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Title tags play a key role in attracting clicks from search results. In 2025, standing out means going beyond keywords – it’s about crafting concise, compelling titles that draw attention and match what users are looking for. This article shows you how. Title tags and their key characteristics Title tags are the clickable headlines displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs). They summarize a webpage’s content and play a crucial role in helping users and search engines understand what the page is about. They remain largely consistent year over year, as they still need to adhere to pixel count limits (55 characters or fewer with spaces is recommended for character-based limits). They shouldn’t be clickbait and must clearly convey what the user will learn or how they’ll benefit from clicking. They should also include the keyword phrase or entity you aim to rank for. Trends and challenges in 2025 The nuances come into play when tailoring title tags for the new year. In 2024, we saw: Media companies exploiting “best” queries for shopping and affiliate listicles. Niche sites reverting to question-based titles and clickbait. Retailers prioritizing SEO modifiers over relevance to their offerings (in the niches we operate in). To compete and stand out in 2025, we must adapt our title tags to differentiate from these trends. Standing out helps maintain rankings and also increase click-through rates. Below are common SEO tactics for title tags that apply to multiple niches I work with. Optimizing title tags for length In many queries we compete for, ecommerce, service providers, and content producers are using the full character limit for title tags. This year, we’re focusing on reducing title length to stand out and capture attention. When most titles in the SERPs are between 45 and 55 characters, a shorter title that includes keywords and possibly a number can draw attention to your listing. Examples: Shop Red Tshirts That Work for Women, Men, and Children The Best Red Tshirts for Children to Adults in All Styles on Sale Red Tshirts for Sports, Fitness, & Casual for Your Entire Family Red Tshirts for the Family – XS – XXL Cotton, Polyester, and Blended Red Tshirts for the Family $25 & Under – Red Tshirts for the Family In these examples, one title includes a number and dollar amount, appealing to cost-conscious buyers, while another highlights sizes. Both provide clear information and stand out when other results fill the available character limit. Dig deeper: SEO for page titles and meta descriptions: How to win more clicks Using numbers and symbols effectively A few years ago, SERPs were dominated by title tags starting with numbers, but their prevalence has declined. This creates an opportunity to strategically reintroduce numbers with modifiers, without reverting to listicles. Examples of modifiers include: Percent off. Dollar amounts. Sizes or lengths. Search your target query to see how many title tags include numbers. If most don’t, or they all use the same format, consider introducing a variation. For example: “50% off” could become “half off” or vice versa. “Buy 1 Get 1” might replace “BOGO.” Incorporating numbers can effectively capture attention as long as the title tag accurately reflects the page content and doesn’t mislead users. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. Business email address Sign me up! Processing... See terms. Shifting from questions to statements In 2023 and 2024, there was a resurgence of questions used as H1 and H2 tags, with many sites using the same phrasing for title tags and headings. If these sites are penalized or the search results you compete in rely heavily on questions, switching to statements can give you an edge. This trend likely stems from platforms like Reddit, Quora, and forums, where community-driven questions surfaced and inspired brands, publishers, and lead gen sites to follow suit. It’s reminiscent of the rise of “People Also Ask” results in search engines. To compete, focus on crafting titles that highlight what users will learn. For example, instead of “Which Blue Tshirt is Best for Baseball?” use “How to Style Your Blue Baseball Tshirt and Get Fitted.” This approach emphasizes the practical value of the content, such as styling tips and sizing guidance, rather than posing a vague question. If competitors are relying on “how-to” guides and questions, statements can help you stand out. For instance: “Blue Baseball Tshirt on Sale + Our True Fit Guide for Sizing.” This example conveys product availability and practical advice in one concise statement. Publishers, affiliate sites, and others can adopt similar strategies to differentiate themselves. Leveraging AI Overviews A key focus for title tags in 2025 is optimizing for AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT, especially if they begin displaying title tags and sources more prominently without user prompts. AI Overviews already show title tags and sources, which is promising, but most strategies for ranking remain standard. The real opportunity lies in standing out among the cited resources once your site is included. To make your title tags stand out, monitor which tags are appearing and how long they remain visible. For static title tags in AI Overviews, consider what you can do for the entity or main query that would cause a user to click on your website instead of the other cited resources. For example, if the AI Overview is about baking sourdough, consider what most users want to learn. If half of the searches focus on baking and recipes while the other half emphasize scoring and artisanal techniques, combine these aspects into your title tag. By addressing the full spectrum of search intent, you position your site as the most relevant and appealing option. Writing title tags that stand out Optimizing title tags for 2025 means analyzing what worked for others in 2024 and using that insight to differentiate your approach. The tips outlined here have proven effective across multiple clients and can be adapted to fit your niche. As search trends evolve, staying alert to new features and search result types will ensure you remain competitive and continue capturing clicks. Dig deeper: How to write title tags for SEO with ChatGPT View the full article

The pre-Super Bowl hype weeks have begun, and with them comes the annual American tradition of calling the NFL rigged. Local drunks, AM radio sports show hosts, and message board experts are all in agreement: The fix is in. Last year, the most interesting conspiracy theory held that the Pentagon rigged the entire 2024 NFL season so the Chiefs could appear in the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift could help Democrats get re-elected in 2024. (Oops.) This year's football truthers have a less esoteric theory for why the Chiefs are definitely going to win the Super Bowl: Follow the money. They make a compelling case, but they're wrong. Why "they" would fix the Super BowlThe rough consensus among NFL conspiracy theorists is that the National Football League fixed the 2025 season in favor of the Kansas City Chiefs because it makes everyone the most money. If the Chiefs have been blown out in the playoff, the league wouldn't have sold as many Patrick Mahomes jerseys. ABC wouldn't be able to charge as much for the commercials that air during the game. We might not have to listen to Chiefs' coach Andy Reid say "bundle-rooski" so often; online gambling companies would have fewer bettors; the guys who sell hot dogs outside the stadium in New Orleans would sell fewer hot dogs. You get the idea: The Chiefs doing well is good business. Is it even possible to fix an NFL game?It's definitely possible to fix a football game—not like they fix professional wrestling matches, but it could happen, and happen without players, coaches, trainers, and team owners having to agree to a predetermined outcome. You could, theoretically, fix a football game with a handful of crooked referees. NFL football teams are usually roughly evenly matched (especially when we're talking about the Super Bowl) and games are decided by a single decisions from officials regularly. And football's esoteric rules make it easy. Refereeing a football game requires subjective interpretation of vaguely worded text—in order for the ball to be "caught," for instance, the receiver must "performs any act common to the game (e.g., tuck the ball away, extend it forward, take an additional step, turn upfield, or avoid or ward off an opponent)," or "maintain control of the ball long enough to do so." So there's room for interpretation. Officials also decide where the ball is placed after a play, whether a blocker is holding another player, how much pass interference "counts," whether conduct is "unsportsmanlike," and a million other judgement calls. Refs can even arbitrarily award a touchdown in some situations, so you could see how officials could hand a ball game to either team. And it's not like it never happened before. Evidence that the referees are helping Kansas CityHere are a few of the questionable calls in this weekend's very close playoff game between The Chiefs and the Buffalo Bills: Remember that definition of "catch?" This is not an example of one: This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. It's an incomplete pass. Or it's an interception. And speaking of the refs deciding where the ball is spotted, in the below clip, The Bills are either just over or just behind the first down line. One ref immediately says first down. The other disagrees. Decision: Chiefs. Even though a close reading shows it was, in fact, a first down. This was the second first down the Bills earned in the same set of downs, by the way. The third down call was BS too: This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. It wasn't just the final game of the playoffs, either. Throughout the season, fans have been pointing out how tackles against Patrick Mahomes are called as "roughing the passer," despite not being particularly rough. Check out this "massive hit" in the Chief's playoff game against the Houston Texans. (Video only available on YouTube.) Note the incredulity in the voices of the commentators and note Mahomes' obvious flop. Here's another flop, just because it's funny: This has been going on all season, too. Over the last nine Chiefs games, they have not been called for a single roughing-the-passer penalty, while opponents have been hit with that costly penalty six times. The case against the NFL rigging football for the ChiefsIt's hard to watch the Chiefs this season and come to any conclusion but "the fix is in." The sheer number of tight games where the Chiefs managed to eke out a last-minute victory, often with the help of a favorable call is evidence enough—11 games in one season that were won with a one-score margin of victory? It sure looks like cheating—unless you're a Chiefs fan. If you're a Chiefs fan, you're seeing the best football team in the world, led by perhaps the best quarterback to ever play, and coached by the best coach since Vince Lombardi. The last-minute, tight victories are evidence of superior clock management: The Chiefs do just enough to win, and they do it like that on purpose. The deluge of roughing-the-passer penalties? Also strategic: Mahomes flops because it's legal and it it works. He's also a running quarterback, so he's going to get hit more often than a more stationary player, and thus draw more penalties. Putting extra importance on events that confirm our biases and ignoring the ones that don't is human nature. Believe it or not, rabid sports fans might not be collectively checking themselves for confirmation bias as rigorously as they should be. How many roughing-the-passer calls are made against other running quarterbacks? Someone is probably keeping track, but fans aren't too interested in a comparative analysis. Always consider the motiveThe idea that the NFL, as an organization, would have the power and clout to fix a football season (assuming they wanted to) seems farfetched enough to dismiss out of hand. NFL teams are owned by different millionaires and billionaires, who likely wield as much power as the league. They would not accept a rigged game (unless it was rigged in their team's favor.) As for the "storyline" argument, I'd be very surprised if the NFL believes that the people who watch football are excited to see the freaking Chiefs win another Super Bowl. I have no evidence except vibes, but if the idea is to produce a compelling narrative, the NFL needs better writers. The Chiefs winning three in a row is a lame story compared to "The always-terrible Washington Commanders, led by a rookie quarterback, manage to win the Super Bowl against all expectations," or even "Holy crap, the Detroit Lions are good this year?" This just leaves the refs. The 2007 cheating scandal that shook the NBA really happened and involved a referee, but it was one referee, and he only fixed the games he was picked to officiate. He wasn't trying to engineer victory for one squad over time. A league-wide conspiracy to support the Chiefs (or any other team) would be way more complex than the NBA chiseler's scheme, and would require many refs, linemen, the mysterious people who review contested calls, and who knows who else to agree to it. Someone would talk. Referees are people, just like usReferees and line judges are as prone to unconscious bias as anyone else. They make mistakes. Could it be that the officials are a little more likely to call penalties that favor the most famous player in the league? Sure, especially since he flops around like a damn soccer player. But are they doing it on purpose? Unlikely. NFL referees work their way up to the league, probably from high school sports, and if they do make the big show, they earn about a quarter million a year, and get to sometimes see Taylor Swift in the stands. It's the kind of job you'd want to keep. Plus, I assume most referees, like most everyone, take pride in doing their job well, and would be unlikely to risk throwing it all away for some short-term gain. As Mike Pereira, the rules analyst for Fox Sports and former head of NFL officiating, recently put it: "The fact that [officials] are looking out for any team or any individual is an absolute myth. You don't want to get fired. You want to be right. People that say that don't know a damn thing about officiating. Until you put the uniform on, until you have to make those quick judgments. ... get off my train. Period." Thankfully, the Super Bowl on Feb. 9 will answer the question of NFL rigging once and for all. If the vastly superior Philadelphia Eagles lose to the overrated Chiefs, we'll all know that the fix is in. View the full article

Google has once again expanded the reach of its site reputation abuse policy, beyond the US enforcement from from May and beyond limited European regions last week - we are now seeing enforcement in the massive German market.View the full article

Google may have pushed some improvements to the reporting system within Google Search Console. Now Google can show how soon the report was updated within a 30 minute interval. So instead of showing last updated 3 hours ago or 4 hours ago, as an example, Google can show 3.5 hours ago.View the full article

Earlier this month, the Google Ads industry had a lot of confusion around if and in what cases the Google Ads API accept or support placement exclusions for Performance Max campaigns. Well, Google's Ginny Marvin clarified this the other day in an email to Navah Hopkins.View the full article

