push you things that you should see but have not yet seen.So when it comes to solving discovery the mid-tier and the long tail is really where we can shine. We can say this particular video maybe it is on a Dubsmash or one of the other thousand apps that also allow user generated content. We can push you to the thing that you should seevery similar to the things that you have seen in the past but having not seen. In that case it is really around like the long tail and the stuff that you would never find otherwise. We want to try to find things like diamonds and just surface them, that is discovery. When it comes to pushing new content that will be the type of thing we focus on.However people want to see the types of things that are being shared very frequently across the head of the market like Fandango or Zappos. Where you have heard of the brands, we can surface the things within those that you should see and also haven’t seen yet. So it is a discovery within an existing brand and category. If you w ant to buy shoes you want to go to Zappos directly but we can show you other shoes because everybody loves them. There is discovery you can do within those existing brands but when it comes to locking up new things it is the mid-tier and long tail that we want.Martin: Alex, if you look at Google, they have Google Analytics on desktop and I believe they have also some kind of SDK on the mobile. What keep them from going in the same direction of deep linking?Alex: So they have a bunch of initiatives that try to index apps. They have this thing called the app indexing initiative and the goal for them is their product is search. So you type in a query and you will get a result. The goal for them is to take their existing index of web results and deliver the user to the app if they have it. Surfacing peer app content for them is actually no that of the great user experience.If you would search for, let’s stick with the Dubsmash example and they surface Dubsmash and you did not have the app installed on your phone, they have to send you to an app store when you click on the link which is from a user experience perspective just awful. You click on a video, you go to the app store. Nobody wants that.So their focus is let’s take all the stuff the great stuff that we have on the web and deliver a compelling search result and if the app is installed we will send the user there. So app indexing is primarily a tool that allows the developer to list what their web content indicate to google that it is also on a corresponding app page. But unfortunately a lot of folks have not yet adopted deep linking. So the subset of those app links is actually pretty small.But for their use case it doesn’t make as much sense for you to index pure app content. Because of a search user experience it is poor. So it is just not their key focus. It is possible that some of the thing they are doing around Google now could start to overlap when they want to recommend you apps that you hav en’t seen yet that you should that are related to something you are doing on your phone but so far they haven’t gone in that direction.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM ALEX AUSTINMartin: Alex, what type of advice could you give first time entrepreneurs?Alex: I have a lot of advice. It is incredibly hard to build a company be it from the life ending problems that you face from a day to day that are product or customer related, or financing related or whatever. Like you are creating something from absolutely nothing and everybody is trying to kill you and stop you from doing it. So it is tough.Advicewise the most important I think is really around attitude. So this is one of the reasons I mentioned that engineering is a really important degree to gather to go through that process like four year education at least where you are just confronted with a continual onslaught of problems that you have no idea how to solve. It is like a problem set you will get and electrical engineering is m uch more mathematical. It is like here is a proof, you need to prove this one like low level physics equation from base principles. I have no idea how to do it but I am going to fail this homework if I don’t figure it out. The consequences are not that severe but it is literally all I can do is have the confidence that I can figure it out and if I just go and keep going and pushing in every possible direction, eventually I will get to the answer.Having a confidence to know that even when you face something that you have absolutely no idea how to solve you have no idea how to do, have the confidence to know that no matter what if you work your butt off and don’t give up you will get to the answer. I think it is like perseverance that I call it.I wrote an article I recommend reading it. The title is called ‘Just keep building’. The first time you try something, it is going to fail miserably, it won’t work at all, you won’t have success. And the most important thing is to l ook at and analyze that failure, see what you did wrong, what assumptions you made that were incorrect then take all of those learnings and then use that as the launch pad to build the next thing. It is the only way that you will actually succeed. There is not a single entrepreneur ever that is ever said I have a great idea and they turn it into a billion dollar company. This does not happen. It is a fairy tale. Just pick a direction, go as fast as you possibly can until you learn that it is not working. Learn everything you can about how and why it failed, take a new direction based on those learnings and go. Just the most important thing is to keep moving as fast as you possibly can because the only thing that you have like fighting against you is time and money which is equivalent to time. You can’t keep doing that forever because you probably will run out of food and rent. But you should keep moving as fast as you can.This execution and lack of fear of making a mistake is abso lutely the most important thing when it comes to building a company. Just be prepared for a lot of disappointment but use that disappointment, feed off of It to move on to the next thing, knowing full well that no matter what at the very end you will find that answer.I have a ton of advice on building company culture, fundraising and all that kind of stuff but I think what is the single most important thing is that it is not about networking, going to the social events and doing this kind of stuff. It is about what you build and accomplish and just keep doing that as fast as you possibly can.Martin: Alex, I am very interested in your advice on corporate culture.Alex: Culture is an interesting one. It defines a lot. We are now 45 people, that is still a very small company. It is very manageable I know everybody. I can interact with everybody. I know what everyone is doing. It is definitely not the point where it is out of control and I don’t have insight on what everyone is doing. But it is just on the border. And especially when I go into things where I can’t be involved as much, as an example going through a fundraising process completely sucks me away from the company. I have absolutely no idea what is going on. I am going from this meeting to that meeting, I am dealing with things that are totally unrelated to the day to day operations and you just have to have faith that every individual person has enough competency, internal guidance to make their own decisions and make sure that they keep going in the direction that you hope they will.The only way to accomplish that is with culture. You can set a high level goal of “This is where we want to go”, but everybody needs to be able to make the same sort of decisions on their own and not just like they face a problem and just set back