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In an ever-increasingly violent world, situational awareness becomes your most important defense against attack. And it’s in your everyday concealed carry practice where the seemingly mundane decisions can have the most effect. Take a different route. Clear away the thick bushes by the window. And in public, put more thought into where you sit.

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Take this photo from the U.S. Concealed Carry Association (USCCA) for example. Walk into a busy, crowded coffee shop or similar public setting, and there are a million little choices that impact are safety. But maybe no choice is quite as interesting as where one sits.

Concealed Carry Practice

Any student of the gun and certainly the old West knows the famous tales of Bill Hickok. Preoccupied with his poker hand, Hickok, for the reported first and only time, sat with his back to the door in Nuttal & Mann’s #10 Saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. That’s when his assailant, forever known as “The Coward” Jack McCall, took advantage and quietly slipped in the door and executed Wild Bill in the back of the head. For our USCCA map, that would make most of the “3” seats pretty undesirable.

Since trouble is most likely to come through the front door, seating choice should reflect the location of the emergency exit along the opposite wall. The two bathrooms are close by, which could potentially offer refuge as well, and possibly a window as well. Table “A” gives quick access to both bathrooms, while tables “B” and “C” provide even quicker exits.

Table “I,” seats “1” and “4” offer the most tactical advantage. With the wall at one’s back, patrons have the most open field of view of the entire coffee shop. You can see both exits, and even the bathrooms. From table “I,” you can also see every other single customer, worker, etc. You’ve got it wired.

There’s a lot of choices to be made in everyday life. Giving them some thought, and thinking of your own capabilities and needs, provides the beginning of a plan. And it’s planning and being prepared that often help provide our best defense.

The post Concealed Carry Practice: Where Should You Sit in This Photo and Why? appeared first on Personal Defense World.

via Personal Defense World
Concealed Carry Practice: Where Should You Sit in This Photo and Why?

Clubhouse — the software project management platform focused on team collaboration, workflow transparency and ease of integration — is taking another big step towards its goal of democratizing efficient software development.

Traditionally, legacy project management programs in software development can often appear like an engineer feeding frenzy around a clunky stack of to-dos. Engineers have limited clarity into the work being done by other members of their team or into project tasks that fall outside of their own silo.

Clubhouse has long been focused on easing the headaches of software development workflows by providing full visibility into the status of specific tasks, the work being done by all team members across a project, as well as higher-level project plans and goals. Clubhouse also offers easy integration with other development tools as well as its own API to better support the cross-functionality a new user may want.

Today, Clubhouse released a free version of its project management platform, that offers teams of up to 10 people unlimited access to the product’s full suite of features, as well as unlimited app integrations.

The company also announced it will be launching an engineer focused collaboration and documentation tool later this year, that will be fully integrated with the Clubhouse project management product. The new product dubbed “Clubhouse Write” is currently in beta, but will allow development teams to collaborate, organize and comment on project documentation in real-time, enabling further inter-team communication and a more open workflow.

The broader mission behind the Clubhouse Write tool and the core product’s free plan is to support more key functions in the development process for more people, ultimately making it easier for anyone to start dynamic and distributed software teams and ideate on projects.

“Clubhouse Write” Beta Version. Image via Clubhouse

In an interview with TechCrunch, Clubhouse also discussed how the offerings will provide key competitive positioning against larger incumbents in the software project management space. Clubhouse has long competed with Atlassian’s project management tool “Jira”, but now the company is doubling down by launching Clubhouse Write which will compete head-on with Atlassian’s team collaboration product Confluence.

According to recent Atlassian investor presentations, Jira and Confluence make up the lion’s share of the Atlassian’s business and revenues. And with Atlassian’s market capitalization of ~$30 billion, Clubhouse has its sights set on what it views as a significant market share opportunity.

According to Clubhouse, the company believes it’s in pole position to capture a serious chunk of Atlassian’s foothold given it designed its two products to have tighter integration than the legacy platforms, and since Clubhouse is essentially providing free versions of what many are already paying for to date.

And while Atlassian is far from the only competitor in the cluttered project management space, few if any competing platforms are offering a full project tool kit for free, according to the company. Clubhouse is also encouraged by the strong support it has received from the engineering community to date. In a previous interview with TechCrunch’s Danny Crichton, the company told TechCrunch it had reached at least 700 enterprise customers using the platform before hiring any sales reps, and users of the platform already include Nubank, Dataiku, and Atrium amongst thousands of others.

