Good evening everyone from the warm confines of Mumbai. I am here with Adam Singolda, the founder and CEO of Tabula. Adam is based in New York and as he tells me it's been a snowy morning there, it's been snowing overnight and he's just woken up to a white blanket of snow all around him. Adam, welcome to the show. This is our weekly Martech leadership series and we are very happy to have you on the show. For those of you, I'm sure none of you need an introduction to Tabula, but for those of you who might want to know a little bit more, just to give you a brief background, Tabula helps publishers drive engagement, advertisers to surface their content to the right audience at scale and helps people discover content they might like. Adam found this company a few years back and as we were discussing, he's also served in the Israeli military for a good seven years. That's a significant amount of time, Adam. He's now based in New York and he runs this company from there. Tabula is not a listed company, not yet at least. Their estimated revenues from what I've read are in the region of $1 billion. You can correct me if I'm wrong. In India, they work with a large number of publishers. I'm told the leading, some of the leading publishers like NDTV, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, Times of India, India Rude, Danik Jagaran, Bhaskar, ABP, the Hindu and several others work with them. They also work with a lot of brands. Tabula was founded in Israel, as I mentioned, and they are currently headquartered in New York. They do currently 150 billion monthly recommendations and have almost 400 million unique visitors and more than one million content pieces that they put out. Adam, welcome to this interaction. Good to have you here. Before I get into the business that Tabula is into, tell us what's been going on. You work very closely with content publishers, both news and non-news alike. We've seen COVID has been an inflection point for digital news consumption in countries like India. Digital consumption of news as well as non-news is really gone up significantly. What are some four or five key trends you've seen in this increase in content consumption in the last few months? First, thanks for having me. Hey, everyone. For me, it's morning. A snowy morning, like I said. Overall, when it just started in March 15th, I think all of us just closed down and just wanted to see what's going to happen. People wanted to wait it off. We've seen two types of behaviors. The first one was people that hoped this will end and we'll go back to normal, whatever normal was. The second group was companies that realized that something will never go back and we're going to have to change. I think those two groups were very different. Those who did choose to change today, we're seeing them getting more success and things of that nature and I'll give you some specifics. Overall, there are a few things that we're seeing. The first one is that the user behavior changed completely. People are at home. They're leaning into a variety of different services, whether that's Disney Plus or HBO Max under TV, websites, subscription services, direct to the reporter. We've seen an increase in user attention. If you think of the user attention as an economy, it went up because we're home. We're not traveling. We're not commuting. Something was created and we're filling that gap with consumption of a variety of services. We're also not spending as we used to in terms of going to, we don't have our annual trip on Christmas and we're not going outside of our house like we used to to purchase things in stores. We're buying more online. This behavioral change from the user and spending perspective created a huge opportunity for both publishers and advertisers, publishers to interact and engage consumers a lot more. Advertisers to reach consumers in ways they never did. I think those two things actually will never go back. Even post-vaccine, post-pandemic, advertisers realized the opportunity to talk to the consumer directly and sell a product directly is something that users are ready for online education, online healthcare. These things we thought it would take 10 years for us to get there. In many ways, I feel like we're in 2030 already. Maybe we're even later than that because it would have taken us 10 years to adopt to the behavior we're seeing right now. So I think that's a huge opportunity and challenge for those who have not adopted to this. That's right. In fact, interesting point you make yesterday, Boston Consulting Group released a report in India that said digital advertising spends that were projected for the year 2023 will happen next year. So it gets pre-poned by two years and nobody has a sense on how much digital content consumption and adoption has got kind of fast track. Possibly three to four years. That's a guess. In countries like India where telecom service providers, one of the largest ones today or the largest one by a number of subscribers, Reliance Geo launched a few years back and they brought in a huge boom in content consumption through video on mobiles. And on the back of that, a huge digital economy has been created on which all these OTT live sports and many other platforms have been writing.  I'll just give an example on that one. I looked in preparation for spending some time with you today about what are people reading in India now versus before the pandemic. So what's changed, what's changed in the open web? So what's beautiful about the open web and journalism is that it's a great proxy for humans real curiosity. Like you will never tell Facebook what you really care about because you don't want people to know. Like you will never tell them about your anxiety about healthcare or about some personal passion of yours because you might not want to share. You will tell them about the things you want people to think or know that you like, right? But open web is different.  So I thought that would be interesting to share with the audience. But specifically in India, as an example, I wrote it down. So food delivery, content around food delivery went up 70%. Online education went up 70%. Health care 65%. Finance 35%, which is interesting as people are planning their future and mortgages, financial services. So 35% increased versus before the pandemic over a long time. Gold went up 13%. Rainfall went up 76%. Maybe related to the rainfall. But if you're in the weather business, that's an opportunity. So all these categories are really opportunities for advertisers to jump in and be the first to convert consumers to try their service. Yeah, that's very interesting because like you said, social media platforms are vanity platforms where you want the world to see you in a certain manner. And when you're consuming content online, whether it's news, non-news, you're doing it instinctively. You're not really thinking about somebody tracking what you're doing. Tell us, Adam, a little bit more about when you say the pandemic will enhance the advertiser's ability to reach the consumer directly. And the digital world did that in many ways in the last few years. Advertisers were able to do that. But what do you think changes now? Of course, content consumption has changed. Trackability remains the same. So how does the advertiser has better tools to reach out to consumers directly now? Well, I don't know that the tools now changed versus eight months ago. I think they are changing fast with the use of AI. I think that we're seeing personalization taking a huge part in how consumers expect the world to be and how advertisers can reach consumers. So we don't want, we only have 24 hours a day. So that will, by the way, never change. So I think in terms of AI and the use of AI, Accenture predicts huge growth in India over the next few years, saying that by 2035, 50% of the country's gross value will be driven by AI. So I think whether that's in India or globally, that is a tool, if you will, that is changing the way advertisers are interacting with consumers, the right messages, meeting consumers earlier in the journey, not only with direct response ads, but earlier with content that they might like and try to personalize the experience for the consumer. So I do think that's a big change. The biggest change that happened in 2020, in my opinion, is on the human side, not on the technology side. I don't think technology has enhanced dramatically in six months, but what enhanced dramatically is how we behave as people and what we expect. So like I mentioned as an example, if I told you in February that billions of luxury masks will be sold, you would think that I'm crazy.   So I do think that the biggest change happened on our side, people, and actually technology is now catching up on us because we're already a step ahead and the biggest enabler to all of that from a technology or tool perspective, I do believe is AI. And it does work for brands and publishers and tech platforms to invest a lot. My concern on AI is the over reliance on AI. I speak about that quite often. When I look at as an example, even in 2020, global elections, people are home consuming media, how do you moderate for fake news? How do you moderate for hate content?  So AI cannot do it solely. I really believe that it's a big mistake to let machines solve a problem that was created by people, fake news. So I think AI is the biggest enabler. It's not perfect. And that's the tool that advances us. And I think the biggest change happened on our side.  That's very interesting. I'm going to come back to the AI and news moderation bit a little later. Let me now ask you on the other side. As I mentioned at the start, Kabula works with both the publishers as well as the brands. Since you also work with many brands, what have you seen from the brand side? How are these last eight, nine months impacted a brand's approach to utilizing digital as a platform? And I asked this for brands that are relatively lesser affected because of the pandemic. Of course, there were many categories, especially manufacturing, where sales just fell off the cliff for many months. But if you look at FMCG companies, you look at banking finance, these companies continue to do well. But have you seen a fundamental change in the way they've approached the digital platforms, either as advertising tools or as business enhancement tools? So I think I'll divide it to advertisers that existed before the pandemic. And within those, I think you've seen initially brand advertisers holding back on advertising just because they have less of a metric that can attach a brand advertising to an immediate conversion. And when business is slowing down or when you're in a pandemic in a financial crisis, performance advertising becomes more front in how you prioritize as a CMO or as a CEO or as a management team, you can't take the risk of thinking too long term when you now need to take care of the now. So I think we've seen brand advertisers pausing back in March and then rebounding heavily towards the end of the year. We've seen performance advertisers really, really doubling down. And the biggest thing that we've seen within that category is how they use data to know what to do. So everybody felt lost. It was such a new thing for all of us globally. Most of us have never experienced a global pandemic before. So when you're in that type of a fog, data can really be your compass to know what to do. So we've seen advertisers that use data to know what to advertise against more than before. Tabula, we specifically because of that thing that we saw advertisers do, we launched a website called trans.tabula.com which exposed all of our data for free. We said, why don't you know everything we know about what people are reading in the open web and advertise against it. And we saw interesting dynamics. We saw this food advertiser that stopped because they thought it's not a good time for them to do that. We showed them that it was 62% in the region where they actually delivered food. There was 62% of increase in readership of food delivery. So they unpaused the campaign, launched video campaign against it and drove growth to us. And it was a great case study of how data was more of a tool in the