Welcome to Asian Review. I'm your host Bill Sharp coming to you from downtown Honolulu in the greatest state of Hawaii. It's a shame, but Taiwan is often overlooked in academia, media, research centers, etc. The new Washington DC-based Global Taiwan Institute is solely dedicated to researching Taiwan issues. As such, it should raise American and global interest in Taiwan. Joining us today via Skype from Washington DC is the Executive Director of the Global Taiwan Institute, Russell Xiao. Welcome to Asian Review. It's great to have you with us, Russell. Thank you, Bill. It's great to be here. That's great. Well, let's get right into it then. The Global Taiwan Institute. How did it get started? Who were the movers and shakers? In addition to you, of course. Yeah, well, you know, I mean, this is the origins of the Global Taiwan Institute really began over a year ago. And while the organization was only established in September of 2016, so we've only been in operations now for about a little over four months, the planning for it really began well over a year. It's really the brainchild of many Taiwanese Americans that really looking at how to really establish an institution in Washington DC to really help raise the visibility of Taiwan policy issues in DC. And so many motivated and passionate Taiwanese Americans as well as Taiwanese in Taiwan and people in Taiwan donated to establish this organization that has now been established. And so as the Executive Director, I run its major programs. We have a very active board to go back to your question. The Board of Directors actually includes... Well, let's go back a little bit here. And then we'll get to the Board of Directors. Okay, so basically the impetus for the Global Taiwan Institute to get a start of what came from Taiwanese Americans and some folks in Taiwan, right? Right. So any political parties? No, we're not affiliated with any single political party. And although people do tend to look at our people that have associated themselves with this institution as being more green-leaning, I always tell the people who are concerned by this or by sort of the perceived coloration of the organization that really the proof is in the work product that we are producing. And I think we can go at much length in terms of really about the products that we're producing and how that really is to reflect a more objective analysis about current developments related to Taiwan and why they are important to the ongoing discussions about U.S. policy towards Taiwan. That's great. And you, of course, had extensive background working in research centers. You worked for the Jamestown Foundation. You worked for Project 2049. And a lot of your work was focused on security issues, if I recall correctly. That is correct. Yes, I've worked for four years at the Jamestown Foundation as editor of its China Brief. And so that was a publication that was produced biweekly where we worked with subject matter experts from across the country and across the world, really, to bring together a great group of expertise to focus on contemporary developments related to the PRC, cross-strait military issues. And I was able to bring a lot of that over to my work here at the Global Taiwan Institute and one of our major programs. Secondly, also, what you already mentioned, that was at the Project 2049 Institute as well, an excellent institution that was established by Randy Schreiber and Mark Stokes. And learned a great deal about really doing deep-dive analysis on military security issues. And so really in those years that I spent in Washington working for this institution, it really gave me a good look and observation from what was really missing in the Taiwan piece of analysis and the discussion here. Well, that's great. Now, how do you differentiate yourself from Project 2049? What's the overlap? Where's the differences? Well, really, Project 2049 is an excellent research organization that has its core competency really at the military security research. And there's no sort of replacing that type of expertise with the type of research that Mark Stokes and Ian Easton do over there. And really, but there is such a wider gap of issues that are relate and affect U.S.-Taiwan relations that just isn't getting the coverage in D.C. for either financial reasons or for human or plain human resource reasons. And really here, GTI is there to fill this wide gap of analysis. That's great. That's great. As I said in my opening comments, it's unfortunate that Taiwan is often overlooked in the media and academia. In research centers, I know Washington is full of research centers and think tanks and all of them seem to deal with Taiwan to one degree or the other, but it doesn't seem to be the highest priority. That's an excellent point. I really want to sort of elaborate on and expand on that if I may. And that is, you know, I mean, yes, you've noted correctly noted that there are elements of Taiwan analysis in several of the major programs in Washington, D.C. and the larger think tanks. However, there are just oftentimes a subset of a larger China program. But there hasn't been any institution dedicated solely exclusively to Taiwan policy research. And really that is where GTI plays its the most important contributing role in that we provide a space for both analytical research as well as a platform for discussion in terms of the seminars that we organized to consistently provide more visibility to Taiwan policy issues as they relate to other discussions that are taking place in D.C. Did you get any, how should I put this delicately, I hope, did you get any hard elbows from some of the other research centers when you were starting out and said, like, why do you guys want to go this way? We already cover this. You just duplicate what we're doing, you know, sort of a little fearful of competition, maybe. You know, I mean, that's an excellent question and I do get that quite often. And I think, you know, and really the answer, and my honest answer here is that no, we did not. And I think that's because, you know, really, there just hasn't been any other organization like GTI. As I mentioned earlier, you know, for the most part, Taiwan, as it's covered in the major think tanks, are often a subset of a much larger China program. And so in the sense that where we are here to provide a sort of a complimentary role to a lot of the Taiwan programs that are out there to provide more research and analysis, we're here to also be able to provide, serve as a hub for that type of research and providing and also a place where these discussions can maybe had so that experts who do look at Taiwan and other institutions can have a place where we can have these discussions to understand really how Taiwan fits in the broader security environment in the Asia Pacific. You put it very well and actually I would say in academia, Taiwan is often treated as a subset of a course or something, some area of endeavor about China. Yeah, it's unfortunate because Taiwan has so many great lessons to teach the rest of the world. Right, right, and there's a great wealth of history there and a wealth of other issues that are often, as you've mentioned, overlooked. You know, there's a tendency in Washington D.C. to really, to lonely look at Taiwan in sort of four-year cycles. And there's a presidential election when there's an election around the corner, in which case, you know, a lot of analysts or government officials are concerned about, you know, the political risk of any type of change in power, or when there is an arms package on the horizon. And so like I was mentioning earlier, there is in between those four years, in between those arms packages, there's a huge gap of information developments that are happening in Taiwan. Cross-strait relations, U.S.-Taiwan relations, that just isn't getting enough coverage. And so GTIs, with its program, stands poised to really provide, you know, really the channels for a more sustained understanding about really a dynamic society that is ever-changing and also a political dynamic that influences cross-strait relations, which is the traditional sort of lens by which many U.S. policymakers look towards Taiwan, whether that is, that should be the case, I think we can certainly have a discussion about that perhaps in another forum. Let me make sure I understand your last comment here. Are you saying that so many people only look at Taiwan in terms of cross-strait relations? Yes, yes, that's what I'm saying. I couldn't agree with you more. I could not agree with you more. And if I add a little political note, I think this is a problem of the Kuomintang, the KMT, is rightly or wrongly the perception of the public, I believe in Taiwan, is that the Kuomintang only cares about cross-strait relations. It really doesn't care about anything else. And that's really to its detriment. Nationalist Kuomintang party officials tell me, well, they're working in other programs and all that, but if they are, they're not very visible. So your comment is very interesting. I think of that as also an extension of the framework of how U.S.-Taiwan relations had started post-1949 particularly. And with the old Kuomintang government at that time with a very assertive trying to retake the mainland, China. And so therefore the framework of that relationship had been, at least from the U.S. perspective, while trying to deter at least Chiang Kai-shek from retaking the mainland, also maintaining a good deal of support and defense relationship with the KMT in order to ensure that it does not get overtaken by the PRC. Well, let me ask you this question. How big is your annual budget? Well, we are a growing organization, so we are really looking at trying to expand. So currently right now we're looking at an annual budget of around closer to about 500,000, which is a decent size for the organization where we have four full-time staff members and a part-time staff. But with all the programs that we have, I like to think that we punch above our weight. That's good. And you're in a really great area of Washington.  