Don't miss out on the ScrapScene giveaway for a kit from WeScrap! Click here to enter.
It's that time of year! The sun is shining, days are longer, and everything is "coming up roses!" — actually, more than just roses. Scrapbook Heaven is having a Flower Garden Online Crop! Our Design Team will share some beautiful variations of hand-made flowers with you. Create a project of your choosing, using the flower tutorial, and you'll have your name entered for our grand prize! Our crop starts on Friday, May 20th, in the Scrapbook Heaven forum. Projects are due May 29th. Hope to see you there!
A bunch of us love our cuddly canines right? Or our Other furry little friends I bet! There are many organizations out there to dedicated to helping out our lap dogs, cuddly cats, and so on. Bree, Illyse and I are all are dog lovers and all of our dogs are rescue dogs. The challenge is it quite an easy one, just show us your layout with your cat or dog and tell us something special about him/her. Make sure to please link the layout in your post! This challenge will begin today, May, 16th and end Wednesday, June 1st. And of course, there is a prize!
My Scraps & More is having a Grand Opening Sketch Crop! All of the challenges will be a sketch with a twist! There will also be games and chances to win some great prizes!! Our crop will start on May 20th but look for pre-crop challenges to start soon! Please visit our message board for all of the information on this fun upcoming crop and to get yourself signed up to join in!
This entry was written by Angie and posted on May 18, 2011 at 7:52 am	and filed under Calls, Competitions, Events, Giveaways, Scrapbooking, scrapscene. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.	Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.


The dimensional model is a thing of beauty when it is done right. It is designed independently of vendor and architecture. It is built with fact tables for every process, conformed dimensions, hierarchies, slowly changing dimensions, bridges, aggregates and so on. It is a work of art you print on a plotter and hang on your office wall for business users to gaze upon in total awe. It is the map you use to trace data lineage and figure out join paths. It is the reference guide for enhancement impact analysis.
When I received the email notice from the TDWI Dallas Chapter about an upcoming Big Data event, I was interested. The meeting was at 8:00 a.m. on a Friday, the traffic wouldn’t be ideal, but it sounded like this might be a good opportunity. Why would it be a good opportunity? Bill Inmon was in town!
Business Intelligence guru, analyst and author, Wayne Eckerson, and I had great times when we worked together at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI). Although we have both moved on to other ventures, we remain in touch and I still like reading his books and articles. I particularly enjoyed the first chapter of his most recent book, Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders, where he talks about the concept of “purple people.” But before I explain that, read this concept from Wayne in his book.
There have been several advancements within the Hadoop world that have positioned Hadoop closer to the data warehousing community than ever before. With a series of Hadoop 2.0 releases starting in October 2013, Hadoop is now much closer to being a platform for a data warehouse.
Every once in a while I brush aside all the stacks of paper on my desk and tell myself to spend a couple hours deep diving into some topic to see where it takes me. If browsers could heat up from over-use, there would be smoke coming out of my office for those two hours. This time I focused on an IDC report that came out towards the end of 2013. I had seen this phrase a few times before, but for some reason it really caught my eye this time: The Third Platform.


TITLE "The Metal Opera - Japan SHM-CD (MICP-30098) PaperSleeve Ltd. Ed."
TITLE "Reach Out for the Light"
TITLE "The Glory of Rome"
TITLE "Sign of the Cross"


Cash is king in any industry, but in the restaurant business it is particularly vital to carefully balance cash in and cash out. This blog examines the most common challenges faced by business owners and offers practical advice and solutions to help restaurants with their cash flow.
Fluctuating payroll – more so than in a lot of businesses, restaurant payroll can fluctuate up and down and this can be a nightmare for restaurant owners. The reasons for this are plentiful – seasonality, high staff turnover and varying hourly rates dependant on experience. It requires careful scrutiny and management to ensure that costs are affordable and that the business remains profitable. Restaurant staff usually expect to be paid weekly, so paying them on time presents an ongoing pressure on cash flow and is a non-negotiable cost. Without a team the restaurant cannot remain open. It is a good idea to set a budget, either weekly or monthly and make it is adhered to. Forecasting can help to set the appropriate budget, taking in to account seasonality.
Not having time to forecast – Knowing your numbers is paramount for business owners, but often finance slips down the priority list and becomes an after-thought. The benefits of forecasting and planning are enormous. Not only can you minimise surprises by planning ahead, you are also far less likely to be de-railed by an unexpected bill or the heightened cash flow pressures of peak season.
Seasonality – understanding the flow of money throughout the year means that you can plan ways to manage it in advance, rather than reacting in a panic when it is too late. Particularly in hospitality, depending where you are in the world, there will be times of year that are much slower than others and in those times you need to ensure you can keep your doors open. Unless you are very lucky, fixed costs like rent will remain the same all year round, so this usually requires that you scale back on flexible overheads like staff costs and readjust ordering according to customer demand. On the other hand, during peak season you will most likely need to accommodate paying temporary staff and allocate money for how payroll will change as a result.
Lack of contingency cash – like owning a car or a house, owning a restaurant comes with the risk of unexpected expenses. Whether that is a bill, a faulty appliance or another cost, it can have a big impact on your cash flow. Operating hand-to-mouth, without a cash buffer means that you run the risk of any such unexpected cost derailing your business completely. Keeping a contingency fund, as well as taking out insurance means that you safeguard the future of the business.
Relying on credit – if you want to stay on top of the numbers make sure you have an efficient way to manage your outstanding invoices. Cloud accounting software is great for providing an up-to-the-minute cash flow picture but use whatever suits you. If it worries you, where possible, try to pay for deliveries on arrival. There might be discounts available for paying immediately or within a week of delivery and so this method has multiple cash flow benefits.
Scrutinise your menu - Your menu can have a massive impact on your cash flow. Make sure you do not stock a lot of high price/low margin items – keep your menu concise – customers are usually overwhelmed by too many choices and you can concentrate on delivering fewer dishes to a high quality. Remove slower moving dishes from the menu altogether and keep inventory as low as possible to minimise waste. Make sure someone is in charge of monitoring stock - you are far less likely to have surplus stock to throw away or find your self out of pocket if you keep careful tabs on it all. Keep a close eye on how much your inventory costs – if your suppliers put their prices up then you need to consider doing that as well. Make sure that your menu looks great and is easy to understand and put high margin dishes in plain sight or on a ‘specials’ areas of the menu.
Shop around – use different suppliers and negotiate discounts wherever you can. Over reliance on a singular supplier may sometimes give you bulk discounts but one supplier is rarely the cheapest for everything and knowing that you are sourcing your ingredients elsewhere may make them more competitive. Bear in mind that if a delivery is late and you have to take popular dishes off the menu, it is your cash flow that suffers, so it is prudent to ensure that you have multiple people to call on for last minute requirements if you are suddenly let down.
Planning and forecasting – track your cash flow weekly to spot trends and fluctuations. Your future-self will thank you as you can use history to predict and forecast for the coming years. Ideally you would plan your budget at least six months ahead. If you are able to, look back over several years to avoid being driven off course by one off spikes or troughs caused by external factors.
Seasonality planning – Yearly budgeting does not always work with a restaurant due to the seasonal nature of sales so individual monthly or quarterly plans might suit you better. Remember to factor in changes to pay roll as your team size expands or reduces. If you are not confident planning and forecasting, ask an expert. There are now a wide range of companies offering part-time Financial Directors or you can ask you accountant. This type of support is exactly what they are there for and a good one will take an active role in advising you on all financial matters to do with your business. In addition to forecasting budgets and planning for payroll, seasonality may demand some attention on marketing. Online discount voucher sites or offers and promotions in local media will help you to fill tables during quieter months.
Business Cash Advance – Even with the right planning and management, cash flow is always a challenge. If you want to reinvest in your business, refurbish or take on a new premises for example, or if seasonality puts on too much pressure you could consider partnering with an external finance provider. If your restaurant business takes card payments and needs a cash flow boost then a Business Cash Advance (BCA) is the perfect solution. It works like a business loan but with flexible, instead of fixed, monthly repayments. You can borrow up to 125% of your monthly card takings, from £5,000 to £150,000+, and only pay back what you can afford.


I'm solo traveler and I need to get to Koh Samui from Krabi on Oct 4. How do I take the bus? In addition, how much does it cost, how long does it take, what are the schedules and should I book in advance?
The bus leaves 3 times a day, the last one (16.00) will take you to the night ferry (overnight journey), the others take about 4 - 5 hours total. Price is 350 - 400 baht per ticket (bus + boat). No need to book in advance, you can pick up a ticket here in any agent. There is also a direct flight operated by Bangkok Airways which is considerably faster, though more expensive.


Ajs Amethyst House can accommodate woman in pregnancy. Woman should abstain from all substance use while pregnant. If you or a loved one needs help staying clean and sober while pregnant please call us today at 855 221 1717.
Current research shows that alcoholism is also known as a family disease. Alcoholics may have young, teenage, or grown-up children; they have wives or husbands; they have brothers or sisters; they have parents or other relatives. An alcoholic can totally disrupt family life and cause harmful effects that can last a lifetime. Each member of the family may be affected by alcohol differently. Parental alcoholism may affect the fetus even before a child is born. In pregnant women, alcohol is carried to all the mother’s organs and tissues, including the placenta, where it easily crosses through the membrane separating the maternal and fetal blood systems. When a pregnant woman drinks an alcoholic beverage, the concentration of alcohol in her unborn baby’s bloodstream is the same level as her own. A pregnant woman who consumes alcohol during her pregnancy may give birth to a baby with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is one of the three top known causes of birth defects. Per the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, about 5000 babies are born each year with severe damage caused by FAS; another 35000 babies are born with more mild forms of FAS (Berger, p.37).
What are Triggers in Addiction?