pandemic when you had no idea what to do. So I think we've seen that change. And the third one that I would mention is the birth of new businesses that would have taken us years to see or would have never been born. I don't think luxury masks that we're seeing now. I mean, I have 10 of them by car manufacturers and all the brands I love, I just buy, I buy so many of them because I need to use them. So I don't think that there are many categories like that. And those categories are new and relevant only because of the pandemic. Yeah, that's very interesting. Let me ask you about the challenges. We've all seen Google and Facebook have really dominated the advertising spends in the digital business for many years now. And publishers across the world have faced many challenges. Some publishers in Western countries have managed to at least break the subscription model to some extent, I would say. Indian publishers have had major challenges. So if you look at this year 2020, how would you define this year for publishers? And I ask this because you have a very good view of where publishers stand in terms of the traction they get on content. On one hand, content consumption is going up, people are spending more time on publisher platforms. Is Revenue ever going to catch up in a commensurate manner? What do publishers need to do? What can they do? Given that Google, Facebook, in the foreseeable future will continue to control the digital advertising market the way it is going? Well, Revenue I think is already coming back a lot of it. The second half of 2020 was a way stronger period than the first half and some territories, some verticals reports, even stronger than H2 of last year. So I think that from just overall programmatic dollars, performance dollars, revenue that came in in a more of an automatic way, we've seen a very strong rebound in the second half of the year. I think brand advertising is coming back and pending how you're using data to help those brand advertisers come back, you're seeing the rebound. So overall, I think that if some publishers share that they're having a great Q4, some not yet, but I suspect they will soon. So overall, on that front, I think things are coming back and that's great. The biggest opportunity publishers have now is one, like I said, users to some extent changed forever. We're now open to subscribe to things, to sign up to a newsletter, and to connect in ways we never did before. There's a reason why OTT is so successful. We love direct to consumer services. We're happy to pay for them. We're happy to pay for different subscription services being touched with someone. We need guidance, we feel alone, and some of that behavioral change is there forever. That is a huge opportunity, not necessarily to, I don't think subscription services and newsletters will replace advertising, but I think it's a very good way to connect. I think it's a very good way to diversify, and it's a very good way to know what your audience, your loyal readers want. So that is an opportunity for publishers that I think I really believe people should tap into. And from an advertising perspective, like I said, the biggest opportunity right now I think is to use data to know what to advertise against beyond what you think you know, because everything changed. So even if you think you know demographics, that you should use data to try to know what to go, the real, the challenge you have is that as a CMO, everybody's now overspending. So how do you find the right person that will discover your brand versus someone else's brand, you know? So I think that's, and I would say more meat term. So maybe not 2020, but a few years. I'm super optimistic about publishers. The reason is when I look at services like Apple News, that's a $2 trillion company, Apple, they're good. It's a good company. And they decided to integrate content in the most intimate way into their multi-billion dollar devices, which means Apple thinks content is important. And usually when you see a company that's as good as Apple make a decision like that, you should suspect there's a revolution coming in other areas. So I'm optimistic because I believe that we will see content getting integrated everywhere, in your car, in your fridge, in your audio devices. We're seeing it in devices. So I suspect we're going to read a lot and have text to audio a lot beyond your browser over the next two, three, four, five years. And I would suspect journalism, local news, national news will become the glue between me and all of the advice around me. So I bet journalism and I'm optimistic about it. And I think we're coming out of 2020 better than we definitely started 2020. Yeah, we all hope so. So this should mean a lot many more opportunities for Taboola, for a company like Apple is so focused on content. For you guys, this will open a whole new list of opportunities because that means more publishers. That means more content online, more page views and more opportunities for you to serve. Yeah, I mean, look, first of all, I think that Taboola's mission is exclusively focused on the open web, right?  And I think that the rest of the world matters a lot. We all need, you know, NDTV, India TV, India TV. We need those publishers to be very, very strong so we can get guidance that protects us from pharma, protects us from politicians, give us local guidance in the pandemic. We need that to survive and be strong. So I think that I'm optimistic about the existing open web and how it can grow. Like I mentioned, because I think the open web will be distributed in many other places. And for us as a company, I hope that we'll continue to make win-win type of decisions that are very aligned to the open web. Tell us, Adam, since you work with publishers across the world, let me come to specifically Indian publishers. Have you seen issues Indian publishers, vis-a-vis publishers in Western worlds? Are there any difference in terms of how they approach business and issues they face? Of course, money, revenue, monetization is an issue for everyone, right? But if you go down to a nuanced level, how do you see them working differently vis-a-vis some of the counterparts in the Western world? It's a very good question because people tend to think that the web is the web is the web, but it's not always true. And there's something very special that companies can learn from the Indian market, user behavior and how they consume content. So as an example, first of all, it's a huge market. So you have over a billion people that consume content in the open web in India. So you have a lot of scale, which is very different than most other places in the world. It's a huge market. It's $8 billion in media spent a year. So it's a market worth pursuing in India. And the digital portion of it is growing 33% into next year. So overall, it's a lot of people and a big market. So let's start with the top. And then more specifically, to me, what's very unique about the market and what companies like to learn is probably the mobile element of it. So if you subscribe to a future that is not mostly mobile, but maybe only mobile, India is probably the best place in the world to learn about the future. So you're seeing a lot more consumers meeting the internet for the first time via a small device, spending most of their time on a small device. And that is probably a proxy for what the rest of the world will look like in a few years. So I think that's something that from an advertiser perspective and a publisher perspective is very different than an enterprise publisher in the US or in the UK or in Australia. So I think from an advertiser perspective in mobile, conversion to performance advertisers in mobile, brand messages, big impact placements, ad formats that are great in mobile, all those things are a few steps ahead in India. And that makes companies like us think harder about how to make that market successful. And when you sit down and have conversations with Indian publishers, what are the three, four takeaways that we choose that they need Tabula to nail down? You know, it's a lot of times about the editorial team. How can we support the workflows, the people that write how we can be part of growing that team from a monetization perspective, how we can optimize revenue with the purpose of growing the editorial team. So a lot of our conversations are focused on editorial workflows. We have a product called newsroom, which is a product that is tailored just to the work, the editorial staff. So as an example, if you're a publisher in India, how can you learn about what your readers read on other sites and in India in the open web? How can you learn which pieces of content convert to subscription? So you can write more about it so you can spark that curiosity for your consumers. So I would say a lot of my conversations with publishers in India and some of my best best friends, Suparna from NDTV and others are from that from the market. A lot of times it's amazing how editorial first publishers in India are more than other markets, which is very special to me. They're really working from their heart. And that means that a lot of their decision and conversation with us is around the people on the ground that actually create the content we all need to consume. Interesting, yes. Let me come to, you know, since we've been talking about digital advertising, let me come to another aspect of digital advertising. I recently had a head for Guru Sanjay Gupta. Sanjay's view was that in the next few years in India, digital advertising growth will be driven by small businesses. It's happening world over these large, you know, world internet companies. If I look at what Tabula has done so far, your primary forte has been bringing brands and publishers together, right, and serving the consumer. What I see is the brands that you largely work with are, you know, the big ones, the, you know, the marquee ones with a lot of money to spend. How does Tabula now curate the next, you know, 10,000 or 100,000 set of advertisers, the small guys, the guy who has, you know, $5,000 or $10,000 to spend and then create a long tail of advertising because that's where growth, especially in countries like India is going to come from. How do you get relevance for that? Yeah, so there are two types of smaller businesses and even long tail over time on the advertiser side and on the publisher side. On the advertiser side, we launched a self-service a few years back to allow basically anyone to go to Tabula website, start a campaign at a very small budget and use the same capabilities that a big brand can use and get going and be discovered in the open web. And that business has grown quite significantly. So it's already over $100 million business for us, which we've announced when that happened. And what's interesting is that a lot of times those advertisers are the best advertisers.  And then by the way, many of them mature into our enterprise service where they have an account manager and because they become so big, they need a lot of attention. So we do have that for smaller businesses on the advertiser side. On the publisher side, we're not there yet.  That takes a different type of technology and processes that we don't yet have. With an advertiser side, I'm very excited about smaller businesses and self-service in general. And funny enough, since we launched it thinking it will be mainly for smaller businesses, I can tell you some of our biggest advertisers prefer to use the self-service versus talking to people. So you just see, what's interesting is when you put yourself out there, you discover how people want to use your product in ways you didn't think they would, which is great, you know, because that's a good way to, it keeps you humble and makes you better. So it is live. It's used by smaller businesses, but also some of our biggest advertisers use it. Fantastic. Let me come to a very, you know, the most, the fastest growing area in, you know, digital at least as far as India is concerned, video, right? Video has seen huge boom in the last few years. As I mentioned earlier, the India's largest telecom provider with their, you know, almost pre-data plans was instrumental in this boom. Today's sports content, IPL, which is the Premier League, which is India's largest sport sporting event is consumed billions of minutes every season. Tabula is a company that started, I won't say in the pre-video era, but, you know, six, seven, eight years back when video was not that big.  