and hope that it will get addressed.What I found to be the most effective and I stole this actually from our previous startup it is sort of an emphasis on individual acco mplishment. It is how you make sure everybody know that they are only successful if they personally achieve success in whatever project they are working on.We do it in a way where we try to shine light on individuals. So we actually have every two weeks a review where every department head who is responsible for marketing, sales , etc. will get up and actually present individual numbers reporting on peoples projects. Sales is very easy. We show individual levels so it is really on the projector, everybody’s name indicating their success over the last two weeks. So people can see like “Awesome job, you know, Austin” or whoever it is and on the team it is like “You really killed it last week”. And that person is recognized in an individual level.Same thing goes with marketing, same thing goes with engineering and support like all the various aspects of the business. Everyone is recognized at individual level. At the same time the person who is like not doing so awesome is al so presented right in front of the whole company. So it is driving them to have a sense of individual accomplishment.We are not like a family, we are a team of rock star players where everybody should feel lucky to be on the team with the other folks. They should look across the table and be like, “I am so lucky to work with that person.” And if they don’t feel that, they don’t belong here.It is just the focus on the individual and what that does is when that individual is faced with a question or a problem or whatever, they know that their own personal success relies on them being able to push past it. There is nothing more motivating than my personal achievement. An emphasis on the individual is absolutely important.So we have very relaxed management. There is very little oversight in general. Everyone is running as fast as they possibly can, everybody knows they live and die by their own work. Every person that I talk to when they start in the company is “I want you to look back 10 years from now like your resume coming out of Branch and say I did the best work in my life for that company.” If they don’t feel they are going to be able to achieve that then they are not going to be successful and they should leave. But if they can, if they are focused on improving themselves, driving to be the best they possibly can they will for sure be able to do that. I think that is one of the most important things.We are not like, I forbid ping pong tables. People say it is a no-fun policy. I don’t want people to feel this is a comfortable place to like come in and relax. This is a place where you come to get shit done. To accomplish things that you would have never have chance to accomplish in any other role. It is not a place you are going to come and kick back on the couch and hang out with friends. You can do that outside of work. So when you walk down the halls here everybody is super heads down and it is very, very quiet. Everybody is working as har d as they can. It is an unbelievable feeling when you are a part of it. It is really cool.Martin: I totally get the point that you are trying to align the company success with individual success of the people. And for the people that are on the top 30 percent I totally get it. Do you perceive that sometimes the bottom ten or twenty percent are feeling bad just because they are visibly shown as being not as good as the others?Alex: Yes, but the best part about that it’s there is no motivator like the feeling of inadequacy. There are a couple responses to that feeling of inadequacy. It is either “I am going to kill myself and improve myself and make sure like a 100 percent I can succeed here and I will do better “ or you leave. And both outcomes are great for us, because we don’t really want somebody that to be honest and frank sucks on the team because no one else is going to feel lucky to work with them.I was a part of a group for a long time RD group and I’ll try to descr ibe as idealistically as possible, where I was an individual contributor and there were a couple of other individual contributors on my team one of which I felt did not do any work. They contributed from and idea perspective but ideas I felt were actually toxic and detrimental to the overall productivity of the team. I asked in every single one on one that my manager fires this person because it was bringing me down. There is nothing more demotivating than being on a team with somebody you feel is not contributing. You are constantly thinking about like “We really are wasting company dollars paying some jackass, sorry, to sit around and spitting nonsense ideas, is super unproductive”. So I ultimately left because of that. I just didn’t wanted to be a part of it.I don’t want anyone here to ever feel that same way. I want to make sure that everybody feels like they are lucky to work with everybody else otherwise that person shouldn’t be on our team. We need to accomplish inc redible things and move with speeds that very few companies have been able to and execute a couple of different strategies that have us excelling in many different areas. If we can’t move very effectively, if there is somebody dragging us down and lagging the team then we won’t succeed. It is super, super important that everybody is high performing.Martin: Alex, how do you balance the individual contribution with the group contribution? Imagine, you have a sales department and on the one end maybe I will be focused only on getting more sales for me and getting something like a competitive environment, which is maybe in the end not maximizing the target metric which is potentially sales, whereas maybe I will have more individual contribution in sales but I will give more referrals or other value advice to other sales people and thereby contributing.Alex: The important thing there is just to make sure that the metrics don’t create that sort of divisive organization. So in the sa les example we actually award assists so there is the ability for people to earn. There is a guy that all he does is just assist. He is still like one of the top performers and everybody recognizes that he is an essential part of the team and really, really valuable. He is not closing but just because we created the metrics that allow somebody like that to be successful.Martin: It is like in basketball. You have some assists, some blocks.Alex: Exactly, and then the same thing with marketing. On our blog we have a very large emphasis on content, there is a lot of people contributing to the blog. There is a person that manages the overall publishing aspect of it and he sees it as his domain to report performance and drive promotions and all that kind of stuff. People contribute individual articles and because you contribute individual article, when that article does well the blog guy will promote it. He will see a lot of success through a lot of work that he does on promotion. The per son who wrote the articles sees a lot of success because they got their own personal brand. We don’t ever say anything that this is written by Branch. It is written by an individual so we just try to make sure that even though the ultimately the company is benefiting greatly from all that the individuals are rewarded appropriately depending on the work that they do. You just be careful that you don’t create those divisive cultures because I have seen them tear companies apart especially sales is one of the most dangerous ones, but just be careful.Martin: Alex, thank you so much for your time.Alex: Yes, of course.Martin: And I wish you so much luck with your startup.Alex: Yes, it is going to be a wild ride.