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Phone Number of Affinity Group Credit Union is (248)334-0568 / 800-552-8643 .
Affinity Group Credit Union is a financial undertaking that render various banking services to customers. The financial undertaking is serving customers from last six decades through six locations. The union provide services under different categories, the union provide accounts of various types that includes saving accounts, CD accounts and business accounts. Affinity Group Credit Union also provide loans of various types to customers. The union offers easy and affordable car loan, home loans and other loans on reasonable interest rates. The bank also deliver all types of master cards that consists of debit card, credit card and visa cards. Affinity Group Credit Union also offers money order services and provide stamps of different types. The union also provide insurance plans to customers. The union has designed plans that suits the needs of every customers. The union also provide wealth management and deposit schemes to account holders with assured benefits.
The address of Affinity Group Credit Union is 22855 Gibraltar Rd, Flat Rock, MI 48134, United States.
The customer support phone number of Affinity Group Credit Union is (248)334-0568 / 800-552-8643 (Click phone number to call).
The postal and official address, email address and phone number (helpline) of Affinity Group Credit Union Service Center and Affinity Group Credit Union customer service phone number is given below. The helpline of Affinity Group Credit Union customer service phone number may or may not be toll free.
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Area employers seeking qualified candidates to fill entry level through career positions, as well as internships and educational/training opportunities, are encouraged to participate in the annual Lima Campus Fall Job and Internship Fair.
This annual event will be held in the Cook Hall Gymnasium from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. on Thursday, September 14, 2017.
A wide array of businesses and organizations from industry, healthcare, education, and a multitude of professional companies are represented at the campus fair each year. Job seekers planning to attend are encouraged to bring copies of their professional resume and dress for the potential of interviewing during the event.
Organizers anticipate more than 100 participants, ranging from organizations with plans to hire on the spot to others looking to make career connections with potential attendees. Rhodes State career services will be available to will help those at the fair gain needed experience and build a stronger resume to begin the career of their choice.
For more information contact Krista Richardson at Richardson.K@RhodesState.edu or (419) 995-8312.


C.O.B.R.A. Self Defense is a Police Academy for Civilians. Combining experience in law enforcement, close quarter combat techniques, martial arts and the psychology of criminal intent the Combat Objective Battle Ready Application, or C.O.B.R.A. Self Defense system is designed to be highly effective in real world situations where your survival is on the line. Offering adult and children's classes.
Our Active Shooter Response Plan is internationally recognized. Unlike many government based active shooter programs, COBRA-Defense is NOT restricted by red tape and regulations.
COBRA is a private organization that conducts highly effective Active Shooter training without the burden of political correctness or ignoring reality. COBRA was developed from real law enforcement training and field experience, including it's Active Shooter division.


Do you need to sell your home fast in Lexington, Massachusetts with no hassles or fees?
ExpertHomeOffers.comTM is the largest network of real estate experts who purchase homes fast. We connect you with local home buyers in Lexington, Massachusetts who want to purchase your home fast. Our affiliates in Lexington, Massachusetts are local to your area and professionals you can count on. At ExpertHomeOffers.comTM experience, integrity and honesty are part of every offer. Our #1 goal is to help you sell your Lexington, Massachusetts home fast!
If you would like to receive a fast, confidential, no-obligation offer on your home please complete our on-line seller form and our local Lexington, Massachusetts home buying expert will be in contact with you shortly.
We buy houses in Lexington, Massachusetts. We buy houses in any area, any price range, and any condition. The professionals at ExpertHomeOffers.comTM are experienced Home Buyers. We often give you multiple offers to choose from so you can sell your home fast! We can pay CA$H, take over your loan or lease option your home immediately.


Your anger? It’s telling you where you feel powerless.
Your anxiety? It’s telling you that something in your life is off balance.
Your fear? It’s telling you what you care about.
Your apathy? It’s telling you where you’re overextended and burnt out.
I haven’t been here in a while…so I’m just now catching up. As always, thank you sis.


Hundreds of brands of wireless headphones can make you confused when you are going to pick one of them. It could be daunting sometimes to pick the best one. As there have been so many products on the market, it is pretty impossible to choose quickly. For some people, they might have considered many things and set the list of the quality, brands, warranty, features, technology and more in one brand. It could take time when you have to make a checklist for every consideration. That is why you need a review to make your work faster. Staying at the store to buy this legit accessory could waste your time, and you may be more confused when you have to face so many brands. You may find headphones that meet the requirements you have made, but it does take times. If you want to play safe and you don’t want to get distracted with too many consideration lists, you have to go directly to choose the brands that have been believed as top brands. Wireless Headphones Guru will give you top 2 wireless headphones brands that you can take and save your time in choosing the best ones. The top 2 brands are listed based on the internet surveys, and we concluded these three top brands.
Talking about headphones, you should have dealt with Audio Technica. This brand is the top brands that have got the highest rate. If you come as professional DJ, this brand should have been the first brand mentioned. The Japanese brand has been around in sound industry more than a half century. The manufacturer has got many awards, and most of them go for their style, comfort, durability and audio quality. The various products given by Audio Technica makes they keep living in the market. The range is pretty long so the users can make it fit their budget for Audio Technica products.
The second brand is Beyerdynamic.
It is very close to the quality rate of Audio-Technica. This Beyerdynamic still gets the most attention in several products too. Those who love music, this wireless headphones brand have been the first choice among hundreds of brands living in the market. It is one of the senior brands that till now catch up the technologies and competition in providing the best range of price and quality. Six years later, this brand will be 100 years old and becomes one the most legendary headphone brands in the world.
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Comments: $9,962 off MSRP! $7,050 below Invoice! 2018 Ford F-150 XLT Magma Red With some available options like Equipment Group 301A Mid (Cloth 40/20/40 Front Seat, Power Glass Heated Sideview Mirrors, and Radio: Single-CD/SiriusXM w/7 Speakers), Trailer Tow Package, XLT Chrome Appearance Package (Chrome Step Bars and Wheels: 18" Chrome-Like PVD), 3.55 Axle Ratio, 4-Wheel Disc Brakes, 6 Speakers, ABS brakes, Air Conditioning, AM/FM radio, Brake assist, Bumpers: chrome, CD player, Compass, Delay-off headlights, Driver door bin, Driver vanity mirror, Dual front impact airbags, Dual front side impact airbags, Electronic Locking w/3.55 Axle Ratio, Electronic Stability Control, Emergency communication system: 911 Assist, Front anti-roll bar, Front Center Armrest w/Storage, Front fog lights, Front reading lights, Front wheel independent suspension, Fully automatic headlights, Illuminated entry, Low tire pressure warning, Occupant sensing airbag, Outside temperature display, Overhead airbag, Panic alarm, Passenger door bin, Passenger vanity mirror, Power door mirrors, Power steering, Power windows, Pro Trailer Backup Assist, Radio data system, Radio: AM/FM Stereo/Single-CD Player, Rear step bumper, Remote keyless entry, Security system, Speed control, Speed-sensing steering, Split folding rear seat, Steering wheel mounted audio controls, SYNC, Tachometer, Telescoping steering wheel, Tilt steering wheel, Traction control, Variably intermittent wipers, Voltmeter, and Wheels: 17" Silver Painted Aluminum Prices may not included Dealer added accessories.


Nause-Waiwash Band of Indians, Inc.
On Saturday, October 13, 2018. Councilwoman Eva “White Raven” Bartrum and Steve “Morning Crow” Abbott represented the Nause-Waiwash at the 2018 Nanticoke River Jamboree at Handsell.
©2018 Nause-Waiwash Band of Indians, Inc.


Under the tent, Bartlett High Principal Tim Jones (at left) and Bartlett City Schools Superintendent Dr. David Stephens are on hand Thursday afternoon for a meet-and-greet event. Photo by Carolyn Bahm.
Bartlett High’s $61 million “Built for Bartlett” renovation project gets underway this week, with major work planned for this summer.
Tim Weatherford, vice president and area manager for Memphis construction company Flintco LLC, listed some of the work that will be ongoing over two years, including utility relocation, the tear-down of two buildings (the cafeteria and the 100-year-old auditorium) and the start of new construction.
This summer the work also includes the building of a new student parking lot and the installation of artificial turf and a drainage system on the high school’s new football field. The turf is expected to save the school thousands annually in reduced maintenance, improve playability in inclement weather and improve aesthetics.
Flintco is partnered with Linkous Construction Co. Inc. and is working with Fleming Architects in Bartlett, Weatherford said.
“I think working with Fleming Architects and the superintendent of the schools, David Stephens, has been a very collaborative effort, making sure that this meets the needs and the desires for the Bartlett community to transform this school for years to come,” Weatherford said.
Weatherford provided the update at an informal “meet and greet” at the current high school entrance on May 24. The event displayed conceptual drawings of the renovations as well as a detailed staging and logistics plan for how construction will be handled safely once school is back in session this fall. That plan along took nine months to complete.
Bartlett High also will host a groundbreaking ceremony for the project at 5 p.m. June 4 at the main entrance to the school, 5688 Woodlawn Drive, Bartlett.
5 p.m. June 4 at the main entrance to the school, 5688 Woodlawn St., Bartlett. The ceremony will mark the beginning of the “Built for Bartlett” high school renovation project.