That is correct, yes. That's a really good place for a nonprofit research center to be located, I think. Absolutely. We're surrounded by banking tanks and government offices and really the target audience, the type of people that we want to attract to our events. And so as I mentioned earlier, we have several programs that we have, which includes a public seminar series. Now, we've had eight public seminars so far already, coping a wide range of issues that ranges from Taiwan policy review, looking at cybersecurity, looking at Taiwan as a... Cybersecurity, that's good. We're coming right up on the break here. We've probably got about 30 seconds to break time. As you know, we have one minute break. And when we do come back to a break, we want to talk about some of the special programs you have and how you reach out to the public and your publications. And I think that would be something that our audience would be really interested in. And I suppose if anybody wants to get on your mailing list, they just get online, go to Global Taiwan Institute and sign up. GlobalTaiwan.org. GlobalTaiwan.org. Okay. Well, we're just about on break here, so I don't know if we want to get into anything substantive right now, but we'll go on the break and we'll come back in about a minute or so. Hello, everybody. My name is Mark Shklav. I'd like you to join me for my program, Law Across the Sea, on ThinkTechHawaii.com. Aloha. Hello, I'm Marianne Sasaki. Welcome to ThinkTechHawaii, where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law, where we discuss legal issues, politics, governmental topics, and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. Aloha. I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii Is My Mainland every Friday here on ThinkTechHawaii. I also have a blog of the same name at kauilukas.com, where you can see all of my past shows. Join me this Friday and every Friday at 3 p.m. Aloha. Welcome back to Asian Review. My guest today is Russell Xiao. Russell is the executive director of the new GlobalTaiwan Institute, which is located just off of Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and seeks to raise public awareness about Taiwan. A really great step forward, I think, in that Taiwan, unfortunately, given all its successes and, in my view, so many countries in the world, they could be as well off of Taiwan politically. That is, democratically and economically, they'd be quite happy. Unfortunately, Taiwan doesn't get the attention that it should because it's often overshadowed by China. Well, before the break, we were going to get into, we said we'd hold off until we came back from the break, some of your special programs, how you reach out to the public, some of your publications, and that kind of thing. So, do you want to tell us about those? Absolutely, Bill.  And that is, essentially, it's really to enhance U.S.-Taiwan relations. Okay. And the way we do that, you know, and the way we do that is through public policy research, through, you know, organizing programings that I'll go to in just a little bit. And so these programs that we have, we have currently four major programs. The first major program is a weekly publication called the Global Taiwan Brief. Now, as I mentioned earlier in the first segment of the show, I was previously the editor of China Brief. And really, I saw the value in terms of providing information and analysis. I might add, for the benefit of our viewing in public that might not be familiar with it, that China Brief is a very high quality publication. I personally benefited from it numerous times. Thank you very much, Bill. That's very nice of you to say. Thank you. And so really the model for this Global Taiwan Brief came from, you know, the work that I did over there at Jamestown Foundation. And the idea is to provide information and analysis and also contextualize analysis about current developments related to Taiwan. Now, you know, the scope of the topics that we cover is wide-ranging. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, the issues that we think are relevant to U.S.-Taiwan relations really should extend beyond just, you know, the traditional security issues while still very important and the political risk issues that often comes with any type of, you know, sort of electoral changes in Taiwan. And so through the publication, what we tried to do is to expand the crop of writers who look at Taiwan and to also expand the crop of issues. And so every week we invite three to four contributing authors to contribute short, brief, accessible articles to the publication about some contemporary developments related to Taiwan policy issues. And so just our most recent issue, in fact, was a special issue that included three articles contributed by David Nguyen, who is actually one of the architects of President Tsai Ing-wen's Asia Silicon Initiative, to include also Arthur Tu, who is a young entrepreneur who actually helped startups, tech startups in Taiwan, and also the vice president of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council, a lot of the Nelson person, and she wrote, you know, sort of a U.S. business perspective on the Asia Silicon Valley Initiative. And so, you know, this is really trying to provide, we try to provide a forum through Global Taiwan Brief for these, you know, timely discussions about policy issues that are relevant to U.S. and Taiwan. So this is one element of our programs. The second element of our programs is the public seminar series, just before we broke, you know, I mentioned that briefly. And that public seminar series is meant to raise the visibility of Taiwan, really be able to, you know, provide a platform for a discussion about contemporary policy issues related to Taiwan. And so we've held eight of these public seminars already, and the topics range from the Taiwan Policy Review where we had Richard Bush, who is a very well-known Taiwan hand, and also China hand, who serves as the former chairman of the AIT, and we provide remarks, former deputy director of AIT, David Keegan, as well as the director of the Asia Study Center, Walter Lohman. And, you know, it really just, we're trying to, you know, really bring in the expertise to help provide some context to these timely developments and being able to help inform, really, you know, current policymakers, the academics, as well as the public at large, about the importance of Taiwan and also the nuances of Taiwan policy, which often gets lost in a very, sort of, in often debates that we hear here in Washington and oftentimes here in other mainstream media outlets. And so we continuously try to raise the visibility by raising different issues that are relevant. So, for instance, as I mentioned earlier, we had a panel on cybersecurity, and there we brought a cybersecurity expert from the private sector to include my former colleague, Mark Stokes, who also happened to be one of our advisory board member. Now he was a former senior Pentagon official and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, now retired. And he's done a great deal of really extensive research on cybersecurity and how the People's Liberation Army is organized to wage cyber war and cyber espionage. And also to include another former Taiwanese naval attaché that, you know, works in the tech office and has good extensive knowledge in. And these are expertise that just aren't heard often enough.  And, you know, and by having these timely events associated with current developments, we really get to highlight the importance of, you know, these literature and studies. And so that's the second element. We're in the process by now planning an annual symposium, which is going to be our flagship project, a conference, and that's going to be held sometime later this year. But the idea is quite simple and straightforward, and that is really to establish a baseline for assessing U.S. policy options towards Taiwan and really bringing together the supporters for a stronger U.S.-Taiwan relationship who may not necessarily agree on how to get there, to a stronger U.S. relationship and really setting up some metrics so that we can continuously and systematically assess really the benchmark of success, to assess the benchmark so that we know where, you know, where we are, where things work and where things aren't working. Okay. Well, let me ask you this. Okay, you're going to do these policy studies. You're going to have this symposium, the annual symposium. So what are you going to do with all this information? Are you going to, not just on pejorative, but how are you going to pedal it to the policymakers?  I mean, right now, that's a great question, Bill. And I think, you know, that's one, that's an issue that we're constantly strategizing and thinking about. And, you know, I think right now what we're doing is within our current strategy is to utilize our website as one of the main channels for communicating the ideas that we're producing to the outside world, that may be, you know, to our audience, to the audience in Washington, D.C., within, on the Capitol Hill or in different government agencies.  