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Albani Companys Competitive Advantage and Need to Refurnish Its Competitive Strategies Free Essay Example, 2500 words

From the Albani company s perspective, society is divided into customers, non-customers and potential customers. The country s economy also plays a significant role in determining the company s progress. Secondly, the demand for the company s products is influenced by people s culture. Albani s targets the European market, which is segregated alongside nationalities. This segregation presents the main difference between the European and American market. Economics: the country s economy has an effect on the company s success and sustainability. Although the company is not a direct subject of the economy, economic pressures affect its influence in the highly competitive market. Economic indicators such as unemployment and inflation reduce people s purchasing power, which affects the company s profits. Other economic aspects that are likely to affect the company s profitability are the influence of the economy on international trade. The French economy and economies of other major Euro pean countries have been decreasing steadily. This indicates that Albani Company is likely to experience a steady reduction in its annual revenues due to decreasing purchasing power. Technology: the external and internal environment of the company is dependent on its ability to utilize available technology. We will write a custom essay sample on Albani Company's Competitive Advantage and Need to Refurnish Its Competitive Strategies or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/page This is a basic strategy in the industry since each gender has specific requirements for beauty products. This stratification also ensures that the company has considerable abilities to monitor the progress of each brand or line of products.

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Marketing Plan For A Startup - 921 Words

This is the idea or perception customers receive when they look at the image of your brand. RallyGirlRacing.com’s brand image has been designed to catch women’s attentions who are racing fans and participants. Along with this, the brand image is meant to display to everyone who see it, that this particular person is a racer. You need a rock solid brand image to stand out among competitors and capture customers’ attention (How to Build a Strong Image, 2015). The marketing plan for a startup is a living guide to how the company plans to build customer relationships over its life in order to fulfill the company’s mission statement (Allen, 2012, p. 351). For the company to succeed in marketing it will utilize two forms of advertisement. Firstly, the company will put car wraps on each vehicle which will allow other drivers to see the advertisement each time the cars are driven in public. Secondly, social media will be utilized through a Facebook and Instagram accounts. 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Toy Story Free Essays