'It took me a long time to understand my water lilies,' Monet wrote of his pond at Giverny. 'I had planted them for the pure pleasure of it, and I grew them without thinking of painting them...And then, all of a sudden, I had the revelation of the enchantment of my pond. I took up my palette. Since then I've had no other model.' The pond became Monet's most enduring motif, the water lilies the most celebrated flowers he ever painted. This book tells the story of their role as a central source of artistic inspiration, bringing exciting insights into Monet's work as a gardener and painter.
Vivian Russell also describes the making of the water garden which, in contrast to the flower garden, was to be meditative and mysterious, in tune with the Japanese aesthetic. She reveals how Monet chose his water lilies from plants bred specially by Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac at his nursery near Bordeaux. Her superb photographs capturing the ephemeral beauty of the flowers, and the way they appear to float on clouds and undulating rushes, portray the changing moods of the pond, complementing Monet's own serene poems to light.


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At Bob Sherwin Ltd we aim to bring you the widest choice of used cars in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire and at great prices. We have some fantastic deals on used SEAT cars, which are always changing. Browse our used cars below and contact us for more information on any of our second hand cars.


Obviously you don't have to go with a flower theme too but I couldn't resist. I love blossom - it's nature's version of confetti. It also reminds me that it's the time of year that students should start knuckling down to revising for exams if they haven't already!
I hadn't inked up these blossoms yet from the CBS set, Love Blossoms but I'm glad I have now. So pretty! The two step stamp design allowed me to stamp the centres in a light purple though it's difficult to see on my picture.
I used a darker shade of grey than the ink I used for the branch to provide more contrast. Using the same shade of card as the ink lost focus on the branch entirely!
The leaves on the branch are created by selectively inking a leaf from the Bridal Bouquet stamp set.
I really hope you can join in the fun with us. Be inspired by the colours and get creative! Check out the full deets of the challenge, and the rest of the CBS DT's creations over on the Clearly Besotted Blog.
I love the soft stamping Aimes. Absolutely stunning.
Love your cards! Great work!


Looking for Valentine’s Day marketing ideas your customers will love? You don’t have to sell chocolates or jewelry to launch a successful Valentine’s Day marketing campaign. In fact, just about any business can take advantage of the following 25 Valentine’s Day marketing ideas to boost mid-February sales.
Seek promotional partnerships with non-competing businesses that share the same target audience. Here’s how it works: each of you offers a small discount to give customers a great deal. You all market the promotion and share in any marketing investment, decreasing your spend and increasing your visibility. It’s a win-win-win proposition! Example: a restaurant partners with a movie theater and a spa hotel to offer a special “date night” package.
Valentine’s Day greeting cards aren’t just for couples; your business can print and mail greeting cards to your best customers. More than direct-mail marketing materials, greeting cards can be personalized to express how much you appreciate each customer on an individual basis – which fosters long-term loyalty.
If you operate a restaurant you can print table tents to advertise your Valentine’s Day specials. If you don’t own a restaurant, you might be able to partner with one to get your Valentine’s Day sales and promotions in front of their customers. Offer to pay for the table tents and advertise what the restaurant wants on one side and place your ad on the other. Consider ways to get customers to take action so you can capture leads: social media sharing, email subscription to receive coupons, etc.
Fun Valentine’s Day contests can be a great way to increase your brand exposure and put your products and services in front of your audience. For example, ask your audience to post their zaniest couples selfies on your Facebook page, and your fans to comment/vote for the best. You can give a prize away to the winner and endear your brand to a larger audience at the same time.
Speaking of Facebook, continually working your page is a great way to maintain audience engagement. For some businesses, paid Facebook advertising can generate the sales boost you’re after this Valentine’s Day. Make sure you understand how Facebook’s ad targeting system or hire someone who does to get the greatest bang for your buck.
Large vinyl or canvas banners strategically distributed to high-traffic areas in your city, adhesive banners prominently placed on walls over your Valentine’s Day sales items, and banners placed in other targeted locations are cost-effective ways to direct customers to your retail location.
Like banners, posters can be placed in strategic locations throughout your city to increase awareness for your Valentine’s Day sales and other Valentine’s Day events. Posters, however, are even more cost-effective and versatile.
Consider what type of event you can host for Valentine’s Day. You might sponsor a local couples (or singles) dance, especially if your products or services align with romance or song. Or, you could host a Scotch doubles bowling tournament to benefit charity. Such events might not generate immediate sales, but they’ll certainly help increase awareness of your business and could present follow-up sales opportunities.
Blanket your town with cost-effective flyers to promote your Valentine’s Day event, sales, or partnership package. If you operate a pub in a busy entertainment district, you might also employ a “street team” to hand club card flyers to passers-by. Offer an incentive, such as a free drink or appetizer to entice Valentine’s Day celebrants to visit your establishment.
Direct-mail catalogs sent to a well-targeted audience in advance of the holiday are great ways to drum up Valentine’s Day sales. Use your catalog not just to showcase your products, but to also explain why certain products make perfect Valentine’s Day gifts. Offer incentives such as coupon discount codes, and make it super-easy to order to boost catalog-driven sales.
Print sales sheets to insert in your local newspaper to advertise your Valentine’s Day sales. This is a great way to get your promotion delivered to thousands of households at a cost-effective rate. You’ll lose targeted (save for geography), but you’ll gain volume. This strategy is especially effective in well-defined local markets.
Print special Valentine’s Day coasters and give them to restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues to help promote your brand. You might even include a QR code or URL with an incentive to subscribe to your newsletter via smartphones. You might have to sweeten the deal to get establishments to distribute your coasters, such as printing their information on one side and yours on the other.
Are you (or your employees) on the road a lot? Print car door magnets to advertise your Valentine’s Day specials on-the-go. Make your design attention-getting and keep your copy short, plus include a memorable call to action, so potential customers can tell at a glance what to do next.
Direct-mail postcards are excellent Valentine’s Day marketing tools. Use postcards to send a single product or service offer to a well-defined target audience. Or, print postcards as “mini-catalogs” and lead customers to your website to view your full Valentine’s Day product lineup. Add a coupon code incentive to sweeten the deal.
Booklets can be powerful Valentine’s Day marketing tools when you use them to help with big purchases or planning. For example, a jeweler might print a booklet that explains how to choose the perfect engagement ring or make the perfect proposal. A wedding planner might print a special booklet on how to plan the perfect wedding. In these examples, you can see how the booklet establishes trust, credibility, and authority for the business and will ultimately generate new customers.
People are busy these days and don’t want to be hassled with any unnecessary tasks. They’re also frugal and deal-savvy. Free add-on’s can make your Valentine’s Day offers more attractive. For example, a gift retailer might offer free gift-wrapping for Valentine’s Day; or, an ecommerce store might offer free two-day shipping for last-minute shoppers.
Email marketing can help drive customers to your website or brick-and-mortar location. You can rent email lists, but the most effective email marketing campaigns are sent to customers who have already opted to receive your newsletters.
Perfect for gift retailers in busy shopping districts, window clings can draw passers-by into your shop for impulse purchases. Print window clings that promote your Valentine’s Day specials and/or offer an incentive for stepping inside.
Want to wow your best customers this Valentine’s Day? Get a few bottles of their favorite wine, soak off the labels, the print your own custom wine bottle labels to place on the bottles. Make each one personalized in some way and brand your company, then send bottles of wine to your best customers. What a memorable way to endear yourself to your customers!
Do you have products that perform so-so individually but could be bundled into an attractive Valentine’s Day gift basket? This is a great strategy for moving inventory and offering value to your customers. Perhaps you have some specialty soaps that aren’t moving as well as you’d like; you could bundle them in with a popular bubble bath in an attractive basket and sell it as a Valentine’s Day at-home spa kit.
Stickers can be fun Valentine’s Day marketing tools. Print stickers with Valentine’s Day themes that are relevant to your customers and your company, then give them away to customers to encourage them to come back to your store.
Do you run a blog on your website? If so, start creating Valentine’s Day-themed content in advance of the holiday and drop references to your products and services in the copy. Come up with a special promo for your readers (consider partner opportunities here) to turn readers into buyers.
Promote impulse in-store purchases by printing attention-getting hang tags. You can use large numbers and symbols to market your discount sales; or, employ clever branding techniques such as bold headlines and images to tell customers why a given product makes the perfect gift.
Finally, you can generate free publicity for your business by conducting surveys or providing other newsworthy data journalists will want to publish. For example, you can track last year’s Valentine’s Day sales to come up with data such as how much the average person spends on Valentine’s Day gifts or a top ten list of the most popular gifts for Valentine’s Day.
All of these Valentine’s Day marketing ideas can be powerful ways to boost business. Start planning your Valentine’s Day marketing campaign today!