Clubhouse has ambitious plans to further expand its footprint, having raised $16 million to date through its Series A according to Crunchbase, with investments from a long list of Silicon Valley mainstays including Battery Ventures, Resolute Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, RRE Ventures, BoxGroup, and others.

A former CTO himself, Clubhouse cofounder and CEO Kurt Schrader is intimately familiar with the opacity in product development that frustrates engineers and complicates release schedules. Schrader and Clubhouse CMO Mitch Wainer believe Clubhouse can maintain its organic growth by that staying hyperfocused on designing for project managers and creating simple workflows that keep engineers happy. According to Schrader, the company ultimately wants to be the “default [destination] for modern software teams to plan and build software.”

“Clubhouse is the best software project management app in the world,” he said. “We want all teams to have access to a world-class tool from day one whether it’s a 5 or 5,000 person team.”

via TechCrunch
Clubhouse announces new collaboration tool and free version of its project management platform

Ohio State University’s licensing income from licensing research and staff innovations reached a new record of $8.8 million in 2019, even without the benefit of a one-time stock sale the prior year.
Kevin Taylor, the university’s new commercialization chief, echoed his predecessors in saying that’s not the number he’s focused on – because if he does his job right, the dollars will take care of themselves. Instead Ohio State focuses on leading indicators like the rise in the number of active spinoffs…

via Columbus Business News – Local Columbus News | Business First of Columbus
As OSU tech licensing income climbs, newly hired commercialization chief sees ‘untapped potential’

Email marketing, as you’ll know, is such a big part of modern-day business.

Mistakes and bumps occur frequently – this can be due to not copy checking, missing links, and various other editing bloopers.

Fails are frustrating for both ends of the emails – even if we all appreciate that, as humans, we all make errors sometimes.  

Mistakes and errors are great ways to learn – allowing you to overcome obstacles and create (nearly) perfect emails in the future.  

Below, we’ve listed the top fails that every email marketing company endures – and how they can overcome them.  

Dear First Name  

There’s really nothing quite as personal as receiving an email that says, “Dear </FirstName>.” 

Not only does this tell the user that they’re just a small tool in your marketing machine, but it’s also highly unprofessional.  

Email marketing is supposed to revolve around, making meaningful relationships with customers or clients. Sending out an email like this will push your audience away, making them feel like, well, a name on a list.  

The best way to stop issues like this happening is by sending out test emails. This way you can make sure that your HTML all works fine.  

Also, when you’re asking people to sign up to your mailing list, are you making it essential for them to give their names? Make sure there’s little margin for error or embarrassment. 

Spelling errors 

This is an inevitable part of any company that works with writing copy. Of course, certain typos and grammar mistakes are inescapable, especially if you’re sending out multiple emails a week.  

Double-check over your email copy, and make sure grammar is all up to standard. For example, an email from San Antonio read: 

“Help Kids Enjoy FREE beer” – one little comma changes the entire message that this email is trying to depict. Always check your emails, use tools like Grammarly to make sure you’re sending out an email that won’t become a viral tweet.  

Spell check might not always be your friend, too – autocorrect can make some embarrassing changes, so make sure it’s not changed anything without you noticing.  

Read over your email a few times before sending it out. That’s the key to a faultless campaign.  

If you aren’t ready to hire an in-house team of writers and editors, you can always take advantage of the available services and tools like Trust My Paper, Best Essay.Education, Grammarly, and Hemingway.

Segmenting your audience  

If you have a large mailing list, make sure that you’re segmenting your audience to an impeccable degree.  

You may remember when Amazon sent out a baby registry email to thousands of people with no babies or no babies on the way. That was a big blunder that caused a little bit of laughter.  

However, segmenting your audience wrongly can lead to some disasters. Certain audiences don’t want to receive certain emails, and it may push them to unsubscribe.  

In fact, the National Client Email Report from the DMA in 2015, stated that 77% of email marketing ROI came from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.  

Make sure that customers or clients are updating their preferences, to stop them from clicking the unsubscribe button.  

The images don’t follow the rules 

Certain emails just don’t look the way you want them to, once you’ve sent them out.  

Various buttons and images will completely go rouge, and make your email look so strange.  

This actually has cataclysmic consequences – if your customer opens up the email, and sees a jumble of images and buttons, they won’t stay on it for long.  