Name: Karl Dent Instructor: Morgen Thomas SP13: SOC 101 Date: Mar 19, 2013 â€Å"A Toy’s Story Observation† When you think about toys the first thing that comes to mind is the joy they gave when you were a kid growing up, and the smile they put on your kid’s face when you see them playing with them on a daily basis. What if toys could talk? What information would they give us? What would they tell us? Recently I set out on a quest to better understand what information I could get just by looking at the toys in my local neighborhood toy store and how they shape the mind of kids from a young age. Unfortunately for me, the day I went to the toy store there were not many people shopping, so this made my research a little harder to complete. We will write a custom essay sample on Toy Story or any similar topic only for you Order Now I wandered around the store for several hours, going through many different aisles and looking at many different toys. At times I felt like I was being watched; it was so quiet I could hear whispers as if the little action figures were giving me the information I needed. By looking at toys as a way of seeing things from a sociological stand point, I can understand why the manufacturers of toys make certain types and what goals they are trying to accomplish. By studying different toys, I started to use them as tools to see the world in a new way and to see how they shape society from both nature and nurture. My views of toys were like sociological imagination; I started to see how contextual our lives are. I then realized our individual identities were only sensible in a social context. But how can you look at toys and figure out how humans behave in our society? The only possible answer I found to my question was sociology. Toys help to form one important aspect of our lives which we come to understand as gender identity. By having toys specific to boys and girls it helps us to understand what it means to be male or female. Understanding gender identity is said to be one of the most important ways we develop who we are and where we belong in our society. With many of the toys I observed, I noticed they would have a specific age group on the box, which is known as the functional age symbol. This helps parents understand the expected developmental growth of their child, being able to compare it with the age of the kids on the toy boxes. There was a lot of cooking toys for girls, and a lot of police toys for boys, which illustrated to me gender inequality. These toys present the message that men are dominant and above women. By looking at the boxes they showed boys play an authority figure of catching bad guys and there weren’t any girl cops on any of the police toys that I saw. This led me to believe that they saw women as being weak and not able to go out and be a police officer in the community that they would eventually grow up and be a part of. There were also toys that sent the message that some men were over other men and some women where over other women. G. I. Joe toys are a way of showing boys what they should grow up to be, while a princess doll shows a girl that she is expected to be a pretty lady. This is the process of general socialization in our society. While this process starts at birth, it continues throughout our lives by way of the nurturing of kids through toys. Laser tag toys are more group oriented because they require more than one person to play. This then teaches group cohesion, this is where an individual would start learning how to work as a team while playing with other people. Looking at a play house princess set you can see how that particular toy prepares girls for the future role that society would proclaim them to have. Society expects our girls to grow up and be wives, the one who is always back at home taking care of the kids and the house and making dinner for the husband. The differences in toys between girls and boys also create gender inequality. It would lead you to think that girls will grow up doing just domestic jobs and that boys will grow up to be cops, soldiers, firefighters, etc. Gender inequality also creates a wage gap for women in our society because it puts male and female with the same potential on an unequal playing field. NBA toys are modeled after real people. They were of James, Bosh, Williams, Durant and Griffin which are all black male players. There were not any female basketball toys; this showed the separation of race, sex, color and gender, and how sports and athletes are seen in American society. By giving athletes the achieved status of celebrity and role model, it enables the toy company to create a new market of toys based on the person and not the sport. By not promoting female sports as much as male sports, we are sending a message that male sports are more dominant than female sports and males are more important than females when it comes to sports. There were not any white basketball toys and this was an appeal by the toy company to get whiter kids involve in basketball so they can be famous and one day own their own toy in a toy store. Separating gender by toys can also lead to other things such as stigma and sanction by family, friends and even teachers. A girl playing with a boy toy and doing boy things will be seen as a tom boy and a boy playing with a girl toy will be seen as s sissy. This can cause serious sanction by parents if they are around friends out in public and society will view this as being deviant because they are going against the norm of what is expected from them. Ranking boys above girls is a form of social inequality and relates to the structure of mobility because it brings about what is called social stratification. One set of toys that stood out were the Home Depot toys. They showed white males being builders and taking control of the development of buildings and handling tools. This was showing men as being engineers and future bosses and did not show where girls could do the same jobs as men in the future. By not giving girls the opportunity from a young age to do what they want, we continue to limit the ability of women in our society. Toys are a very important way for kids to develop. This is one of the many ways they learn to start sharing things with each other. Toys help kids to understand their roles and gender. Day-care, pre-kindergarten and kindergarten are very good places for kids to start their venture of learning. This is where individuals and groups get a chance to interact. In this setting, they have the ability to focus on the creation of their personal identity through playing with toys and others. Of particular interest is the relationship between individual action and group pressures. Having this opportunity to be away from their parents and spend time around other kids will help them nderstand what friendship is and learn the difference between boys and girls. We can expand military toys not only to boys but also to girls because women have proven to be just as productive in the military work forces as men. Allowing boys to play with dolls without being sanctioned is a good way of teaching them how to take care of a child and be more loving when they hit adulthood. Making NBA toys for both males and females is a way to promote the WNBA as much as we do for the men and to gain the interest in the sports for more women. Making white NBA toys will show our kids that white basketball players are as good as black. Teaching girls how to work in construction is not a bad thing because women can also be successful engineers and builders. Domestic jobs such as taking care of the kids should be taught to boys and not just girls. Giving girls more access to the things that are normally set aside for boys from an early age and allowing social mobility will allow them to move from one class to another. If we made these changes we could reduce gender inequality in our society between girls and boys. How to cite Toy Story, Essay examples

Friday, April 24, 2020

Quality Of Our Education Essays - Educators, Occupations, Teacher

Quality Of Our Education I feel we as a country we cant really complain about the quality of our education. We have it real good. People from many other countries often travel here to get higher education. But there are some things that could be changed. We need to use our advancements in technology to our advantage. Also, more specialized teachers would improve the quality of learning. And in high school the thing I felt was the biggest problem was class size it was too hard to listen to a teacher and focus on the material with a class of over twenty-five. Technology is what makes the world go. We need to use this to our advantage to make our education better. There are many ways to make this possible. We could use the Internet to broadcast interactive classes. This way you have the best possible teachers to teach everyone all over the country and even the world. In doing this the level of education will rise, because the teachers will be the best in their field. Right now technology is already making it easier to learn. We have so many resources over the computer and Internet. This is just going to continue to grow as far as our advancements in technology grow. Right now in many schools there are teachers that have gone to school and learned how to teach. Many of the teachers may not be the best in their field. For example in music someone who has studied music all their life would most likely make a better teacher then someone who went to school to be a music teacher. But in many cases will not get a job as a teacher because they do not have that teaching background. The same goes for art classes. If we had the best artists and musicians teaching our classes the children would learn more. The biggest issue in schools today I feel is class size. Schools are getting over crowed and the classes are getting to big. It is making it harder to learn and each student gets less personal attention from the teacher. When a teacher has one on one interaction with the student the student will probably learn more and retain more of the information. With smaller class sizes the teacher can monitor all the students easier. Then if one student is having a problem with a specific topic the teacher can stop and focus on that issue with the student. In turn bettering education as a whole. In many high schools the average class size is about twenty-five. This is either because there are not enough teachers or not enough classrooms. This is a big issue because it is harder to learn in a large class than it is in a smaller class with about fifteen students in it. Education

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Roman Generalship In The Campaigns Against Britain - Caesar vs. Agricola