And because what they offer is, again, you know, the Global Taiwan Brief offers something more than what, you know, the mainstream media can provide because it's written by experts who have looked at these issues, who have a deeper understanding about these issues, and hopefully can then provide a more nuanced understanding about these developments for what they mean. And so, you know, that's really what we hope that people will do in terms of, you know, going on our website at www.globaltaiwan.org and signing up to receive our newsletter. We also have our events. Let me ask you this. Let me ask this, President. Who's going to go to the State Department or Capitol Hill and say, look, this is what we think U.S. time, U.S. policy towards Taiwan should be. Who's going to be the chief salesman? Am I looking at him? Well, you know, I'm always selling to organizations, that's for sure.  And, you know, I'm working with an excellent team of researchers who, you know, include a good friend and David Ahn who previously worked for the State Department and other individuals like Melissa Newcomb who worked at other research institutions in Washington, D.C., Annabelle. And, you know, and we're working with a great team also of international, well, advisory board members who are very well established in the, in this field, either in Taiwan studies or Taiwan military security studies. And, you know, I named a few earlier, but we have a group of 16 advisory board members currently. And, and, and they include some great people such as Gordon Chang, who voted on China. Ralph Costa, whom, you know, as, as you mentioned earlier, is a local of Hawaii and a great great great great mentor to to many young aspiring Asian, Asian hands. And, June Topol Dreyer, Daffy Thel. That's a very well known name, very well known name. Yes, right. David is, is, and maybe Europe's number one Taiwan expert. Yes, yes, excellent, excellent. He's done so much, so much work on Taiwan. It's just incredible. Yeah. I personally have never met him, but I'm quite familiar with his work. Oh, good, good. Good. Good. And then there are others like Shirley Khan, also who, you know, formerly worked at the Congressional Research Service. And she's another Hawaii product. Let me chime in on that. She's been on the show as well, actually. Oh, fantastic. That's great. That's great. And also former AIT director of Bill Stanton, and who I understand also was on the show to, to include former Ambassador Stephen Young and AIT director Stephen Young. Others like Arthur Waldron, who is one of the most prominent academics, you know, working on China and Taiwan issues. Toshi Yoshihara from the Naval War College. And so that's really naming a few have been John Tashik, Mark Stokes. We're coming down here to our last two minutes. Let's just talk a little bit about future plans. So to focus on that for maybe the last minute and a half or so. One minute. Right. I've been corrected. One minute. Okay. So we'll have to ask you, unfortunately, we'll have to ask you to make this brief. No worries. No worries. All right. So really the upcoming seminars that we have that are the most important to know is if we have a book talk with Misha Oslin coming up next Monday on his book, The End of the Asian Century. Now, this is a very provocative title sounding book, but we want to tease out the Taiwan significance to, you know, really the theories that he is, he is putting forward in his new book. We also have an excellent, excellent panel coming up on February 15th on President Trump's Taiwan policy. And so there we'll have Ambassador Stephen Young come down to give the opening remarks to include comments by Gordon Chang, Harry Kazianas, and our very own David Ahn. And, you know, we're really going to continue the momentum and try to continue.  So it looks like our time is up. And I want to thank Russell for joining us today from Washington, D.C., where it is 10.30 at night. So we really appreciate that. And his great introduction to the Global Taiwan Institute. I'm sure we all appreciate it. And we're glad to know about it. I also want to thank you for joining us. And I encourage you to join us again next week, February 13th at 5 p.m. When my guest will be Robert Landau, who is the Executive Director of the Hawaii Association for Independent Schools. He is working on a really special project to help further internationalize education in Hawaii, especially at Hawaii's prestigious Illinois School. So we'll see you then. Thank you for joining us.


All right. Great talk. Really excited to see what SUSE has done and what IBM's done personally. I'm here today to talk very briefly about Cloud Foundry on Google and specifically some best practices that we've seen customers use to design infrastructure on GCP in a security-first world. So I'm going to give you five facts in five minutes. My name is Evan Brown. I lead a team of dedicated engineers at Google that build the CPI for GCE, the Service Broker, a nozzle for Cloud Foundry to Firehose, as well as a few other things. It's what we do 100% of the time. I've been involved in this project for about three years now. First best practice is to isolate network control with shared VPC. So is anyone using shared VPC on GCE today? Cool. No one is. But you will be soon. That's wonderful. The idea behind shared VPC is fairly simple. It's to isolate control of networking components by separating them into different projects very simply. This means that in Project B, all of your network constructs, like subnetworks, firewall rules, and routes, they exist in that context. And VMs that are deployed for foundation exist in a separate project. And this allows network operators to control the network infrastructure and the Cloud Foundry or platform operators to do their deployment in a separate project. Fact, the second is to isolate services with private load balancers. GCE supports a layer four TCP private load balancer that we recommend using in front of services like UAA, Credhub, or Cloud Controller and GoRouter. The third fact, manage database with private IP only. Cloud SQL, which supports MySQL and Postgres engines, allows you to reserve IP addresses in your RFC 1918 space inside your subnetwork in a shared VPC. So private only connectivity to a fully managed database with failovers, automated backups, and customizable maintenance windows. Fourth fact, access APIs from NAT. So when you deploy a foundation and you use the service broker to provision access to Cloud ML or Cloud Vision, your application deployed in a Diego cell needs to access those APIs. They're APIs on the public internet. Typically you would need NAT to do this. There's a checkbox called private access. So in a subnetwork inside your VPC, you enable private access and you magically have access to Google APIs, all Google APIs including maps, without needing public IP addresses on your Diego cells and without needing NAT. So it's a nice quick way to access those services with very little or zero overhead. But in the event that you do need traditional NAT for outbound access, this morning we announced Cloud NAT in beta today. Cloud NAT is a little bit different than what you've seen from other providers. It's not a VM based solution. It's done at the network level via the software defined network that powers GCE. Works for GKE, works for GCE and Cloud Foundry and it's pretty flexible. I've got one minute left. So this is the sixth tip. I kind of messed this slide up. This should be number six. I just added it right at the last second there. So the CPI for GCE supports the multi CPI model in Bosch. And so maybe a bit more esoteric but if you're especially security focused, you can use the multi CPI model to provision multiple GCE. GCP CPI is on a Bosch director and use each of those CPIs to deploy a different component to a different project. And what this allows you to do is to restrict credentials or service account credentials for say UAA to one particular project and isolate those credentials for CredHub to a different project and then get a different project or a third project for your other foundational services like the router and the cloud controller or Diego. We've got several customers that use this model today. Relatively recent support for multi CPI but it does kind of blend well with the tight security model. So thanks everyone, we've had a great time here. Our booth, we have a lot of socks left. So if you're in need of socks, please come collect some socks because I do not want to drag them back home to Seattle. Thanks everyone.


Tell our viewers if you could, who might not be familiar with Hellman Electric, what Hellman Electric is and what you do. Sure. So Hellman Electric, we're a company, electrical contracting company based out of Bronx, New York. We were, until only about eight years ago, we were primarily an outdoor heavy construction contracting organization. Over the last eight years, we've opened up two separate divisions. We've opened up a datacom division as well as an interiors division. And the heavy construction division, which was once the organization itself, is actually the division that I oversee. So we get involved in a lot of government projects for the most part. We're a public works contractor. We do work for the different agencies throughout New York City, in particular the MTA, New York State DOT, New York City DOT, DEP. Every agency basically that dels in the infrastructure, roadway work, airport lighting, bridges and tunnels, that's where we have our primary focus, again on the heavy construction division side. So interiors division, they deal with schools and buildings, corn shell operations, and datacom in the private sector of telecommunications.