Again, this can be solved with a simple test email being sent out to multiple different browsers and devices. This way, you can ensure that it all works the way you want it to.  

Don’t try to hide the unsubscribe button  

As an email marketing company, the unsubscribe button might feel like your worst enemy – but you should never try to hide the button.  

Every form of an electronic message is required to have an unsubscribe option, and it’s only fair.  

Firstly, you could end up getting in a lot of trouble, which is never desirable and doesn’t reflect well on your company.  

Secondly, if they can’t find your unsubscribe button, they might just choose to report your email for spam. When multiple people do this, it causes real problems.  

Just make sure it’s nice and obvious. If people want to unsubscribe, for whatever reason, they should be able to without any issues.  

Fonts not displaying correctly 

Email clients are very restrictive when it comes to what they may (or may not) render.  

It’s frustrating because there’s a wide range of beautiful fonts out there, but you can’t use them all with emails. Sometimes, it just isn’t worth the risk too.  

It all depends on the contact’s own device. This means it’s best if you stick to standard web fonts, so you can ensure they’re accessible to everybody.  

If the font you have used isn’t on the recipient’s device, it will fall back to a web standard font anyway. This can cause your design to look strange for some people. You don’t have any control over what this backup version looks like, unfortunately.  

“I strongly recommend that you always play it safe with fonts. The standard web fonts can make great emails, anyway. Don’t be disheartened if some obscure font you really like can’t be integrated or displayed in various email clients.” — Amanda Muller, an email marketing specialist at Grab My Essay.

Ineffective subject lines  

Did you know an average business worker receives and sends upwards of 121 emails every single day? 

There’s very little chance that they will open and read every single one. They will, however, see all the subject lines.  

If you have a cliché or boring subject line, they’ll delete without even opening.  

Writing headlines and subject lines is a tricky art to master. It’s absolutely essential, though. The subject line is the difference between an email that’s engaged with, and one that isn’t.  

Plan your subject lines carefully, and always make sure that you’re targeting the audience that you want to.  

Emojis are a great way to communicate in business, believe it or not. This is especially true if you’re targeting younger generations.  

Remember; what’s the problem you’re trying to solve or the main selling point? 

Offering no value  

On the same note, with so many emails being sent out every single day – you have to provide your audience with value.  

To begin, you have to build a relationship and create a level of trust with your subscribers. This will ensure that they will open your emails. 

For example, if you’re a travel website – make sure that you provide your audience with a mixture of valuable information and promotions. Top 10 travel tips, The best rucksacks for backpackers, and the cheapest hostels in Bali are all great pieces of information, that can all be used as selling points.  

Don’t give too much information, though. People don’t have the time or attention span to read through paragraphs of information. Make it short and sweet – with snappy, appealing links, and headlines. Give the power to the reader.  

Conclusion

With all these common mistakes and fails, it should all be seen as a learning curve.  

There are multiple ways that an email campaign can go wrong – but avoiding these top mistakes will ensure that it happens much less often.  

Failure doesn’t mean that you should give up. It simply means that you should keep climbing and learning. It’s a necessary part of creating the most successful email campaigns.  

What mistakes have you learned from? 

via Noupe
Top Fails That Hit Every Email Marketing Company

I saw Miguel’s post about David Hogg claiming that mass shootings today are somehow related to Wounded Knee and some Harvard level deep thinking like that.

David Hogg is part of the chorus of voices calling for civilian disarmament, which has metastasized thought the Democrats and is now part of every Presidential primary candidate’s platform.

From History.com:

On December 29, the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under Big Foot, a Lakota Sioux chief, near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. As that was happening, a fight broke out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot was fired, although it’s unclear from which side. A brutal massacre followed, in which it’s estimated 150 Indians were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men.

From the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln:

While these discussions proceeded in the Lakota camp, a number of Indians began singing Ghost Dance songs, with some rising to throw handfuls of dirt in the air. The troops who surrounded them perceived the singing and dirt throwing as signals to attack, and at this tense moment the fuse was lit. A man named Black Coyote (sometimes called Black Fox) refused to surrender his rifle to a soldier. The two began wrestling over the gun, and in the struggle it discharged. Immediately the nervous troops began firing, while the Miniconjous retrieved their weapons and returned fire.