Roman Generalship In The Campaigns Against Britain - Caesar vs. Agricola Reasons for the first invasion of Britain in 55 BCThe planning stages of the invasion of Britain by Caesar in 55 BC are believed by historians to date back to 56 BC and possibly even 57 BC. He invaded because the Britons were giving aid to the Gauls and hence obstructing Caesar's efforts to defeat them: "omnibus fere Gallicis bellis hostibus nostris inde subministrata auxilia intellegebat" . This, however, was not the only reason - no other Roman military leader had made a successful campaign in Britain so a successful campaign would have 'dignitas' to it as well as Britain's widely renowned mineral wealth of metals such as gold, silver, iron and tin as a reward. 55 BC was the time at which an invasion became feasible and achievable.Factors contributing towards Caesar's successes and failures in BritainCaesar sent Caius Volusenus over to Britain to inspect the beaches and gather information about the island and find a suitable place to land.CÃ ¦sar treating with the Britons.He retur ned to Caesar and told him what he had discovered: "Volusenus perspectis regionibus omnibus quantum ei facultatis dari potuit, qui navi egredi ac se barbaris committere non auderet, V. die ad Caesarem revertitur quaeque ibi perspexisset renuntiat." This had a positive effect because without this information, Caesar would have had no idea where he was going. This was one of the many bits of good planning on Caesar's part seen throughout the invasion.They arrived at Dover () with the enemy lining the cliffs making it impossible to land, forcing them to land further up the coast: "...atque ibi in omnibus collibus eitas hostium copias armatas conspexit. Cuius loci haec erat natura atque ita montibus angustis mare continebatur, uti ex locis superioribus in litus telum adigi posset." This had a negative effect in delaying the landing.

Sunday, March 1, 2020

What Black Hollywood Says About the Oscars

What Black Hollywood Says About the Oscars The Academy Awards is one of the biggest nights of the year in Hollywood, but something is often lacking: diversity. The nominees are often dominated by white actors and directors and this did not go unnoticed in minority communities. In 2016, many African Americans chose to boycott the ceremony and, because of that, the Academy has made vowed to make changes. What spurred this movement and what did black actors have to say about it? More importantly, have there been any modifications to the voting process since then? The Oscars Boycott Actress Jada Pinkett Smith called for a boycott of the 2016 Oscars on January 16 because each of the 20 nominations in the acting categories went to white actors. It marked the second year in a row that no people of color received Oscar acting nods, and the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite trended on Twitter. Supporters of actors like Idris Elba and Michael B. Jordan felt particularly slighted that these men weren’t honored for their performances in â€Å"Beasts of No Nation† and â€Å"Creed,† respectively. Film fans also argued that directors of both films- men of color- deserved nods. The former film’s director, Cary Fukunaga, is half-Japanese, while the latter film’s director, Ryan Coogler, is African American. As she called for an Oscars boycott, Pinkett Smith said, â€Å"At the Oscars†¦people of color are always welcomed to give out awards†¦even entertain.  But we are rarely recognized for our artistic accomplishments. Should people of color refrain from participating altogether?† She wasn’t the only African American actor to feel this way. Other entertainers, including her husband, Will Smith, joined her in the boycott. Some also pointed out that the film industry generally needs a diversity overhaul. Here’s what black Hollywood had to say about the Oscars’ race problem. The Oscars Aren’t the Problem Viola Davis has never been one to hold back when discussing social issues such as race, class,  and gender. She spoke about the lack of opportunities for actors of color when she made history in 2015 by becoming the first African American to win an Emmy for best actress in a drama. Asked about the lack of diversity among the 2016 Oscar nominees, Davis said the issue went beyond the Academy Awards. â€Å"The problem is not with the Oscars, the problem is with the Hollywood movie-making system,† Davis said. â€Å"How many black films are being produced every year? How are they being distributed? The films that are being made- are the big-time producers thinking outside of the box in terms of how to cast the role? Can you cast a black woman in that role? Can you cast a black man in that role? †¦You can change the Academy, but if there are no black films being produced, what is there to vote for?† Boycott Films That Don’t Represent You Much like Davis, Whoopi Goldberg blamed the all-white 2016 Oscar nominees in acting on the film industry rather than the Academy. â€Å"The issue is not the Academy,† remarked Goldberg on ABC’s â€Å"The View,† which she co-hosts. â€Å"Even if you fill the Academy with black and Latino and Asian members, if there’s no one on the screen to vote for, you’re not going to get the outcome that you want.† Goldberg, who won an Oscar in 1991, said that for actors of color to land more prominent roles in films, directors and producers must be diversity-minded. They must recognize that films with no cast members of color miss the mark. â€Å"You wanna boycott something?† she asked viewers. â€Å"Don’t go see the movies that don’t have your representation. That’s the boycott you want.† Not About Me Will Smith acknowledged that the fact he didn’t earn a nomination for his role in â€Å"Concussion† might have contributed to his wife’s decision to boycott the Oscars. But the twice-nominated actor insisted that this was far from the only reason Pinkett Smith chose to boycott. â€Å"Had I been nominated and no other people of color were, she would have made the video anyway,† Smith told ABC News. â€Å"We’d still be here having this conversation. This is so deeply not about me. This is about children that are going to sit down and they’re going to watch this show and they’re not going to see themselves represented.† Smith said that it feels like the Oscars are heading in â€Å"the wrong direction,† as the Academy is overwhelmingly white and male and, thus, doesn’t reflect the country. â€Å"We make movies, it’s not that serious, except that it plants seeds for dreams,† Smith said. â€Å"There’s a disharmony that is brewing in our country and in our industry that I want no part to that. †¦Ã¢â‚¬â€¹Ã¢â‚¬â€¹ Listen, we need a seat in the room; we don’t have a seat in the room, and that’s what is most important.† Its also interesting to note that Smith has received two Oscar nominations in his career. One was for Ali (2001) and the other for The Pursuit of Happyness (2006). Will Smith has never won an Oscar. Academy Not the Real Battle Filmmaker and actor Spike Lee announced on Instagram that he would sit out the Oscars, despite winning an honorary Oscar in 2015. â€Å"How is it possible for the second consecutive year all 20 contenders under the actor category are white? And let’s not even get into the other branches. Forty white actors and no flava [sic] at all. We can’t act?! WTF!!† Lee then cited the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: â€Å"There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it’s right.† But like Davis and Goldberg, Lee said that the Oscars weren’t the source of the real battle. That battle is â€Å"in the executive office of the Hollywood studios and TV and cable networks,† he said. â€Å"This is where the gatekeepers decide what gets made and what gets jettisoned to ‘turnaround’ or scrap heap. People, the truth is we ain’t in those rooms and until minorities are, the Oscar nominees will remain lily white.† A Simple Comparison Chris Rock, the host of the 2016 Oscars, gave a succinct but telling response about the diversity controversy. After the nominations were released, Rock took to Twitter to say, â€Å"The #Oscars. The White BET Awards.† The After Effects Following the backlash in 2016, the Academy did make changes and the 2017 Oscar nominees did include people of color. They have taken steps to add diversity to their Board of Governors and vowed to include more women and minorities among its voting members 2020. Moonlight, with its African American cast took home  the honor of best picture in 2017 and actor Mahershala Ali won best supporting actor. He was also the first Muslim actor to ever win an Oscar. Viola Davis took best supporting actress for her role in Fences and Troy Maxson was nominated in the lead role for the same movie. For the 2018 Oscars, the biggest news was that Jordan Peele received a best director nomination for Get Out. He is only the fifth African-American in Academy history to receive this honor. Overall, it seems that the Academy heard the passionate voices and has made steps toward progress. Whether or not we will see another #OscarsSoWhite trend, only time will tell. There is also a conversation about expanding the diversity beyond African Americans and hopes that more Latinos, Muslims, and actors of other minorities can be well-represented as well. As the stars have noted, Hollywood needs to change as well. The 2018 release of Black Panther and its predominantly African American cast, was quite the buzz. Many people have said that its more than a movie, its a movement.

