The future of business is here, and it’s powered by artificial intelligence. BRISBANE, Australia , Dec. 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Click Start Digital, a leader in e-commerce business solutions, has launched its new AI-Integrated Training Platform, designed to help entrepreneurs start and scale their online businesses with ease. This upgrade enhances its renowned training programs by integrating AI tools for market research, automation, and growth strategies. With over 13 years of expertise, Click Start Digital is revolutionizing the way entrepreneurs approach business, delivering smarter, faster results using cutting-edge technology. How to Launch Your E-Commerce Business Using AI Click Start Digital combines innovative AI tools with proven expertise to make launching an online store simple and effective. For those wondering how to start a business, the platform offers a transformative approach. From idea generation to scaling, entrepreneurs gain the knowledge, tools, and strategies they need to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace. What Sets Click Start Digital Apart? “Artificial intelligence is transforming how we do business, and we’re thrilled to bring this innovation to aspiring entrepreneurs,” says Samantha Hurst , founder of Click Start Digital. “With our training and tools, anyone can start an e-commerce business, simplify operations, and achieve results faster than ever.” Why AI is a Game-Changer for E-Commerce AI tools are reshaping business operations with benefits such as predictive analytics for high-demand products and automation for personalized customer experiences. With Click Start Digital, entrepreneurs can: Click Start Digital ensures that starting an e-commerce business is not just possible but sustainable with the power of AI. About Click Start Digital For over a decade, Click Start Digital has helped entrepreneurs launch and grow successful e-commerce businesses. Combining bespoke websites, AI-powered tools, and expert support, it has become a trusted partner for thousands turning their business dreams into reality. To learn more, visit Click Start Digital . View original content: https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/how-to-start-an-e-commerce-business-using-ai-302331732.html SOURCE Click Start DigitalVanuatu's political uncertainty continues as it prepares for a snap election in January Voters in Vanuatu will go to the polls for a snap election on 14 January next year. This comes after President Nikenike Vurobaravu dissolved parliament two weeks ago. The government and the president, at that time, were both about to face votes of no confidence. Vanuatu has been riven by political instability, with frequent elections and changes of leadership in recent years. The snap election comes despite the people of Vanuatu supporting referendums earlier this year, aimed at establishing greater political stability in the country. The changes aim to make it more difficult for MPs to shift their allegiance. The resulting law changes were not gazetted by the government when the dissolution of parliament was announced. The Vanuatu Electoral Office said registrations close today, 3 December, with qualitied candidates to be announced on 31 December. On the same day, campaigning will be officially allowed to begin. The current government, led by Charlot Salwai, came to power after ousting Sato Kilman in a vote of no-confidence in October 2023. Kilmam himself [https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/497262/sato-kilman-elected-as-vanuatu-s-new-prime-minister won power after a snap election in September 2023, following a leadership challenge against Ishmael Kalsakau. Then in November last year Salwai successfully defeated a vote of no confidence.
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. donors gave $3.6 billion on Tuesday, an increase from the past two years, according to estimates from the nonprofit GivingTuesday . The Tuesday after Thanksgiving, now known as GivingTuesday, has become a major day for nonprofits to fundraise and otherwise engage their supporters each year, since the 92nd St Y in New York started it as a hashtag in 2012. GivingTuesday has since become an independent nonprofit that connects a worldwide network of leaders and organizations who promote giving in their communities. “This just really shows the generosity, the willingness of American citizens to show up, particularly collectively,” said Asha Curran, CEO of the nonprofit GivingTuesday. “We are just seeing the power of collective action and particularly collective giving over and over and over again.” This year, about 18.5 million people donated to nonprofits and another 9.2 million people volunteered, according to GivingTuesday's estimates. Both the number of donors and the number of volunteers increased by 4% from the group's 2023 estimates. “For us, it’s not just about the number of dollars," Curran said. "It’s about the number of people who feel like they have agency over the way their communities progress forward into the future.” The nonprofit GivingTuesday estimates the amount of money and goods donated and the number of participants using data from donor management software companies, donation platforms, payment processors and donor-advised funds. Curran said they are purposely conservative in their calculations. Nonprofits in the U.S. raised $3.1 billion in both 2022 and 2023 on GivingTuesday. That mirrored larger giving trends where the overall amount of donations dropped in 2022 and mostly held steady in 2023 after accounting for inflation. It’s never easy to predict current giving trends, but Una Osili, associate dean at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, said there were economic forces pushing in both directions. “At the very same time, there’s a lot of uncertainty, especially around prices, the cost of living, the supermarket toll that people are expecting to continue even though inflation has moderated,” she said. Donating or volunteering with nonprofits aren't the only ways people participate in their communities. Many give to crowdfunding campaigns , political causes or support people directly in their networks. But tracking charitable donations is one way that researchers use to understand people's civic engagement. “This country is undeniably in a lot of pain and very divided right now,” Curran said. “And so to have a day that felt as hopeful and as optimistic as yesterday did, I’m sure was not only comforting to me, but to many, many millions of people.” ___ Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy . Copyright 2024 The Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.NoneBangor Walmart reopens after evacuation