The tech industry has long been infatuated with metaphors relating to the original space race. Its favorite one is moon shot, a term it applies to any undertaking of atypical ambition. But Chinese startup DeepSeek’s release of a reasoning AI model that may be a peer of OpenAI’s GPT-o1—despite having been created on the cheap, without access to Nvidia’s best chips—has everyone reaching back to 1957’s original Sputnik moment as a point of comparison. It somehow took most people a week to pay attention to DeepSeek’s R1, which the company released on January 20. Once they did, it spawned an insta-frenzy whose shockwaves ranged from the technological to the geopolitical. They include a stock market beating for Nvidia and other chipmakers, new questions about whether vast resources actually provide an edge in AI after all, and shock that the Biden administration’s bans on shipping the most powerful U.S.-designed chips to China didn’t prevent that country’s researchers from making a possibly epoch-shifting breakthrough with the stuff they had on hand. DeepSeek’s abrupt impact has undeniable similarities to the panic set off more than 67 years ago when the U.S.S.R. successfully put a satellite into orbit before the U.S. did. But as former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong pointed out in a post this week, the parallels are shallow. For one thing, the Soviets worked in deep secrecy. By contrast, DeepSeek is publishing code and research relating to its techniques for creating AI that does more with less. That gives the entire world the opportunity to quickly build upon what the company has created, potentially accelerating AI’s use everywhere rather than preserving a daunting competitive advantage for one company or country. To be sure, the sudden commodification of AI could have profound implications for the handful of powerful U.S. companies that have hitherto propelled the technology forward. But while the details and timing of such an inflection point were unpredictable, its inevitability was not. For example, an internal Google document leaked in early 2023 was titled “We Have No Moat and Neither Does OpenAI.” Or, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it when I talked to him later that year, “As far as I’m concerned, early leads in technology don’t matter.” DeepSeek’s R1—and other AI technologies modeled upon its approach—may well force AI’s incumbent giants to reassess everything about their future. Yet that’s hardly an end game for the industry as we’ve known it. Artificial intelligence isn’t anywhere near hitting an insurmountable wall that prevents further progress, and it’s tough to imagine that companies with access to vast resources won’t be able to unlock some advances that those operating under greater constraints cannot. Most importantly, the dizzying improvements we’ve seen in LLMs over the past few years have yet to be matched by the real-world AI in applications we use. As generative AI’s novelty wears off, tools such as Microsoft’s Copilot look like rougher and rougher drafts of something that needs further ingenuity to live up to its potential. The work of hooking up AI to all the processes we use to get stuff done has barely begun, and a lot of money stands to be made by the companies who get it done. That’s the underyling fact behind the industry’s obsession with so-called agentic AI—a slightly annoying buzzword that encompasses forms of the technology that can perform complex tasks without constant human oversight. There are some decent early stabs at the idea out there, such as Asana’s “AI teammates,” which already shoulder some of the grunt work of wrangling tasks in the project-management app. But those examples are outnumbered by instances of agentic AI that mostly prove the technology isn’t ready to do much on its own. Last week, for example, OpenAI released Operator, a “research preview” available to users of its $200/month ChatGPT Pro tier. Operator can type into a web browser and control a mouse pointer, a theoretical first step toward letting it handle all the tasks we humans perform on the web. Over at Platformer, Casey Newton reported on his hands-on experience with the service, which included asking it to perform tasks such as writing a high school lesson plan for The Great Gatsby. It took minutes to achieve results that were no better than what the non-agentic ChatGPT came up with almost instantly. And when Newton tried to use Operator to order groceries—something a stock chatbot can’t do—it turned out that the current version of Operator is pretty hopeless at the job, too. In December, I got a demo of Google’s experimental agentic AI, “Project Mariner,” that also involved grocery ordering and was too glacially slow to look like progress. That Operator and Mariner aren’t yet ready to handle a humble task such as buying a gallon of milk isn’t evidence that they’re exercises in futility—just that the goal of making AI usefully agentic remains largely aspirational, even at OpenAI and Google. DeepSeek and other feats of LLM optimization yet to come won’t get in the way of further development of agentic AI. Indeed, they’ll surely help by making the underlying infrastructure more accessible to more people with good ideas. Even then, the U.S.’s AI kingpins will maintain some distinct advantages, from the money and engineering talent they can throw at tomorrow’s challenges to their ability to market new products to big, established customer bases. Maybe DeepSeek-R1’s arrival marks a turning point for these companies. But only a failure of imagination would doom them to irrelevance. You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. More top tech stories from Fast Company Everything wrong with the AI landscape in 2025, hilariously captured in this ‘SNL’ sketch In a recent ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch, Bowen Yang and Timothée Chalamet managed to highlight several glaring flaws with the current technology. Read More → What people on TikTok are really talking about when they say ‘cute winter boots’ The trend has nothing to do with footwear but is instead an example of ‘algospeak,’ or the use of coded language to avoid filters and censorship. Read More → Bookshop.org is launching e-books to help local bookstores compete with Amazon’s Kindle The challenger brand to Amazon’s hegemony has big plans to build further, starting with a new e-book initiative. Read More → These 5 trends show where music and streaming are headed in 2025 Data firm Luminate’s music streaming data shows where the industry is headed in 2025—from 2024’s big year for pop to growth in international subscribers. Read More → Why did DeepSeek tell me it’s made by Microsoft? The Chinese-language model has shocked and awed the American stock market. But my chat with it indicates there are many reasons to be skeptical. Read More → Your guide to avoiding job scams in 2025 You’ve probably felt the thrill that comes with receiving a job offer. You read the congratulatory email, begin to imagine life in your new role, then quickly fill out all the required HR paperwork and receive the necessary equipment. And if all is well, you start preparing for your first day. But what… Read More → View the full article

Google AI Overviews, even when not signed into a Google Labs project, is providing coding and programming examples and help. This started sometime yesterday, I believe, and before, I believe you had to opt into a Search Labs experiment to trigger this.View the full article

You likely send dozens of emails each day, but are your messages being well received? Are some of your emails frustrating recipients? You might be violating some fundamental rules of business email etiquette. Our editorial team gets and sends hundreds of emails a day. We’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly. So, we’ve come up with email etiquette guidelines that business people should follow for solid email communications. Business Email Etiquette Guidelines Here are some email etiquette guidelines you may wish to consider for your own small business. Get the Salutation and Closing Right Writing effective emails starts with the proper salutation and closing. A Perkbox Insights survey of 1,928 professionals found there is a real preference for certain email greetings and closings versus others. Almost half of those surveyed prefer emails that start with the greeting “Hi”. Other popular greetings include: Good morning/afternoon (48%) Hello (21%) Dear (20%) When it comes to closing expressions for business emails, survey respondents preferred the following: Kind regards (69%) Thanks or thanks again (46%) Regards (31%) Thanks in advance (21%) Best wishes (20%) And what is the worst way to end business emails? “Love”, “Warmly”, and using no sign-off rated the worst ways to close. Don’t Leave People Hanging Confirm receipt for messages you can’t get to right away. Let the sender know that you got it and will respond at a later date. Tell them when to expect it. Set a date and time and stick to it. When you go on vacation or out of the office for more than a day or two, set up an out-of-office reply or away message so people will get a prompt response, ensuring they are not left wondering. Include the date you’ll be back in the office and when you expect to respond. Give people an alternate contact for urgent matters in case they need to reach someone in your company right away. Limit Acronyms and Jargon Before using business abbreviations, acronyms, or jargon in your emails, assess the familiarity and understanding of your audience. Consider the knowledge of the recipient. If you’re dealing with clients in different industries, for example, you might want to include more information than you would with your co-workers. Overusing acronyms can alienate or confuse participants, reducing clarity. Only Use ‘Reply All’ When Necessary When you get emails that include several people, you might be tempted to just reply to everyone. Consider the relevance of your response to all recipients before doing so. But this can lead to a lot of wasted time for recipients if the message isn’t relevant to them. It can be quite embarrassing if your response contains sensitive company information and is sent to a client who is accidentally copied. Consider the necessity and potential impact of your message carefully. Therefore, exercise caution and only use “reply all” when it is truly essential. Use the Undo Send Feature Some email clients like Gmail have a feature that allows you to undo sending an email for up to 30 seconds. This gives you a brief window to reconsider or rectify any mistakes that can cast a long shadow if you breach email etiquette. If you forgot to check for typos or an attachment, or if you have second thoughts about the content or tone of your message, act quickly, and you can cancel sending the email before it arrives at the other end, preventing potential misunderstandings or the need for follow-up explanations. Utilize this feature wisely to ensure your communications are accurate and convey the intended message. Wait 24 Hours Before Sending Emotional Messages If you find yourself inclined to send an angry or emotional email, take a moment to carefully craft your message. Consider the potential consequences of your words. Refrain from hitting send until you have taken a day to step back and clear your mind. This pause allows for a calmer perspective. Work-related emails should be devoid of negative emotion. It’s painful for others to receive emotional words, and it can lead to unintended consequences. Avoid Using All Caps Don’t go crazy with the CAPS LOCK, as 67% of people can’t tolerate it, according to the survey. This type of message is perceived as shouting, which is often unwelcome. Always use sentence case. Capital letters can emphasize your message, but they may be perceived as shouting, which can alienate your audience instead of engaging them. Instead, think about using italics or color to highlight key points in a way that is more inviting and less overwhelming for readers. Keep it Short About 29% of individuals report that they cannot tolerate lengthy emails. Do you really want to risk losing nearly a third of your readers due to the size of your message? It’s important to respect the time of your team and business associates. Utilize short paragraphs and formatting techniques like bullet points to make your emails easier to skim. Instead of a long email, try an alternative: a video call, face-to-face meeting, or phone call. If it has to be in writing, create a separate report in an attachment or shared cloud document. A Clear Subject Line is a Must Subject lines should accurately reflect the content. A clear subject line is a courtesy that informs the recipient what to expect before opening your message. More than that, it may make the difference between people opening your email or ignoring it, ensuring your communication is timely and effective. An ambiguous subject can delay response times. Don’t Share Confidential Information Emails are all too easy to forward and share or to accidentally send to the wrong person, making them a risky choice for sensitive content. Most email messages are not the right format to share confidential information as they lack the security measures necessary to protect such data, underscoring the importance of using secure, encrypted channels for sensitive exchanges. Use Humor with Caution You might be tempted to add a little fun or humor to your emails. But without body language, humor and tone can be difficult to decipher in emails, potentially leading to misunderstandings or offense. Never include jokes in your emails unless you have a strong rapport with the recipient and are confident they will appreciate the humor. This way, you can ensure that your intent is clearly understood. Limit Emoji and Emoticons When it comes to emojis, smileys, and emoticons, keep those to conversations with friends and close co-workers where the context and relationships support their use. Customers and sales prospects may see them as unprofessional or too casual for business communications, potentially undermining your message’s seriousness or professionalism. Don’t Be Hasty with Reminders Give a recipient a day or two to respond, depending on the type of inquiry. A recipient may feel chastised by getting a reminder when he or she has been out of the office or in meetings all day. Also, before sending reminders, please check your junk or spam folder. Put yourself in the recipient’s shoes. Has anyone ever complained they did not receive one of your messages, forcing you to go out of your way to re-send it, only to then reply, “Oh, it was in my spam folder?” You probably felt slightly annoyed, thinking, “Why didn’t you look there in the first place?” Be Careful with BCC BCC stands for blind carbon copy and it means that others do not see the blind-copied person on the recipient list. BCC is good etiquette if you want to inform other people in your organization and protect their name, title, or email address from going to, say, a sales rep for an outside vendor. But BCC can be bad etiquette if your purpose is to be devious and go behind a coworker’s back. How will you feel if your coworker learns that his boss was blind copied? If it could upset him, then don’t use it. Add a Personal Message When Forwarding When you need to forward an email to a coworker, add an introduction at the top instead of just hitting send. This personal touch can clarify the relevance and ensure the recipient understands the context. Don’t force associates to read through an unfamiliar email thread without context. Also, consider changing the subject line title so it makes more sense and directly relates to the current discussion or task at hand. Add the Email Address Last If you’re drafting a brand new email, start with the subject and content before adding email addresses. This will prevent you from accidentally sending it too early and having to waste everyone’s time telling them to ignore your incomplete message. Have a Clear Call to Action What do you want the recipient to do with your message if anything? If it’s purely to inform the other person, then so state. But if you expect a reply, a decision, or another thing, be crystal clear. It’s amazing how many emails are vague about what the recipient is being asked to do (or not do). Include Contact Information Twenty-three percent of email users say it is poor etiquette to not have an email signature block. A professional email signature with relevant information doesn’t just make you look more professional; it also makes it easier for the person you’re contacting. Include relevant information like your phone number, company website, and social media handles so they can easily reach out if they have extra questions. If your email includes specific instructions for a person to call you or contact you in another way, include those details in the body as well. Stick to Black and White Some individuals try to add some pizazz to their emails with unique colors, fonts, or design elements. But this can rub some recipients the wrong way. And the styles that appeal to you may make it less appealing to others. Avoid using unique font colors and background patterns in your emails. Classic black and white is the easiest to read. And pair it with basic fonts like Times New Roman. This can help you make a professional impression, whether you’re communicating with employees or partners. . Limit Exclamation Points Some use exclamation marks to show excitement or convey friendliness. However, they should be used sparingly in professional email. In fact, 16% say this punctuation mark is unacceptable, while 48% will tolerate only one per email. Keep in mind the tone of the email. For example, an email announcing exciting new products or services may accommodate more than an email about an employee communication issue. And then read through it at the end to double check that it’s not packed full of excess excitement. Proofread You don’t want to take the time to craft a great email message only to have it littered with spelling and grammar mistakes. Take a minute to proofread and spell-check before sending so you can catch any potential errors. Look for both spelling and grammatical issues. Additionally, read through your message with a mind on how your recipient will read it. Think about the tone to make sure it doesn’t get taken in a different way. Then go back and make sure that you spelled the person’s name correctly in your email. You can’t be too careful in this instance. Also choose the proper email address — it’s embarrassing to send to the wrong email accounts. Know When to Be Formal Keep things more formal with those you’re emailing for the first time. Err on the side of being more formal and professional with clients and superiors as well. Formality shows respect and is less likely to be misinterpreted. Once you get to know someone more, you can get less formal. For instance, you might use first names or a nickname instead of full names. Or you could shorten your greeting or sign off with those you communicate with regularly. Don’t Forget to Attach It’s quite common to mention that you are attaching a file and then forget to include it. This oversight not only makes you appear forgetful but also requires the recipient to follow up with a reminder. Therefore, be sure to double-check before hitting send. Additionally, name your attachments appropriately if there are several. This allows them to avoid opening each one to see what it is. And it can even help them avoid opening attachments with viruses or malware. If possible, send PDFs instead of files that require a specific program so they don’t need to download extras to see what you’ve sent. Consider Different Cultures and Languages When corresponding via email with individuals from diverse cultures or backgrounds, it’s important to keep this in mind while crafting your responses to avoid causing offense or confusion. For example, use simple, widely recognized terms instead of American-centered slang. If you regularly communicate with teams or recipients in a particular country, research info about that culture to get even more specific and avoid miscommunication. Start a New Email Chain for New Subjects When emailing someone who you correspond with frequently, it can be tempting to keep just one chain going continuously. But this can make it difficult to keep your conversations organized. So start a new chain for each new subject. Along the same lines, only forward messages when absolutely necessary. Avoid hitting reply all when you only need to message one or two recipients on an email chain. GuidelinesDos/Dont'sAdditional Info Salutation and Closing- Use appropriate greetings and closings. - Avoid inappropriate greetings or closings.Survey preferences: "Hi", "Good morning/afternoon", etc. Confirm Receipt and Out-of-Office- Confirm receipt and specify response timeframe. - Set out-of-office replies during vacations.Provide date of return and alternate contact during OOO. Limit Acronyms and Jargon- Use clear language. - Avoid excessive acronyms and jargon.Adapt language based on recipient's industry knowledge. Only Use 'Reply All' When Necessary- Be cautious with "reply all." - Avoid sending irrelevant emails to everyone.Prevent wasted time and potential embarrassment. Use the Undo Send Feature- Act quickly to undo sent emails for corrections.Available in some email clients like Gmail. Wait 24 Hours Before Sending Emotional Messages- Avoid sending emotional emails immediately.Maintain a professional tone in work-related emails. What are the dos and don’ts of business email? Dos: Do keep business correspondence professional. Do compose emails that respect people’s time. Do stick to the subject matter and get to the point. Don’ts: Don’t overuse emojis or exclamation points. Don’t use slang with clients or business associates you don’t know well. Don’t use emotional words. Don’t use sarcasm, and be careful with humor and tone so that you don’t inadvertently offend when you send an email. What are the benefits of email etiquette? There are five advantages to adopting email etiquette rules: Professionalism. Improved company image. Better response to sales messages. Organizational efficiency and time savings. Lower workplace liability by avoiding improper tone or misinterpretation. DosDon'ts Keep business correspondence professional.Overuse emojis or exclamation points. Compose emails that respect people's time.Use slang with clients or unfamiliar associates. Stick to the subject matter and get to the point.Use emotional words. Use sarcasm, offensive humor, or unclear tone. More etiquette tips: Office Etiquette Tips Online Meeting Etiquette Image: Depositphotos This article, "Email Etiquette Tips for Professional Communication" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