Friday, February 14, 2020

HOUSING MANAGEMENT & MAINTENANCE Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

HOUSING MANAGEMENT & MAINTENANCE - Essay Example l as the community is being managed by other members of the community who are responsible for administering the building and resolving its salient issues such as planned and unplanned maintenance. Generally the chosen building displays full occupancy all year around with most people belonging to the working class residing. Meanwhile some residents are part time students as well as part time workers (for gas stations, super store, take away and the like). The building is a typical skyscraper built along the beams and columns design principles. The entire building is composed of beams and columns that have been created using concrete as well as steel. Steel cages have been intertwined with poured cement in order to create the beams and columns. The floors have been constructed similarly although the composition of the steel frameworks or cages is far denser in the floors than in the beams and the columns. A few places in the building are also reinforced using structural steel although it is not highly visible. Adequate cladding in these areas ensures that the structural steel is not totally visible although some structural steel can be seen due to damaged cladding. The beams and columns are relied on to create different apartments such that all apartments have access to some form of ventilation in the shape of windows that are exposed to the outside environment. The matrix like structure created through the use of beams and columns is such that apartments exist on all the exposed faces of the building while hallways exist in their middle to provide access to the apartments. Within each typical apartment the external windows are all created using glass. These windows may stretch for entire man height in some areas while in others they are restricted to between 1.5 feet and 3 feet. The internals of the apartments are all done in concrete such as the beams and columns and the floors and roofs. The external shells of the apartments (the walls mostly) are done with

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Economics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

Economics - Essay Example Due to current civil unrest in Bahrain and neighboring locations there are no current statistics available. However, the rate of inflation in 2010 was 3.3% which was up sharply from the reported 2.8% in 2009. One author from the Wall Street Journal wrote, â€Å"In its statement, Egypt's Central Bank said deteriorating regional political circumstances, including a civil war in Libya as well as violence in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, could drive up oil prices and further slow the continuing global economic recovery.† (Bradley) The Bahrain Economic Development board is positive in the most recent release, â€Å"In Q4 2010, the Bahrain economy is expected to post similar growth to that seen in the third quarter growth†¦over 4%† (Bahrain Economic Quarterly p. 4). Overall there is growth occurring especially in the tourism section as oil only accounts for approximately 15% of the economic outlook. With the civil unrest and potential for continuing problems there may be a d rop in tourism as a result. It will be necessary to see what the results are before making long term forecasts. Bahrain Economic Quarterly, . "Bahrain 2030, Bahrain Economy." Bahrain Economic Development board. N.p., First Quarter 2011. Web. 28 Apr 2011. http://www.bahrainedb.com/uploadedFiles/Bahraincom/BahrainForBusiness/BEQ%20Q1%202011.pdf Bradley, M. "Egypt Central Bank Keeps Key Interest Rates Unchanged ." Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones and Company, 28 April 2011.