Saudi Arabia banned film for 35 years. The Red Sea festival is just one sign of the industry's riseSo far, ByteDance has shown zero willingness to spin off TikTok in the US. The Chinese parent company seems to be banking on the Supreme Court or President-elect rescuing the app . The obvious names that would would buy TikTok if they could — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. — are sitting on the sidelines and waiting to see what happens in the coming weeks. The clock is ticking. Congress to and reminding them that they will be legally liable for continuing to host TikTok in their app stores after January 19th. Then there’s , the real estate billionaire and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. For months, McCourt has been very public about his desire to buy TikTok. He has ramped up his drumbeat since ByteDance recently lost its legal fight on appeal. This week, he pitched more investors on his Project Liberty plan to buy the app’s US operations. When I spoke with McCourt over Zoom in between those investor meetings, he told me he currently has roughly $20 billion behind him for a bid. He has asked , who was briefly TikTok’s CEO the time it was almost banned from the US, to be involved, though Mayer hasn’t signed on. McCourt told me his team has talked to “most” of ByteDance’s biggest American investors and that they’re “very interested” in his plan. (Spokespeople for these firms either declined to comment or didn’t respond to my pings, and Mayer didn’t have a comment.) There are several reasons McCourt’s attempt to buy TikTok is a long-shot, the biggest being that, even if ByteDance wanted to sell, the Chinese government may not let it. Then there are the technical details of his proposal, which would see TikTok put on a that is funded by McCourt and untested with a platform of TikTok’s size. For me, the biggest red flag of all is that there’s a cryptocurrency called Frequency tied to the project. McCourt has high-minded ambitions for how the internet should work that are in line with the rise of federated platforms like ActivityPub and Bluesky. He imagines TikTok offering a marketplace of user-created algorithms, much like Bluesky does today, and users having the ability to own their profiles. Keep reading for more from our conversation this week... Having seen the harms of social media and where the internet was going as it became highly centralized, I dedicated some resources to start a public policy school at my alma mater, Georgetown. I was perhaps naive in retrospect, but I thought that we could get the policymaking apparatus out in front of the problem and steer things in a better direction out of that school. Then I realized that the public policy making apparatus is no match for Big Tech, so I began to go back to my roots. My family has been building infrastructure for 131 years, so this actually isn’t very far afield from our core competency when you think about this not as software at the app layer, but as infrastructure at the base layer. I talked to a few brilliant computer scientists that we have in the company and put the task to them of solving this from an engineering perspective if you had no limitations. The answer came back that you would go ahead and create another protocol that would connect us, just like TCP/IP connects devices and HTTP connects data. Our goal here is bigger than buying TikTok. It’s reimagining how the internet works. Purchasing TikTok and moving 170 million people to a reimagined, upgraded internet would catalyze that alternative and compress time. I see it as both and we’ve been very careful to separate the two. Project Liberty has an institute, a 501(c)(3), that’s purely not-for-profit. DSNP has been gifted to the world. That is being supported by the institute. The layer-one blockchain, Frequency, is tokenized. The community will own the majority of the tokens but that will be a commercial endeavor. TikTok, when we buy it, will be a commercial endeavor. Probably not because I don’t know how you would achieve the objectives we want to achieve, which is to be able to run the platform without the algorithm and give people ownership and control of their relationships. You need an implementation device to use DSNP. I would be totally open, however, if someone else built an alternative to Frequency. We’re looking to decentralize, not further centralize. I admire all the people who are doing that because they are trying to improve the internet and respect individuals. A federated approach is very different than having a universal social graph that’s globally accessible. We’re saying that something has to change fundamentally with the internet. What is doing with Bluesky is great but you still have a Bluesky identity. You’re still on Bluesky and your relationships are on Bluesky. Let’s stipulate that it’s better but you’re still there, right? At some point maybe Jay is not there. People are super excited about this and capital will not be an issue at all. The issue is going to be what ByteDance does. We’ve been saying for over six months that we felt the government was going to win the case. I don’t think