Above, Opera Dresses, from Nicholas Heideloff, Gallery of Fashion, 1796. For original dress description, click on link.
Dress á l' Espagnole. The front hair combed straight on the forehead; the side hair in ringlets, and the hind hair in three loops, the ends returned in ringlets. Fancy-hat of white and lilac-coloured taffeta. White muslin gown; short sleeves, puffs, and Vandyke scollops of lilac silk. Small handkerchief trimmed with broad blonde. Pearl necklace. Diamond ear-rings. FIG. CII.
The front hair combed straight on the forehead; the side hair in ringlets: the hind hair turned up plain, and the ends returned in ringlets. Turban of silver net, looped at the right side with a silver band. One light-blue, two white brush feathers, and a large diamond pin, with a diamond aigrette, on the left side. Robe of yellow stained muslin; short sleeves. White satin girdle with small roses, and shoulder clasps. Small handkerchief trimmed with blonde.
The toupee dressed large, and in small curls; plain chignon, falling very low on the back; two wreaths of green foil round the toupee; and a bouquet of white roses on the left side. Robe of silver tissue, embroidered in the shell pattern; short sleeves trimmed with lace; full épaulettes of Italian gauze. Tucker of broad lace. Wreath of green foil round the neck, fastened in the front and upon the shoulders with diamond rosettes. Sash of white satin riband, tied on the right side into a bow. Festoon pearl necklace, with a medallion. Large pearl ear- rings.
Above left: New Roman style dress. Figure 87, 1796 (Vol. 2, No. 11) from Nicholas Heideloff, Gallery of Fashion, 1794-1800. This is Plate 3 of the issue, featuring figure 87 and is labelled "New Dress, in the Roman Style, introduced at the Opera by a foreign Lady of distinction." Above right: Detail of hair and jewelry of same fashion plate.
"... [the plate shows] a pelisse opera coat, without any seam in the back, composed of orange-blossom tinged with brown, made of Angola cloth, or sarsnet, trimmed either with rich Chinchealley [sic] fur, or sable tipt with gold; white fur will also look extremely delicate. The pelisse sets close to the form on one side, and is fastened on the right should with a broach; both sides may be worn close as a wrapping pelisse."
"The chilling blasts of winter hastening to supersede the mild freshness of the autumnal evenings, and the Steyne, the Parade, and the hoarse-resounding [sic] Beach, with soon be deserted for the Opera, the ball-room, or the cheerful domestic fire-side. The almost universality of half-dress, so convenient and proper at a watering-place, will therefore, soon be laid aside for the more dashing and eccentric elegancies of fashion; and the purveyors of the different articles of female ornament, for we cannot call it attire, are all on the qui vive to bring out the newest thing."
"The Mizra Turban and La Brada Mantle are also articles of novel elegance. They will doubtless have a great run during the winter. For the Opera-dress we think them peculiarly [sic] calculated.--The Persian costume is at this time much adopted, in every species of decoration, and we really think it is highly advantageous to British beauty. "
The University of Washington's Notes on Theatre Going This site offers useful information on the times and types of entertainment offered in the nineteenth century.


Sitting at 175sqft in a historic, open and beautiful setting, this conference room is perfect for meetings, presentations, and more. The meeting room seats up to 6. The room also includes video conference equipment. Features: - Access to mother’s room included - Coffee, tea, water (sparkling or still) available in kitchen (coffee/tea/water service additional cost) - Large Whiteboard - Gender neutral restrooms We are a 5-minute walk from the light rail station, close to bus routes and the Capitol Hill streetcar. We are also walking distance from a variety of eateries, cafes and coffee shops. Please note, we have a $1,000 minimum for weekend reservations.
-Under no circumstances whatsoever may event guests relocate from the designated reserved area into private work spaces. -Outside food and drinks are allowed for events. Set up, clean up, tear down of food service items must be coordinated by the renter. -All recycling and trash removal must be done by the renter. -Banquet permit is required if serving alcohol. -Renters will be responsible for restoring the space to the state it was upon arrival. Additional cleaning fees may apply. -Catering recommendations are available upon request. -Be a good guest, enjoy our beautiful professional space and come back often! And let other people know how much you enjoyed using our space.
Great space! Worked very well for our meeting. Thanks.
This conference room was perfectly suited for our needs. The space was beautiful and the customer service was top notch. Great location on Capitol Hill.


A new one-year contract freshly inked, Randall Cobb is eagerly anticipating what lies ahead in Dallas.
The Cowboys' free-agent pickup spoke to the team's official website and is optimistic about where the offense is headed.
"I think you look at this offense, you look at this team, a playoff team that is a contender, I think I can provide a valuable piece to this team, and I'm excited to get started," Cobb said, per the Cowboys' official website.
Earlier in Cobb's career, his versatility was utilized out wide, in the slot and in the backfield. But he's primarily been a slot receiver in recent seasons. According The Quant Edge, he's lined up in the slot 80 percent of time the last three years.
It's expected that he'll be the Cowboys' primary slot receiver, replacing Cole Beasley who left in free agency for Buffalo.
Coming off an injury-riddled season, Cobb is essentially on a prove-it contract. His final year in Green Bay was condensed to only nine games due to hamstring and concussion problems. It was his fewest amount of games since the 2013 season when he fractured his fibula and was placed on Injured Reserve for 10 games.
Once regarded as one of the better yards after catch (YAC) receivers in the NFL, Cobb feels he can regain that status with the Cowboys.
"I'm excited to get back out there and prove myself. It definitely was a tough year for me last year. But that's all in the past now, and I'm ready for a fresh start. I'm excited to be here, to get rolling, and get to work, and bring a championship back to Dallas," Cobb said.
Cobb is the type of player that should help a Dallas offense yearning for more innovation. A receiving corps of Amari Cooper, Michael Gallup, Allen Hurns, Tavon Austin and Cobb should elevate a 23rd ranked passing attack from 2018.
By saying he wants to "bring a championship back to Dallas," he is already ingratiating himself in the city.


i have been eagerly watching local designer Gisele Human’s WAIF unfurl from a small passion project to a now fully fledged jewellery line, and am so happy to exclusively debut this wonderful new shoot and her online shop! Gisele comes from an advertising background, and collaborated with a team of cool creative people to bring this campaign alive.
The images capture some longstanding WAIF pieces and some new additions. The intention here is to introduce new pieces and let go of old ones, while maintaining the items that people love and enjoy. The idea is not to redesign a new collection every six months, but to slowly progress, more in line with slow fashion, a movement I strongly advocate.
Artist Claire Johnson created a temporary paper cutout inspired by WAIF pieces. The transparent golden mesh garments were custom-made for the shoot by designer Phillip Obermeyer, inspired by the shape and texture of WAIF. The shoot’s concept itself was born out of many conversations with Travys Owen and Githan Coopoo, whose input was intrinsic to the final product. Alet Viljoen‘s make-up, barely there, dewy and quite raw, enhanced Jesse’s particularly unique look. Jessica Crichton brought an element of outlandish beauty and emotion that only Travys could capture with such sensitivity and depth. All in all, every element was a reflection of true collaborative effort.
my favourite pieces are probably the mermaid earrings and the lady brooches. and the all seeing iO earrings. and the necklaces!! actually, it’s pretty hard to choose. peruse everything at her online shop.
Gorgeous jewellery, stunning styling, and I am also in love with some of those clothes! Any idea who they are by?
Everything works. Color, shape, texture. Very nice.
Those super dramatic earrings look so good!
Nice. I love the first one.
You always find the most inspiring work!


Buy Online Now! Classic Elton John Concert Posters and Memorabilia!
Born on March 25, 1947, in England, Elton John’s unique blend of pop and rock styles turned him into one of the biggest music icons of the 20th century.
He also found success on Broadway, composing the score for Billy Elliot (2008), which went on to win 10 Tony Awards. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and was knighted in 1998.
We stock a couple of awesome Elton John Prints.