Friday, January 24, 2020

Is Abortion Wrong Or Right? :: essays research papers

Abortion, in my opinion, is wrong, but, as it is obvious, it is not wrong in to other people. To make this fair, I have gotten a few people to make a statement about whether they were pro-life, or pro-choice and why. "Pro-choice. As a man, I don't believe that it is my choice to make as to whether a woman decides to keep her child or not. I do not believe that it is my place to pass judgement on all of womanhood when it comes to having an abortion or not. If the circumstances were different, say if the child was mine, then I believe that I have a say, but not for women that I have never, nor will ever meet." Jeff, 20, S.C. "Pro-choice, because women have the choice no matter what. That doesn't mean I'm for abortion though either, just the right to choose." Adrian, 18, Pennsylvania "I'm both. If someone gets raped and doesn't want to have a baby, and it's not their fault that it happened, they should be able to have an abortion because they should be free to live their life. but if someone knew about what would happen if they had sex and they weren't careful, and got pregnant, then they should deal with the consiquences." Lauren, 13, New York. "Pro-life.I think that abortion is morally wrong and it is scientifically proven that the baby is its own person with its own DNA and fingerprints. No one has the right to take a life but Christ. The baby is not part of the mothers body-she can't kill it;it is murder." Drea, 17, Texas. "When asked whether to choose sides on the issue of abortion, I am faced with an unusual quandry. In Michigan, only women have bearing on the baby/fetus while it is still in the womb. All paternal rights come after birth, not after conception. So if a man wants an aborition, but the woman doesn't, the baby is kept. But the converse occurs also; if a man wishes to keep it but the woman doesn't, the fetus is aborted. In my eyes men's paternal rights are beign trampled on because half of that baby/fetus' makeup is from the sperm. I dont side with either and in my eyes, all men should do the same in order to get a voice in raising our families.