John Mueller from Google noted that he finds it "interesting" how those who spend time in our industry "can often recognize made-for-search-engine content fairly quickly." Meaning, we are good at seeing a piece of content on the web and knowing if it was created to perform well in search or written by a normal user trying to help others.View the full article

Learn how to scale your SEO services to new markets and drive recurring revenue without sacrificing time or sanity. The post Scaling Up: How To Expand Your SEO Services To New Markets appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: How can I get more sleep? A: I am writing this at 11:12 p.m., so this advice is as much for myself as it is for anyone else. Here’s what we should all be doing differently: First, set a schedule and stick to it. The “stick to it” part is hard. But it’s called the golden rule of sleep for a reason. Set a bedtime, and then plan at least 20-40 minutes back from that time to start your bedtime routine. You might even need an alarm to remind you that it’s time to end what you’re doing. So, if you have to get up at 7 a.m. and you want to get seven hours of sleep, you want to be asleep by midnight. That means you should start your bedtime routine by 11:30 p.m.. And speaking of bedtime routine, you know you can’t go directly from staring at a screen to lights out, right? Your mind needs to wind down. Sleep experts recommend that you not only stick to the same bedtime every night, but that you also stick to the same (or similar) process each night. One option is to take things in 15-20 minute stages. First, prep for the next day (pack lunches, set out clothes) and do your nightly hygiene routine. Then spend 20 minutes doing a relaxing activity like reading. Whatever you do, don’t sleep with your phone next to you. The other golden piece of sleep advice is intuitive but many of us with desk jobs skip it: Do some kind of physical activity during the day—but not right before bed. If you spend 30-40 minutes a day being active, you will be more physically tired and it will be easier to fall asleep. Want more advice on how to get more sleep? Here you go: Ultimate guide to getting more sleep 5 ways to get a better night’s sleep Having trouble sleeping? Ask yourself these 6 questions View the full article

Illinois lawyer Mathew Kerbis markets himself as the Subscription Attorney, charging businesses and individual clients a monthly rate for legal advice and offering additional services like contract review and legal document drafting for a flat fee. Kerbis is a fairly tech-savvy lawyer—he’s a regular at the American Bar Association’s ABA Techshow conference, he hosts a podcast about subscription-based billing and other industry innovations, and he uses a Stripe-integrated web portal to streamline client payments. So it’s not surprising that he’s spent time experimenting with AI tools to help him do legal research, draft documents, and otherwise assist clients more efficiently. “The faster I can get something to a client, if you think about it in terms of time equals money, the more money I make,” he says. “But also, the more valuable it is to the clients to actually get things faster.” Today, Kerbis is a customer of Paxton AI, a legal AI provider that boasts it can help lawyers quickly draft legal documents, analyze everything from contracts to court filings, and conduct research on legal questions based on up-to-date laws and court precedent. He says Paxton can help tweak model contracts for a client’s situation, find relevant sections of law for a particular legal issue, and review proposed agreements for potentially troublesome terms. Doing the work of a young attorney—at superhuman speed “If a client books a call with me and gives me a contract right there on the phone with them, we could start identifying problematic issues before I’ve even put human eyes on the contract,” Kerbis says. Paxton, a startup that just announced a $22 million Series A funding round, is one of a number of companies offering AI-powered assistance to lawyers. Its competitors range from established legal data vendors like LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters to other startups, all looking to use the text-processing power of large language model AI to more speedily parse, analyze, and draft the voluminous and precise documents that are inherent to the practice of law—and part of the reason for lawyers’ notoriously long hours. “The idea is to do the work of, say, a young assistant or even a young attorney at a firm, but to do it at superhuman speed,” says Jake Heller, head of product for CoCounsel, a legal AI tool from Thomson Reuters. “If you talk to lawyers, I think there’s a universal feeling that there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things they want to do for the companies they work for, their clients, their law firms.” [Screenshot: courtesy of Paxton] A 2024 study by legal tech provider Clio found that 79% of legal professionals already use artificial intelligence tools to some degree. Roughly 25% “have adopted AI widely or universally,” according to the survey. Clio CTO Jonathan Watson says Clio Duo AI is the fastest-growing product in the company’s history; it helps lawyers answer questions about particular documents, schedule meetings, and even analyze data from the company’s law firm management software—all of which allows them to focus more on legal work and less on rote tasks. “What we ultimately want to do is free them of that burden, so they can get back to doing what they do best, and that’s practicing law,” Watson says. Putting AI through law school And while lawyers’ misuse of AI has sometimes generated headlines when they’ve submitted court filings with hallucinated quotes and citations, legal AI providers generally say they’ve built their software with guardrails to reduce such errors—as well as protections for attorney-client confidentiality—and linked their language models to specialized legal knowledge bases. “In order to be a proper legal assistant, you need legal training,” says Paxton AI cofounder and CEO Tanguy Chau. “And what that means to us is a complete understanding of all the laws, rules, regulations, statutes that govern the legal practice.” Paxton AI has used a large language model to help analyze court decisions and document how they reference each other in a network graph structure, says cofounder and CTO Michael Ulin. “We have the LLM make a determination as to whether it’s been upheld or overturned,” he says, something that was historically done by human attorneys updating legal reference books and databases. Those sorts of materials are, in fact, part of what helps power CoCounsel, with Heller pointing to a company history of publishing legal information and references dating back to the founding of lawbook giant West Publishing—now part of Thomson Reuters—in the 1800s. “They’ve hired some of the best attorneys in the country and said, ‘Well, give us your commentary or thoughts on this topic,’” Heller says, with that material now accessible to the AI. “It’s able to also do what a lawyer would do, which is draw from these resources, read them first, get a deep understanding of a topic or field from the world’s best experts that really only we have, and then that informs its decision-making process.” Lowering the risk of hallucination Legal AI tools generally use the technique known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), in which search-engine-like processes first locate relevant source materials, then provide them to language models to use in providing a well-cited, on-point response with less risk of hallucination. “Even several years ago, it was very clear that the retrieval—you know, the R element to the RAG—was the most important part of this whole process, being able to properly identify what cases are responsive. Not just cases, but legislation, regulation,” says Mark Doble, cofounder and CEO of Alexi, which offers legal AI with a focus on litigation. “And so we’ve done a ton of work in making sure that the retrieval component is really good.” Alexi has also developed rigorous automated and manual systems to verify its AI consistently and statistically predictably gives accurate responses, Doble says. Similarly, CoCounsel is routinely quizzed on tens of thousands of test cases, Heller says, and Paxton has published to GitHub its AI’s results on two legal AI benchmarks, including one developed by scholars at Stanford and Yale as part of a study of legal hallucinations by LLMs, where Paxton claims a nearly 94% accuracy rate. [Screenshot: courtesy of Paxton] Still, even the most rigorously tested AI systems aren’t immune to making mistakes. RAG-powered systems can still hallucinate, particularly if the underlying retrieval process produces irrelevant or misleading hits, something familiar to anyone who has read the AI summaries that now top many internet search results. “From the perspective of general AI research, we know that RAG can reduce the hallucination rate, but it is no silver bullet,” says Daniel E. Ho, a professor at Stanford Law School. Ho is one of the authors of the legal hallucination study and an additional paper looking specifically at errors made by legal-focused AI. In one example, Ho and his colleagues found that a RAG-powered legal AI system asked to identify notable opinions written by “Judge Luther A. Wilgarten” (a fictitious jurist with the notable initials L.A.W.) pointed to a case called Luther v. Locke. It was presumably the result of a routine false-positive search result based on the made-up judge’s first name. While a human lawyer searching a decision database would have realized the mix-up and quickly skipped past that search result, the AI was apparently unable to note that the case was decided by a differently named judge. “It would not surprise any lawyer who’s spent time trying to research cases that there are going to be false positives in those retrieved results,” Ho says. “And when those form the basis of the generated statement through RAG, that’s when hallucinations can result.” Even so, Ho says, the tools can still be useful in legal research, drafting, and other tasks, provided they’re not treated as out-and-out replacements for human lawyers and, ideally, with AI developers providing information about how they’re built and how they perform. [Screenshot: courtesy of Paxton] “The lawyer is fully responsible for the work on behalf of the client” Since lawyers are already used to picking apart documents, arguments, and citations, as well as double-checking the work of junior associates and paralegals, they may be as well equipped as any professional to use AI as a helpful tool—the first or last pair of eyes on a document, or a path to finding case law relevant to a particular question—rather than an omniscient oracle. “This is something you’re asking to infer how to respond to you, and you need to look at that with a critical eye and go, does that make sense?” says Clio’s Watson. As some attorneys using general-purpose AI tools have learned the hard way, groups like the American Bar Association have said relying on AI doesn’t absolve lawyers of their basic duties to competently represent their clients, safeguard their confidentiality, and ensure what they present in court is accurate and truthful. “In short, regardless of the level of review the lawyer selects, the lawyer is fully responsible for the work on behalf of the client,” according to a formal American Bar Association opinion from July. Experts have suggested that lawyers who rely on mistaken AI-generated information could be sued by clients for malpractice. Even law-focused AI solutions often disclaim legal responsibility for errors, meaning lawyers are likely on the hook for any AI mistakes they fail to catch. Kerbis says he uses Paxton AI to find on-point sections of the law, but he’ll still read the actual cited references. And when he asks the AI to find potential red flags in a contract, he’ll naturally evaluate them himself. Other Paxton customers use the tool to look for the relevant “needle in a haystack” in bulky document repositories, like medical records involved in an injury suit, Ulin says. Since AI can work so quickly, and its findings can often be quickly verified by human attorneys, there may be little reason not to at least see what it can find. Kerbis says the AI sometimes flags a section of a contract that’s ultimately unobjectionable, like an unusually long contract term that actually benefits his client, but such findings are easy enough to skip past. Since Kerbis generally charges clients flat fees instead of an hourly rate, it’s to his advantage if he can do good legal work faster. Some experts predict such arrangements will be more common if AI helps more lawyers work more quickly, though previous predictions of the end of the billable hour have proven premature. Also yet to be determined is whether AI-forward lawyers and law firms will ultimately prefer to get AI tools through an existing vendor like Thomson Reuters or Clio, or from an AI-focused startup like Alexi or Paxton. And it remains to be seen whether the technology will really provide lawyers the level of productivity boost proponents and AI vendors hope for. If it does, it may well become as necessary to the modern practice of law as Microsoft Word. Already, some of those paying the bills and waiting on legal advice have begun to urge lawyers to adopt AI, says Doble, adding, “It’s not clients getting angry when lawyers use AI tools. It’s clients getting angry when lawyers don’t use AI tools.” View the full article