ByteDance’s appeal is going to be successful. This is going to be a shut-it-down or sell it scenario. Like President-elect Trump, I’d like to see it not banned. We’re not asking China for the algorithm. We’re not an antitrust threat. We’ll pass CFIUS vetting. We don’t need or want the algorithm. We have a clean stack where the user base can migrate. We don’t know what ByteDance is going to decide. We certainly hope they decide to sell and preserve some value for their shareholders. We’ll do it on terms that we think can be a win-win. China keeps the algorithm. US citizens are protected. The app stays alive. That’s what we’ve got circled right now and that’s an order of magnitude what we think this is worth. Now, I say that with a huge caveat: we don’t know what ByteDance is selling. We think we have a very good idea of what the current numbers are, but it’s not like there’s a data room that ByteDance has set up and we’re inside of it. I think we have a good sense of what this would be worth if ByteDance keeps the algorithm and sells the user base and the content and the brand. There are three categories of investors. One group is the existing American companies that have invested in ByteDance. We’ve talked to most of them. They’re very interested, assuming ByteDance agrees to sell. They would either put more capital in or keep their capital in. A second category are people that are familiar with the asset because they’ve looked at it in the past. Some are looking at it for the first time. These are the large balance sheets that deploy big amounts of capital and they’re interested in what we’re doing. The third category is the bucket of cultural capital, people with influence who are interested in being a part of this and bringing their communities with them. We’ll be able to share once we know what ByteDance is doing. It makes no sense to be barking up the wrong tree here. That’s correct. I reached out before the decision. They were not interested in speaking at that time. We’ll try it again. They know at this stage of the game that we exist, we’re interested, and we hope that there’s incoming at some point as well. But we respect their decision-making process. They’re going to decide what they think is best for their interests. We’re in the process of reaching out. I’ve heard President-elect Trump say he doesn’t want to see the app banned. I’m very interested in having that conversation once this gets sorted on the China side and they decide what they’re going to do. I don’t see the big incumbents being bidders here for a couple of reasons. One is antitrust, obviously. Secondly, imagine you were a tobacco company and you built a big business and then people started to get worried because people were getting sick and dying because of the addiction of cigarettes and carcinogens. If you bought a tobacco company after the surgeon general’s warning, then you were putting a target on your back because you were buying it with the awareness that your product kills people. The growth of these platforms happened really fast. Then we discovered that there are harms. Anybody buying TikTok and replicating the current design, which is to scrape peoples’ data, apply algorithms, and manipulate people, they’re buying this with their eyes wide open. So I don’t see a lot of bidders because people realize they’re just putting a target on their back. Let’s take this problem and actually use it to catalyze an upgraded internet. Then, a lot of the problems go away. A lot of the lawsuits go away. A lot of the harms go away. That’s Project Liberty. Hundreds of the world’s top researchers gathered this week in Vancouver, Canada for NeuralPS, one of the world’s top academic gatherings in the field of AI. I asked (who just published ) what it was like being there on the ground: The conversation came up sometimes, but this is not the place where people actually believe that. AI safety was something I wound up talking about a lot. A research topic that also came up a lot was what focuses on, which is helping AI understand the world like we do in terms of physics and objects. That touches a bunch of cool things — robotics, agents, advanced reasoning. This conference was filled with students from Waterloo and University of Toronto who basically want AI job. (It was quite sweet sometimes watching those students corner an AI exec at a party.) If parties are any indicator, everyone wants to get as close to OpenAI as possible. This is a highly academic conference with lots of people just wanting to do good, deep research. The Midjourney party was 4x oversubscribed and researchers kept sending me the RSVP link. Everyone was asking about the secret OpenAI parties, though. There are plenty of interesting takeaways from . The Microsoft AI CEO doesn’t seem to agree with on the timing of AGI’s arrival, and he revealed that Microsoft won’t train its own frontier models when OpenAI is doing it for them anyway. He also takes some shots at Google’s management culture versus Microsoft’s, which I’m sure will cause some eyes to roll in Mountain View, given the way Suleyman excited. As a follow-up to this conversation, I recommend with and . Reading between the lines, it’s clear that there is ongoing tension between the level of compute Altman wants and what Nadella feels comfortable spending. For those closely following Nvidia’s stock price, Nadella also mentions that Microsoft no longer feels GPU constrained but rather constrained by the power requirements for its data centers. If you aren’t already getting new issues of , , which includes unlimited access to all of our stories and an improved ad experience on the web. You’ll also get , featuring scoops about companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, and more. As always, I want to hear from you, especially if you have a tip or feedback. Respond here, and I’ll get back to you, or . I’m happy to keep you anonymous. Thanks for subscribing. /