Thursday, January 16, 2020

Breaching Experiment Essay

Have you ever been to a wedding and just felt completely confused because one of the female guests decided she was going to wear a wedding gown of her own to someone else’s wedding? Wouldn’t it be weird if one day, you walked into one of your discussion classes to find that your cool, hip, macho male T.A. just all of a sudden decided that to put on make-up, wear fake rubber breasts, and dress like a female to teach his class? Is this normal? What exactly is normal and who is to define what is normal and what is not? Norms, as defined by Schaefer’s Seventh Edition Sociology text, are standards of behavior that are maintained by society. However, there are several types of norms, in which all act upon its distinctive ways. Informal norms, however, are behaviors that are maintained by society that are generally understood, but not precisely recorded. The wedding gown and the macho, but very pretty T.A. were both examples of informal norms. There are no specific punishments for the awkward behavior of these two people. However, a few might confront the bride and tell her she is being disrespectful or the T.A.’s students might ridicule him, calling him different names. The society has no precise penalty for people such as the two mentioned above. The response from the people around them would be their only result of breaching an informal norm. At most times, when in public, or even around your friends, a standard distance is usually kept in respect to others. Personal space is at least an arm’s length, or about 1  ½ to 3 feet around the body. Most people do not like having their personal space invaded and everyone reacts to this in their own personal matter, depending on that person’s preference and the approach of invasion as well. In most cases, this personal space is set for the comfort ability of one another, especially while conversing. However, in my experiment, I decided to breach this norm, and took a few situations into action. I deliberately invaded personal spaces of friends, adult strangers, and adolescent strangers and observed the many reactions of these individuals. The feedback I received from the invasion of my friends’ personal space  differed from the response of invading a stranger’s. As I had gone shopping with one of my female friends, I would walk really close to her stay by her side most of the time. She had no dramatic reaction toward my invasion but just questioned if something was wrong or if I was afraid of something because I was remained so close to her at all times. As with my male friend, my physical being of closeness to him did not affect him physically, but instead it confused him mentally. He and I went out to eat one time and instead of him being on one side of the booth at the restaurant and me on the other, I decided that I would sit right next to him on his side instead, leaving the opposite end unoccupied. As we were eating, I would once and a while just stare at him, and when he looked at me, I would just give him a smile. He had no major reaction toward my gesture, but, his generosity toward me had increased and the next time when we went out, he dressed up very nicely and even did his hair. Later that week, I had heard from one of my friends that he was beginning to believe that I had a crush on him. It was then that I decided to keep my distant from him before he would take an approach into things himself. However, when I approached the adult group of strangers, their reaction toward my entrance into their space was different. While I was at the Brea Mall, I randomly spotted a Caucasian man who was sitting on a bench reading a magazine. As I sat down right beside him just to relax a bit, the man stopped reading and looked over at me, got up and just walked away. On the other hand, when I sat right down, at the same mall, by an Asian women shopper, she looked over at me and smiled. She seemed nervous at first, but as soon as I smiled back at her, she said hi and seemed more at ease and we even carried on a short conversation. The effects of invading the personal space of the teenage crowd produced a much more interesting outcome. As I stood in line at the Commons at the University of California, Riverside, right by the side of another Asian female student, she turned toward me and gave me a look of annoyance due to the fact that I was standing less than two feet behind her. Yet, I remained at this distance until she had reached the counter register to pay for her lunch. As a result, when she walked away with her lunch in her hand, she  turned her head one last time and gave me this look of hatred with the squinting of her eyes gazing directly at me as I just looked away. On the contrary, my encounter with an Asian male student also attending the University of California, Riverside, was an experience of amusement. When I occupied the vacant seat that was placed right next to his in the Rivera Library, he remained in his own world, continuing to study. As I sat there right next to him, I was not doing much but just flipping through my notebook and occasionally would just glance at him, just to get his attention in hopes for a reaction. After a short moment of silence, this student spoke to me. However, his first words to me were, â€Å"Ni hao. Ni jiao suh ma ming juh†, meaning hi, what is your name, in mandarin. I’m assuming that he thought I did not speak much English and chose to speak in Mandarin to me because of the Chinese papers that he might have seen while I was flipping through my notebook. Luckily I was capable of conversing shortly in Mandarin. It seems that he thought I chose to sit by him because I did not know much of English and I wanted to ask him for assistance around the library. After my brief conversation with him, I left that vicinity as soon as I can, trying to escape so that he would stop conversing with me in Mandarin since I was not that fluent with that language. In my conduction of this experiment, there were several variables that contributed to the reactions of these random individuals. In the case with my friends, my girl friend, being the caring and emotional companion that most female friends would be, noted my physical closeness not as an invasion, but believed that I was having problems and was trying to catch her attention. As with my male friend, because of our social acquaintance, my short and abrupt attachment to him gave him must have shocked him, giving him the impression that I was interested in him. Also, after my first approach toward his personal space, the next time I went out with him, I noticed how he had engaged in Erving Goffman’s impression management. He had dressed in apparel that he would not normally wear when he went out with his friends but did with me. I assume he was trying to create a distinctive appearance to try to impress me, thinking that I was interested in him as well from my actions when we had gone out before. As with the two adults that I encountered in the Mall, the man and the woman both responded toward my approach in their own polite way. Even though the two were at about the same age group, one more issue became involved with the situation. First of all, the Caucasian man and I were of dissimilar race and ethnicity, which holds a possibility of being a factor to his response. Then again, the lady’s courteous behavior when I sat down by her may be from the issue that we were of the same ethnicity and of the same sex as well, giving her the comfort ability with my presence being near. I have observed that gender has a great affect on invading personal space. When my male group member made his approach with an Asian adult female at the mall, I witnessed her negative response toward his action while my experience resulted positively. Another observation of mine with the other male member of my group also involved the issue of gender. While he stood very closely to an adult couple in an elevator, the stranger male pulled his female significant other closer toward his body. However, when a female member of my group approached the same situation, the outcome was vice versa, where the female stranger drew closer to her male significant other. Carrying out this study of personal space invasion has not presented me with any obvious result of negativity until I stumbled upon an Asian female student at UCR. One reason I believe, that may have cause such an indecent behavior may be because we were of the same ethnicity, sex and same age group. In such cases, as would most adolescents during this example, would contribute to Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach. Goffman’s perspective is that people resemble performers, and most adolescents of this young age group are these performers in a matter in which they are concerned with their image. This leads to another aspect of the self, face-work. In this sense, people make efforts to maintain proper image and avoid embarrassment in public. With a majority of youngster’s, there is tension between one another, creating competition and the want to with hold an image that they want everyone to view them as. I would assume that the UCR girl reacted with such offensiveness because she wanted to protect her own image, to show that she was strong, where if she had just walked away without showing me a sign of anger, it would be taken into her opinion that I had the power of harassing her and putting her down. Therefore, her rude expression was her  way of defending herself against the action I took upon her. Through my experimentation of the human response to the invasion of personal space, it was obvious that there was no positive or negative correlation. It was a qualitative research in which everything was measured through naturalistic settings. My approach of invading one’s personal space was the control variable used. The individuals that were randomly sampled were the independent variables, which had fixed traits, such as gender, race and age. The difference in gender affects personal space. Generally, members of the opposite sexes are more acceptable of another being close to them. Personal space reactions also alter with age, as the older one may be; the more mature their manner gets if their space gets invaded. In conclusion, the social norm of having personal space is frequently taken for granted. As observed, there are no real consequences when this norm is breached. On the other hand, the reactions of others when their space that is needed to be at comfort in that particular environment is violated, their responses may result negatively or positively, depending on the variables of gender, age, sex, ethnicity and an individual’s preference. Many informal norms are taken for granted by society without realizing how much it may affect us all if it was breached. How would you react if you and a stranger were the only ones in an elevator, but instead of being spaced out, this individual decided they would stand right in back of you, where you can almost feel their breath on your neck? Would a situation like this be normal? How would you respond? Works Cited *Luce, Tracy ohttp://gradeng.en.iup.edu/classes/en202/Papers2000/Luce.htm *Schaefer, Richard T. oSociology seventh edition McGraw Hill, Copyright 2001