A lawn care business is an excellent way to become an entrepreneur and be your own boss. Homeowners are multitasking more and more and they need these services. Small businesses always want to make a great first impression with a well-manicured lawn. This blog will walk you through everything you need to know about how to start a lawn care business, from equipment selection to initial planning and marketing, plus customer retention. The Basics of a Lawn Care Business The lawn care industry is thriving. It has experienced significant growth and outpaced the overall economy. Lawns typically require ongoing maintenance, and there are cross-selling opportunities such as pest control. If you want to know how to start a lawn care business, this is an encouraging environment. What is a Lawn Care Business? A lawn care business does several things, like regular grass cutting. Other services include control and fertilization plus pest and disease control, to name a few. The potential clients include residential homeowners and commercial properties. Recreational facilities, schools, and hospitals can also be clients. Why Lawn Care Services Are Essential Lawn care services play a pivotal role in enhancing outdoor spaces’ aesthetic appeal and health. A well-maintained lawn not only boosts the overall visual appeal of a property but also provides various environmental and health benefits. Lawns act as natural filters, capturing dust, smoke particles, and other pollutants to provide cleaner air. Additionally, they help prevent soil erosion, reduce noise pollution, and even increase a property’s value. Engaging in regular lawn care ensures that these green spaces remain vibrant, healthy, and beneficial for both the environment and the residents of the property. Aesthetic Appeal: A well-maintained lawn beautifies the surroundings and creates a pleasant outdoor environment. Environmental Benefits: Lawns serve as carbon sinks by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, which contributes to cleaner air. Soil Protection: Healthy grass roots hold the soil together, preventing erosion and runoff, especially during heavy rains. Noise Reduction: Lawns can significantly reduce noise pollution by absorbing and deflecting sounds. Property Value: A beautifully maintained lawn can increase a property’s market value and curb appeal. Recreation and Well-being: Green, well-kept lawns provide spaces for recreational activities and have been shown to reduce stress and promote well-being. Temperature Regulation: Lawns can act as natural coolants, reducing the surrounding temperature and minimizing the heat island effect in urban areas. Habitat for Wildlife: Healthy lawns can provide habitats for various small creatures and support local biodiversity. Steps to Launch Your Own Lawn Care Business Following are the steps for how to start a business and offer lawn care services to your community. Evaluating Your Market: Commercial vs. Residential Lawn Care You need to know the differences between serving residential and commercial clients. Residential properties tend to be smaller and easier to maintain. In contrast, commercial clients typically require additional services, such as an irrigation system and more frequent visits. The contracts vary as well. Residential clients may prefer seasonal or one-time services, whereas commercial clients typically seek longer-term agreements. Drafting a Business Plan A business plan offers financial projections and background information. These can help you define your objectives and attract investors like banks and potential partners. Components include: The executive summary. The business description. Marketing strategy and analysis The services and products. A competitive analysis Financial projections. Business plans can help you get funding and create a marketing roadmap. Choosing a Business Structure You have several common business structures to choose from. The sole proprietor is easy to set up, and you have full control over the business. Personal liability is one of the downsides. A partnership has more potential for resources. It can be difficult to transfer ownership with these. A limited liability company has a flexible management structure and pass-through taxation. However, having a few members means tax complications. A Corporation has strong liability protections in place. The con here is complex regulations and legal requirements. Securing Financing Here’s a list of some of the financing options available. Bootstrapping Bootstrapping can entail contributions from family and personal savings used to start a business. Venture Capital These companies invest in startups with good potential and ask for equity in exchange. You get access to investors with experience. Bank Loans These usually have strict credit criteria. Small Business Administration Loans These government-backed loans have longer repayment times. Crowdfunding Kickstarter serves as an example of a platform that allows individuals to raise funds from a wide audience. However, managing these campaigns can be time-consuming. Designing an Effective Lawn Care Website Websites are a cost-effective way to get global exposure. A carefully designed site is available 24/7. A successful website features strong branding with consistent messaging and logos. Begin by researching the best landscaping business name ideas and choose one that aligns with your services. Next, acquire a matching domain. The design should be user-friendly across tablets, mobile devices, and desktops. Make sure it is optimized for SEO, and refer to this website startup guide for additional tips. Creating a Unique Brand Identity for Your Lawn Care Company Good branding for your company increases exposure. A good logo is simple and clean. Establish clear guidelines on consistency as to where and how it gets used. Colors make a big difference. They need to meet accessibility standards. Using at least one primary color in the logo for any lawn care business is a good idea. Include a mission statement as the driving force behind your branding. It should be concise and clear. Securing Essential Lawn Care Equipment Of course, you need landscaping tools and equipment to get started. A Lawn Mower and Other Tools Smaller lawns only need a walk-behind lawn mower unit. Bigger commercial properties might require a riding mower. Keeping lawns in good shape means having professional edgers and trimmers. A good blower will clean up debris like leaves and grass clippings. Working with bushes and trees means getting a pair of pruning shears. Don’t forget personal safety equipment like glasses and gloves and ear protection. Buying Or Renting Lawn care companies must decide whether buying or renting is the best choice. Buying the equipment means you’ll have it whenever you need it. However, there is a significant investment at first. Renting usually has maintenance included. However, there are no assets to sell later on. FactorBuying EquipmentRenting Equipment Initial CostHigh upfront costs to purchase machinery and tools outright.Lower initial costs, only paying for the duration of use. Maintenance & RepairsOwner is responsible for all maintenance and repair costs.Maintenance and repairs typically covered by the rental company. DepreciationEquipment will depreciate in value over time.No concerns about depreciation as equipment is returned after use. FlexibilityEquipment is available at any time for business operations.Flexibility to rent specific tools as needed for specialized jobs. Long-term CostsMight be cheaper in the long run if equipment is used regularly and maintained well.Can become expensive if renting frequently or for extended periods. StorageNeed dedicated space to store equipment when not in use.No storage concerns, as equipment is returned after use. Equipment UpdatesUpdating or upgrading requires selling old equipment and purchasing new.Easier to access the latest equipment models as needed. Asset OwnershipEquipment becomes a business asset and can be sold later.No ownership; therefore, no asset to sell or leverage in the future. Tax ImplicationsPotential tax benefits from depreciation or capital write-offs.Renting expenses can be written off as a business expense. Cash Flow ImpactSignificant initial expenditure can impact cash flow.Spread out costs can be easier on cash flow, especially for startups. Pricing and Service Packages Good lawn care businesses offer basic, standard, and premium packages that give customers a choice. Legal and Licensing Considerations Consider the following: A Business License allows you to operate in your city or county. A Landscaper Contractor License may be required if you plan on doing landscaping work. Some areas will need a Water Use Permit. General Liability Insurance covers your business in the event of property damage or personal injury. There can be other requirements, too, depending on the scope of your business. Hiring and Training Consider hiring extra staff during peak demand seasons in the spring and summer. Be sure to train them in proper safety procedures for equipment. Social media and industry-specific websites are good recruitment channels to start with. Developing a Service Menu A service list might look like this. Lawn Mowing and Fertilization Weed Control Insect and Pest Control Lawn Aeration For each of these and others, you should highlight the convenience of the service and your expertise. Explain the benefits of other features like flower bed maintenance and mulching. ServiceDescriptionFrequencyAverage DurationPrice Range* Lawn MowingCutting grass to a specified height. Often includes trimming edges near walkways, driveways, and other structures.Weekly/Bi-weekly30 min - 2 hrs$30 - $100 FertilizationApplying fertilizers to promote healthy grass growth and prevent weeds.Seasonally30 min - 1 hr$40 - $100 Weed ControlUsing herbicides or manual methods to reduce or eliminate weeds from the lawn.As needed30 min - 2 hrs$50 - $150 AerationPuncturing the soil with small holes to allow air, water, and nutrients to penetrate to the grassroots.Annually1 - 3 hrs$70 - $200 DethatchingRemoving thick layer of roots, stems, and debris that can build up on a lawn's surface.Annually/As needed1 - 3 hrs$100 - $300 Pest ControlApplying treatments to deter or eradicate common lawn pests like grubs, ants, and more.As needed30 min - 2 hrs$50 - $150 OverseedingPlanting grass seeds directly into existing turf to improve density or introduce a new grass variety.Seasonally/As needed1 - 2 hrs$100 - $300 Landscaping & DesignPlanning and creating aesthetic features, including planting beds, walkways, water features, etc.One-timeVaries greatly$500+ Leaf RemovalClearing leaves from the lawn during the fall season or as needed.Seasonally1 - 3 hrs$50 - $200 Irrigation MaintenanceChecking and maintaining sprinkler systems to ensure proper water distribution.Annually/As needed1 - 2 hrs$70 - $200 Obtaining Licenses and Permits Licenses and permits can vary depending on the state you’re in. There are some general ones you should look into, like: A Business License This allows you to operate in a legal manner in your jurisdiction. Sales Tax Permit You might need one to remit and collect sales tax. Zoning Permits Your business needs to comply with local zoning requirements. Look into Lawn Care Business Insurance There are several types of insurance that fall under the small business insurance category, including general liability insurance. This type of insurance protects your business against third-party claims for damage and bodily injury. Additionally, if you employ workers, lawn care businesses are required to have Workmen’s Compensation insurance. Property insurance is important to protect your inventory and equipment. Building a Client Contract Make sure to add in the contract details, like additional charges for special services and the frequency of visits. Be specific about the services, like weed control and mowing. Implementing a Booking and Scheduling System A digital system streamlines appointments and provides real-time updates. Formulating an Environmentally Friendly Approach Remember, environmentally conscious clients are looking for sustainable practices. Reduce the need for chemical treatments and water consumption. Networking and Building Industry Relationships Establishing local connections builds trust. Gaining knowledge from others in the industry helps you to stay updated. Safety Protocols and Equipment Maintenance Detailed records of equipment inspections, repairs, and maintenance are important. Regular safety meetings to review procedures are critical. Setting Up a Business Bank Account Separate personal and business finances for tax purposes. Supply an employee identification number (EIN) for the IRS. Effective Marketing for Your Lawn Care Business So what is marketing for a lawn care service? Effective strategies include both online and offline elements. For example: Advertise in local newspapers. Network at business events. Create a professional website showcasing your services. Google ads and Facebook ads work, too. Building a Loyal Clientele Retaining clients is about effective communication and consistent quality service. Offer seasonal maintenance plans and loyalty programs. Continuous Learning and Upgrading Staying on top of industry trends will help your company to grow. You’ll learn about environmental regulations as well as new techniques and equipment. Consider joining a professional organization. How Much Does it Cost to Start a Lawn Care Business? Generally, a start-up costs between $1,450 and $2,500. A basic mower ranges from $200 to $400. Hand tools such as a shovel and rake can cost as much as $400. Marketing can cost you between $200 and $500 for advertisements and flyers. Other costs include business licensing or registration and your vehicle. What is the Profit Margin for a Successful Lawn Care Business? A one-man operation can have profit margins of around 15 to 20%. The higher overhead costs and additional labor mean bigger businesses have a lower margin of around 10 to 12%. What Challenges May a Lawn Care Business Owner Face? A lawn care company operates in an industry that might seem straightforward on the surface but can be fraught with numerous challenges, including the following: Unpredictable Weather Patterns: Weather affects grass growth pest activity and can delay scheduled jobs. Increased Competition: A surge in new startups and other competitors can make it challenging to secure clients and differentiate services. Fluctuating Fuel Prices: Any rise in fuel costs directly influences the operating costs, especially for companies with heavy machinery and transportation requirements. Labor Issues: Finding, training, and keeping skilled workers can be difficult because of the job’s physical demands and its seasonal nature. Staying Updated: Keeping up with the latest in landscaping techniques, eco-friendly practices, and local regulations requires continuous learning and adaptation. Tips from Lawn Care Professionals: Ensuring Success in Your Business Here’s some advice gathered from budding entrepreneurs. Stay updated on different regulations and best practices. Get the information you need from industry publications and conferences. Be willing to adjust your business strategy as the market changes. https://youtube.com/watch?v=LxdA_5M7TRQ%3Fsi%3D4mJ8XctdPKT_4CvE FAQ: Starting a Lawn Mowing Business Is a Lawn Care Service a Good Business to Start? Yes, starting a landscaping business can lead to a consistent income, and you have the opportunity to expand your operations over time. Is Lawn Mowing Business a Good Side Hustle? This is a good side hustle because there are low start-up costs. Use the post above as a business startup checklist. Is it Essential to Have a Background in Horticulture to be a Lawn Care Professional? It’s not an essential qualification, but this expertise gives you in-depth knowledge of soils and landscaping. Which State has the Longest Lawn Mowing Season? Florida has the longest mowing season. It can extend through most of the year. How can Seasonal downtime be handled in the Lawn Care industry? Adding on off-season services like snow removal or holiday light installation can help. You might also look into other types of businesses with a year-round model. For example, research how to start a handyman business. Image: Envato Elements This article, "How to Start a Lawn Care Business" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

There's a lot you can do to boost your chances of success on social media — optimize your content for engagement, find your perfect posting times, master the art of thumb-stopping hooks... But even these smart tactics don't guarantee success. Few things do when it comes to navigating social media algorithms and ever-changing audience behavior. From our research and experience at Buffer, there's only one thing that comes close: posting consistently. It’s a social media tip successful creators, marketers, and even platform bosses (thanks, Adam Mosseri) share all the time. The more you post, the better your chances of success on all social media platforms. And guess what? Now we have some data to back this up. Buffer’s resident genius (sorry, data scientist) Julian Winterhiemer recently conducted a massive analysis that measured the impact of consistent posting on engagement across all the channels Buffer supports — Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads, X, YouTube, Mastodon, and Pinterest — over the last six months. As you can imagine, the numbers are pretty darn cool. Spoiler: The most consistent posters received a whopping 5x more engagement — likes, comments, and shares — per post than users who posted inconsistently. Even folks who were moderately consistent got 4x more engagement on their posts. I’ll explain how we classified these levels of consistency below. We are (sorry) Julian is working on weighing up the impact of posting consistently on each platform, and we’ll share that soon, but for now, we wanted to take a look at the big picture, long-term. Let’s dig in. Breaking down the numbersTo understand these numbers, it’s helpful to see how we arrived at them. We looked specifically at users who created posts in the last 26 weeks (which is 6 months). That way, we were comparing people equally and not including folks who hadn't posted at all or who had just signed up. More than 100,000 Buffer users met these criteria. From there, Julian grouped them into three categories to measure the consistency of each user. Then we measured how many weeks those users posted within those 26 weeks. Using that definition, we arrived at three groups of users ranging from inconsistent posting habits to consistent posting habits: Inconsistent users posted 4 weeks or less out of the last 26 weeksConsistent users posted 5-19 weeks out of the last 26 weeksHighly consistent users posted 20+ weeks out of the last 26 weeks(Note that we are measuring posts on a weekly cadence, so this isn't the number of posts, but the number of weeks that a user posted at least once — more on this below!) Once we had defined these user groups, we looked at the median engagements per post for each group — and here's where it gets interesting. “The definition of engagement varies by platform,” Julian notes. “So for this analysis, the total number of engagements is the sum of comments, retweets, favorites, reactions, likes, shares, repins, reposts, quotes, and replies.” We used the median engagement rate because it provides a more accurate representation of datasets with outliers, such as social media data. Outliers, like viral posts, can skew results, so the median offers a clearer view of typical post engagement. The pattern was crystal clear: The highly consistent posters saw more than 5 times the engagement per post compared to those who posted sporadically. Let’s put that into perspective with some percentages: The highly consistent group saw an impressive 450% more engagement per post than the inconsistent group and 26% more engagement than the consistent group.The consistent group saw 340% more engagement per post than the inconsistent group.Not too shabby, is it? What’s pretty neat too, is that even the consistent posters (the middle group) saw a massive jump in engagement compared to the inconsistent posters — getting quadruple the engagement per post. Of course, there’s some nuance here. Let’s break that down even further. Here’s a look at median engagement per post measured against the number of posting weeks. Take a look at 21 weeks — that spike appears to be the "sweet spot" for balancing effort and engagement, with a median engagement of 4.47 engagements per post. Our findings suggest that posting consistently over 20 weeks can lead to the highest levels of engagement, but beyond that, there may be diminishing returns. After 21 weeks of posting, engagement started to plateau and eventually decline (though it’s still significantly higher than most of the consistent group), suggesting diminishing returns for users posting every week without breaks. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean you should map out your content calendar for the next six months (26 weeks) and be sure to skip at least five of them. What it suggests to me is that posting at least weekly is ideal, but you can give yourself a week’s grace here and there while you’re on holiday or going through a busy time. If posting weekly feels a bit out of reach for you for now (I completely get it!), there are a few significant steps up that I thought I would be interesting to mention: Week 3: A 58% increase compared to Week 2.Week 4: A 27% increase compared to Week 3.Week 5: A 17% increase compared to Week 4.Week 7: A 16% increase compared to Week 6.These numbers really show how impactful even just a few posts can be! So, just because you can’t post often, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t at all. 📌It’s worth noting that this analysis didn’t take into account the impact of posting multiple times per week, which will undoubtedly be fascinating — we’re working on that analysis and will report back soon!Why this mattersSocial networks want to keep their users entertained, engaged, and coming back for more. To do that, they need a steady stream of quality content — so when they get that from creators like you, they're more likely to reward you for it. And — if looking at those yellow bars is intimating — let me give you some perspective. The highly consistent users posted in at least 20 weeks out of a possible 25. They didn’t post every single week. They took a few off here and there — and they may have only posted once within those weeks. Posting once a week over the next few months — pretty doable, right? And it could have a huge impact on your engagement and, as a result, audience growth. If that sounds like a bit much, let’s take a look at the consistent middle group. The good news? You don't have to post every single day to see results. Our data shows that even moving from "somewhat consistent" to "consistent" posting can make a significant difference in your engagement rates. Start small, think bigIf you're feeling overwhelmed by the idea of consistent posting, remember that you can start small: Pick one or two platforms to focus onSet realistic goals for your posting frequencyUse social media management tools (👀) to schedule content in advanceBuild a content bank or library for those busy weeksThe key isn't perfection — it's progress. Even posting once a week consistently is better than posting daily for a week and then disappearing for a month. So, what's your next move? Maybe it's time to dust off that content calendar, set some realistic posting goals, and start showing up a little more consistently for your audience. Looking to make your start? We have some really handy resources to help: Become a Social Media Creator in 2025: Your 9-Step PlanHow to Create a Swipe File for Your Social Media Ideas7 Simple Habits to Help You Get Better at Creating Content More ConsistentlyTypes of Social Media Content: 30+ Ideas for Your Next Post (With Examples)View the full article