So, but funny enough, I started Tabula as a video recommendation company, just so you know, because I couldn't find anything to watch on TV. And so actually the first few years of Tabula were just video recommendation service with no advertising business. So funny enough, we're closing a circle on that. Video is not insignificant part of our business now. We've acquired a company in 2016 called Convert Media, which basically what we had a feed product integrated across the web. And we followed some of Instagram evolution from the product perspective and how they integrated feed video in the feed. And we thought that's a really engaging way to surface videos to consumers. We figured there's going to be the YouTubes of the world when you go to a video website to watch a video. And then there's the rest of the world where you stumble upon video. Right? It's not so much of a video website, but video is part of the experience. And we, as we analyzed that, we thought that video in feed could be bigger than YouTube. Right? So if you think of all the impressions in the world outside of YouTube collectively, when we read, if video was part of that, video would be huge for everyone. So the question is how we can do it in a way that's relevant, personalized, engaging, and good for advertisers and publishers alike with users in the middle. So that's, first of all, that's our go-to-market strategy. We've acquired a company called Convert Media to execute on that vision and basically integrate video into our feed. That has grown significantly for us and helped our publishers generate a lot of revenue. Brands really like it. It's very visible. Viewability is great. Completion rates are great. And in general, I think that as TV is moving to digital and as publishers are looking to grow revenue, video will be one of the best ways to do it. But it's not going to be how we used to do it. Publishers used to move a user from an article page to a video page. Publishers used to have a small YouTube section on their site. And it's very difficult to convert a reader to a video experience like that. But I think if you do the opposite and bring the video section into the article experience and make it infinite like Instagram, like TikTok, you'll find that the consumer is really engaged with it. And that's a great opportunity for publishers to become YouTube websites. So my belief is that the future is an open web that looks like Instagram with video part of it. Yeah, I think video will be a very, very large instrumental part of what brands are going to do on the web and also where the consumer consumption trends are headed. Everybody is, like you mentioned, Adam, everybody is caught on to content today. Content is the game in town when it comes to publishers trying to get traction, whether it is text content, video content, or brands using content to reach out to those consumers via these publisher websites. What that has led to is two things. One, among us amounts of fragmentation because everybody is doing the same thing. And they are all doing it at the same time and they are doing it multiple times over. So if you had to tell a brand, a CMO, three, four key important things to follow when you are creating a content-led strategy to be on publisher platforms, what would those things be in today's world, a post-COVID world? I think I mentioned data. I don't believe everything is the same. There is a huge signal that happens when someone is behaving in certain ways. So I think data is a good guide to break your beliefs about what you think you know.  But then let data enable you to make mistakes and open up. So I think my first advice would be to make mistakes using data. Explore yourself. That's the first one. The second one is to don't do the obvious. It's much easier to work with the top 20% of the market, the top 30% of the market, to work with Google and Facebook. So I think diversity really matters in terms of... How many CMOs do you find who are willing to take their risk? I think CMOs really want to take their risk, but a lot of times they're very busy and the people that execute the campaigns are not them. So those who execute any campaigns, they don't necessarily have the appetite to learn how to work with a different publisher, to work with a different platform. So I do think CMOs have an overall strategy to diversify their campaigns and not be relying on any one channel. But a lot of times these are huge organizations with thousands of media buyers that have funded harder to actually execute on that. But I think that's important because the last thing we want is Google and Facebook having every all of our budgets controlling prices, controlling product innovation, controlling our success, owning our future. So that is just a very bad future. So we it's important to do that. So I think data to make mistakes, diversity in terms of your channel spend, I think that's important. By the way, I think also for more of a humanity perspective, if I was a CMO, I would also look at just DEI as a topic and just diversity in general and try to think how as a CMO I can make an impact on the topic of diversity, equity, inclusion, I see some agencies in CMOs talking to me about it. I think it's amazing. So as a CMO, you have an opportunity to dictate and decide where things are going. So that means I spoke about diversity from a budget perspective, but that you can also make an impact on humanity by supporting small businesses that are owned by diverse communities, by supporting different businesses that if they succeed, it will enable more diversity. So I think money is not money all the time. There's different ways of spending it and using it. And I really think all of us as leaders, CMOs, head of publishers, head of advertisers, people like you that talk to the world, we have an opportunity to especially after 2020 to think differently about the future. And I believe by the way it will drive business growth. Like I don't think you're doing this because you're just holistic. I think you're doing it because it's the right thing to do and it will do good for business as well. So I think I spoke about data, I spoke about diversity of channels, I spoke about impact and beyond gross margin and business and things like that. And that's why I would strongly encourage people to make DEI a topic for them to discuss. And Leslie, I would try to, if I was a CMO, I would measure how many people do I have their email or their phone or a way to connect with them directly, not through anyone. How many people can I talk to directly? I think that is the biggest user behavioral change of 2020. And if you think we're going back to nobody wants to sign in future, you're living in the past. That's right. I think that's a well-made point, Adam. You mentioned about Apple reading content for their devices. And as we've seen, Facebook has been going after Apple in the past few days. What's your view on that? And does that also impact the digital publishing environment? Because if data availability is going to be restricted by companies like Apple, then it does impact the digital publishing and digital advertising business. Well, Apple has already impacted the open web by blocking third-party cookies a few years ago. That's right. So I think what we're seeing right now is a different type of giants talking to each other with us little people in the middle. And then, but right now what you're seeing is more of a native app privacy discussion, which obviously affects Facebook more because most of their business is in an app environment. So I think the current dynamics are less relevant for the majority of the open web journalism, because most of the journalism traffic is still either mobile web, amp, tablet, or desktop. So when it's mobile, for publishers, a lot of time it's not necessarily the app. App is a good business, but a lot of time the mobile web version and the amp will supersede by a lot the app traffic. Some publishers it's different for them, but I would say categorically it's not. So I think that the Facebook Apple discussions right now are less relevant because they're mainly tailored around the native app and in that world we're less reliant on that as publishers. Saying that, you know, the dynamics around privacy are very important. You know, we all want a better private future for consumers because I'm not sure my mom understands when she goes on a website who tracks her and what follows her and all those things. So I really want the web to be safe. Saying that, I think we need mechanisms for advertisers to succeed in the open web. So I think Google is doing a good job leading discussions on replacing cookies with a different mechanism and I trust they'll do the right thing. So I do think it's the right approach and attitude. We do want a better private future than the craziness that we've seen in the last 20 years. Saying that, I do think we want to eliminate the opportunity to personalize and make the web relevant. So that's going to take two years or three years to evolve. Nevertheless, I think the Apple Facebook thing doesn't really affect publishers necessarily as much. Tell me the cookie-less future does impact publishers and by virtue of that, it also impacts companies like Tabula. What's your take on that? How do you get around that? How do you prepare for a cookie-less future? Because that's not going to happen. All the tracking mechanisms you've created in the last few years, they kind of become redundant. No, that's not really because I'll tell you, first of all, it might be completely the opposite. So first of all, Safari's been around with third-party cookies been blocked for a while. So we're already already again in the future looking back at a cookie-less world in many ways. So I think we shouldn't expect and Safari, by the way, has a lot of market share globally. Some countries less, but in a heavy Android market. But overall, Safari and Apple, they have good market share. So I think we've already seen some of it. And the second thing is that do I think programmatic companies that rely on retargeting and things like that are impacted? Yes, because it's much harder to retarget and do things of that nature in a cookie-less world. Companies like Tabula and publishers, by the way, that have a very strong signal for what you currently read. I don't think that this is going to be a huge problem for them because there's something very, very important that advertisers need side by side to an article. So when you read about on a technology section of a news website or an automobile website, when you read about something like that, I'm telling you your signal for curiosity and being in that market is a lot more than you told Facebook you like cars. Okay, because you're now reading about it. So I think that even in a cookie-less world, one, the signal of the open web is very strong. Two, I don't think cookies are going to die and will be with nothing. I think cookies will be replaced with a safer, better mechanism and the analogy I'll make is when Flash, if you remember Apple killed Flash, I don't know, 10 years ago, it was replaced with HTML5. HTML5 gave us the capabilities of we used to enjoy with Flash online, but much safer, much lighter. So I think that's what I think is going to happen. Clear point. Let me come to the recent big news about your merger call-off with Outfrain. I'll spend a limited time on that, but tell us why you were doing the merger and does that set you back and how do you kind of continue with your growth plans despite the merger not happening? I mean, I think, first of all, it was a very engaging and intense experience for everyone. Both companies did it, got into that engagement because we wanted to do it and we wanted to succeed. I think we didn't anticipate it will take longer than we thought and the pandemic will happen. So things happened that we didn't anticipate when we got into that, but for the most part, I