Join us for free, one-hour webinars to be presented regularly by the ALA Chapter Relations Office and the ALA Office for Library Advocacy.
March 27, 2019: "Advocacy Open House: Tour ALA’s New Web Resources for Advocacy and Relationship Building." ALA relaunched its advocacy website at Midwinter Meeting in Seattle. Hear from members of the Grassroots subcommittee of ALA’s Committee on Legislation about what tools are available and how you can use the resources for advocacy at all levels. You can also let ALA know what resources you’d like to see added. We are pleased to be joined by: Nikki Scarpitti, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Columbus Metropolitan Library; Mary Hastler, CEO of the Harford Public Library; and Emily Wagner, Assistant Director of Communications and Knowledge Management in ALA’s Public Policy and Advocacy Office.
February 27, 2019: "Libraries and the 2020 Census." State and local governments are organizing for the upcoming 2020 Census, and libraries should have a seat at the table. Governors, state legislators, mayors, philanthropic funders and other leaders across the country are forming Complete Count Committees and allocating resources to help get communities get counted. These efforts offer library staff and supporters opportunities to increase awareness of library services, strengthen community relationships, and support libraries' work related to census outreach. Hear from librarians who have been involved with Complete Count efforts and learn about new advocacy resources from ALA’s Public Policy and Advocacy team. Our guest speakers will be Michelle Perera, Director of the Pasadena Public Library; Jennie Stapp, Montana State Librarian; and Diane Foote, Executive Director of the Illinois Library Association. We will also be joined by Gavin Baker, ALA’s Assistant Director of Government Relations and Larra Clark, ALA’s Deputy Director of Public Policy.
December 11, 2018: "Preparing for the 116th Congress." The 116th Congress is on the horizon and ALA is planning for the year to come. With such a large number of new members of Congress, it is a critical time for your Senators and Representatives to hear from library leaders about continuing federal funding for libraries of all types. Join ALA’s Advocacy and Public Policy team for an overview of our upcoming appropriations campaign, a discussion about advancing our priorities through in-district engagement, and a preview of the fresh resources that will be available in the new year.
November 28, 2018: "Hack Your Engage." Maximize your chapter's use of Engage advocacy software. Hear from Jeremy Johannesen, Executive Director of the New York Library Association, about how New York has successfully used Engage in a variety of targeted advocacy campaigns. We'll also be joined by our Engage account representatives who will share resources and answer your questions.
October 31, 2018: “Building Relationships with Legislators and their Staff.” Relationships are key to the success of your legislative agenda. How can you work on those relationships year-round, with both legislators and key staff members? Join us for a conversation with Dave Schroeder, former Kentucky Library Association president and current chair of KLA’s advocacy committee, as well as a member of ALA’s committee on library advocacy.
May 2, 2018: "Get It Together: Building Blocks of Thriving State Ecosystems." Hear from a variety of stakeholders, including Terri Grief, Legislative Chair, Kentucky Association of School Librarians; Laura Hicks, Program Specialist for School Library Media at the Maryland State Department of Education; Annie Norman, State Librarian of Delaware; Annie Eppersen, Chapter Councilor for the Colorado Association of Libraries; and Craig Seasholes, President of the Washington Library Association, about their unique perspectives and contributions to the state library ecosystem.
March 28, 2018: "States Respond: The Fight for Net Neutrality Continues." How are librarians involved in efforts to enact state level protections for net neutrality? We will be joined by Larra Clark, Deputy Director of the Washington Office; Kieran Ayton and Julie Holden, President and Vice President of the Rhode Island Library Association; Kate Laughlin, Executive Director of the Washington Library Association; and Cindy Aden, Washington State Librarian.
February 28, 2018: "Friends Like These: Maximizing Your Relationships With Friends and Trustees." A conversation with Beth Nawalinski, Executive Director of United for Libraries, and Libby Post, President of Communication Services and a United for Libraries Board member.
January 24, 2018: "Back in Session." A conversation about how Chapters can prepare for and engage members in state legislative activities. We’ll also get an insider’s view of how to defeat adverse legislation. We are pleased to be joined by Kathi Kromer, Associate Executive Director of ALA’s Washington Office, and Bob Doyle, immediate past (retired) Director of the Illinois Library Association.
October 25, 2017, "Message Received: Developing Messages that Resonate." How do you reach state lawmakers with messages that generate support for libraries? Do you focus on a specific theme (education, workforce development, etc.)? Who decides what those messages will be? Join us this month for our next webinar, featuring Doug Evans, Executive Director of the Ohio Library Council, followed by a facilitated discussion for participants.
September 27, 2017, "Back to School: School Library Legislation in the Statehouses." Our first State Ecosystems Initiative webinar. Fewer than half of all states currently require a school librarian in their public schools. In recent years, however, legislation has been introduced in several additional states. Who is leading these efforts and what insights can they share with the rest of us? We will hear from three states and follow their presentations with a facilitated discussion for participants. This webinar was brought to you by the American Association School Librarians, Chapter Relations Office, and Office for Library Advocacy as part of our State Ecosystems Initiative to strengthen coalitions across libraries.
May 24, 2017, "Maintaining the Momentum." Our fourth presentation in the series included presentations by Lucinda Nord, Executive Director of the Indiana Library Federation, and Lisa Lindle, Grassroots Communications Specialist, ALA Washington Office. Presentations answered this question: With National Library Legislative Day behind us and many state legislative sessions drawing to a close, how will your chapter maintain advocacy momentum over the coming months?
March 2, 2017, "Busy Time in Statehouses." Our third presentation in the series included a presentation by Dave Schroeder, President, Kentucky Library Association, who discussed Kentucky SB 48; and Wendy Woodland, Director of Communications, Texas Library Association, who discussed Texas Senate Bill 6.
January 12, 2017, “The Year Ahead.” Our second webinar in the series included a presentation by Lisa Varga, Director, Virginia Library Association (VLA), and Shari Henry, IF Chair, VLA, on censorship attempts, and a presentation by Jody Gray, director, ALA Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services (ODLOS), on ODLOS resources, including Intersections Blog, Libraries Respond, ODLOS Newsletter, and Diversity Member Interest Group.
October 28, 2016, “Leveraging Advocacy Resources to Strengthen All Chapters.” Our inaugural webinar in the series included an update on ESSA planning, using Engage for state-level advocacy, new advocacy resources from ALA, conversation on how ALA can best work with Chapters on their state-level advocacy efforts, and an opportunity to share best practices.
The Chapter Relations Office and Office for Library Advocacy want to hear from you!
We look forward to your joining us for all webinars in this series.


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TheArmenianKitchen.com : Cool off this summer with some of our favorite Madzoon (yogurt) recipes!
Cool off this summer with some of our favorite Madzoon (yogurt) recipes!
With the summer season heating things up, it’s time to step out of the kitchen and revisit some of our favorite hot-weather recipes, starting with Homemade Madzoon (yogurt).
Just click on any of the recipes on this list, and get ready to feel refreshed!
To wash all of these down, sip on a tall glass of Armenian-style Iced Tea!


SONGS FROM THE INSIDE is a 50-minute TV documentary musical, the first of this genre to be made in Australia. The film explores the stories of eight prisoners living inside the walls of Berrimah Prison through music, song and dance. With a holding capacity of over 800, Berrimah's the Northern Territory’s largest prison. Nearly 85% of inmates are Indigenous. The result is an in depth portrait of both the prison and its inmates, people normally out of sight and mind of contemporary Australia.


For the month of January, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1998 and 2005.
For the month of February, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1997 and 2005.
For the month of March, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1997 and 2005.
For the month of April, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1997 and 2005.
For the month of May, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1997 and 2005.
For the month of June, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1997 and 2005.
For the month of July, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1997 and 2005.
For the month of August, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1997 and 2005.
For the month of September, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1997 and 2005.
For the month of October, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1996 and 2005.
For the month of November, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1996 and 2005.
For the month of December, average values for station „Tajima“ were calculated from climate data measured between the years 1996 and 2005.


The current community in advocating environmental protection and sustainable development, many people feel distressed while faced so many waste in the cities. Faced with this situation, the wood pellet machine seems to work efficiently. Our country is a big agricultural country, with the most abundant agricultural waste biomass feedstock, our annual yield 700 million tons of straw, all kinds of bad residues of about 8,000 tons. Despite these huge reserves of biomass resources, but mainly have been abandoned, waste of resources and pollute the environment. So the full use of modern technology and the use of biomass resources are not fully utilized biomass industry. Which will become the focus of future development, but also important to the development of circular economy material guarantee.
Various forestry and agriculture waste materials can be used to make biomass pellets such as wood sawdust, wood shavings, wood chips, wood logs, straw, rice husk, coffee husk, bamboo, tea waste, wheat straw, etc. The raw material is renewable and sustainable. They are available locally, so the cost is affordable and predictable. Wood pellets are renewable, clean-burning and cost stable fuel generally made from compacted sawdust or other forestry, agro wastes for heating aim both for homeowners and industrial production. Pellets offer better and more uniform heating properties per unit volume due to their low moisture content. Pellets burn cleaner, have reduced particulate emissions compared with coal, are more economical to transport due to increased bulk density and can be easily produced from wood waste and byproducts.
Biomass pellet fuel is one of the most inexpensive, sustainable, renewable and carbon neutral fuel sources in the word. It is a sustainable resource and require minimal processing for use. The superiority of wood pellets and drawbacks of raw material such as logs are clear to almost all of us. Low moisture content, high bulk density, high fuel value, renewable & eco-friendly characteristics make wood pellets and wood pellet press machine more and more popular on the market. Since wood pellets possess a higher hulk density, they are easy to store, cost less to transport and it also make the fuel more efficient when burning.
Our ring die wood pellet mill and electric flat die wood pellet mill have unparalleled advantages replacing the traditional energy fuel: wood pellet is a kind of a biomass pellet fuel. Development of biomass energy, not only to protect the environment and mitigate climate change, but also to promote sustainable development of agriculture. Wood pellets are mainly used for heating purpose both for homeowners in wood pellet stove & heating furnace, and commercial production in industrial boilers, hot water boilers, biomass power plant, etc. Using biomass energy can replace oil, coal and other traditional energy sources, to reduce annual crude oil imports 11 million ton, saving the equivalent of 2.5 to 3 billion euros, and saving 1,600 million tons of CO2. With good ecological and social benefit, it make great contribution to the country’s energy conservation and emissions reduction. So,wood pellet machine will be realized completely by instead of coal in the future.


HEArtT Program - Art, Dance, Music & More - ArtWorks 4 ENA, Inc.
Applications for 2018-2019 available now!
Due November 17, 2018 by 5PM.
PURPOSE: The HEArtT Program was designed to provide youth with artistic training in the areas of dance/choreography, visual arts and music production/song writing. The mission of the program is to teach and expose youth to the healing power of creative artistic expression. The program is completely FREE to participants!
A series of 10 workshops in which youth will be provided with hands on experience in the areas of Dance, Visual Arts and Music Production/Songwriting.
The first Saturday will be an orientation in which youth and parents meet with Art Ambassadors (artistic experts) and get a program overview. Youth will spend the remainder of their time (10 workshops) working up close and personal with trained professionals in their chosen track learning the fundamentals of their artistic medium.
Throughout the program youth will work with our Art Ambassadors to create an artistic piece that is meaningful to them and will have the opportunity to process their work through journaling and by engaging with a licensed therapist.
The HEArtT Program culminates with an Art Showcase where participants can share their finished pieces with friends and family.
All art, music and dance supplies used during the program are FREE for the participant to keep!
Applications for the 2018-2019 HEArtT Program are now open!
Program spans from November 2018 to April 2019: 10 workshops total.
Looking for kids excited to learn more about the arts!