The military’s rifle fire was complemented with cannon rounds from Hotchkiss guns, whose accuracy and exploding shells were formidable. The outnumbered and outgunned Lakotas fled, and for several hours intermittent gunfire continued, with the military in pursuit. Bodies were found as far away as three miles from the camp. Firing ceased, and by midafternoon the troops had gathered up their dead and wounded, as well as Lakota wounded, and returned to Pine Ridge Agency. The fear of a reprisal attack kept troops and civilians entrenched at the agency until January 3, 1891, when a military-escorted civilian burial party proceeded to the site of the massacre. There they buried 146 Lakotas in a single mass grave. Other dead were accounted for later, bringing the total to more than 250 Lakotas; the Seventh Cavalry lost twenty-five men.

So the Wounded Knee Massacre was the result of the US Government engaging in civilian disarmament.

This horrible massacre, which is a stain on the history of the United States, was the 1890’s equivalent of what David Hogg has been demanding for over a year and the Democrats are campaigning on.

By Hogg’s current standard, the 7th Calvary are the heroes, taking the rapid-fire, high capacity magazine rifles away from civilians.

This just goes to prove that any disarmament program will be a blood bath, as all it takes for the shooting to start is for one man to refuse to give up his rifle and get into a tussle over it.  The idea that several million Americans could be disarmed peacefully is ludicrous if the US Calvary couldn’t peacefully disarm a few hundred Indians.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t go Harvard like David Hogg, but I just can’t follow the logic here.

via
A little history for David Hogg and the Democrats on Wounded Knee

via Recoil
KelTec Releases a New .22LR Option: The P17 Pistol

While the software revolution started out slowly, over the past few years it’s exploded and the fastest-growing segment to-date has been the shift towards software as a service or SaaS.

SaaS has dramatically lowered the intrinsic total cost of ownership for adopting software, solved scaling challenges and taken away the burden of issues with local hardware. In short, it has allowed a business to focus primarily on just that — its business — while simultaneously reducing the burden of IT operations.

Today, SaaS adoption is increasingly ubiquitous. According to IDG’s 2018 Cloud Computing Survey, 73% of organizations have at least one application or a portion of their computing infrastructure already in the cloud. While this software explosion has created a whole range of downstream impacts, it has also caused software developers to become more and more valuable.

The increasing value of developers has meant that, like traditional SaaS buyers before them, they also better intuit the value of their time and increasingly prefer businesses that can help alleviate the hassles of procurement, integration, management, and operations. Developer needs to address those hassles are specialized.

They are looking to deeply integrate products into their own applications and to do so, they need access to an Application Programming Interface, or API. Best practices for API onboarding include technical documentation, examples, and sandbox environments to test.

APIs tend to also offer metered billing upfront. For these and other reasons, APIs are a distinct subset of SaaS.

For fast-moving developers building on a global-scale, APIs are no longer a stop-gap to the future—they’re a critical part of their strategy. Why would you dedicate precious resources to recreating something in-house that’s done better elsewhere when you can instead focus your efforts on creating a differentiated product?

Thanks to this mindset shift, APIs are on track to create another SaaS-sized impact across all industries and at a much faster pace. By exposing often complex services as simplified code, API-first products are far more extensible, easier for customers to integrate into, and have the ability to foster a greater community around potential use cases.

Graphics courtesy of Accel

Billion-dollar businesses building APIs

Whether you realize it or not, chances are that your favorite consumer and enterprise apps—Uber, Airbnb, PayPal, and countless more—have a number of third-party APIs and developer services running in the background. Just like most modern enterprises have invested in SaaS technologies for all the above reasons, many of today’s multi-billion dollar companies have built their businesses on the backs of these scalable developer services that let them abstract everything from SMS and email to payments, location-based data, search and more.

Simultaneously, the entrepreneurs behind these API-first companies like Twilio, Segment, Scale and many others are building sustainable, independent—and big—businesses.

Valued today at over $22 billion, Stripe is the biggest independent API-first company. Stripe took off because of its initial laser-focus on the developer experience setting up and taking payments. It was even initially known as /dev/payments!

Stripe spent extra time building the right, idiomatic SDKs for each language platform and beautiful documentation. But it wasn’t just those things, they rebuilt an entire business process around being API-first.

Companies using Stripe didn’t need to fill out a PDF and set up a separate merchant account before getting started. Once sign-up was complete, users could immediately test the API with a sandbox and integrate it directly into their application. Even pricing was different.