Last fall, Will Ferrell sang an homage to PayPal to the tune of Fleetwood Mac’s classic “Everywhere.” The payments platform was making a big swing with the comedy legend for its biggest-ever U.S. ad campaign. It was also the first major piece of work under PayPal chief marketing officer Geoff Seeley, who joined the company in February 2024. The campaign was created with agency BBH, with an assist from Publicis Groupe creative shop Le Truc. But there was another partner holding influence over the brand strategy, all behind the scenes. The Intangibles—which some might call the Avengers of marketing—is a marketing powerhouse that has largely operated in the shadows until now. Founded in 2022, The Intangibles is a unique consultancy in a marketing industry littered with consulting options. Led by founder and CEO Ben Richards, founding partner Jon Wilkins, and chair Judy Smith, the firm is now launching publicly. It’s made up of executive talent that focuses exclusively on intangible assets like brand, innovation, IP, customer experience, reputation, and culture—all oft-overlooked yet critical areas that drive long-term value. Richards is the former global chief strategy officer of Ogilvy, where he led a team of 1,500 strategists across 83 countries for nearly a decade. Wilkins was most recently the global chief strategy officer of Accenture Song, one of the world’s largest agencies. The two met in the early 2000s at legendary strategy firm Naked, where Wilkins was one of the three global founders. Smith is also CEO of strategic advisory firm Smith & Company, the former deputy press secretary to President George H.W. Bush, a veteran of crisis management, and the real-life inspiration behind the hit ABC series Scandal. From left: Judy Smith, Chair, Jon Wilkins, Founding Partner, Ben Richards, Founder & CEO. Richards says that intangible assets are seen as the dark matter of the business world. “In reality, they’re very real, they’re very measurable, and I think they’re the future of business,” he says. “So we started thinking about the kind of company that could advise on how to grow tangible value from intangible assets.” “Tribrid” model A decade ago, marketing and advertising was in the midst of a tug-of-war between major consultancies and ad agency holding companies. Deloitte alone had acquired more than a dozen creative agencies, while Ad Age named Accenture Interactive (now Accenture Song) the largest and fastest-growing digital agency network every year between 2015 and 2021. Agencies, meanwhile, were shifting their own strategies to better compete. R/GA, for example, set up a business transformation practice in 2012. The relationship between consultancies and agency partners for brands is still a shifting landscape between competition and collaboration, but Richards says he and Wilkins saw an opportunity for a very specific type of consultant, with a particular approach. “It’s a ‘tribrid’ firm that combines the rigor of a management consultancy, the creativity of Madison Ave, and the value creation mindset of private equity, that we thought would be the best at unlocking tangible value for intangible assets,” says Richards. Take the PayPal example. When PayPal named Alex Chriss its new CEO in September 2023, Seeley was less than a year into the job. PayPal was looking to shift its positioning quickly and significantly from a payments platform to a broader fintech company. “We were brought in to help them engineer a new way to bring the brand to life in North America,” Richards says of The Intangibles’s partnership with the company. Seeley says the firm has been invaluable in providing high-level consulting on the overall brand strategy, given the breadth of their experience in particular with marketing and marketing transformation. “I need people around me who have been there and done it right,” says Seeley. “They’ve played the snakes and ladders of marketing for a long time, and they know more about the ladders, and they know where the snakes are.” PayPal’s Seeley says the work his company has done with The Intangibles has complemented his other agency partners. “It’s not competitive, because the services that they provide aren’t tangible things like making an ad or buying media,” he says. “It’s sitting with my VPs of marketing, or my heads of growth, and consulting with them over ‘Hey, when we did this at like this big company that I was at, this is where we found some goodness.’ So it’s more senior client whispering than it is agency services.” Elite experience The “tribrid” model is combined with what Richards called a “naked” style of communication and transparency: solid advice, plainly told. In a time when CMOs are asked to do more with less, and always faster, it’s easy to see why a resource like this could be helpful. Executing on this promise is easier when consultants are seen more as peers than hired help. The firm has talent with experience in the upper echelons of the industry, as opposed to a few senior leaders backed by an army of junior talent. So far, Intangibles works with about 30 people across New York, London, and San Francisco. At the partner level, the company’s roster includes former Global CMO of Disney Studios MT Carney, former Goodby, Silverstein & Partners’ Chief Strategy Officer Gareth Key, former Global CMO Lufthansa Alex Schlaubitz, former Global CMO of Bill Gates-backed C16 Biosciences Margaret Rimsky, and former Global CEO of Ogilvy PR Stuart Smith. So far, the company has done work with PayPal, Venmo, YouTube, and Kenvue (owners of Tylenol, Neutrogena, and Band-Aid), as well as a handful of private equity firms. Essentially, the company has assembled an on-call SWAT team of marketing, creative, strategy, and communications for the executive suite. Wilkins describes it as a hybrid model of senior talent within the company, and then tapping into their collective Rolodex to tailor teams to a client’s particular needs. “We’ve got traditional employees, but we’ve also got this fantastic network of folks who are on speed dial,” says Wilkins. “So this really surgical application, this Avengers-style team, bringing together genuinely the best people in the world for a particular mission has worked really well.” View the full article

Within just a week, the sheer devastation of the Los Angeles wildfires has pushed to the fore fundamental questions about the impact of the climate crisis that have been largely avoided by lawmakers, influencers, and the public. Among them: What is the future of insurance when people’s homes are increasingly located in areas of climate risk—whether wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, or the rising sea levels? Those questions have bedeviled policy makers in California—where insurance giants like State Farm, Farmers, and Allstate announced last year that they were no longer writing new policies in the state due to the surge in wildfires (in 2024 alone, firefighters across the state battled 8,024 wildfires that burned more than 1 million acres and destroyed 2,148 houses and other structures). Insurers have long been aware of the risk of climate change—rising premiums, increasing losses. In 1973, the German insurance firm Munich Re published a brochure on flooding that it claims was the first use of the term “climate change” in the industry, warning of the growing risk of rising temperatures and increased carbon dioxide in the air. Some 40 years later, the CEO of French insurance giant AXA said it would be impossible to insure a world that is 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 Fahrenheit) warmer. Nonetheless, insurance companies have become some of the biggest financiers of fossil fuels, which are the primary cause of climate change—the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal are responsible for over 75% of greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90% of carbon dioxide emissions. Fossil fuel companies made up 4.4% of the investment portfolio of the insurance industry in 2023, up from 3.8% nine years earlier. Two insurance giants, Berkshire Hathaway and State Farm, increased their fossil fuel positions by around $200 billion in that period. Overall, however, more than half of the country’s 238 property and casualty insurers recently surveyed by the Wall Street Journal have reduced their investments in oil, gas, and coal over the past decade. But while insurers around the world have restricted their coverage of fossil fuel projects, U.S. companies continue to write policies for conventional oil and gas projects. Spokespersons for State Farm and Berkshire Hathaway did not respond to requests for comment. It’s a vicious cycle, some insurance industry experts say, with insurers investing their customers’ premiums in fossil fuel companies, whose activities accelerate climate change, which in turn increases the risk of the wildfires, super storms, and flooding that are causing insurers to drop coverage for millions of homeowners in order to avoid losses. “That’s a significant amount of capital that is supporting polluting industries,” said Frances Sawyer, the founder of Pleiades Strategy, which works to stimulate climate action. “That hasn’t been as much of a focus as it should be in their total structural risk—fossil fuel investments that are directly making the risk environment worse that they’re handling on the other side of the balance books.” By the numbers, climate change is having an enormous impact on the industry. The insured weather losses attributable to climate change have increased from 31% to 38% in the last decade, an annual increase that “significantly outpaced” the growth of losses in other sectors. Overall, about $600 billion in such losses over the last two decades can be attributed to climate change, according to a report by Insure Our Future, a global consortium of groups pushing insurance companies to stop investing in fossil fuels. For many insurers, the losses are not being offset by the premiums they collect from their coverage of fossil fuel companies. For more than half of the 28 leading insurance companies, their estimated losses due to climate change exceeded their fossil fuel premiums. Overall, climate-attributed losses for all 28 insurers totaled $10.6 billion, erasing most of the $11.3 billion they collected in premiums from fossil fuel companies. As a result, insurers have now dropped more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts since 2018, with nonrenewal notices tripling in more than 200 counties across the country, according to a recent congressional investigation. The burden falls heaviest on lower-income Americans and people of color. About 15% of the country’s homeowners who earn less than $50,000 a year are uninsured, according to the Consumer Federation of America. And 14% of Latino and 11% of Black homeowners are uninsured. Increasingly, more Americans are underinsured, making it likely that the full cost of reconstructing a house won’t be reimbursed. A University of Colorado Boulder study on the 2021 Marshall Fire, the worst in that state’s history, revealed that 74% of affected homeowners were underinsured. Among them was Erica Solove, a mother of two who was forced to flee their family home barefoot when it was destroyed in the Marshall Fire. Because her policy reflected the valuation of her home when she bought it years ago, it wasn’t nearly enough to help build a new home. She had to rely on savings and a GoFundMe campaign to finish reconstruction. When she tried to get homeowners insurance for that home, “We were rejected by all of them,” she said. “The insurance companies are not being held responsible for not insuring people to any reasonable level reflecting the current reality,” said Solove, who started the group Extreme Weather Survivors, and recently started an online Slack community for California wildfire survivors. “It’s not an individual problem, it’s a systemic industry problem.” And the cost of homeowner insurance has skyrocketed, jumping more than 30% between 2020 and 2023 (13% adjusted for inflation), according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. That dynamic has increased pressure on insurers to shun the fossil fuel industry—both by no longer providing coverage to oil, gas, and coal projects and by no longer investing in the industry. “Insurers’ self-reinforcing cycle of driving climate risks higher and restricting coverage for those risks is threatening public interest and financial stability,” warned Insure Our Future. Some insurance giants are taking steps—Italy’s largest insurer, Generali, announced in October 2024 that it will no longer provide new coverage for oil and gas companies in the midstream and downstream sectors, which includes liquefied natural gas terminals and gas-fired power plants. But U.S. insurers in general continue to back the industry, and they have played a prominent role in the liquefied natural gas boom along the Gulf Coast. All of the senior lenders for the giant Rio Grande LNG terminal in Texas were insurance companies—Fidelity & Guaranty Life Insurance (F&G), Everlake Life Insurance, American General Life Insurance, Security Life of Denver Insurance, Symetra Life Insurance, and Allianz Life Insurance of North America—according to an SEC filing by the developer, NextDecade. Spokespersons for the companies did not return requests for comment. That role was highlighted in an industry publication, Insurance Asset Risk, which noted that “despite seemingly making progress towards net-zero goals, insurers seem to be taking on a role previously occupied by banks in financing fossil fuel projects.” In recent years, some insurance regulators have pushed for more transparency from the industry and warned it of the danger of investments that contribute to climate change. The insurance commissioners of California, Oregon, and Washington did a first-ever stress test of insurance company investments last year to detail the “hidden cost” of delaying climate action. In addition to exacerbating the climate crisis, such investments could be risky for insurance companies’ bottom line as the world moves to a clean-energy future, making it harder for them to write policies going forward. The three insurance commissioners warned in their report: “Insurance companies invest premiums that they collect from people and businesses, generating returns that enable them to pay future claims, meaning the performance of investment income can have a direct impact on a company’s ability to take on additional policies down the line.” According to the insurance commissioners’ findings, insurers face greater exposure to climate risk in their corporate bond portfolios than in their equity investments. Their future losses on corporate bonds could range from $7 billion to $40 billion, per the analysis. Because homeowners insurance is required for most home loans, some economists are concerned that the insurance crisis could reignite a mortgage crisis on a scale of the 2008-2009 recession. “Rising premiums and limited availability of insurance can have significant ripple effects across housing markets, reducing demand (and housing values) for homes in high-risk areas,” according to a new Brookings Institute study. “Any wide-scale decline in property values” would present “a systemic risk to the U.S. economy similar to what occurred during the 2007-2009 mortgage meltdown and ensuing global financial crisis,” the Senate Budget Committee warned in a December 2024 report. “It has a sort of this chilling effect where if insurance companies are announcing that they’re no longer writing policies in entire neighborhoods or entire communities or in some cases even entire states, that has implications for whether you’re going to be able to sell your home because the mortgage market won’t be available,” said Jordan Haedtler, climate finance strategist with advocacy group the Climate Cabinet. The crisis has prompted most states to develop an insurer-of-last-resort program, available to those who can’t get coverage from private insurance companies. But they are at risk of being overwhelmed. California’s FAIR Plan, which has only $200 million in reserves and $2.5 billion in reinsurance, has exposure of $5.9 billion from homeowners policies in Pacific Palisades alone, where the number of policyholders grew by 85% from last year. As California’s former insurance commissioner Dave Jones told Capital & Main, provisions in the FAIR Plan leave homeowners across the state on the hook for losses if the government plan is exhausted. Moving forward to address this crisis may take some dramatic steps, say experts. Publicly funded climate risk insurance, such as the FAIR Plan, don’t adequately address the problem since they would “face many of the same challenges as the private market in terms of managing rising costs and increasing climate risk exposure, plus the added complexity of political pressure to keep premiums artificially low,” according to the Brookings report. The think tank recommends that state regulators develop initiatives to make more advanced catastrophe modeling tools available to insurers and incentivize them to offer discounts to policy holders for taking steps to make their homes more resilient by installing wind-resistant roofing, fire-resistant siding and hail-resistant shingles. Unfortunately, insurers aren’t on board yet in California. Last year, Jones worked with state Sen. Josh Becker and the Nature Conservancy on a bill that would have required the models used by insurers to account for risk mitigation efforts such as forest treatment, creating defensible space around homes and home hardening. “The insurance industry killed it,” Jones said. “They killed the bill through lobbying and donations to lawmakers. They basically went in front of the insurance committee of the Senate and the Appropriations Committee of the Assembly and, and said, ’We’re opposed to this,’ and convinced those two committees to gut the bill.” What’s key is addressing the role of climate change, said Sawyer. “We’ve got to think about how we’re reducing climate pollution and continuing and accelerating California’s commitment to emissions reduction and investments in resilience,” she emphasized. “The last thing we need is solutions that try and treat this as a temporary financial crisis without reaching down to those roots and really thinking about the [insurance] sector’s role in decarbonization and making us safer across the board.” This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. View the full article