Renny is a larger than life character who is beloved throughout the airshow world as much for his one-of-a-kind personality as he is for his aggressive aerobatic routines. Flying the legendary Russian Sukhoi-29, Renny Price is known as one of the world’s greatest aerobatic pilots. In addition to his fearless skills as an aviator, Renny brings an unbridled joy of life to his work and he is known throughout the industry for his tireless efforts to spread his love of aviation to airshow fans, school groups and newcomers to airshows.
If he’s not in the cockpit at an airshow or preparing for his performance, he will most likely be found with a big smile on his face working the crowd lines, shaking hands, signing autographs and engaging the fans with his unique brand of airshow fun.


cd changes the current working directory to a given directory, then executes a program.
cd is a standard shell builtin. Be careful if you want to use the cd command outside of an execline script.


A Crypto Currency Boom is fuelling a new startup financing market - But can it help Save The News?
So How Then Is PressCoin Going to Change any of this?
A primer on Scoop’s "ethical Paywall"
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working behind the scenes getting to know the team behind Presscoin.com, the latest participant in the remarkable Initial Coin Offering (ICO) boom which is rocking financial markets around the world, and which may well herald an inflection point in the history of money.
Scoop Co-editor Joseph Cederwall brought PressCoin to my attention initially. And after exploring the PressCoin website and reading the white-paper, my initial impression of PressCoin – just three weeks ago- was one of admiration for the audaciousness of their plans, mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism.
As I dug deeper, and got to know the crew, I embarked on a fairly steep learning curve. To understand their plans I needed to better understand the blockchain itself (which can perhaps be most easily thought of in the case of PressCoin as trust mediation technology which can be used to facilitate cooperation) as well as the extraordinary boom in Crypto Currencies (1500% growth over the past 12 months). One of the things I quickly stumbled upon is the fact that it is in all likelihood the ICO Boom which started in earnest in July this year – that has been driving the explosion in the broader Crypto Currency market - and most spectacularly and the value of Bitcoin (BTC) the oldest and, for now, most valuable crypto-currency in the market.
The report that follows (Part one of a two part series) outlines what I have discovered in my inquiries, about PressCoin and its plans and the people and businesses behind it. It also provides some context around recent developments in the #FutureOfNews debate, to assist those who might consider investing in PressCoin to better understand the business processes the PressCoin project is hoping to address and disrupt.
And I conclude by talking briefly about why I decided to join the team working on the project.
My Conclusion: The PressCoin ICO is certainly worth consideration, and if you are interested in the future of news like I am probably worth investing a few dollars in. Hence my deciding to join the effort to help it succeed.
From what I can see most ICOs tend to be based around traditional disruptive high risk technology plans – companies hoping to be disruptive, to achieve exponential growth, and which aspire to join the ranks of the unicorns - or failing that be bought out by one of them.
PressCoin by contrast is at its heart a collaborative play, a venture which plans to build its future around assisting an existing industry to better chart its path through troubled waters in a cooperative manner.
And in a sense therefore it is a blockchain venture that plays directly to the promise inherent in this remarkable new technology - and indeed into the promise that the internet showed in its early days.
Of course like everything at the bleeding edge of this technological maelstrom, it is a high risk investment. But at the same time it has - in my view a more credible plan than most, the possibility of systemic change - albeit a remote one, plus a great spirit.
And consequently I have become a supporter and joined the team.
20 years after I started working in the online news business back in 1997, it has become blindingly obvious in the past four years that an industry which looked to have such a bright future back in 1990s is now fundamentally broken.
And it’s not simply a question of Facebook and Google eating the old media world’s lunch.
The way the traditional news industry has responded to the threat has also been fundamentally mal-adaptive. The consolidated media giants have been for the most part closed-minded, combative and competitive. The industry has rejected opportunities to join forces and form industry responses to the challenge – and continues to ignore innovative ideas even when they presented to them on a plate.
Back in 1997, when a group of four Kiwis (Peter Fowler, Ian Llewellyn, Andrew McNaughton and myself) launched NewsRoom.co.nz immediately after the first MMP (proportional representation) election in NZ of 1996, we had hopes for a bright future for our venture.
It was only a short time after the World Wide Web and its foundational language HTML had been invented by Tim Berners-Lee. The prospect of being able to publish at very low cost to a worldwide readership looked certain to herald a new golden age of news publishing. And in political and readership terms the promise of our new form of up-to-the-minute internet publishing was immediately realised.
NewsRoom, like Scoop.co.nz, digitised the in-box of NZ’s Parliament, and revolutionised the manner in which political parties talked to each other, the media and the public. Within a few short months the quality of material being produced by the participants in the democratic process had dramatically improved and we had become an invaluable part of NZ’s political nervous system.
By providing participants in the political process - especially the smaller and less powerful ones - with the ability to flag to the world their views on what ought to be done, I think we helped facilitate the massive improvement in NZ’s Parliamentary process that arrived with MMP. Within months of our launch we would often see political parties trading releases about particular issues over the course of a day. In the past such discussion would have taken several days to work its way through, as the news cycle worked on a daily or perhaps twice daily update cycle at best.
But while we disrupted - and we think improved politics - we quickly found that translating this into revenue was also difficult. NewsRoom’s main initial source of revenue was a contract to provide a news service to one of NZ’s first ISPs, ClearNet, which was later merged into TelstraClear. And when this contract was lost, the loss of revenue precipitated the fall of Newsroom 1.0.
Scoop.co.nz arose out of that early foretaste of the precariousness of digital publishing. And in the years since, I have had the benefit of a ring-side view of the ever accelerating cycles of disruption of the old-order of journalism and news publishing.
The rise of blogging and forums, the empowerment of angry "commenting" personalities set free by anonymity to express their malice, market-eating algorithmic marketing systems, the invention of the smart-phone, the rise and rise of "the platforms", and most recently the commercialisation of fake news, the segregation of points of view on Facebook (and creation of echo-chambers) and the weaponisation of news information delivery systems to attack democracy - as seen in Fake News epidemic that took place during the US 2016 presidential election.
Today as we approach the end of 2017, seven election cycles later in NZ, I can only see a very bleak future for the so-called Fourth Estate. While journalism is a things which everybody seems to acknowledge as a vital component of our democratic systems, our economic and political system appears to be unable or unwilling to support it.
Confidence in the news industry both internally - among journalists and publishers - and externally, by readers, is at an all time low. The endless cycles of journalist headcount cutting which began in the 1990s continues at pace. The ubiquity of complete nonsense and click-bait masquerading as news is painful to experience.
Meanwhile the pace of technological innovation in marketing and news delivery systems continues to accelerate, making it impossible for small independent publishers to join the game – no matter how talented they are – unless they wish to do for several years as a hobby – happen to know a millionaire - or are willing to stake their house of the gamble that they might be able to achieve what nobody else has been able to.
These days globally only the very biggest of the biggest are even close to breaking even in their digital publishing divisions. Using a combination of advertising and paywall/membership revenues – global reach and viral content delivery channels, the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian and Daily Mail are the leaders amongst a handful of publications making a go of commercialising news in the online space.
But the reality is that all four of those publications is also propped by old-school industrial news business models, namely print advertising and cover price revenue. And all of them also started this cycle of destruction with deep reservoirs of cash reserves - most of which are now gone.
There’s also a bit of irony in the fact that the three quality journalism publishers among this group are arguably doing better right now, precisely because they have - in a sense failed in their role of informing society? The twin trans-Atlantic democratic debacles, Brexit and Trump, have been a great boon for quality news media membership models (like the Guardian’s), and a fillip to paywall subscription sales at the NYT and Washington Post.
In the event that these crises are at some point resolved, public subscription and membership revenue for all three of these publications may well start to fall again.
Meanwhile for the new generation of digital publishers, Vox, Axios, Buzzfeed, Mashable, The Intercept and Vice, the news is also not so good – even though they are definitely doing great high quality journalistic work they are beginning to hit a ceiling, after having barely taken off.
After a fairly brief flirtation by venture capital firms with new media companies in 2015 and 2016, the interest of the disrupters in the media fizzled out around the time Gawker media was killed off by Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan. Two years on their valuations are falling and revenue targets are being reset, downwards. Buzzfeed in particular has discovered the sponsored editorial model doesn’t scale well –it turns out becoming a digital agency in this day and age can be a relatively low margin high maintenance business.
The possible exception to this is Politico, a publication which like Scoop.co.nz reports on the core democratic processes - so far in the US and the EU. Politico’s highly valued news intelligence output has secured it a special place among partially paywalled websites, distinguishing itself from other paywalled sites which serve a deep pocketed elite with the information they require to function such as the The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg news.
None of all this has been much of a surprise to me. Over the decade since 2017 the direction of the "attention market" – wherein publishers decided they were in the business of selling the eyeballs of their readers - has been steady and remorseless - disrupting both the advertising and news industries in an equally inexorable fashion.
As technical solutions to the challenges of servicing e-commerce businesses, i.e. finding the right targeted audience were solved, the vast bulk of advertising inventory became nearly worthless.
Here in New Zealand, while the recent, and rather spectacular success of the Jennings/Murphy/Hickey NewsRoom.co.nz re-launch, and the rise and rise of TheSpinoff.co.nz are certainly bright spots in the history of digital media in NZ, their success is being achieved against the flow of the market, and will be hard to maintain.
In the end their futures will be decided by a group of perennially fickle corporate marketing managers, who will be constantly advised by their agencies that there are higher ROI [Return on Investment] options to help them deliver bottom line performance in selling widgets or whatever else they’re buying advertising to achieve.
Call me a cynic - and I hope I am wrong about this- but my experience strongly suggests that corporate organisations struggle to understand the value of association with excellence in content, no matter how well it is presented to them.
These days, news just seems so ubiquitous, so commodified. As consumers of information it almost seems oppressive at times.
And this is so in part because there is no concerted effort by the news industry to sell itself, to convince their advertising clients, corporations who rely on the success of democratic institutions and the rule of law, that the news industry is nothing more than a carrier signal for marketing messages.
Perhaps realising they are stuffed, Stuff (Formerly Fairfax) appears to have decided to continue its diversification strategy expanding its foray into the fibre-broadband market and the online video entertainment space.
This was my question when Scoop co-editor Joseph Cederwall sent me a link to the ambitious USD$100 million ICO plan a couple of weeks ago.
If the news market is so screwed, what could possibly make a difference?
Joseph lined up a call with Amit Rathore, the erstwhile leader of the PressCoin project, to explore the possibility of a collaboration between PressCoin and Scoop. Our Skype discussion - NZ/US/France - started with a brief explanation of Scoop.co.nz and its raw-news aggregation and ScoopPro business models.
Amit listened with interest and then explained his background as a founder of Quintype, a high-tech cloud based publishing platform provider which simplifies the deployment of state of the art news publishing systems.
We quickly established that Quintype may well be a good fit for the next stage of Scoop’s development.
Amit then explained that PressCoin’s vision of a way to fix the future of news was to grow a 100 million strong network of thinking and discerning readers to support a decentralised, platform based news eco-system that would serve the news needs of people who care about fate of the planet and democracy.
So far so good, but like a lot of people I was wondering how exactly this would work. How would this USD$100 million investment kick off this systemic change?
Amit was certainly saying all the right things when it came to defining the problem. But that has always been the easy part. My initial feeling was that on the solution side the story PressCoin was telling was still a bit fuzzy.
Nevertheless I was open to being convinced, and our discussion continued over the next few days.
The core business-model for PressCoin in its early stages will be Software As A Service (SaaS) subscription revenues paid by independent publishers for use of PressCoin built, shared, scalable, state of the art (data driven) publishing system. Systems which Amit is confident can be provided at a fraction of the cost publishers routinely pay when trying to build such systems via the traditional digital agency/developer model.
These services will be provided on top of the AWS (Amazon Web Services) news publisher developer-kit which Amit had previously built at Quintype. The company is now servicing a variety of different clients and serving 120 million pages of content a month. Perhaps most notable among these clients is The Quint, an Indian Huffington Post like publication in English. Fortune and Bloomberg also have deployed Quintype-powered publications.
Having spent years trying to keep up with the technology requirements in the industry, and failing, this part of the pitch made perfect business sense to me as a publisher.
And this shared data-driven technology platform approach immediately reminded me of Scandinavian news publisher Schibsted Group’s call in 2016 for the formation of a global alliance among news publishers.