can just tell you we met amazing people. Many of them will stay friends with, I mean, this is not personal. If anything, we met great people that we were impressed by and we learned from each other as what's our aspiration about the open web and things of that nature. So it was a very good experience on that front. I think we didn't anticipate the pandemic, we didn't anticipate it will take so much longer and at the end, it didn't work for both of us, but not for any reason, but the fact that we thought we had a better future independently. So I think this was, both companies made a decision together to move on and removed on, but I'm sure they'll be okay and to bully is in a very strong place to invest in the future from a product perspective and to keep expanding in all directions I mentioned. So I could not be more optimistic and bullish about the future than I am now and I wish my friends an outbreak with luck. Thanks, Adam. Let me come to a video because as we as we discussed, video is the future of content consumption online and video is there in many parts. Do you see content publishers once slow in catching up on video because truth is that if you leave out native television content producers, the other publishers are not really, they don't have video in their DNA, right? Whereas the consumer is looking inherently, instinctively for video content today. So what do you think is the way for content publishers to catch up on video content curation because that's where the world is headed? And how does the vula kind of play that game because you know that's as we discussed in the future? Yeah, I think it's a wrong assumption to think that users are looking for video. I don't think that's the case at all. Think they look for video when they open Netflix, they look for videos maybe when they go to a broadcaster like NDTV. But those are very specific situations when the brand is a video brand. It was born to be video, it is video, the video, it's a video brand. For the rest, I don't think we should assume users look for videos. I don't think we should assume we can convert them to look for videos. We should do exactly the opposite. We should bring videos to them. So I strongly think that if let's take a simple example, let's say you're an automobile blog. You have no video production, you don't have a video section. You can do one in two things or two things. You can create a video tab so people go and watch videos on your site which is your YouTube on your site. There's a video section.  Or the other way around you can bring videos into the articles themselves. So I read about Toyota and in the article I have a feed with videos that are relevant for the article. I strongly believe the second option is what is going to be the video growth for the open web because I don't think people are aware that I'm supposed, I don't think users are aware that we're supposed to have a video section unless the brand is a video brand from the moment it was born like YouTube, Netflix or NDTV or CNN or NBC News. I don't think we should expect users to change behavior. So we have to bring videos to them. But you have every publisher, especially I'm talking about news publishers, everybody is changing videos. Even the non-television native companies, everybody is going doubling down on video. So do you think they are getting it wrong? No, I mean I think again, if you're a native video company, I'm saying non-native video companies. Yeah, if you're not a native video company and you're doubling down on video the question is how do you surface that video through your consumer. If you're doubling down on video and you're putting all those videos in a video section, I think you're going to fail. It will be uniquely hard to convert readers to video watchers. If you're doubling down on video and you're putting those videos where users already spend their time, you're going to be massively successful. And that is, by the way, that is the Instagram Facebook case study. Instagram had two options. Launch a video tab or bring videos into the feed. And what did they do to fight YouTube? They did not launch a YouTube. They brought YouTube into the feed. So again, I don't think Instagram made the wrong decision. People were already scrolling on the feed. The way to fight YouTube for Facebook was to bring YouTube into the feed, not to launch a YouTube section. So I believe doubling down on video is the best thing you can do, whether it's creation, syndication, aggregation. But I think it's mainly about the user experience and how you do it, if that makes sense. And as we know, Instagram has now done both. They've also launched Reels within the app. So you also have videos within the feed and you have a separate tab also. So they've done both in a way. So let me come to another topic you touched upon, which is fake news. And content seeding has also led to this huge industry that is spawned where you are putting out content, which is coming from unknown, unreliable sources. And social media platforms obviously have been accused of allowing fake news to get populated on their massive platforms. And nobody really has been able to put down a meaningful solution. Like you mentioned at the start, AI is not a solution. AI can't solve a human created problem. Because at least as of today, human brain is far ahead of whatever we've created in the computers. So if you were to look at the interim term, 12, 24 months, do you think the problem of fake news is going to go up multiple times over? I mean, I think we're much more aware of this topic than we used to. So I don't suspect it will. The trend is negative. I think that in 2020, we spoke about, especially around the elections and all of that, but we spoke about fake news and the importance of content moderation by an order of magnitude more than we did in the past. So I actually think we're doing the right thing. We're talking about it. You're talking about it. CNBC is talking about it. Bloomberg is talking about it. Everybody's talking about it. So I think we're seeing the right trend of bringing it up to an awareness. A few things. One, I don't think if it's an unknown, you mentioned unknown brain, it's necessarily bad. In fact, I think we should not allow ourselves to think that. What's great about the open web is the opportunity for anyone to share their voice and to be discovered by people. So we shouldn't be in a future that only the New York Times survives. Right? We don't want that. New York Times is great. We need more. We want opinion. We want diversity. We want to give a chance to smaller businesses and so forth. So I don't think unknown is the problem. I think problems are the problems. If you are doing something bad, that's bad. So then the question is, how do you moderate? What do you do? What resources do you put in place to make sure that the web is safe? So my opinion is that AI can help you, but you have to start a team of humans, people, that actually are engaged church and state. Nobody can talk to them. There is a public policy. Say what you think is wrong. Put it out there. If you're a platform, if you're a publisher, if you're whoever you are that interacts with consumers, say this is wrong, that's what I don't want to do and give people a chance to react to your policy and start a team of people that will moderate it. We now have more at Tabula, more than 50 people that moderate over a million URLs a month, reading pages. And we have a huge R&D in Israel and LA. So it's not about AI deficiencies. We have a lot of it. It's just not good enough. It will never be good enough to moderate new things. There was this case on TikTok that there was a tag on TikTok that kids uploaded videos and they said eating pasta for dinner. And it sounds perfectly fine, but what people realized after a while is that when kids uploaded videos with eating pasta for dinner, I read about it. Obviously, I didn't know about it. Otherwise, it was a sign of kids that were considering committing suicide. AI would never know that eating pasta for dinner means shouting out for help.  So I think that the solution has to involve humans alongside AI. If I was Facebook, I would hire 50,000 people to do it and moderate everything all the time against the policy, not to block the unknown, not to block free speech, but to block every fake news, hate, and things that should not be out there anywhere. That's yeah, I think I think one of the key things is for companies to put adequate resources to do it. That's the starting step. And then is the next step of being able to moderate it, not black it out, but there are gray areas there also, right? I mean, there is something which is obviously fake news. And the other part, which is more, you know, gray area where there is different differing opinions. So at least the first part can be tackled very easily, which is clearly fake news. The second part can be taken on later. But I think the first thing that is required is for adequate resources to be put into moderate this content. We have just two, three minutes left, Adam. So before we go, I want to talk about Tabula's plan, plans now that the merger has been called off. Are you planning to do an IPO? Are you planning a fundraise? How does Tabula grow from here? How do the next three years look like? Yeah, I mean, there's nothing I can share in terms of specific plans. But in general, Tabula is in a very good place. I'm very fortunate for our people's health, our partners, you know, sticking strong and weathering the storm together. So I feel very lucky. You know, my dad is a musician. He hasn't played on stage for almost a year. So you see just very different ways people receive the pandemic. So overall, I'm very lucky. And I feel, you know, gifted to be here today and talk to you and about the future and all those things. Specifically, you know, we're looking to the future. There are two areas we're going to look at. The first one is, you know, how we can recommend more type of things such as, you know, e-commerce and more video and some of the things we talked about today. And that will make our yield better and experience for consumers better. And the second thing as a growth opportunity is how we can expand beyond the browser and bring our publisher news into anywhere people spend their time. So, you know, I think test floods should be solved with Tabula inside of them, you know, and surfacing news by all these great publishers from India. So I'm shocked Tesla is not sold with Tabula inside of it. But, you know, hopefully one day. So my point is that anything that I'm interacting with should have Tabula inside and surfacing me, you know, in distant time and in the TV and all the publishers I learn. So the second area of growth for us is Tabula everywhere. And bringing those relevant premium quality personalized news anywhere I may spend my time on. So those two things will take us to the next five, 10 years. You know, you mentioned we're over a billion dollars in gross revenue company. We're profitable. We're growing fast. It's over 60 billion dollar advertising market globally in the open web. And I think the open web needs someone that is exclusively passionate about just open web, not the platform with an identity crisis, not, you know, someone that just cares open web. And that's that's who we are. If I may add lesser controversy. Thank you so much, Adam, for joining us on an early Friday morning there. It's almost nighttime here. The sun is already set in Mumbai. We wish you luck. And as I mentioned at the start, Tabula is a company which is God sent for publishers, especially in India, where revenues, especially in a COVID world, are not easy to come by. And a large share is taken away by what we call these wall gardens. So most Indian publishers will wish that you bring in more revenue to them. And they continue to create more traction. They continue to create more user engagement. Thank you. And it was a very enjoyable session. I hope people who joined in liked it will be happy to send you any questions that come post the session. I'm told we have limited time since you have another session. Good luck to you and thank you for joining us. Stay well. Thank you everyone. Thank you.