The iconic Louvre in Paris is no stranger to crowds. Since first opening in 1793, the museum has played host to millions of guests and undergone dozens of expansions and renovations to accommodate them. Today, though, overtourism has brought the historic site to a breaking point. In a typical year, the Louvre is prepared to accommodate 4 million visitors. But in 2024, almost 9 million people—70% of them originating from outside of France—passed through its doors. “Visiting the Louvre is a physical ordeal,” museum director Laurence des Cars wrote in a widely publicized leaked memo. Now the Louvre will now undergo a massive renovation to address overcrowding and expand its viewing capacity to 12 million annual visitors, French President Emmanuel Macron has announced. The ambitious project includes opening a new entrance on the Seine river, and dedicating a stand-alone room to house the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, to give the famed Italian Renaissance painting some breathing room. A timeless attraction with an outdated structure The Louvre’s proposed redesign follows a slew of critiques from des Cars and years of wear and tear to the museum’s architectural structure, which has been exacerbated by growing crowds. There isn’t room for visitors to take a break, according to des Cars, who also assessed the museum’s food and restroom facilities as “insufficient in volume.” She added in her memo that some areas of the museum are prone to leaks, while others experience wide temperature variations, potentially impacting the preservation of the artwork within. The Louvre’s signage needs to be redesigned as well, des Cars asserted. [Photo: Antoine Boureau/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images] The Louvre currently has only one entrance—the iconic glass pyramid by architect I.M. Pei, opened in 1989. Overcrowding of the throughway in recent years has led to both a greenhouse-like heating effect and unpleasant sound amplification. A similar issue has plagued staffers guarding the Mona Lisa. According to des Cars, around 20,000 people pack into the room housing the famous painting each day, resulting in massive lines and far-from-ideal viewing conditions (if you can even get close enough to catch a glimpse). “I’m leaving in a state of extreme fatigue and I’ve vowed never to visit again,” one loyal local visitor told The Guardian. “The noise is so unbearable under the glass pyramid; it’s like a public swimming pool. Even with a timed ticket, there’s an hour to wait outside. I can’t do it anymore. Museums are supposed to be fun, but it’s no fun anymore.” A design solution to overcrowding At a speech delivered in front of the Mona Lisa on Tuesday, Macron introduced a plan to bring the fun back to the Louvre. In short: improve the flow of foot traffic throughout the space in order to prevent major backups. To start, Macron announced, the renovation will include a new grand entrance at the Colonnade de Perrault on the museum’s western side near the Seine, finally adding an additional pathway for guests to enter the building, and relieving crowding at the pyramid entrance. The Louvre will hold a competition to choose the firm responsible for the addition, which is slated to open in 2031. Several underground rooms will be added to boost exhibition space. And the museum will relocate its pièce de résistance—the Mona Lisa—to its own dedicated room. That room will require a separate access pass and be “independently accessible compared to the rest of the museum,” Macron said. In response to the issue of overtourism, the museum will also institute higher prices for foreign travelers. Starting on January 1, 2026, Macron announced, all guests from outside the EU will be required to pay a higher entrance fee. These renovations come as other popular destinations like Spain, Greece, Italy, and Germany have all begun implementing taxes for foreign visitors as a means of dealing with rampant overtourism. It’s only a matter of time before additional landmarks will need to consider designs specifically created to manage the effects of overcrowding. View the full article

Until recently, if you threw away an old mattress in Amsterdam, it would likely end up in an incinerator—the same way that most of the 15 million-plus mattresses thrown out in the U.S. each year end up in landfills. Now, however, around half of Dutch mattresses are recycled, and that number is growing. Some of the material is starting to be used in new mattresses, sofas, and other furniture by manufacturers like IKEA. [Photo: IKEA] In one facility near Amsterdam, a company called RetourMatras uses automated equipment to dismantle old beds, beginning with a machine called a peeler that cuts off the mattress cover so the fabric can be recycled. Then the core is separated into materials like polyurethane foam, latex foam, and metal springs, depending on what’s inside a particular product. More than 80% of a typical mattress can be recycled. In another corner of the facility, the company has pioneered a process to turn polyurethane foam into the chemical building blocks for making new foam that can be used in furniture. [Photo: Ikea] In the past, shredded foam could only be “downcycled” into a lower-quality material for products like carpet backing. Now, if you buy an Extorp sofa or Poäng chair from IKEA in Europe—or a new mattress—it will likely contain foam partially made with chemicals that RetourMatras recycled from old mattresses. The investment arm of Ingka Group, IKEA’s largest retailer, first invested in the recycling startup in 2019 to help it scale up. The aim was to help with IKEA’s own circularity goals. “We would like to recycle as many mattresses as IKEA puts on the market globally,” says Alberic Pater, who manages business development at Ingka Investments. (Last year, the company sold more than 11 million mattresses.) At the time of the first investment, there was almost no recycling capacity in the region, Pater says. “Incineration or landfill was still commonplace, because the cost was far cheaper than recycling,” he says. Cost is still a challenge, though RetourMatras says that automation is helping—along with the fact that the company can now produce higher-quality materials for use in new furniture. The recycling company now has three facilities in the Netherlands, along with three facilities in the U.K. and one in France. In total, it has the capacity to recycle 2.5 million mattresses in a year; last year, it handled 1.6 million. So far, only the location outside of Amsterdam has the new tech. But another new investment from IKEA will help the startup grow. This month, the furniture giant announced that it planned to invest more than $1 billion in recycling infrastructure, including an unspecified amount in RetourMatras. (The recycler hasn’t yet announced any plans to expand to the U.S., and so far, there aren’t any other American recycling companies with the same type of foam-to-foam recycling technology.) At the same time, IKEA’s product designers are working on making mattresses more recyclable. For example, many of its mattresses now have covers made from 100% recycled polyester, which can be recycled again. The covers also have zippers, so they’re easier to remove. “It’s extremely easy just to unzip the cover, take out the foam, and let the cover go in a different recycling stream,” says Johan Kroon, a product developer for Inter IKEA. (Because they’re removable and washable, it also makes it more likely that consumers will keep the mattresses longer, which can cut the environmental footprint of the product even more.) The company’s product design team is working on multiple projects related to mattress recyclability, including making it easier to separate the materials inside. Other companies are also innovating in the space. Royal Auping, a Dutch company that has made mattresses since 1890, designed a fully circular mattress in 2020. Called Evolve, it’s made from only two materials—PET, the material used in plastic water bottles—and steel springs. A specially-designed adhesive makes it possible to separate the materials with heat instead of energy-intensive shredding. PET is also easier to recycle than foam. The design has fewer than half of the components of a typical mattress, but is as comfortable, the company says, with better ventilation than a foam mattress. RetourMatras says that mattress brands can tour its facilities to better understand how to design for recyclability. It will take time to see the benefits. “We’re dismantling mattresses from 10 years ago,” says Chico van Hemert, managing director at RetourMatras. “If we change something now, we’ll benefit in 10 years.” Meanwhile, IKEA’s product developers are also figuring out how to use the new recycled foam. Right now, it only makes up a small percentage of the total material in the company’s products; one IKEA mattress sold in the Netherlands, for example, uses 10% recycled polyol, the main building block for making foam. That percentage can increase as the supply of recycled material keeps growing and costs come down. “The biggest challenge is to get more mattresses,” says Pater. IKEA collects old mattresses at its stores, but governments need the right policies to collect mattresses at a large scale. Several European countries now have “extended producer responsibility” laws that require mattress retailers to figure out how to get old mattresses back for recycling. The U.S. lags behind, but four states also have similar laws. “We need more markets, more countries, to implement the right legislation,” he says. View the full article