Stripe chose to simplify pricing dramatically by starting with a single, simple price for all cards and not breaking out cards by type even though the costs for AmEx cards versus Visa can differ. Stripe also did away with a monthly minimum fee that competitors had.

Many competitors used the monthly minimum to offset the high cost of support for new customers who weren’t necessarily processing payments yet. Stripe flipped that on its head. Developers integrate Stripe earlier than they integrated payments before, and while it costs Stripe a lot in setup and support costs, it pays off in brand and loyalty.

Checkr is another excellent example of an API-first company vastly simplifying a massive yet slow-moving industry. Very little had changed over the last few decades in how businesses ran background checks on their employees and contractors, involving manual paperwork and the help of 3rd party services that spent days verifying an individual.

Checkr’s API gives companies immediate access to a variety of disparate verification sources and allows these companies to plug Checkr into their existing on-boarding and HR workflows. It’s used today by more than 10,000 businesses including Uber, Instacart, Zenefits and more.

Like Checkr and Stripe, Plaid provides a similar value prop to applications in need of banking data and connections, abstracting away banking relationships and complexities brought upon by a lack of tech in a category dominated by hundred-year-old banks. Plaid has shown an incredible ramp these past three years, from closing a $12 million Series A in 2015 to reaching a valuation over $2.5 billion this year.

Today the company is fueling an entire generation of financial applications, all on the back of their well-built API.

Graphics courtesy of Accel

Then and now

Accel’s first API investment was in Braintree, a mobile and web payment systems for e-commerce companies, in 2011. Braintree eventually sold to, and became an integral part of, PayPal as it spun out from eBay and grew to be worth more than $100 billion. Unsurprisingly, it was shortly thereafter that our team decided to it was time to go big on the category. By the end of 2014 we had led the Series As in Segment and Checkr and followed those investments with our first APX conference in 2015.

Plaid, Segment, Auth0, and Checkr had only raised Seed or Series A financings! And we are even more excited and bullish on the space. To convey just how much API-first businesses have grown in such a short period of time, we thought it would be useful perspective to share some metrics over the past five years, which we’ve broken out in the two visuals included above in this article.

While SaaS may have pioneered the idea that the best way to do business isn’t to actually build everything in-house, today we’re seeing APIs amplify this theme. At Accel, we firmly believe that APIs are the next big SaaS wave — having as much if not more impact as its predecessor thanks to developers at today’s fastest-growing startups and their preference for API-first products. We’ve actively continued to invest in the space (in companies like, Scale, mentioned above).

And much like how a robust ecosystem developed around SaaS, we believe that one will continue to develop around APIs. Given the amount of progress that has happened in just a few short years, Accel is hosting our second APX conference to once again bring together this remarkable community and continue to facilitate discussion and innovation.

Graphics courtesy of Accel

via TechCrunch
APIs are the next big SaaS wave

Melissa Bailey joined Ohio State University’s optometry faculty in 2006, catching the entrepreneurial bug amid the school’s first efforts to amp up commercialization of research.
She spun out her first company, a mobile app to measure vision, in 2014 – a long licensing process "from scratch," the associate professor said. It also was tough to find internal funding to develop the product. Her second spinout in 2017 was bifocal soft contact lenses. OSU’s licensing process was streamlined and she…

via Columbus Business News – Local Columbus News | Business First of Columbus
Ohio universities take ‘big leap’ on tech commercialization with new ‘IP Promise’

hackingbear writes: A team of researchers at China’s Zhejiang University were able to create a gel that makes tooth enamel repair itself, they wrote in the science journal Science Advances, a development that could spell the end of fillings as an (unreliable) method to repair cavities which are one of the most prevalent chronic diseases in humans. The gel succeeded in making the enamel repair itself within only 48 hours. Though it now only manages to generate a layer of about 3 micrometres — about 400 times thinner than undamaged enamel, the researcher says the gel could be repeatedly applied to build up this repair layer. The team is now testing the gel in mice and hopes to later test it in people.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via Slashdot
Chinese Scientists Regrow Tooth Enamel In 48 Hours With Phosphate Gel

Link

Beyond the Brick shares a noisy, yet hypnotic look inside one of the production lines at LEGO’s Kladno, Czech Republic, as a nearly endless stream of freshly-molded minifig parts roll out of sifting machines to be stamped with graphics to give them their identities. We love the part at the end showcasing all the designs.

via The Awesomer
LEGO Minifig Printing Factory