You need a financial advisor with the freedom to focus on your specific needs. Whatever your goals, Reeve Potter can create a game plan tailored to you. Call Reeve at 432-0777 at Pikeville, Kentucky to learn more. This month, the Appalachian Center for the Arts will premiere Driving Miss Daisy, a play adaptation of the 1989 classic film. Tuesday, Mountaintops spoke with executive director Robin Irwin about the show. Well, we're delighted. It's a play that won the Pulitzer in 1988. It was written by Alfred Urie, who is a prolific Southern playwright. And we're just delighted to be able to do theater again and bring it back for all the people to see. With performances by Robert King Jr. and Deborah Taylor, Driving Miss Daisy will tackle themes such as racism and prejudice. Irwin adds the play is also about friendship. Really, it's about friendship. It's really about their friendship evolving over 25 years. And that's what we say. It's like friendship happens in the most unexpected places. So it's really, it's lovely. It's darling. It's clean. It's a beautiful, tender play made incredibly famous by the movie with Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy live on stage. For tickets or for more information, you can visit theapparts.org. The play begins May 13th. For Mountaintop News, I'm Joel Chorjol.


The students just for enthusiasm and energy is really contagious. They're having a good time engaging with our staff and inspiring us to do our best to make sure their experience with us is really meaningful. So one of the things I really love about the students is that they're so passionate about nuclear science. Their passion really energizes me. I get a kick out of answering all their questions about all nuclear science. Not just reactors but about nuclear medicine, reprocessing, materials, inspections, just all kinds of things. I'm really enjoying this experience and I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this program.


Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commerce Tools Elevate here in Miami Beach, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Shelly Kramer. Shelly, we just came from the main stage where we heard a lot of Commerce Tools executives talking. This is, they're really revolutionizing commerce today. Absolutely, absolutely, as it should be. I mean, we're undergoing massive transformation across all industries, B2C, B2B, and so really how we consume, how we buy, how we serve our customers, all of those things are, of course, very much top of mind. These are going to be shaping the forces of our new economy. So I'd like to welcome Dirk Horig. He is the CEO and founder of Commerce Tools. Thank you so much for coming on here. Thank you so much for having me here. Well, you did a great job in the keynote. I'd love you to tell our viewers, just give us a broad brush of where we are right now in the market and what you're seeing. Yeah, we've seen significant growth over the last couple of years in the digital commerce market, especially then fueled by the times of COVID when everything skyrocketed, right? So you might remember the times where nobody could leave their houses anymore and then you figured out, okay, how to get food, how to get new clothes. So e-commerce definitely had been thriving through that to new heights. And then we saw over the last two years a little bit more of a normalization in the market. And most people are asking now, okay, what is growth now looking like? What is a new kind of normal, right? So and especially in 22 and 23 with interest rates going up with inflation, macro effects happening, we saw some challenges. But what we are now realizing is that growth suddenly is picking up. And what that means is that in total retail, we're expecting about 2.3, 2.4% growth. But when we look on the commerce part of it, on average, region by region, category by category, a little bit different, but on average over the next few years, we expect a growth of 8% across the industry. And that is actually pretty exciting. And we also have been talking on stage about that today. And the audience agreed that that was a good number. It is a good number because 8%, especially when we come from times of hyper growth might seem a little bit low. But when we look at the absolute numbers, we're talking about roughly 2.2 trillion on incremental increase just over the next four years. And these 2.2 trillion is all of e-commerce globally in the year of 2017, right? So none of us would have said in 2017, hey, e-commerce doesn't matter. And that's just a niche kind of trend that will go away. It already was big by then. And that's what we are now expecting to grow the market just over the next four years. So it's so clear that e-commerce tools is a company that innovates with the customer in mind. I'm curious, your perspective, what is driving this reversion to this new normal? Because as you said, we had this explosion during the pandemic, then things fell off a bit, but now it's picking up. What is it, what's going on right now in the customer's mind? So from our customer's perspective, it's all about elevating on the one end their user experience. We probably have to look back over the last 10 years. There happened so much innovation on the consumer side. We saw more and more devices coming up. This is just going to about to increase. We're now in the times of AR, of VR, of AI. So there's constant change happening to all of us on the consumer side. And that is increasing the requirements that we are putting on the brands and retailers. And what this means is 10, 15 years ago, if you'd been running an e-commerce business, you didn't have to do much changes on an ongoing basis because the environment around you has changed so much. Now, we don't know anymore what's going on or what to expect within the next six to 12 months. Everything is just spinning faster and faster and faster. But as a company, it means you need to adapt. And if you want to build this business resiliency to be able to not only adapt but embrace that change and make an opportunity out of that, you need to gain that flexibility to constantly evolve, to constantly iterate. And now coming out of the years after COVID, there's a huge backlog on innovation, sitting within the brands of retailers of things that they need to get doing, not only on the e-commerce side when we look into the stores, right? We try to see this holistically. We talk about unified commerce because we all, as consumers out there, we don't care if I'm working on it or connecting on a tablet, on a smartphone, on my computer, in the store. We are a customer and expect that everything is working seamlessly. We just want the goods. We just, yeah, and not only the goods, right? We want to be understood. We want to be heard. We want that they know about our preferences. We just want to get good recommendations and much more. And this backlog of requirements is now more and more coming to market and that's what's also helping us, yeah, to build better products and supporting our customers. So how do you manage that? Because, I mean, describing that backlog of innovation, that is something that as a customer would be really frustrating. Why aren't they letting me do this? Why don't they understand me? Why don't they see me and know my needs? It sometimes looks so obvious to the outside why are not they doing that, right? So I have seen this, they must have seen that. And often they have seen this, but we're getting back here that the technologies that you often find still today within retailers had been bought about 20, 25 years ago. And there, these use cases didn't even exist, right? So we need to look, when we look back to 2002, 2003, if you already did 100 million online on revenue, you probably had been a category leader within your industry. Now today, you're probably more kind of in small to medium-sized businesses because just the pure scale, the requirements have changed so much. And that, what has holding many of them back, so they put investments into that and then realized we're not getting enough kind of things done. And our approach here was that 10 years later, so in 2010, we came up with the vision that the market probably needs different technologies to help them empower their digital businesses, not only to deal with the requirements that are having today, but making a future proof. And therefore, we benefited from cloud already being there at the time, so we could elaborate on cloud technologies, something that came up in the years 2008, 2009, more publicly, not as a term, but when we look at our partners like GCP from Google or AWS from Amazon, so we could leverage on top of these platforms, use their scalability, incorporate it into our products and give that to the customers. And then secondly, we went for a product approach that works a little bit more like little legal breaks, right? So we have a complete solution, but within that solution, it's all composable, which means if you want to make a change to the customer experience, to functionality, if you want to launch a new business model, like we have a lot of automotive manufacturers that started to inject our commerce platform into the cars automatically. So if you want to do all of these kind of things, it makes it way easier, way faster, way simpler. Well, and I think that that addresses a couple of things, I think there's a shortage of highly skilled tech talent, right? And so being able to have your tech teams use these kind of platforms and use these Lego bricks and have it all be, the key theme that came out of every bit of the keynote was simplicity at every level, really listening to and serving customers. And I think that there's such an opportunity here for a competitive advantage because from a consumer standpoint, we have very limited amount of patience, right? And so if in our shopping experience, what happens, we expect personalization at scale, we expect an omnichannel experience. We don't, and if you're as a retailer, not serving those things up, we're not going to wait around. And then you've got social media and you've got the fact that we're always on and we're always shopping. You're scrolling through TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or whatever. And so being able to be there and meet customers where they are in a highly personalized way in extremely efficient ways, all of that is the key to success here, you know? I fully agree, right? So we're in the times where attention span on all of us, it's very small, it's very fast. Yeah, and Goldfish, you say. And it's just when something is not working to your level of standards and your expectations, a second later, you're on to the next vendor. Because you know there is another one. You know what I'm saying, our, you know, at our fingertips are the options that we have and we know how to find them and we, and I think part of it too is a message that you send as a vendor. When you don't serve up an amazing experience, you send a message to a customer that you're not that important to me and I'm sure it's not the message you really intend to send, but it's like, you know what, as a customer it's like, okay, next. What do you agree? So we had Frank Keller here on our show earlier today. He is the EVP at PayPal. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about this expanded partnership with PayPal and Fastly? Of course, so PayPal and Commerce Tools already had been partners for a couple of years, especially on the PayPal payment side and the brain tree integrations. And what we always have been looking for is how can we optimize the checkout experience. Checkout matters. We believe that we have probably the best performing card and checkout in the industry, also by volume. And payment is a crucial component of it. And payment is coming from the partners. PayPal is one of many. And for us it was specifically interesting when PayPal started to innovate more than a year ago across their checkout experience when they are integrated into our solution and then the solutions of our customers. And then especially when they came up with a new guest checkout experience. Because not everybody wants to sign up, not everybody wants to register. If you're not, maybe if you're experiencing a brand or retailer for the first time, but you like the product, you don't have much time, you just want to buy and leave as quickly as possible. Yeah, and probably later on, you might sign up at your second purchase and so on. And when we heard from the PayPal team that they are making significantly investments into that, we started the conversation last year and said, okay, how can we provide that in a fast way to our customers? Because at the end, it's all about conversion rate optimization from their perspective. So we had been happy when Frank was joining us today on stage and we could take our partnership to the next level and announce that the products that PayPal is about to release or in the process of releasing right now will become available to all of our customers soon. And what do you anticipate this will do for your gross? I believe it will support our customers to grow their GMV by increasing the conversion rate. I believe that they will see less customers dropping out of the checkout process. It will just make a lot of things more, it will make it frictionless, right? So it will get a more seamless checkout experience. I agree. Well, I think some of those drop off numbers, was it 50% that if you don't serve up an optimum experience, you're looking at a 50% drop off rate? I mean, that's a lot of money. Now, Tina. Payment options, just having one more form, one more thing that you need to fill out with a checkout is significantly increasing the chance that somebody's dropping off. And it's the same like in store offline. If you have a long queue of people waiting just in front of the checkout, in front of the POS, you consider twice if it's not a brand you're specifically tied if you want to stand there. And it's what I personally, I'm not good in waiting, right? So you mentioned it before with, so everything is now moving so fast. As consumers, we are not always having now these days the highest brand loyalty. Everybody has their one, two, three things that they like and everything else is seen as a commodity. And if you then realize, okay, here I have to wait a little bit longer than I would like to something isn't working there and not giving me the payment option, they're requesting more data from me that I'm willing to give in. I'm probably a second next somewhere else. And this is actually where we're helping our customers to further even increase already the well-performing checkout that they're having on commerce tools, getting that numbers even a little bit better. So this is a market that's expected to grow. Commerce tools, especially as you increase your brand recognition and growth, it is a real opportunity here. What are some other things that are most exciting to you in terms of the product offerings that will differentiate commerce tools from competitors? Yeah, what I am specifically exciting about is one component that we launched. It's our Foundry solution. We brought it to market early this year in January, first for B2C. We're launching this week Foundry for B2B on that end. And what Foundry does, it helps you to gain all the benefits that we and our partner ecosystem are providing around scalability and flexibility, but in a very simple and fast way. It's already pre-composed to their main needs and standards because we see a lot of customers reaching out to us. We said, okay, we love to do the same that one of the other customers that they admire that we are having has done, but is there a best practice way that you can show us that we cannot go live in months but already in weeks with that because we have a lot of pressure. So we have been thinking about how can we create a recipe which is not only about various kind of products that we are offering and that the partners are offering, it's about a pre-configured solution around it that we brought to market and it makes enterprise commerce that had been complex for more than the last 20 years significantly more simple. And one component that's related to that, that also makes me very excited. It's, I think we cannot have a conversation without talking about AI at least for a minute. Is all of the abilities and capabilities that we are already getting today and the pace of change on innovation on AI, it's moving so fast that it's hard for all of us to follow but we believe that when we look forward to the next two to three years, and we will see things happening and being possible that we would have not thought before would have been possible today. From a customer standpoint, from a developer standpoint, all of those things are, I think, very worth being excited about. I want to give you some props here that Mike Sharp, your Chief Product Officer, shared some really interesting things. So you have 30 billion GMV order volume that was processed in 2023. 30 billion, okay? More than 20,000 orders are processed every minute. 10 billion requests come in every week and you have 99.995% of time. I mean, kudos to you, that's really amazing. Thank you so much. A lot. It's always taking a village to get there, right? So it's an amazing team that's making that possible. And of course we started with smaller numbers at the beginning and also could not have thought about getting there. But when we look at the growth over the last years, I think we had been coming from 21, 22 billion on GMV just a year before. So that's been significant increase and we are projecting to, and somewhere north of 40 billion over this year. And which is interesting because that already makes us today one of the fourth largest commerce platform providers in the world. But it feels as if we are just getting started still kind of early days for us. Yeah, well, I mean, that was really clear too that you only launched this technology in 2013.  You are the founder and also the CEO. When you think about what is next for both your company as well as your career. I mean, do you want to stay in? Cause a lot of times the technical founders maybe say, I don't know if I want to be in the tech. I don't know if I want to do the business. What are you saying? No, I actually love building the company and what I especially love and at an event like this that we're having today is the connection with the customers and partners. I got often asked, Dirk, when you look back to the last 10 years, what are you specifically proud of? I think often the question tends to business numbers and figures and employees, revenues and so on. And yes, this is all impressive if you look back but what really matters is when I had an event like this year or another random occasion here from a customer, how much they love the product or from the partner, how it had them to grow their business because also in the partner ecosystem, there's more already like 300 million of volume on contracts that they are closing every year just around the ecosystem of commerce tools which is also significantly growing over the last couple years. And this is when I hear about that about 11 years ago when we launched the product what I would have not thought about that you just meet so many people and they say, hey, this has changed at least from a business perspective, completely our life. Yeah, no, the enthusiasm is really evident here in this room, so. And by the way, everyone of your senior executives that we've spoken with so far at the event has said the same thing. And I know that that's not rehearsed here. We haven't coined that. No, but it's that passion for speaking with, interacting with, solving problems with customers. And I think that shows, that's very much steeped in the DNA of the commerce tools brand. That's a great point, Shelley, because it clearly is part of the culture at commerce tools. This idea of we are thinking about the customer. Everything we're doing is building with the customer in mind, how do you make sure that that comes from the top down?  Yeah, it's probably baked in from day one into our culture, right? So as we thought about creating this company and the product, we actually at the beginning tried to convince everybody else on building it because we knew how hard it is. But having 10 years on the customer side, so because we had been involved in agencies and integrators the decade before helping customers to elaborate on the commerce technologies that had been out at the early 2000s on running the digital business, we saw the pain points that they all had and we felt them with them. We thought about, okay, there must be a solution to overcome these. And we also knew how hard it is and how long it takes to build a business like that. So therefore our initial idea was, hey, why don't the vendors that are already out there try not to build a platform like that because then we don't need to do it again because we knew how much hard it works. And as Ben saw this not working out in 2010, we decided, okay, if nobody else is doing then probably we have to do it. But always, therefore with these customer pain point and focus in mind and everybody from the very first developers that we hired, the very first sales people that we hired, the very first customer success people that we had and so on knows the DNA of the company, where we are coming from. So as you're then starting to hire like-minded people with a similar kind of vision, I think this is how the company culture is being built like that. Virtuous circle. I could. Well, Dirk, thank you so much for coming on the show. A really fascinating and fun conversation. Thanks for having me here. I'm Rebecca Knight for Shelly Kramer. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of Commerce Tools Elevate. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news.