Three events signal that a parallel WordPress community is gaining momentum The post WordPress Shakeup Signaled By 3 Recent Events appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Invoice factoring allows businesses to boost their cash flow. Businesses sell unpaid invoices to a third party or factoring business at a discounted rate, and these companies supply immediate payments to small businesses. This is a way for businesses to avoid challenges like delayed payments and waiting for clients to pay invoices within agreed credit terms. They can use the money for payroll, inventory and other operational expenses. What is Invoice Factoring? Invoice factoring is different from invoice financing. Here are the differences between factoring and invoice financing. Invoice factoring takes place when a business sells its invoices to a factoring company. This company then handles the collection of payments and provides an advance payment of approximately 70 to 90 percent. Invoice financing involves a small business using invoices as collateral to get advances from a lending institution. In this situation, the small business needs to collect the money. For invoice factoring, there’s an advance rate, and that’s the amount the company pays to the original business upfront. The discount rate or factoring fee is the money the factoring company charges. When a small business needs to back up any invoices the factoring company can’t collect, it’s called recourse factoring. When a factoring company assumes almost all the risk for non-payment, it’s called non-recourse factoring. Invoice factoring and financing have obvious differences and applications. How Does Invoice Factoring Work? Here’s how invoice factoring works in steps. Choosing a factoring company should include looking at advanced rates and factoring fees. Look to see what industries the company specializes in and if the factoring is without or with recourse. When a small business applies to a factoring company, it must supply financial documents about its customers and invoices. Everyone involved must agree on the terms and then approve the application. After that, an agreement is signed. Businesses can electronically submit the invoices they wish to factor. It’s important to remember that factoring companies assess the risk of non-payment, as well as the value of the invoices. Once they verify all the information, a percentage of the invoices get delivered within 24 to 48 hours Once the factoring business takes over, it collects payment from the initial business customers. When the customer pays, the company subtracts the advance amount given to the business. StepDescription Choosing a Factoring Company- Consideration of advance rates and factoring fees. - Evaluation of the industries the company specializes in. - Decision on recourse vs. non-recourse factoring. Application Process- Submission of financial documents related to customers and invoices. - Agreement on terms between the small business and the factoring company. - Approval of the application followed by signing an agreement. Invoice Submission- Invoices can be submitted electronically. - Factoring companies assess the risk of non-payment and the value of the invoices. Funding- Upon verification, a percentage of the invoice value is delivered to the business, typically within 24 to 48 hours. Collection and Settlement- The factoring company takes over the collection process from the business's customers. - When the customer pays, the factoring company subtracts the advance amount (plus fees) given to the business and remits the balance. The Role of a Factoring Company Invoice factoring companies purchase outstanding invoices, providing immediate financial assistance to the small businesses that issue them. This relationship extends beyond mere financing; it offers a comprehensive cash flow solution. Businesses receive a substantial percentage of their invoices in advance, which is a major benefit for small enterprises seeking immediate and consistent cash flow without the delays associated with traditional payment terms. A factoring company pays the business and subsequently collects on the invoice. Application and Approval Process Before approving businesses for financing, an invoice factoring company will evaluate them based on the following criteria: The creditworthiness of the business’s clients is the most significant consideration. These companies look at payment history and financial stability. Factoring businesses specialize in specific industries, including wholesale, transportation and manufacturing. These companies look at the submitted invoices to ensure they’re free from possible legal disputes and likely to get paid without any hassles. Businesses must supply documentation with a list of their client’s financial statements, invoices, and tax ID numbers. Receiving Advances and Fees Structure This process is helpful for businesses that have long invoice payment terms but need cash. Businesses issue invoices to customers and sell them to a factoring business. That company verifies the invoice details and provides an advanced payment. The customer pays for the factoring business. Once the customer pays, they send the balance to the business and subtract their fee. Factoring companies usually advance up to 90% of an invoice upfront. The specific rate depends on the number of invoices and the industry. Quite often, factoring fees range from 0.5% to 5%. Here’s an invoice factoring example. A manufacturing company invoices a retailer for $10,000 with a 60-day payment term. The company then sells the invoice at an 80% advance rate. The manufacturing company gets an advance of $8,000. The retailer pays the factoring business the entire $10,000 on the 60th day. They charge 3% of $10,000, which amounts to $300. At the conclusion of the transaction, the manufacturer receives a total of $9,700. This includes the $8,000 advance along with the remaining $2,000, after deducting the $300 fee. The factoring company disburses that amount. Benefits of Invoice Factoring for Small Businesses Invoice factoring offers a range of benefits that can be particularly advantageous for small businesses seeking flexible and immediate financial solutions. These benefits include: Immediate Access to Capital: Factoring allows businesses to convert outstanding invoices into immediate cash, providing a more predictable cash flow. This is especially beneficial for covering short-term expenses or capitalizing on timely opportunities. Non-Debt Financing: One of the key advantages of invoice factoring is that it doesn’t add to a company’s debt obligations. This aspect helps in keeping the balance sheet healthier. Unlike traditional loans that require repayment (with interest), factoring simply involves selling your invoices at a discount, thus not incurring debt. No Collateral Required: Traditional financing often requires collateral, but invoice factoring does not. This can be a significant advantage for businesses that may not have the necessary assets to secure a loan. Time and Resource Savings: Outsourcing the management of accounts receivable to a factoring company can free up significant time and resources for business owners. This time can be better spent focusing on core business activities, such as sales, product development, and customer service. Credit Analysis and Risk Management: Factoring companies typically conduct credit checks on your clients before agreeing to purchase your invoices. This can provide valuable insights into the creditworthiness of potential and existing customers. By highlighting the reputation and payment history of your customers, factoring companies help you manage and mitigate credit risk more effectively. Flexible Financing Option: Invoice factoring provides a flexible financing option that can scale with your business’s sales volume. As your business grows and you invoice more, you can factor in more invoices to access more capital, in contrast to a fixed loan amount. Improved Financial Management: With faster access to cash, businesses can improve their financial management, meeting obligations on time and taking advantage of early payment discounts from suppliers. Enhanced Business Focus: By alleviating the burden of chasing down payments, businesses can refocus their efforts on strategic growth initiatives rather than being bogged down by financial constraints and administrative tasks related to accounts receivable management. These advantages make invoice factoring an attractive option for small businesses in need of a cash flow solution. However, it’s essential to carefully consider the specific terms and conditions offered by factoring companies, as well as the potential impact on customer relationships, to ensure it aligns with your business objectives and values. Invoice Factoring Cost There are several fees and costs to consider when deciding to use this financial option, including the following: Factor Rates: This refers to the percentage of the invoice that the invoice factoring company provides to the business in advance. Typically, these rates fall between 70% and 95%. Service Fees: The company charges this cost for its services. It usually ranges from 0.5% to 5%. Some companies use a tiered fee structure. You need to be careful and watch out for that because these fees can increase the longer any invoice is not paid. Additional Fees: Ensure you understand any service charges and set-up fees the company charges. Remember that if a factoring business needs to check your customer’s credit, that cost can be passed on to you. What to Look for in Invoice Factoring Companies A partnership with a factoring business needs to check some of the following boxes. The company needs to have experience and a transparent fee structure. Outstanding customer service and flexible factoring terms are essential. Reviews and testimonials about the company’s reputation can help you decide. Additional services like account management tools and reporting features should be looked at. Take a good look at the platforms and technology the company uses. It should be user-friendly for submitting invoices and tracking payments. Risks and Considerations of Factoring Invoices Invoice factoring, while beneficial for enhancing cash flow, especially for small businesses in need of immediate financial liquidity, comes with its own set of risks and considerations. It’s important to weigh these factors carefully to make an informed decision: Dependency Risks: Relying heavily on invoice factoring companies can be precarious for small businesses. These companies might: Alter their fee structures unexpectedly, leading to higher costs. Change the terms of the agreement, potentially putting your business in a challenging position. Cost Considerations: Factoring fees may be considerably greater than those associated with traditional financing options, like bank loans or lines of credit. This difference can affect long-term financial sustainability. The cumulative cost over time, considering these fees, might outweigh the immediate benefits of improved cash flow. Loss of Control: Entrusting your accounts receivable to a factoring company means relinquishing some degree of control over them. This can influence: The manner in which invoices are managed and collected. The relationship with your clients, as the factoring company’s approach to collecting payments, may differ from yours, potentially affecting client satisfaction and trust. Impact on Business Relationships: The interaction between your clients and the factoring company can affect your business’s reputation. If the factoring company employs aggressive collection tactics, it could strain your relationships with clients. Confidentiality Concerns: Sharing sensitive financial information with a third party involves a level of risk. Ensuring that the factoring company respects confidentiality and has robust data protection measures is crucial. Contractual Obligations: Some factoring agreements might include long-term commitments or clauses that are not favorable to your business, such as minimum volume requirements or penalties for early termination of the contract. Possible Impact on Future Financing: Relying on invoice factoring can influence your business’s ability to secure other types of small business financing options. Lenders may view the use of factoring as a sign of financial instability. Carefully evaluating these risks and considerations is essential before proceeding with invoice factoring. It may also be beneficial to explore alternative financing options and compare them against the potential costs and implications of factoring to ensure it aligns with your business’s long-term goals and financial health. https://youtube.com/watch?v=VU3zSmdOuyg%3Fsi%3DSrd21LTyqzQ-3iXC FAQs: Invoice Factoring Here are some answers to questions small business owners ask. What types of businesses can benefit from invoice factoring? Wholesale, manufacturing, and transportation businesses can benefit. Plus, any others that have long payment cycles. How does invoice factoring affect relationships with clients? Involving a third party can put a temporary kink in payment practices and direct communication with a business and its clients. What happens to unpaid invoices in a factoring agreement? Under a non-recourse agreement, the factoring company assumes the risk associated with unpaid invoices. In contrast, with a recourse agreement, alternative arrangements must be established, or the company is required to repurchase the outstanding amounts. How can invoice factoring improve a small business’s cash flow? A small business can get immediate access to a big part of the money that gets tied up in unpaid invoices. How does a factoring company make money? They charge clients a fee, usually a percentage of the invoice value. Read More: What is an invoice? How to create an invoice Image: Envato Elements This article, "What is Invoice Factoring and How Does it Work?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

When famous and powerful people open up about their autism experiences, it often gets attention. One example is Bill Gates sharing an excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings. In it, he writes that “if I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.” But although this caused some struggles, he also notes: “I wouldn’t trade the brain I was given for anything.” For many in the autistic community, this visibility can feel like a win. Seeing a successful person identifying as autistic can inspire hope and serve as a reminder: An autistic brain is not something to be ashamed of. In fact, there is much to celebrate. But these high-profile disclosures also bring mixed feelings. Along with the celebration comes a concern about autism and success narratives, who benefits from them, and who is harmed by them. The ‘Autistic Genius’ Stereotype and the Superpower Narrative Popular narratives often frame autistic people in extreme ways. We are either geniuses (albeit often misunderstood) destined to revolutionize industries, or tragic figures, defined solely by our struggles. When someone influential comes out as autistic, the story often focuses on their “unstoppable neurodivergent brilliance”—their extraordinary talents, creative thinking, “superhuman” persistence, or unique approach to problem-solving. It feeds into the neurodivergent superpowers narrative. This might seem like a major improvement over the “broken and deficient” stereotypes, yet it can also be a trap. Innovative talents and the humans who exhibit them are worth celebrating. Yet a powerful mental image of “a genius” risks obscuring the broader, more nuanced picture of autistic experiences, and creating stereotypes that might be positive—yet still have negative effects on other autistic people. Research indicates that once we categorize something, cognitive schemas and stereotypes guide our memory and perceptions. This means we are “stuck” in the oversimplification. Challenging and broadening narratives—in this case, understanding the wide range of autistic experiences—becomes difficult. One of the more obvious consequences of the “tech genius” stereotype is pushing people toward tech careers that may or may not align with their calling, while restricting opportunities in fields that don’t align with that stereotype. Another problem with the fascination with “autistic genius” is the risk of perpetuating the perception that autistic people’s value is conditional on having extraordinary abilities. It reinforces a hierarchy of worth, where only the most “useful” or “exceptional” are deemed valuable. For many autistic people, this narrative creates an implicit expectation to keep proving our value—a burden that can exacerbate feelings of inadequacy and exclusion or result in a burnout. The risk of burnout also stems from the expectation that autistic people “deliver” above and beyond in environments where we lack support. Moreover, “wealthy genius” narratives can obscure the disproportionate economic challenges faced by the majority of autistic people. Policies and programs focused solely on “tapping into autistic potential” may miss the mark when it comes to meeting foundational needs like housing, transportation, or healthcare, and protection from blatant workplace discrimination. Everyday Realities of Working While Autistic In his writing, Gates acknowledges both his luck and his privilege. And I am happy to celebrate his story. But there are so many other stories. Untold, and unheard. Most autistic people face complex and painful challenges in their careers and in their lives. In addition to extremely high unemployment, even those who work are held back by poverty, inaccessible environments, and the lack of understanding from their employers. Their stories are far less glamorous, but they’re just as important. They reflect the lives of the majority of autistic people—the ones who don’t make headlines. Here are a few stories from my book, The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work, to provide a broader perspective on the autistic experience at work. In that experience, ability and high performance are often not enough. Working as a HR systems analyst in the U.K., Charlie Hart often received positive feedback about her productivity (“eats workload for breakfast”) and the quality of her work (“meticulous attention to detail”), yet she never got anything above “achieved” in her performance reviews. She was striving for the “exceed expectations” rating though, and asked the HR director what she needed to do to get it. Well, she needed to be a different person. Charlie was assigned to an interpersonal skills coaching, which was de facto a neurodivergent masking and “passing for a neurotypical” coaching—exacerbating years of trauma and pushing her into depression for months. Burnett Grant, a highly experienced Black, autistic lab technician from the U.S., was advised by their supervisor “to get on disability benefits and clean houses for extra money under the table.” Burnett was a high performer and didn’t ask for advice, which leaves little explanation for this unsolicited guidance other than stereotyping. Dr. Jacqui Wilmshurst from Beverley, U.K., is a health and environmental psychologist. After she was diagnosed as an adult, she disclosed her neurodivergence to her new manager. She was immediately sent on a mandatory occupational health referral to reassess her ability to do the job. That was the job for which she had been through 11 interviews—after being recruited by the employer in the first place, for her unusual thinking and innovative approach. After disclosure, Jacqui’s manager said they needed a “playbook” to manage Jacqui, and only a doctor could provide that. Jacqui ended up resigning. Justin Donne worked in the U.K. and France for governmental organizations, private companies, and many boards. He was also seen as “too much” and told to slow down. In one of his roles, Justin broke organizational records for KPIs, facilitated fundraising windfalls, and developed award-winning programs. Then, he was placed under a micromanager who wanted to control everything Justin did and how he did it. That was the end of Justin’s career with that organization. These stories may not be glamorous, but they’re important. They reflect the experiences of the majority of autistic talent—the ones who are too often left out of workplace conversations or considerations. Canaries in the coal mines whose struggles are signals of broken human resources and management systems. A Broader Vision of Autistic Talent Fairness means building unbiased, outcomes-focused work environments. It means supporting all autistic people in developing their talents, extraordinary or not. It means removing the barriers that hold so many back. It means recognizing autistic people’s value as inherent, not commodified. To move from celebrating the exceptional to creating work environments of ordinary excellence where all autistic people can thrive, where all people can thrive, we need to: 1. Broaden the Narrative: Highlight a range of autistic stories, including those of people who are overlooked, struggling, or simply living ordinary lives. Push back against reductive portrayals of autism as either a “superpower” or a “tragedy.” Autism is a complex human experience, not a marketing slogan. 2. Celebrate Human Value: Celebrate autistic and allistic people for who they are, not for “superpowers.” Everyone deserves dignity, belonging, and the chance to contribute. 3. Remove Barriers: Design fair and flexible workplaces that offer employment and success opportunities for all people, autistic or allistic, regardless of their economic or social standing. Such workplaces benefit all. They help create more stories to celebrate. When a high-profile person brings a spotlight to autism, it’s an opportunity to celebrate and educate. But it’s also a moment to reflect. Whose stories are centered? Whose stories are ignored? And how can we expand the conversation to ensure fairness and opportunities for all? The full story of autistic talent is about people—all of us—deserving dignity, respect, and the right support to thrive. Helping everyone develop their talents enriches the workplace and the world far beyond the contributions of any one person, however exceptional. 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This year, 2,500 girls will be able to attend secondary school in Afghanistan. While this shouldn’t be a remarkable feat, it is: The Taliban government forbids girls from receiving an education beyond 6th grade. Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit organization, is helping to support The Underground School Initiative that educates girls in 38 secret locations throughout Afghanistan. In an unexpected turn, this project will be partially funded by The Citizenry, a U.S.-based home goods brand, which raised money during its Black Friday sale last year to pay for teachers, educational supplies, and facilities for these students. [Photo: The Citizenry] Desperate for an Education In 2021, when the United States left Afghanistan and the Taliban took back power, one of the new government’s mandates was that girls would not receive more than a primary education. Schools shuttered overnight. This came as a rude shock to the 850,000 girls who were pulled out of school, when they had previously assumed that an education was a fundamental right. Teenagers were turned away from their old classrooms, some in tears. Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, who founded Ideas Beyond Borders eight years ago, had been paying close attention to this unfolding catastrophe. The goal of his organization is to create a free and prosperous Middle East by spreading knowledge and education. For instance, the organization has added upwards of 40,000 articles onto Wikipedia in local languages, including Arabic, Farsi, and Pashtun. [Photo: Ideas Beyond Borders] After the U.S. left Afghanistan, Al Mutar, who splits time between the U.S. and the UAE, began receiving messages from journalists in Afghanistan saying that there were families and teachers who wanted to defy the ban on education and start creating a network of underground schools. There are now many brave communities across the country that are putting thousands of girls through school. “They were taking incredible risks,” Al Mutar says. “Parents were donating their houses so that girls could continue their education.” Ideas Beyond Borders wanted to support this work, so it sent a team to vet these schools. It then served as a link between these schools and the outside world, helping to find individuals and companies who would be willing to fund these underground schools. [Photo: The Citizenry] There appears to be some disagreement among the Taliban’s leadership about whether girls should be allowed to go to school. There have been several points over the past four years when some leaders were open to reversing the decision. But a minority of senior hardliners are committed to this stance, and girls continue to be banned from school. While it is a risk for these girls to attend the underground school, communities have found ways to skirt the rules. Teachers describe their classrooms as madrasas, or Islamic religious schools. And according to CBS News, the Taliban’s involvement and regulation of these madrasas vary by location and local officials involved. In Taliban strongholds in the south and east of the country, authorities tend to enforce the ban, while in other areas, leaders are willing to turn a blind eye. Al Mutar isn’t particularly optimistic that things are going to get better in Afghanistan. He says that regime appears to be set on imposing more restrictions on women. The Taliban is making it harder to work, and there’s a new law that bans women from singing. “It’s been more and more challenging,” says Al Mutar. “Freedoms are declining.” [Photo: The Citizenry] Black Friday For Good Rachel Bentley and Carly Nance launched The Citizenry in 2014 as a brand that sold home decor ethically sourced from 4,000 artisans in 23 countries around the world. (Last year, it was acquired by Havenly, which owns many home furnishing brands.) They partnered with Fair Trade to ensure that all workers were receiving a living wage. “We learned that handmade doesn’t always mean fairly paid,” Nance says. “We want to invest in these communities for many reasons, including that it allows them to deliver the best craftsmanship.” Nance says that over the course of working with skilled craftspeople from around the world, they found communities in Afghanistan than made traditional hand-knotted rugs. The company was keen to source rugs made by female artisans. But when the Taliban took over, women were no longer allowed to work outside the home. The Citizenry worked with local organizations committed to helping women continue to work safely, if they chose to do so. “This meant rerouting rugs through neighboring countries before sending them to the U.S., rather than shipping them directly from Afghanistan, since this would make it less likely that local authorities would audit the rug-making facilities,” says Nance. “We’ve worked to build a supply chain and shipping rout where we can get the rugs in and out, while protecting the women who are working on them.” [Photo: Ideas Beyond Borders] When Nance discovered the network of underground schools, she was eager to support this work through The Citizenry. She believes giving girls an education is one step toward helping them work across many industries, ultimately creating more possibilities for their lives. She reached out to Ideas Beyond Borders to see how her team could help. The Citizenry turned its Black Friday Sale into an opportunity to raise funds for these schools by donating profits to Ideas Beyond Borders. It raised $30,000 that will fund the education of 2,500 girls in 38 secret locations across the country. “Black Friday is our single-biggest day of sales in the year, and we thought it would be a beautiful kickoff to the holiday season,” she says. Al Mutar hopes that the education the girls receive will allow them to find work in areas they are interested in. Some are eager to learn English and French so they can find work as translators. Others are eager to become graphic designers. A proportion of these girls are even able to go to university in women’s colleges in Bangladesh. “They can then go through a more formal education system and find even more job opportunities,” he says. View the full article