In June 2016 , The Tinius Trust – which owns half of the Schibsted Group (Scandinavia’s largest newspaper publisher – and the owner of a large number of online classified market sites in the EU) – had assembled a cast of news luminaries including legendary Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger to introduce their ideas.
They published a wonderful report dissecting both the ailments of the news industry, and proposing a solution.
Schibsted’s plan was to build a state of the art data-first publishing platform to personalise the news services provided to readers who would be, by virtue of the benefits of doing so, be encouraged to login to use the fully featured product. This would make news services functionally more like Facebook, and thereby give the news industry sufficient scale sufficiently to directly compete with Facebook and Google in advertising markets.
But Schibsted quickly discovered that asking News Companies to work together is a bit like trying to train cats to hunt mice together. The Tinius Trust’s call for a global media alliance wasn’t even reported on in Alan Rusbridger’s own newspaper.
PressCoin’s plans are more fluid than Schibsted’s but broadly similar, and focussed on a different tier in the publisher world. PressCoin hopes to help network the new and emerging publishers of the world keep up with the pace of change.
And while USD$100 million will only get you so far in developing such technology, using development teams based in India ought to make this sum of money go at least five times as far as it might go if invested in tech teams based in Stockholm.
However for me there remained a key unsolved challenge in this story.
In a market where revenue yields on advertising have been on a steady downward path for a decade – crippling every new entrant to the game before they even get started – SaaS revenue from publishers might also be difficult to grow, unless PressCoin was able to also bring to bear some other innovations to tilt the playing field in their direction.
If lowering the costs of news publishers by using shared digital infrastructure is leg one of the PressCoin vision, leg two involves enlisting the assistance of engaged readers to improve the quality of the product – and to help the network grow.
This idea also rang a few bells.
2.	Dutch crowd-funded start-up De-Correspondent – which is set to launch soon in New York with what can be expected to be a fire-cracker crowd-funding campaign.
WikiTribune, which is presently operational in Beta – built on a modified WordPress platform, is providing its readers with the ability to participate in news creation by contributing articles, proposing ideas, and suggesting edits, additions and corrections to articles on the site. Article production is supervised by a staff of paid editors and journalists. It’s early days so far, but it is definitely an exciting project (which you can join here if you want to have a look inside the kitchen).
WikiTribune, like Wikipedia, presently has a reader donation funding model and the project already has a fairly large number of supporters who have committed to recurring monthly funding. This is the same business model which is powering De-Correspondent and Jeremy Scahill’s Intercepted podcast (on The Intercept, First Look Media’s investigative journalism powerhouse led by Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras and funded by billionaire Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar.
For its part De-Correspondent is a reporter’s dream, a publisher built by writers for readers who value quality thoughtful content from subject specialist reporters. Their model is also reader funded, and includes baked in opportunities for informed readers to help shape the news agenda via facilitated engagements with reporters and newsletters. There is much more to its very well thought out approach that can be explored here.
Given that PressCoin is a crypto-currency based project, it is unsurprising that Amit’s vision for facilitating reader assistance is blockchain based.
Amit’s plan is to provide for blockchain tools to be integrated into publishing platforms to reward engaged readers for their "mid-funnel" assistance with the news publishing and distribution process. This could range from submitting stories, and tips, to fact-checking, collecting source material from the scene of a news event, and sharing material on Social media.
Rewards would be securely and transparently tracked using the Blockchain and delivered in the form of PressCoin tokens.
While I have some skepticism about how well monetary incentives work in such circumstances, I can see very clear value in a cross publisher karma system to enable engaged and clever readers to move about a news universe and assist publishers in subjects they are expert in.
In addition, paying for assistance in crypto-currency is all very well, but will the PressCoin tokens be worth anything?
The facility of PressCoin for the purpose of making a new market for news will be backed up by provision of a real-money/PressCoin gateway via an associated project which lends quite a lot of credibility to the PressCoin project.
CointypeX is a brand new Cryptocurrency exchange with an integrated Swiss Bank, featuring super-low transaction fees on transfers, payments and even fiat foreign exchange. CointypeX was built by a team of Wall St. technologists with experience in high-frequency trading, and investors in PressCoin are being encouraged to open up their crypto wallets inside this new exchange.
In addition, PressCoin’s NEWS tokens are backed with share in ownership of the PressCoin platform company itself – PressCoin PLC - which makes it entirely different than most of the new ICOs presently being issued, some of which have no real asset lying behind them at all.
By providing an external market to price PressCoin, and encouraging PressCoin transactions within its eco-system, it should be possible for PressCoin network publishers and technology providers to start trading internally to build network connections – for example by building a web-traffic exchange to direct readers to related websites and content - and to pay writers, designers, technologists and sales commissions for referrals with PressCoin earned from the sale of advertising and subscriptions.
Crowd-funding will also be able to be carried out using PressCoin for finance, and if the PressCoin marketplace achieves sufficient liquidity the value of PressCoin could start to rise independently of the value of the underlying business that it sits on.
This aspect of the Initial Coin Offering method of funding a networked platform business is a fascinating aspect to the economics of crypto currencies and I plan to discuss this in part two of this report.
This was the part of PressCoin’s vision that initially had me excited, albeit for somewhat self-interested reasons, in relation to Scoop.co.nz.
As readers of Scoop.co.nz will know, we have developed a novel way to fund our public interest news services - our Ethical Paywall and our raw news publication model. These are approaches to news revenue generation that we are very keen to accelerate and see used for funding more quality public interest journalism.
A couple of months ago the Scoop team even began internal discussions around planning a crowd-equity raising - a project we called Scoop 3.0 - to provide us with funds to develop a new cloud based SaaS version of Scoop, one which could be deployed by small groups of entrepreneurial reporters and technologists in other jurisdictions.
PressCoin’s support and the Quintype technology suite - if it works as advertised - would enable us to massively accelerate this path. it was therefore very exciting to see the support of projects like this in their roadmap.
Scoop’s "Ethical Paywall" is so-named - using Fair/Ethical trade parlance - because it addresses the market failures for two groups in the news supply chain : a) journalists and publishers who can’t get paid; and b) readers who are increasingly finding themselves on the wrong-side of paywalls which prevent them from reading articles they need to access to fulfil their obligations as informed voters.
"help create a polis trained to participate generatively in the public sphere"
After our initial conversation I followed up to Amit with a written description of Scoop.co.nz’s "Ethical Paywall" and raw news publishing approach to news monetisation.
I pitched the idea as a good fit for PressCoin’s objectives – a business model which is neither advertising nor member funded, and one which is by its very nature decentralised and which results in an open website that can serve the public interest.
In May 2015, responding to a precipitous collapse in advertising revenue yields after NZ’s 2014 General Election Scoop.co.nz introduced a novel news monetisation model which we originally called an "invisible paywall". Invisible because we don’t actually have a paywall at all – and a paywall because we require professional users of Scoop to pay to access the site.
the ability to reach, through Scoop, a high quality audience of decision-makers with their news releases.
Our funding model incentivises us to produce content which is useful for our paying institutional and organisation readers – and this content is by default also useful for society as a whole, and is unlikely to be very click-bait like.
When we introduced the idea we thought we had a pretty marginal chance of success – I put our odds of succeeding at around 10% at the beginning of 2015. But thanks to the amazing support of our readers, who donated more than $150,000 in crowd-funding campaigns to enable us to make the transition over a two year period, by May 2017 we had grown our licensed professional user base to 180 organisations and were within sight of reaching our goal, advertising-free sustainability.
Amit sent off our proposal to his collaborators for their consideration and invited me to assist with the effort to put PressCoin together.
At which point I began to meet the PressCoin team.After a week of working with them I confess that I am growing rather fond of their way of doing business.
First of all Amit Rathore, the driving force behind the PressCoin project.
A technologist first and foremost – and a remarkably adept one on the basis of what I have seen – Amit is also a very open, down to earth, accessible and kind person. He seems to be very genuinely concerned for the future of the planet and of its people just as I am.
Based in San Mateo California Amit coordinates the work of the PressCoin ICO team, which at this point numbers about 20, and is and based in at least four countries, India, the UK, the UK and France (me).
Early on in my engagement with Amit I pushed him a little to help him prepare for what it will be like if an investigative journalist decides to have a go at him about the ICO funding model. Amit responded very naturally and confidently, albeit a little tersely. My impression at this point is that he comes more from the Tim O’Reilly/Craig Newmark mould of entrepreneurs, as opposed to the Mark Zuckerberg/Steve Jobs one.
My introduction to Amit’s team came shortly after we spoke, and initially via the online collaboration tool Slack. To get to know their community PressCoin had simply set up an open slack instance and invited all-comers to talk to them directly. A very open start-up approach. Inside Slack I soon met Amit’s cousin Manshu Rathore, an ex-Quintype engineer, who is based in India, very helpful, and as far as I can tell doesn’t sleep.
Next I met Andreas Stenzel, who lives near Amit and whose kids play together, Andreas is managing the paid marketing side of the launch using an impressive array of spreadsheets - another very down to earth, open and competent, experienced technology industry person.
I next met two more of the founders – Andrew Markell and Gunther Sonnenfeld, who are also partners of Amit’s in another related venture, HigherOrderVC, a VC company which is focussing on Blockchain technologies for "Enlightened Value Creation". Andrew and Gunther are busy working behind the scenes to line up high net-worth investors in the PressCoin ICO.
For some considerable time Gunther has been working closely with Journalist Dr Nafeez Ahmed, whose INSURGE Intelligence investigative journalism platform is the initial flagship platform for the PressCoin crypto-economy. A beta version of the platform is online and a working version is expected to be launched early in the new year.
Nafeez is an experienced investigative journalist whose work Scoop had the privilege of publishing as early as 2002.
Over a skype call from the Geneva waterfront I talked with Andrew and Gunther for some time about the amazing rise in the price of Bitcoin. I was quickly brought up to speed with various theories on the remarkable events of the past few months in the cryptocurrency world.
Finally I have conversed via IRC with, albeit not yet met by voice or video conference, another of PressCoin’s founders Amit Bansal, a web-wizard and entrepreneur and who is the CEO of PressCoin’s NextElection platform, a new digital townhall which plans to bring the best aspects of digital communications to bear during (and after) elections everywhere, to ensure voters are fully informed about what and for whom they are voting.
More importantly, NextElection will maintain a real-time collaborative spotlight on the incumbents, relevant issues, and challengers - 24/7 - to ensure elected officials are doing their job, and their ratings are transparent. After all, as Amit likes to say, "citizens should be like politicians, remembering at all times, that there’s always a next election coming up …"
And it’s worth mentioning that one of the team members I haven’t yet met is a leading fintech player and who is the genius behind Cointype and CointypeX.
So all in all a pretty impressive team.
But right now the pressure is coming on the PressCoin team, fast and hard. The next 28 days will be a baptism of fire.
To get to USD$100 million will be a remarkable feat, and this team has its work cut out for it. If successful this will be unquestionably the largest initial public fund-raise of any new-media venture ever.
The ICO proper opened today.
India was the first jurisdiction where investors are able invest directly using fiat currency – and the fiat investment gateway is now open. This allows. investors to purchase NEWS tokens directly in Indian Rupees (INR) without having to first create a crypto wallet and buy some other cryptocurrency. A fiat currency gateway for investors in US Dollars (USD) has now also been opened up.
In coming days pounds (GBP), Swiss Francs (CHF) and Euros (EUR) will also be able to be used to purchase NEWS tokens. In some jurisdictions in order to invest with regular fiat currencies, investors will need to prove that they are qualified investors in order to satisfy security laws.
Which highlights one of the most fascinating aspects of the ICO boom.
At its heart the PressCoin ICO is effectively an unregulated IPO, financed by the sale of a brand new currency. If it succeeds then in all likelihood investors will soon be able to purchase coffee directly from their phones with fractions of their investment – something which is hard to do with shares in Facebook or Appal and also with most other ICO tokens - most of which are not presently listed on crypto-exchanges.
The stated intention of PressCoin PLC. is to eventually seek a sharemarket listing for PressCoin, probably in the UK, with each NEWS Token mapping to a share in the new company on the London Stock Exchange.
So will PressCoin succeed in this crowd-sale?
Obviously time will tell. The ICO closes on January 8th, and if everything goes to plan PressCoin’s NEWS tokens will then be immediately tradeable on the CointypeX exchange.
While I have no idea whether it will succeed, I would certainly like it to do so, and not only because it may benefit Scoop.co.nz.
If there hadn’t been a bunch of recent ICOs for similar amount of money with significantly less substance behind them than this one I’d have thought this a true moon-shot.
But as it is I think this one has a chance – and with the Crypto Currency Boom exploding in the headlines PressCoin’s timing appears to be perfect. And for the reasons discussed in this article, right now, I think the PressCoin plan I have seen so far to save the news industry. And potentially our planet from the scourge of misinformation.
And for all these reasons I am greatly honoured to have been invited to join the team.