Hey guys, it's Nate, AKA The Foot Account, and welcome back to the channel. It is rewards time in a few hours. We're gonna talk about the market today. Are these the last foot-freeze SBCs that we will see today on Thursday? Infiva 21 Ultimate Team was a new card design that was put into the code as well. We're gonna talk about that, kind of taking us back to the summer showdown SBCs that were out last year during summer heat. So we're gonna talk about that in today's video as well. But the thing I wanna talk about right now is there are a lot of cards getting panic sold into Weekend League Rewards. And the number one guy that everybody is looking at right now is Alan St. Maximon. This dude was extinct at 1.3 million coins for the entirety of this week. And he's right now down to 1.06. Usman Dembele as well was like a 1.6 million coin card and he is now down to 1.2 mil. Crazy price drops on a lot of these foot-freeze items headed into rewards. Because what happens is people think they're gonna get packed, right? They think they're gonna get packed. They see these guys' prices as something that's gonna drop a lot in the near future with rewards coming and there's a lot of panic selling. So that's why you see a lot of this. I do think that it does rebound though after rewards today because these cards are very rare. A lot of people want to try them. And this is what happened with these cards last week too. St. Maximon Dembele are probably gonna have similar movements to guys like Bernardo Silva, Casemiro, and Mane as of a couple of weeks ago when these cards were in packs, right? Bernardo Silva, I remember at rewards time, dipped down like 50, 60K and then rebounded like crazy because it was a cool position change card in FIFA that a lot of people wanted to use. And I think that's gonna happen with Dembele, you know, St. Maximon probably, Kealini as well. Keep an eye on those cards today because I do think they will rebound after rewards. But again, one thing I do wanna talk about today is how is, are we seeing the last foot freeze SBC today on Thursday, right? I wanna take a look ahead at the content drop for today. We have a center mid Liverpool item that was shown to us earlier this week. Now that graphic is not on the loading screen anymore. There's no teaser graphic out here, but I think we're seeing the last foot freeze SBC today. I think they haven't updated any other, you know, like here on the hub, right? The foot hub, they've been showing us, you know, the French striker, they showed us the Wolfsburg player. And then today on Thursday is the last one center mid from Liverpool. So we're thinking it could be a few different cards and hopefully we get the same SBC guy that priced our, right? But we're thinking today that it could be for Mino, right? We could be getting a special for Mino card today or possibly a special trend, Alexander Arnold. Of course, for Mino was not in team of the week this week. We got a Jordan Henderson team of the week card which made a lot of people think that the SBC we could be getting today could be a Roberto for Mino item. Now it's gonna be very interesting to see who EA does pick for today's SBC, but if it is at all, similarly priced to the OR SBC, I think the OR SBC in terms of value for the player that you get is probably like the best. Marquinhos and OR are the top two SBCs from this foot freeze promo in my opinion. Now we got that a couple days ago. Yesterday we had Joao Victor, which is basically that Luca Bacchio SBC from FIFA 20 foot miss all over again. A very expensive striker in the Bundesliga, not worth it. We got the expensive SBC guy yesterday for Joao Victor. We got the good SBC guy for OR. Hopefully the good guy shows up again today and we end the foot freeze promo on a high note with a Firmino or a Trent Alexander-Ornold position change SBC. Now I have said and I have mentioned that I think there are some possible investments you can make that would link to these cards. Muhammad Salah is one of them. I would still look at these, right? Muhammad Salah's gold card. Whoever the SBC is, if it comes out today, if it is good value and it's a card that is usable and it's Premier League, right? It's Liverpool, so there's gonna be hype there. But if it's a good value card that is usable, I think you will see cards like the Salah, like Mane, 247 for the Salah is kind of where he has been. It's before rewards and I'm recording this. So his price is still kind of low, right? Same thing with Mane today. This guy actually has been dropping. Mane was under 20, he was like 215 earlier today. Now he's back up almost at 230, it looks like, 225. So when rewards comes as well, this probably ticks up again another decent amount. But again, I would just recommend, if you're wanting to do any last minute Thursday flips, take a look at some of these Liverpool players that could link to a center mid card. So maybe a center back, maybe Van Dyke gold card, right wing especially, maybe some other center attacking mids and strikers. Yeah, of course, you might wanna take a look at like a Firmino center attacking mid card. They could put out a number of people today. I'm honestly just feeling that it's gonna be a decent value SBC. And I think this is the last one, right? Because we have not had any other teaser SBCs released here on the loading screen. So that's why I kind of titled the video what I did today. It seems like the foot freeze, like the daily SBC kind of thing. And I'm gonna pull up the actual website right now and see if they gave us any information on when the actual SBCs are going to be ending. It just says freeze player SBCs will go live throughout the event. So it doesn't actually say, it doesn't actually say, no, it doesn't give us a date for when the freeze player SBCs are gonna end. But I think the last one might be today since they have not been updating that teaser screen for the last couple of days. And this Liverpool one is the last one that we saw. So I think that's gonna be it for today and foot freeze. And then after today on Thursday, I think we might be kind of done with that whole SBC stuff, even though the road to the final cards and the other foot freeze items are impacts through the weekend. Of course, you can see here, this display five foot freeze items are now impacts for five days, 11 hours. Same thing with the road to the final items. And just in case you wondered, there's new winter stadium items that you can pack and have now in your, in your ultimate team. W, I guess. But the other thing that a lot of people are looking forward to right now and are really, really wanting is new icon SBCs. And I don't know if this is gonna come today on a Thursday, but these guys are expiring in two days. I think it's possible on Friday that we get new icon SBCs out in this game. But it's just very interesting to me that we have not gotten any more yet. After we had the initial, what was it? Like six or seven? Now we have not had literally any since then. So that's kind of interesting to me that we have not gotten those yet. Hopefully we do get some more of those. And league SBCs as well. We have the MLS, we have Syria, the CogniBull, and that's it. Like we need some more league SBCs EA. Even though these SBCs are, they don't give out any players, right? Which is a huge L for a lot of people. I think people are still doing these for the packs. 100K pack for the Syria. I think some people have grinded towards that. But hopefully we get some more icon or league SBCs today as well. Like this promo, literally today is the final day where EA can either leave people in FIFA with a good taste in their mouth about this foot freeze promo, or they leave them with a bad taste, right? Because the SBCs we've had so far, have they been terrible value? Some of them have been, right? A lot of them have just been okay value though. And the position change have sometimes been cool, right? Awar was awesome. Lamer was pretty decent. LaLa though, eh, right? Jaw Victor, no thanks. That's one of the worst ones. But then you had some other ones like Marquinhos was good. Jesus Namas was kind of a joke, right? For the player that he is and how he fits in game. Adama Traore, once they upgraded the work rates and changing his strong foot, that was kind of a card that a lot of people were interested in, right? The 86 plus upgrade, we could get another SBC like this today. I know it has three days remaining, but that could be another SBC that we would get pretty soon as well. It has another like repeatable pack that they could put out. A lot of people would be interested in that in my opinion. This Aguero card's been out for forever. I feel like three days remaining, he's still out. We still have Wambasaka that is