Trini girl natural. Hi everyone. Welcome to my channel Today we're going to be doing my spring flashback where I take a look back at the products that I use this spring And let you guys know what worked and what didn't and just give you a quick recap and like point you to some of my full reviews If I have them so Don't have that many products this season. Maybe that's good. Maybe the PJ Jean is leaving me But anyway, let's get to the reviews. No particular order Guess I'll start with the blue rose beauty. So I had the blue rose so very cool watch, which I love and I remember telling you I don't remember if I tried it before and I was really still don't remember But all I know is my hair was moisturized My hair was actually fine. I like that matters for a cool wash. My hair was clean and It smells great Like Barry said your texture and everything I do have a demo of me using this up on my channel So if you want to see how awesome it was for moisture and how clean my hair was and everything Definitely take a look at that and I used it with the try here tea. So I mentioned this This definitely isn't new and I'm sure I mentioned it before another Spring flashback, but I just want to repeat. This is a great product. I think she added even more moisture, which is awesome So it's super moisturizing, especially after the co-wash and it really for true reduces your shedding So if you have a lot of shedding definitely give this a try I also love the blue rose shampoo, but I'm okay cream gel stop But I want to use these to this spring. A lot of her products are pretty light, but they're great for like summer joy It's been my big head on care season. So we'll be seeing more blue rose next seasonal stash. Next up is the miche duty I kind of had a mixed feelings about this Line in general. I only have the twisting butter here with me, but I did use the whole line I had the DC, which I think I finished off the twisting butter, which is pretty much full and The oil which I really can't find to be honest PJ problems I think this line is actually great for twisters and braiders So it's probably meant more for them than for wash and goers Like I mentioned the leaving sat on my hair So didn't give me enough moisture just because it was just kind of thick and hard to work in the DC Also sat on my hair, but after steaming it penetrated and was nice So I was happy with the DC in the end. Although I like immediate results Not so much sitters, but if you have normal crossing I'd be good. The twisting butter doesn't have any whole products But it does actually penetrate better than the leaving. I can't really ram this twisted I use it on my wash and go but over the leave and it didn't really work for me. So I'll come back with a review I'm definitely going to be doing more braid outs. I can't really say twists. I can't even say outs I'm definitely going to be doing more braids this year because it's just really convenient Especially for Jim but last well keeps my hair moisturized and I could have my hair in the same braid for like two weeks Without worrying too much. I do love wash and goers. They served me well from the first part of my natural hair journey And I will definitely keep doing them as well But I'll definitely be adding more braids this year and I may try this for one of them I didn't like the oil. It was light had a nice scent and contains some of my favorite oils I definitely like the oil I'm just not much of an oil buyer because I just buy them and put your oil to mix them That's the only reason I wouldn't repurchase it, but I liked it. I'm smell great I have decent slip and dead oil things so Yeah, for that and thanks again to Michelle for sending me these products and I was really happy to try them I'm looking forward to seeing what else she comes up with Definitely maybe a lighter leaving would be good for me and I'll be looking out for a gel as well We have the Sultanicels shampoo butters. I got the shave erotic butter shampoo And I got the cocoa rassau butter shampoo. So I really enjoyed using both of these This one doesn't really feel like it cleansed my scalp Somebody mentioned adding water after I use it to get it to like foam a little bit and do more cleansing So I'm definitely gonna try that next time I use it this time. I didn't add water I just kept adding more and more butter shampoo trying to make it do something So I did end up using about half in one go. I was probably because I wasn't using it correctly So I'm gonna try it again and see if maybe just a quarter would be enough for me If I wet my hair after putting it on that was a tip one of my subbies gave me Thank you, and I'll definitely be trying it and the rest of my beautiful subbies, you know Feel free to give me tips and advice as well. My hair was super moisturized It had great slip and everything It just didn't feel quite cleansing enough for me My hair was really dirty that week and you know already feeling a little bit itchy and stuff So I needed a shampoo to really reset me and after I use this my hair You know, it wasn't screaming at me, but it didn't feel soother than refreshed and happy So this is more of a cool wash and I'll definitely try it again and keep you guys updated But don't use it if you need a clarifying shampoo or as a strong shampoo The cocoa rassel butter shampoo was definitely more cleansing. My scalp felt great after using it It was still just as moisturizing as this one but more cleansing The only thing is I feel like this one had less slip than the shave. I don't really need a lot of slip in my Shampoos or co-washers because I can be time to more later when I get to the conditioner So that's fine for a co-wash, but a little slip never hurt nobody either. So That was my only critique with this. This smell great. It smells like cocoa. This smell great Had a nice musky scent like I told you So I love the scent of both of these and I love the concept and definitely I'm curious to try more buy more use more and you know form of an opinion so far I'm very intrigued. I'm still intrigued. Let me see how much I used in this one I use a little bit less, but I would still say I use like a good third of it So, you know, it may not last that long and that would be my only concern So I have to check the prices again and everything but you know, I agree with people who say that Getting three even four uses of a shampoo just seems a little bit weird But again, it's not really a shampoo is a co-wash So if you think of it like a co-wash then there are some co-wash stuff You might only get three or four uses still smells like cocoa. I Love this. That's love the color. I'm like just give me that chocolate I love the scent and like I said, my hair was clean and moisturizing everything So it's definitely one I consider repurchasing. I have to think about it I'm a pocket think about it and stuff in terms of how much you need to use how much it costs to start in the other But just in terms of the how good the product was without any of the extra Calculations, I like it me want it. Then I have the can't believe it's not syrup Chocolate extreme conditioning. So I love chocolate when I saw that she had it in chocolate I definitely had to get it so people get in the greens and stuff for the shampoo But I was like, oh chocolate and of course when I saw this has to make it a wash day, right? I have myself all prepped for the can't believe it's not like caramel or Can't believe it's not honey vibe when I use this but it wasn't like that at all So maybe she watched my video cuz I remember when I reviewed this I was telling you guys it was really sticky and didn't have enough light in Williams for me Because it didn't have any emollience. It was just all humectants, and I love you back then, but I realized wait no All you medicines isn't everything that could be More than I need in my life besides humectants. So this made me realize that At least for my course why are you here? If your hair is like more silky you might be fine But yeah, that's actually it's kind of like a regular conditioner It's not like a syrup at all. So you can see this it is actually pretty much a cream so I was all prepping For syrup and it turned into a cream so that was good. It was really easy to use and everything It's not pretty much just talking about a shampoo, which I love so my hair was like super moisturized and my curls were popping after so I was like Like I was coming out to say well I did not saw like how my hair was looking like ah, okay Okay, so if you're looking for extra moisture, definitely get this to try and maybe even do a little combo like I did and get both Just for like a fun scent spa Moisturizing wash day. My only critique of this was again. It just didn't have quite enough slip for me My multiple 2018 is you gotta have a slip. I only want to use products with crazy slip I love this so much. I'll consider buying it again, but the lack of slip was like a wrong note for me So I wouldn't say it has no slip. It just has less slip than I would like So I'll I love you if you're listening and if you took my advice on this Then take my advice on this and give us a little more slip because if this had more slip I would be raven were not watching screaming spinning circles because it was everything and more except The slip was just a little subpar So I'm looking forward to your version of this next time being super perfect And if you need testers because I think you do need some why we here course here testers to ultra low porosity why we course So yeah, so last but definitely not least Product is really good. You hear that all that that was yeah, these products are bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb I tried this permanent pair restorative mask So I was a little concerned that a protein treatment when I looked at it was just all moisture pretty much It probably does have protein down at the bottom, but it's very low down and this is super moisturizing The word for the day is juicy because when I have a winning deep conditioner like the she said conditioner My hair feels juicy. So my hair was moisturized. It was juicy like just plump and wet and Soaked in moisture juicy after using this my hair was soft the tangles were melted like the slip was crazy perfect a one not a thing could be improved in this like Everything it was life life life life. You're so I'm gonna stick out if you follow me on Instagram I was just posting pictures and just going crazy Love So I'm gonna be getting more of these for Black Friday. I definitely hope that sticks around And I love it and like a life really said like pretty much all her products. So life really said Moisture for days. It does say trust and believe. Okay. I've been talking about it too long, but you get the idea I like it a lot. I love it. Okay. Good. Let's move on to the pomegranate pear crunching conditioner That's what I use as a leaving and I use it for my inverted wash day which with my coils I needed really extreme slip and moisture. She said it gives me that all the way So I use the blueberry co-wash then power that pear DC then this Crunching conditioners are leaving and the slip and moisture was there all the way She never let me down. She never let go of my hand. She had my hands for the entire thing. Thank you, Carla I can't wait to try it again Like right side up maybe to get all that kind of regular impression But upside down I had great moisture and great slip and can't really ask for anything else It does have protein, but the protein is pretty low down So that's why I decided to just go ahead and use it as a leave-in as I mentioned that I use my fancy Conditions as a leave-in so I buy them but still use them as leave-in. So this definitely worked well for me in that capacity I have it in my hair right now actually and my hair is just light and love in life. I am just light and love in life So yeah, light pretty cent again like pretty standard. She sent it sent I don't know how the propaganda smells like but I do think I smell pear in here Although I could be imagining things but light pretty cent basically. I mean it is still running But it does look kind of thick as well. So it's definitely not the most runny She said the conditioner you ever seen if you guys have finally listened to me and got it You know, this is on the thicker end for she said the products But it was still of course Hydrating penetrating moisturizing with crazy slip because that's how all the products roll so didn't disappoint definitely loved it Yay, so that's it. That was it for my spring slash slash back. Thanks for coming on the journey with me I guess I hope you enjoyed that quick review of everything check out my videos for detailed reviews and demos of these products And I will see you at the end of summer for that flashback So see you soon, but I mean I'll see you much sooner than that. I'll see you next week for my next video But just in terms of the flashbacks I do them every season. So See you next week and see you at the end of summer. Thanks for watching. Bye


Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii, where we discuss the impact of change on workers, employers, and the economy. I'm your host, Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, inviting you to join in the conversation. Please call us at area code<PHONE_NUMBER> with your questions or comments, or tweet us at thinktechhai. Higher education has experienced some of the most significant changes in the way it operates. Most of us remember queuing on registration day for enrollment cards that told us where and when a particular course was being offered. We may have had to go through that process several times in order to ensure we could get the classes we wanted on days and at times that were doable for us. We turned in papers, literally papers, written on manual typewriters.  Like it or not, those days are mostly over. There are many alternatives to the kind of education experiences that the baby boomers and Generation X survived. One of those alternatives is distance education where a student communicates with faculty and administrators via online communications media. The classroom is a learning management system and students and faculty may never meet face to face. Joining us today to discuss the distance education revolution is Rochelle Kim. Rochelle is the director of Aston American University, one of the innovators in taking the US model of university education to a wider more global audience. Hi Rochelle. Hi Cheryl. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. I am really enamored of the Aston American University business model. So if you could, tell us how widely dispersed your students, faculty and staff are and how you manage to get everybody together and kind of coalesce into a university community. Great. Yes. So we have wide wings of students in international locations. We have students from Peru, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, France, all over the world. And we also have instructors all over the world.  The way we facilitate our classes is through a learning management system and people can log on to their classroom and they can interact with their teachers there and they can get student support there. We have live chat. We have 24-hour contact where students can come on and ask questions of their advisors and also they can of course always email their instructors. So we have very good communication with students, faculty and all of our all of our participants. Tell us about who kind of the best candidate for online or distance education would be. I mean, I can imagine someone who says, oh gee, I don't have a regular schedule at work or I have children at home or whatever it is. This is great because I get to study whenever I want. But that doesn't necessarily mean that that person is the best candidate for online education. So what kinds of traits going in should students expect to have as they begin to contemplate whether distance education is the right model for them? Majority of our students are non-traditional students. They have full-time jobs. They have to take care of their families and they still have the dream to complete or finish an education that they never got to do. And so your question about what is this perfect student or what kind of traits that a student would need is there is a lot of self-motivation that's needed. A person needs to be organized, be able to block out time. I find that some students think that, okay, I'm going to study tomorrow but they don't actually schedule it into their calendar and then they never do it. And so organization, you know, time management are very important skills that the student needs to have in order to be successful online. And then they have the flexibility. So one of the best things about studying online and distance learning is you are able to study when you want to. So you can study. Some people study really well at 2 a.m. Others, they can't. Yeah, that would be one of the camps. Right. So the one good thing about distance learning is the flexibility. What about people who are, because I've had classmates like this in university, maybe you did too, the ones who for on purpose would wait until the very last minute to try and do something, get an assignment finished, write a paper, whatever it was. And you would be working on it incrementally and trying to keep it relatively smooth but those people just couldn't function if they weren't tied up against a hard deadline. The students like that experience more or fewer challenges say in a distance learning environment. In any learning environment, we already suggest to a student that you study little by little.  But like you mentioned, there are students that will cram at the end and try to read and write and submit at the very last minute. So we highly suggest in our orientation that we have a student and we pace yourself. It's like a race, pace yourself. You know, don't start out very quickly and then sputter out at the end.  So there's a lot of different things that you need to plan. So I mean planning is a key but some people just do drive on that adrenaline at the end and trying to submit. How about faculty? Are there, are there, you mentioned you have faculty all over the world. What kinds of qualifications do faculty need to have in order to become part of the Aston University model? Most of our faculty have doctorate degrees, so either a PhD, a DBA, or a JD, which are the doctorates in the specialty fields of the business administration that we offer. If a faculty member has special subject matter expertise in a specific field but does not have a doctorate, then we may also evaluate that candidate as one of our instructors. So some people may have their master degree in economics, but maybe does not have a PhD, but they are the subject matter expert in that field and so we may evaluate that instructor and have them come on board to help as well. I can see where that would make good sense, say in disciplines like accounting or finance, where CPA is very, very important in order to be licensed, to be an accountant, or perhaps in finance where you might be a certified financial professional or a certified stockbroker or tax preparer or whatever. And in those cases, it might be pointless to have a doctorate degree, which really need is that the expertise in that particular discipline. Is it difficult in your opinion to recruit faculty from all over the world? Not all faculty have worked online and so there's some really fantastic faculty who come from brick and mortar universities and that are just fantastic in person with students. We specifically do look for instructors that have more capabilities in being able to connect and engage with the student online. And that's not as easy necessarily in an online environment as it is in a brick and mortar where you can see your teacher and say hi and good morning to them. So we do look for people who have worked in an online capacity when we bring them on to our staff. How about your administrators? Because I know that you have some in Cyprus, some in Turkey, some in the continental US, some here. How do you all manage to get together to collaborate on different projects or get your daily assignments finished? We use a lot of online tools. So there's several online tools that we use to organize ourselves in the administration area and one is called Zoom. It's a go-to meeting type of a connection where you can go online, you can actually see each person and you can talk there, you can record the conversations, you can record the meetings that you have, you can share your screen to show people where you need to go, what do you need to do and things like that. And then we have another really big tool that we use and it's called Asana. And both of those tools help organize our projects and kind of give us a project management layout and then assist us in being able to facilitate amongst remote workers the project that needs to be done. So you could have students telecommute, you can have faculty telecommute, you've got administrators telecommuting. Tell me about the kinds of programs that you offer. Are there some programs that are perhaps easier to deliver in an online or distance format than maybe some other topics? The programs that we deliver are business administration programs. So our Bachelor of Business Administration and our Masters of Business Administration and then we also do a English as a second language course. And so that has been actually very successful. We do it in a hybrid online and tutoring type of a session. So each student gets the opportunity to study with our materials on an online platform. So 80% of their work is done online speaking, reading, writing, and then they schedule a one-to-one personal appointment each week with their instructor and they get to actually converse with them online through Zoom. And so they really love that part of it because that's really where they also can make a connection, especially when you're trying to teach English. Yes, I can imagine that. It's tough if you can't see and pronounce and see the articulation. Yeah, that's true. The guys in the booth speaking of speaking English are telling me in English that we need to get ready for a break. So let's do that, hang around, don't move. We will be back in about 60 seconds. This is Working Together on Think Tech Hawaiʻi. We'll be right back. Aloha, I'm Kili Ikeena and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock PM on Think Tech Hawaiʻi's Hawaiʻi Together. In Hawaiʻi Together we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government, and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaiʻi Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaiʻi Together. I'm Kili Ikeena. Aloha. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. Welcome back to Working Together on Think Tech Hawaiʻi. I'm Cheryl Crozier-Garcia and we are talking today with Rochelle Kim, the Managing Director at Aston American University about the changes to university education that are possible using various kinds of online media. Now, Rochelle, you and I had talked before and this was something I had never thought about. Now, I've been a university instructor for 22 years. I started teaching when I was eight. But I never had to ever worry about issues of censorship. I could pretty much, within reason, pick the textbooks I wanted, the supplemental readings that I wanted. If I wanted to address a specific topic in a specific way, academic freedom has always allowed me to do that. But that isn't true necessarily for all of the students that Aston reaches out to. So, can you tell us a little bit about some of those kinds of censorship issues that may come up and what do you do to get around them? Some of our students cannot even get Skype or cannot get some of the internet channels that there are, you know, apps that we're trying to use. So, we have to find other ways to contact them. So, some of my tutors that normally we use Zoom or we use Skype to do a one-to-one. But in certain countries, I think it's like Qatar, Oman, they're not allowed to have Skype. So, then we have to find what they're using like WhatsApp or there's others we chat or whatever it is that they're using in order to do our one-to-ones with them. So, we go out of our way to find the technological means to be able to contact our students. And then, some of our students are not allowed to get textbooks. So, I think that was the one we were talking about. Right. Where, you know, a lot of universities might require you to purchase a specific textbook in order to shake this class. Well, they can't receive the textbook because they're in China or in another country that doesn't allow specific books or things to come in. So, all of our resources are done online. So, everything that we have is on our learning management platform. And sometimes we connect to links. I think we talked about this as well. And the link might get broken. So, we'll have to find other links that will work with that. Our teachers are good at finding those links and filling in the things that they need to when missing piece of information is gone. How challenging is it for a student, say, who lives in a country that has relatively strict censorship laws? And I'm thinking specifically of perhaps those in the Middle East where not only are there issues about what you can and cannot bring into the country, but also rules about who gets to socialize amongst each other. Do any of those issues become problems? Like, do you have to go and look, say specifically for male or female faculty to meet the needs of male or female students in countries that are gender segregated? Those issues haven't come up for us in terms of online because most of our interactions are through, like I said, our learning management system. So, they're able to log in and they can work with different instructors. So, if we do once in a while have requests from students that want to have a different instructor and we try to accommodate requests if it's something that they really want. But for the most part, our instructors are fantastic. And so, anyone can work with them if need be. That's good to know.  And I was not aware that they were actually doing this, but they would purposefully segregate themselves. So, all of the male students would ask for, say, office hour time right around the same time. And the female students were nowhere to be found. And then the female students would say, well, we'd like to come, can we come see you on Friday at two o'clock? Sure, you can do that. And the male students at that point were nowhere to be found. And I discovered that later, like, why is it that they're always like that? And it's because in their home country, there's no such thing as coeducation, that is to say, genders together. It's either the males are all in one school with male teachers and male staff and administrators or all females with an all female faculty, all female administrators. And it was incredible. The women loved it. The men found it a little bit challenging because they had never actually had a woman, say, in a position to evaluate their work or to assess performance in any way. And they didn't know how to handle when it was no, it's really not an A. It really is a C. And let me show you why. And they had some real difficulties in dealing with that. Are there cultural issues that come up, say, in distance education that make it more challenging? For us in distance education, we have to deal with a lot of different cultures. It's not just one area that we're working with. We're working with people from so many parts of the world.  But when they come to us, we are set up as an American university. And so when they come to us and want to attend our university, then we do let them know that you're going to be following American standards and the American ways of education. So there will be differences necessarily than maybe their own culture. So it is really set up for American education to be shared with international students. And so the students love that part of it. They want to know about the culture of America. They want to know about what do you eat? What is hamburgers? What is French fries and pizza? And so we also do fun things like that where we will talk about have discussion boards about just American pastimes or American life. And that's a dream. For a lot of the international students, the dream is to come and immigrate to the US. And what is it like? What is it really like in the US? Do you have a way of tracking where your graduates end up? Most of our students right now, we're still very new, are still living and working in their own countries. But like I said, a lot of them want to come to the US and immigrate. And so they take classes with us. And we also offer a prep class in IELTS, which is the International English Standards. And so we help them with those type of English proficiency so that when they go to their immigration office, they can speak about the things that they're going to be asked about and in immigration. Wow, that's great. And do you do sort of interview coaching? Right now we're not doing interview coaching, but in that prep class, we help them with several different parts of the tests that they're going to need to know. And part of it is the interview that they're going to face with the immigration officers. That's got to be scary. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't even like going through customs in different countries. Right. No, just a little bit creepy for me. But so I can only imagine what a student would have to really emotionally prepare almost the way an actor would prepare to put on a play or to do some kind of performance.  We really try to prepare our students for what they will face if they do get to come to the U.S. And so career planning, you know, preparing yourself in terms of your, what kind of job are you going to want to apply for once you get your education, you know, those kind of things that we discuss with our students as well. Yeah. Do you have a career placement office? We have a career planning program and we're expanding that program. It's very exciting for us. We're expanding two programs right now, which is our career planning program and then also our entrepreneurship program. Wow, that's great. Let me ask you a little bit about the doctoral program because you said that you had, you were focusing on the DBA, Doctor of Business Administration, rather than on the PhD. I don't know that our audience knows the difference between the two degrees. So could you tell us what those differences are? Sure. Both are research degrees. The Doctor of Business Administration will be taking more coursework in order to complete their requirements for the doctorate. And then the PhD is mainly a research study, either quantitative or qualitative. So it would depend what they select in terms of that. On the DBA, it is more quantitative versus the qualitative. And do students say who would have been accepted into the DBA program, are they allowed to choose, say, their own research topic that they would write on? We have not accepted any DBAs yet. Yeah, our program will be beginning shortly. We'll have a launch date on our DBA within the next three months. Wow, that's great. That is so exciting. I realize that at the moment you're not really accepting students from the U.S., but I think that the moves in education that we've been seeing from other universities who have a similar type of distance education model, and moving towards terminal degrees like the doctorates, really are opening up education to groups of people who would not have been able to otherwise contribute to society in that way. Yeah, I mean, part of our mission is to deliver an attainable higher education. And so for us, attainable means two things. One is for people, like you said, that never thought that they could do this. It is an attainable goal and reachable goal. And the other part of attainable is the cost. A lot of it is, you know, some of the DBA degrees are very, very expensive. And for us, attainable means that we're going to be offering at reasonable prices. Do you operate only in U.S. currency or are you able to accept currency? We can accept other currencies through our Western Union pay. So Western Union pay will do the conversion for us. Wow. So you really are just approaching it from a perspective of let's try to get rid of all the roadblocks. Let's kick all of the bumps and smooth out the surface. That's so great. I mean, because you don't want an education to be easy.  It sounds like you're doing a really good job of just like smoothing out that environment so that the student can focus on what's really important, which is that mastery of new knowledge. Yeah. For us, the practical real-world skills is what we would like to give our students. And so students can come to us and learn about the different theories and the different concepts. But what we want to give them is a practical real world skill that they can actually take out into the workforce and say, I'm using the things that I learned here in the workforce, like how to write a resume or how to network online with other people or how to complete a LinkedIn profile. Things that actually make them look better to their employers and that they can apply in their actual work environment. Wow. I wish I had had that model in high school. I had the joy once of telling my high school math teacher that algebra had not helped me at all in my future life. And we're running out of time. We're almost done. You know, learning is a lifelong process. From the moment we're born until we take our last breath, our experiences color and shape the way we see the world around us. Broader perspectives mean that we are better able to cope with that which is different. Education, especially university education, is one of those broadening experiences that has both personal and societal advantages. As an individual, a university graduate has the ability to think broadly and innovatively about the issues he or she faces. Society benefits from an educated populace that is able to make decisions for the good of the entire community and understands the risks of both taking action and failing to take action to address concerns. Without education, humankind could not have progressed to where we are today. And if we want to continue to grow and improve, we've got to commit to educating the future generations. That's all for today on Working Together. On behalf of all of the volunteer citizen journalists here at Think Tech Hawaii, thank you for watching. I'll be back in two weeks. Till then, take care.