Wroclaw - the Meeting Place, true capital of culture, unique and magical not only for the dwarfs, which have decided to reside here, but also well known for its perfect offer concerning the business sphere.
At the crossroads of the Gliniana and Hubska Street there is an exceptional hotel, enjoying a vast popularity due to its convenient location and a trouble-free access via public transport means.
In the close vicinity there is the Wroclaw Airport, Railway as well as Bus Station which makes our facility enormously popular amongst travellers – both on business and for pleasure. However, our offer is not restricted barely to the accommodation and gastronomy services as it usually takes place in this case since we also pamper our Guests with a rich Wellness & Spa palette as well as the Bourgeois’es Brewery nearby.


paul reid • blog » Australia’s slow broadband a disservice to Digital Natives?
Cartoon PD online package ePortfolio - dead concept or holy grail in education?
Of course the other aspect of all this is the use of restrictive firewalls and other barriers to the effective use of a wide range of educational resources founded on Web 2.0 technologies.
Coonan parroting Prensky probably isn’t going to hurt the cause - we all understand that digital natives are avid users - but are not necessarily critical users - so it seems a better argument to highlight the role of schools and universities in equipping the students with the requisite skills and knowledge to not only consume, but consume critically, manage the technologies, control the technology (in terms of soft-, firm- and hard- ware). GRIP-FIX-TURN as well as RIP-MIX-BURN.
Of course there are also the economic imperatives - why don’t we see K-12 sector advocating Richard Florida’s “Creative Class”?
Especially here in Perth, we need to foster a Creative Economy - the reliance upon primary resources won’t sustain us much longer. We need to develop Perth, Bunbury, Kalgoorlie and Karratha as Creative Cities… with an active and productive Creative Class - but the potential for our students to develop as members of that group is limited by policy and access restrictions such as those we’ve outlined. The high-speed net is, so far, a pipe dream (no pun intended) in Australia. I’m struck that I find myself agreeing with Rupert Murdoch in this instance - something that doesn’t happen often!
We need to start more effective lobbying - the reality is that in WA there is minimal use of ICT in teaching and learning programs.. a handful of well-informed and well-intentioned teachers are pushing the envelope but the vast majority still baulk even at email communication let alone true Web 2.0 engagement.