out as well. So a lot of these cards are out for a very long time. Serge Nabri is out for eight more days. So you have a lot of these SBCs that are out in the game at the moment that our foot freeze cards that some of them are just okay. But I think the last one we are getting is today with Liverpool unless EA is gonna do more over the weekend, we shall see. Now again, Footwatch tweeted out some code today. They tweeted out the showdown, right? I think they tweeted out the code and they called it, yeah, showdown and showdown plus. Now this is kind of interesting, right? Because we had stuff last year in FIFA that was called summer showdown, which was part of the summer heat promotion. And that was the card design that you saw on the thumbnail for this video today. Showdown and showdown plus was added in as an item type. These are the cards. This is probably the showdown item with the upgrade kind of symbols, as you can see here, very similar to these as of last year, right? We have the Venetius Junior with like the heat logo on them and also kind of similar to the cards we had last year too. Oh, the headliners. We had headliners last year as well that kind of had this same symbol at the top. So this would be like the card when it's released, not upgraded. And then this would be like the upgraded version with the green around the edge and then the green as the up arrow as well. And just a reminder, what summer showdown was and what these possible items could mean is, each week they highlighted real world football matches with special summer heat players. So they would put out two players with those teams or playing against each other and you would have an SBC and you would say, all right, you have to do this SBC, whichever one you do or if you do both of them, if the game ends in a draw, they both get a plus one boost. And if either team wins, the player that was the SBC player would get a plus three, right? So Real Madrid played against, I forget who it was. I think it was like Venetius versus Darwin, my cheese was like the matchup for the summer showdown. And Real Madrid won. So this Venetius card went from a 92 to a 95 and that could be what we see here with this showdown and showdown plus. This would be something, this brought a lot of hype last year because it was another aspect of FIFA that tied FIFA to real life. People love this. And last year, especially during summer heat, a lot of these SBCs were very, very good value. I think Wynaldum was another card last year that had a summer heat, did he? Or was it just a regular one? Okay, nevermind, he did not have a boosted one. I was looking at Ericsson. There's a lot of summer heat cards last year so I kind of forget which ones were like actually boosted for a summer heat. But a lot of those summer showdowns last year, if you guys do remember, as you can see here, if they get a permanent plus three overall stats boost if they win and in a draw they get a plus one. So that's kind of the whole premise behind what these cards could be unless this is a new promo that E is gonna be putting out on Friday. I honestly don't think, and we'll talk about this for a second. I don't feel like reading a new promo on Friday, man, because we have wrote to the final items and packs through the weekend. Foot freezes technically like not over because those cards are in packs for five more days. I don't know if EA can like, have they ever done a point where there's been three different types of card sets and packs? I don't know. I feel like this Friday would be like icon SBCs or some sort of other SBC type promo and not more cards and packs. I don't know. It would make sense if they put in team of the year nominees and maybe if we have some more pack code released on Thursday night tomorrow, we'll see that. But as of right now, it's we're kind of going towards a Friday that looks kind of maybe stale on the game, I guess and not a super duper hype time on the game. Right now I am kind of prepping up and trying to find some of my last Thursday flips. If you guys saw this in the video earlier today, that's sold first listing. I got a nice Lazy on a Zaha at 150 and that was a really, really nice Lazy sale. So I'm going to check through a couple of prices right now because I'm recording this right before rewards and I'm just going to see what I can find. This Zaha card in like the 120s is a huge buy in my opinion. I have some Oli Watkins as well, just to be fully transparent with you guys before rewards kind of showing you what I bought. The second and form Oli Watkins at like 50K is a major buy, center attacking mid, position change there as well is a big dub for this card. I think that's going to be upwards of 60K after rewards. One thing to note, if you guys bought gold cards, one thing that we've noticed in the past couple of weeks is a lot of these gold cards, they actually skyrocket and a lot of their prices go up the most in the hour between rivals rewards and weak and weak rewards. So if you are somebody who invested in gold cards, always make sure that if you're, even if you're going to sleep or if it's like really early in the morning, overnight, whenever rewards are for you, try to make those cards so that they're listed overnight and are on the market, right? So like a guy like Joe Gomez, who I think was, he's like under 30K again, even after a lot of people bought this card as an investment this week and he's like 29, 30,000 coins. Yeah, he's right, 29.5. This card probably is going to spike up between rivals and between weak and weak rewards because with rivals rewards, a lot of people take untradable, but they start buying their stuff and then once the tradable rewards come out for weak and weak, some of the stuff gets supplied and more listings come out and people change their teams and buy other players because maybe they got somebody new, right? So I think a lot of the golds actually spike a lot during that hour between rivals rewards coming out and foot champs. So just be very careful, even if you're on for rewards and you're watching this video, see if that happens again this week. I would expect it to in my opinion. But again, I want to take a look at some of these foot freeze cards just really quick here at the end of this video because even a guy like Kealini, we look at this every week with the team of the week. This card I think has caught a lot of people's eyes. 223 for Kealini, that's the cheapest one on the market right now. Really? I mean, I can't really flip this for a tax profit if I'm being honest, unless he used it 240. I mean, I can barely make profit off of that. There's like 11K tax. I'm probably not going to try that, especially if it's not selling. A 10K undercut right now before rewards. But watch these guys getting supplied during rewards, these first five cards, Kealini of course, Moreno, Goosens, Maximon and Dembele. Wow, Dembele was just 1.28 and now Fopen is saying he's 1.34. These cards, they're definitely gonna skyrocket at some point and it looks like Dembele is just really, really rare. How rare is Allen St. Maximon under like one point, let's go like 1.15, 1.17, which is 100K over his price. Yeah, there's not a lot of supply there. So I think some of these cards are gonna skyrocket just because they have a lot of hype. And right now it's just a lot of people that are panic selling these cards. First owner, tradable. How many of these are second owner? That somebody would have sniped. Second owner, tradable, no games played, right? I bet if you snipe this guy though, you're probably playing games with him. So fourth owner, second owner, tradable. Somebody bought that card, played games with it. What about this one? Second owner, tradable. They sniped it probably third owner. Yup, fourth owner again. So a lot of these cards are, you know, second third fourth owner, which tells me that probably people who are listing these up are losing coins. So just be careful today with rewards. I do think you will see some of these guys bounce back even though they seem very expensive. A lot of people wanna try out these new freeze items because the position change and the stats upgrade. So that's kind of the video for today, boys. It really comes down to the SBC content for today. Are we gonna see a winter showdown or showdown type promo or even just cards come out in the game this weekend? That's kind of up in the air at the moment. And I think I'm really curious to see what happens with some of these foot freeze cards at rewards today. Yeah, boys, should be a good one for sure. If you enjoy the video, smash the thumbs up on it. Comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe if you're new. It's been Nate, The Foot Account, and catch you guys later. Peace out.