So FreeNAS has reached 11.2 RC1 or release candidate one and boy they have quashed a 173 bugs and added 12 features. So lots of bugs here are pretty cool. Lots of lists, everything from typos to boot environment list dates, there's a lot of little stuff, but these are all those details that you expect by time it comes into release candidate. So it's looking really nice. Some of them were you didn't know what it was doing when it would be the best way to describe it. So it would not have proper UI updates to know like a progress bar and stuff like that. So they fixed all kinds of little stuff and really brought this along. A couple of feature updates, added EMMC flash storage, revise updates page, added ID storage pages, added ability to specify jail root. Really cool. Updated IO plugins. This is the big one we're going to talk about here. Add infinite scroll to entity table, move string from task type section to into help text files. Add clone ACL CLIT. That's kind of neat. So you're going to clone the ACLs from the command line. When you're doing some larger scale stuff, command line sometimes becomes easier than GUI to do stuff like that. So nice they added that. Add ability show mounts while jail is running. That was a bug I think I talked about before is it just wouldn't show them and you had to stop the jail. And now you don't. So that's really cool. So interface wise, it looks much the same, but more polished put on it. So I've said this before, I really like it. Some people as much as I am used to the old one, I've seen a lot of people say, I still like the old interface. I'm like, I kind of like this better. I mean, it's pretty neat. I like the fact that I can just click on hard drives. I can see status of things. It tells me it's healthy. I can jump right into reports. I don't know why this isn't hyperlinked, but at least the reports are right to the storage pools. But easy enough, they're on the side here. Go to pools and away you go. Now something cool and maybe I missed this in the last one, but one, they've added a nice consistency to the UI. I've seen this in different sections where you can control and customize the tabs that show up here for each one. But this is what's kind of neat. I don't know when this got added, but you can do individual for self-encrypting hard drives if they have that support. You can put the individual self-encrypting drive passwords for each drive in here. And I thought that's kind of neat. So it can add an extra layer. So instead of just relying on the OS encryption, you can also encrypt the drives and then use the OS encryption too. So now you've really, really got things encrypted.  You can double encrypt everything if you want. So that's kind of nice. Most of the other stuff, it's very much the same, but more polished added to it so far as what I've seen. Now let's jump over to the plugins because that's weird. There are some changes. People have asked me, well, what about own cloud? What about next cloud? How are those working? They're gone. There is no next cloud. Nope. Own cloud. That's missing too. Not here. So I'm guessing with IO cage and the updates to that, they just changed a few things, including removing them because I was told by people that it were broken. I had not tried them with the previous version. They were in here, but didn't work properly. I was told. But apparently they are still not working properly because now they're removed. So I'm assuming this list and the updates to the plugins is a list of these are the plugins that currently work. So those are the ones that are available in here. I didn't try each one of the plugins. I did try Plex. Plex seems to be working perfectly fine. No issues there. The reports are looking a little bit nicer. So once again, it's all these little polishing updates because it's in release candidate now. So I'm assuming other than finding more little bugs here and there that for the most part, this is interface release stable enough to say this is what it's going to look like. This is probably how the final product is going to go. And I really like how it works. I like the way you can just jump into the shell here. It seems very snappy compared to the last time. So I think some of the under the hood stuff they did just made this work a lot better. And overall, it's we're still just sitting on my test bench, but we're actually looking at probably building a second free NAS for the office. And when we build out this free NAS, we're probably going to load even though it's release candidates, we're just building a backup free NAS to replicate everything for us. We're probably going to run this on it. And so far, I really haven't had any problems with it. Never done anything super extensive, mostly just dumping data and playing with the cloud backup. And I didn't try it since I took the new one yet, but I'm sure it still works. That was kind of cool that it does the encrypted cloud backup. That's a feature I'm really excited about. And I've said that before with the other reviews, but hey, that's really cool. Having it pre encrypt all the cloud backups so you can easily take your free NAS.  That's really nice. That's a nice feature on there. I did try something else because someone had mentioned that the authorized assets was broken in ice fuzzy. If you wanted to have encrypted ice fuzzy initiators, that seems to be perfectly fine. Now that was in the bug list of things they fixed. So now you can add a password to your ice fuzzy without a problem. You can put it in here. I think a group ID was zero and it doesn't fail anymore with the password. It was a weird problem what it was doing. So I couldn't put that in here. So now it works and I can click save and it will do it. Actually, I got to put a password long enough. Those of you don't know and that may be I'm going to be doing some new videos soon. But for ice fuzzy, your password must be between 12 and 16 characters, not 11 and not 17 ice because he has some very specific requirements for that. I'm going to do a separate video once this comes out or maybe not. This isn't release candidate. I'm going to start doing some new free NAS videos because I assume this is how it's going to look in the end. And maybe if I find some bugs, I will be reporting them as well. But so far, everything seems to work perfectly fine. I didn't try this, but I know in the bug list was some features for when you have to replace encrypted drives. Once again, I'll be doing some new videos coming up soon on all the processes. There are same videos I did with the previous version of free NAS, but I'll be doing them because of the new UI. And I think they've made things a little bit more intuitive with this. So they're going to be a little bit easier to do. But that's it. Go ahead and download it if you're interested. Obviously, be careful, back it up because this is still release candidate. It's still in a beta phase, but we're out of the regular beta into that release candidate. So this is just the fine tuning. So pretty soon, it's on a roadmap. They're going to have the release candidate, and we'll go here. And so far, what I've seen with this, I don't think I have any problems switching over my production system to this once it comes into full release because nothing about it has struck me as anything I don't like. I do like as well for those who don't know. So as much as I like the reporting, it still has in far as I know this is all staying in, of course. And the system overview with net data is still built in. So they're keeping that up to date, which is awesome, because as much as I like the reporting that they have added and they made it look really nice, it's still not net data. Net data is just really extensive, which is why they integrated in here. But overall, definitely happy with it.  So look for updated videos coming soon of all the new features in here as I make tutorials and how to set up sharing in here and everything else. And I probably will do a new getting started video based on this version. I may wait till release candidate two. So I know it's as stable as possible or wait till it fully comes out. Alright, thanks. Leave questions, comments below. you're interested in notifications. Hopefully they send them as we've learned with you two. Anyways, if you want to contract us for consulting services, you go ahead and hit launch systems.com and you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you. We work with a lot of small businesses, IT companies, even some large companies, and you can farm different work out to us or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network. Also, if you want to help the channel in other ways, we have a Patreon. We have affiliate links. You'll find them in the description. You'll also find recommendations to other affiliate links and things you can sign up for on LawrenceSystems.com. Once again, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.


Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, around the world, children are the silent victims of war, subjected to unimaginable horrors and atrocities. And in 1989, world leaders made a historic commitment by adopting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, CRC, defining children's identity and acknowledging their special needs and rights. The CRC is to date the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, with 196 state parties. However, despite member states' obligations to uphold these rights through the ratification of the Convention, the reality of today's world shows that the number of gray violations against children in armed conflict verified by the United Nations continues to increase year after year. Collectively, the international community must strengthen its actions to ensure respect for international humanitarian and human rights law in situations of armed conflict, to prevent gray violations against children and to reduce the impact of conflict. There is a need to remind the international community about the consensus to protect children affected by armed conflict and rally behind the instrument that has already been agreed upon widely. Therefore to do so, and in my capacity as special representative of the Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict, I will launch in 2024 a global campaign advocating for renewed commitment and compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This campaign will last for three years and give a central place to the voices of children in order for them to be heard and included in key political negotiations and agreements. It is time for us to commit to our engagement and do better and more. Let us stand in solidarity with children who, despite facing unimaginable challenges, dare to dream of a better future. I thank you.