Hi everyone Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com happy Sunday coming at you with a good way to start the Sunday 2021 hit parade basketball sapphire edition a dual case break 12 boxes total Each box just contains one sensational card should be pretty nice. Good way to start the day only 50 hand numbered boxes produced Big thanks to this group here for giving it a shot. Thank you Appreciate it all 30 basketball teams are in Thanks basketball teams. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it two and a six eight times for names and teams One two three four five six seven and Eighth and final time There it is two and a six eight times eight times Robert Wolf down to Steve Wright two and a six eight times for the teams one two three four five six seven and Eighth and final time after eight. We got the Brookline Nets Brooklyn Nets down to the Memphis Grizzlies Grizz Robert with the Nets Greg with the Wizards Jose with the Pelicans last spot mojo Sean Oh with the Clippers Adam with the Hornets Sean Oh with the Lakers Fred with the Raptors David with the Bulls Alex with the Mavs Corey with the Magic George with the Knicks Sean Oh with the Celtics Greg with the Bucks Sean Oh with the Hawks Paul with the Warriors Sean with the OKC Thunder Adam with the Pacers Sean Oh with the Jazz Aaron Nuggets and Spurs Jason with the Pistons John with the Rockets Daniel with the Kings Aaron with the Cavs Alex with the Sixers Matt with the T Wolves Tom Blazers George Heat Michael Sons Steve Wright Memphis Grizzlies It's alphabetized by a team. I'm gonna pause the video when we come back. We're gonna see if there's any trades Then we'll have the break. So stick around. We'll be right back All right, welcome back folks. There was a little bit of trade chatter, but in the end No deals were done. So thanks again. Here's the final printout hot off the presses Appreciate everybody Making this happen. No fillers or anything So this is a dual case break. Let's see what we got once again Sapphire basketball series one By hit parade thanks at parade You do a pretty good job with this stuff So here's six boxes right there Good luck ladies and gentlemen seal right there. All right, so these are not covered You can share your hit with it parade. They're pretty good people first one out of the gate is Is a wizard Jersey and autograph Bradley Beale 116 out of 149 from 2012 13 select basketball. I think that's rookie Bradley Beale Valinger just destroyed one And that's Greg five g five in the chat tried to trade couldn't trade mojo He was like Lawls wizards. I'll trade the wizards for anything. He's pretty good. I like Bradley Beale I think he's gonna resign with the wizards, too Did he read did he resign with the wizards? So much free agent movement here. I think he's still He's still with the wizards For now anyway Congrats, Greg Yeah, I think he's got he oh, he's got one more year as a wizard on his contract So I think there's been some speculation on will he be extended will he be traded? Or two more years he's got the 2021 22 season and then he's got 22 23, which is a player option All right, next one Good luck We got a graded card here and it's Kobe nice 1996 97 upper deck Centering a 10 and Then the rest or no corners centering a 10 Corners and edges are a 9-5 surface is an 8-5 for a total of a 9. It's hardwood prospects insert Nice, who's got my Lakers? That'll be for Sean. Oh And the Lakers nice Kobe Yeah, actually that that would that would be Kobe's rookie year, right? He was drafted in 96. Yep 1996 Next is gonna be oh, that's nice From contenders basketball rookie ticket autograph Trey young ice trade and that will be for Sean Oh and the Atlanta Hawks Next we have something for the Oklahoma City Thunder. That's SGA. Shague. He'll just Alexander 5 out of 15 from flawless hoops From 1920 flawless basketball. I think he just got it. Didn't he just get an extension? Yeah, he got he got a multi-year deal with the Thunder Good for him. He's pretty solid Okay, see that'll be for Sean M So Sean the Sean's hitting Sean Oh Sean M Next card out of the gate is gonna be Wow nice rookie ticket autograph R. J. Barrett from Contenders optic basketball that hybrid product That is 45 out of 149 the Knicks have been ahead of schedule. They're pretty good George Cobb With New York sixth box graded card It is a PSA 10 Wow nice 2003 upper-deck rookie exclusives PSA 10 D. Wade Look how young he looks there nice Dwayne Wade Miami heat It's gonna go to George Cobb in the heat pretty nice But wait, there's more we got another case to go. It's a dual case break 12 boxes total Here's another six 2003 upper-deck LeBron James PSA 9 I've heard of him. He's pretty good. It's calves Cleveland this is for you Aaron with the Cleveland Cavaliers Nice one Aaron next up. I think it's this one's landscape mode NBA, Inc. Nikola Jokic What a season he's had and that is 10 out of 10 Denver nuggets Aaron again. He's heating up graded card It's It's more Kobe Another one from 1996 97 tops basketball Graded in 8-5 Centering is an 8 edges and surface a 9-5 the corners are an 8-5 RIP Kobe Bryant another Kobe for Sean Oh and the Lakers RIP Three boxes to go another graded card. I it's a PSA 10 And it's a rated rookie Jason Tatum From Panini Donner's optic basketball the red yellow Parallel Boston Celtics Sean. Oh, he's on fire From downtown Two boxes to go Yeah, mamba memories.  This is a big one here Already graded for you and everything easy easy. Thanks. Hit parade There he is Congrats, man. And last but not least who could it be now? Doo-doo-doo There's a break for your dad FSU Nice even better pops is gonna be pretty happy with this ion. All right last card It's gonna be ooh nice Reggie Miller autograph from Donner's optic basketball dominator Insert nice Reggie Miller Three out of ten nice low number two three something he does pretty well hit some threes That's Adam Kelly and the Pacers there you go Adam There you go everybody pretty nice break if I do say so myself Hit parade always does a great job. That was sapphire edition series one dual case break Random teamer on a Sunday the 8th 2021 I'm Joe for jaspies case breaks calm and I'll see you next time for the next break. Bye. Bye


The study investigated the effect of pin eccentricity and welding speed on the mechanical properties of friction stir, welded AA-5754H24 aluminum alloy. An artificial neural network, ANN, model was developed to accurately predict the mechanical properties of the FSW-DAA-5754H24 alloy as a function of tool pin eccentricity, E, and welding speed, WS. The results showed that the tensile strength increases with both E and WS, which was already captured from the ANN predictions. Additionally, the R2 values were greater than 0.97 for all the predictions, indicating high accuracy. This article was authored by Ahmed R.S.S.A, Mohamed M.Z. Ahmed, Aboud R.K. Aboud and others.