The Chinese AI company DeepSeek is making major waves across the tech industry after rising to prominence seemingly overnight. The artificial intelligence tool emerged in the top spot in Apple’s App Store yesterday, above competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—and on a comparatively tiny timeline and budget. But there’s another way that DeepSeek is quietly outdoing its American competitors: through its branding. Late last week, DeepSeek released an updated version of its open-source chatbot called DeepSeek-V3, a product that has some tech analysts describing the company’s efforts as “a shot across the bow at the U.S. tech world.” DeepSeek-V3 performs similarly to chatbots like ChatGPT-4o and Meta’s Llama—despite being created in just a few months, being trained on inferior hardware, and requiring a reported budget of just $6 million. (ChatGPT spent $100 million on its latest iteration alone.) The news caused the Nasdaq to tumble by $1 trillion yesterday as markets reacted to the success of the lower-cost LLM challenger. But the visual representation of this industry disruptor is not a swirling black-void logo à la OpenAI, or even a robot. Instead, it’s a friendly blue whale. This diverges from branding trends currently dominating the AI industry, which lean into abstract design and increasingly rigid, tech-inspired aesthetics. By bucking those trends, DeepSeek is offering consumers a new point of view on how an AI company might conduct and represent itself. [Image: Deepseek] DeepSeek’s logo makes a splash DeepSeek’s logo is a plump, bright blue whale that almost appears to be jumping across the screen. It’s accompanied by the brand’s wordmark in a rounded, fractured sans-serif font. The overall visual identity creates an air of approachability and friendliness that makes the brand stand out. That’s because there’s been a “lack of personality and joy” in tech-industry branding over the past several years, according to designer Martin Grasser, who created Twitter’s iconic blue bird logo back in 2012. “We’ve seen this homogenization of design when you look across tech companies,” Grasser says, adding that he doesn’t see identity design as “a big differentiator” in the current tech environment. He notes that the tech sector has undergone a stark branding evolution from the playful and humanist approach of the aughts to more grandiose visual storytelling. “Now we have Uber, Meta, Tesla, X—we’ve really taken this turn toward technology as the answer,” he says. Grasser says he was “charmed” by DeepSeek’s logo, as well as the concept behind it. [Image: Deepseek] The brand is a WIP, but “evokes imagination” While DeepSeek hasn’t openly explained its design choices, when we asked the company’s chatbot about the logo, it replied that the mark “likely symbolizes depth, intelligence, and exploration—qualities that align with the company’s focus on AI and deep learning.” The choice of a whale works on several symbolic levels, according to Teemu Suviala, chief creative officer at Landor. “There are many cultures that associate whales with wisdom, power, and prosperity,” he says. “Seeing a whale [is] an omen of good things to come in many cultures.” Suviala adds that the concept of a whale navigating the ocean is a strong metaphor for DeepSeek’s users. “The concept of navigating is probably connected to the open-source nature of DeepSeek that is somewhat different from the competition,” he says. Suviala and Grasser agree that there’s still plenty of work to be done on DeepSeek’s branding, both noting that the whale’s eye becomes lost at a small scale. Grasser believes the brand’s typography doesn’t quite fit with its friendly, optimistic logo, as the fracturing creates a “nervous” feeling. Suviala called out the inconsistent kerning. Such inconsistencies could be due to the nature of startup branding. Ross Clugston, chief creative officer at Design Bridge and Partners, says that in the U.S., most startups tend to hold off on investing in branding until “they have matured and need to signal to investors they are serious about making profit.” Clugston points to Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, and even TikTok, noting that “all of their early branding efforts fell drastically short” of the actual product they were building. “Logos with animals are usually reserved for more playful tech pastimes like Twitter, Mailchimp, Tripadvisor, Evernote,” he says. “I think this is a conscious effort [by DeepSeek] to be nonthreatening.” Still, DeepSeek’s unexpected branding is a first building block toward establishing an AI company that opts to distinguish itself from the competition rather than blending in. “It evokes imagination and the unknown, and that’s cool,” Grasser says. “It’s nice to hear from somebody who’s curious, as opposed to omnipresent or hovering above you.” Logos from OpenAI, DeepMind, Synthesia, DeepMotion, Laika, Oneirocom, Mentum, Regie.ai, Eyeware, Stability AI, HyperWrite, Cortexica, and oPRO.ai [Image: courtesy James I. Bowie] Will this design disruptor have staying power? Over the past several years, dominant AI companies have embraced a few key graphic icons that have come to define the space at large. There are the minimalist, robot-inspired logos, as those from Replika, Jasper AI, and Enzyme. There’s the abstract, swirling hexagon that’s come to define giants like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Stability AI. The secondary sparkle icon has been used by companies as far-ranging as OpenAI, Google, Adobe, and Grammarly to suggest the presto magic of their AI tools. As AI has become more powerful, it seems Big Tech companies have focused more on signaling that they’re part of the industry-shaking, boundary-breaking AI “club” than actually distinguishing their own brand identities. And the more ingrained these tropes become in consumers’ minds, the more incentive there is for new AI companies to go with the flow and bank on established visual associations. Taken alongside the sector’s existing logos, DeepSeek’s mascot-adjacent approach is a pretty big risk. Whether the play actually succeeds, Suviala notes, will come down to how the company conducts itself in the coming months—including whether the product experience itself and the company’s communication style aligns with its friendly exterior. “I would venture as far as to say that DeepSeek is and was always going to terrify Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and government regulators,” Clugston says. “So it’s strategically sound to make the logo a cute little whale.” View the full article

CONECUH COUNTY, Ala.—At the confluence of the Yellow River and Pond Creek in Alabama’s Conecuh National Forest, there’s a place of peace. It’s a small, icy blue, year-round freshwater spring where the locals often go to unplug. Nestled inside Conecuh National Forest, Blue Spring is surrounded by new growth—mostly pines replanted after the forest was clear cut for timber production in the 1930s. Nearly a century after that clear cut, another environmental risk has reared its head in the forest, threatening Blue Spring’s peace: oil and gas development. Oil and gas development within Alabama’s Conecuh National Forest could potentially put recreation areas like Blue Lake and Open Pond at an environmental risk. [Photo: U.S. Forest Service] As the Biden administration came to a close earlier this month, officials with the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) initiated the process of “scoping” the possibility of new oil and gas leases in Conecuh National Forest. On Jan. 6, USFS announced it would soon begin a 30-day comment period to solicit public opinion on the proposal, which includes the continued availability of tens of thousands of acres of federal land for oil and gas leasing and the possibility of leasing an additional, nearly 3,000 acres where the federal government owns mineral rights but not surface rights. Conecuh National Forest stretches along the Alabama-Florida border, spanning more than 85,000 acres across two counties in the Yellowhammer State. Past efforts to lease large tracts of land in Alabama’s national forests have been unsuccessful, with a planned 2012 lease auction nixed as a result of public outrage over environmental concerns. Federal oil and gases leases in Alabama aren’t uncommon, though they’re rarely commercially productive, records show. Still, any oil and gas buildout can present various environmental risks, including air and water pollution in an area meant to be preserved as part of America’s environmental heritage, experts warn. The Forest Service itself acknowledged the various risks involved in oil and gas leasing within Alabama’s national forests in a 2004 environmental impact assessment, though the agency also emphasized in the document its stated goal of expanding energy production and dismissed certain environmental impacts of the project as “negligible.” In 2012, when federal officials renewed their interest in fossil fuel leases in Alabama, agency representatives pointed to the 2004 environmental assessment as a reason to allow for additional oil and gas development. Environmentalists objected to that analysis, arguing that relying on a then eight-year-old assessment to potentially approve thousands of acres of public lands for extraction was dishonest and legally dubious. “We have a strong sense of place in the South, and our public forests should not be sold to the highest bidder to be destroyed for short-term profit,” Tracy Davids, director of Wild South, said of the 2012 proposal at the time. “These are the places that families hunt, fish, hike, and recreate. Oil and gas drilling will ruin these lands and force us off of our national forests. This is an assault on our heritage and we won’t stand for it.” This month’s announcement that the Forest Service will analyze oil and gas leasing within Conecuh National Forest may be a way for federal officials to shore up their legal position, updating the environmental assessment necessary for defending against litigation over new oil and gas leases there. The new analysis would assess “how changed conditions and circumstances could result in a need to update leasing availability decisions described in the 2004 Forest Plan,” the announcement by the agency said. The USFS’ previous environmental assessment did not include any analysis of the impact of expanded oil and gas development on efforts to mitigate climate change, something environmentalists argue should undoubtedly be part of the government’s decision-making calculus. This month’s announcement did not mention climate change or greenhouse gas emissions but did say that updating the forest plan and other scoping documents would further government policy to “foster and encourage private enterprise in the development of economically sound and stable industries.” Including impacts on climate change in any environmental assessment around oil and gas development seems far less likely under Trump, who as a candidate regularly trumpeted oil and gas extraction, repeating the conservative catchphrase, “Drill, baby, drill.” Much of the area proposed for lease availability surrounds recreation sites within the national forest, including Blue Lake, Open Pond, Conecuh Shooting Range, and the Leon Brooks Hines Public Fishing Lake. Will Harlan, southeast director and senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity, said environmentalists are worried about the new proposal, which he called “incredibly dangerous.” “Conecuh National Forest is less than 1% of Alabama’s land, so when we’re talking about having oil and gas sites in the national forest, it’s concerning,” he said. “Alabama’s national forests rank No. 1 in the country for species diversity, especially of fish, turtles, and mollusks,” he said. “This is a global biodiversity hotspot that’s being potentially targeted for oil and gas drilling.” Allowing expanded oil and gas development in the forest would present an unnecessary risk, Harlan said. “There are plenty of lands where oil and gas drilling can occur, but not this spectacularly diverse national forest,” Harlan said. The U.S. Forest Service’s informal 30-day public comment period ends Feb. 12. Comments on the proposal can be submitted at this website or mailed to Garner Westbrook, USDA Forest Service, 2946 Chestnut St., Montgomery, Alabama, 36107. — Lee Hedgepeth, Inside Climate News This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News. It is republished with permission. View the full article

As fires burned tens of thousands of acres across Los Angeles County, officials were warning residents that the air was a “toxic soup” of pollution—fueled by the fact that not only vegetation but cars, buildings, homes, and all the plastics and electronics inside them were going up in flames. But to some residents’ surprise, the Air Quality Index (AQI) on their phones didn’t relay that same message. That’s because AQI doesn’t capture the full scope of air pollution—which, during the fires, was made up of toxins including lead, chlorine, and bromine. To give residents a fuller picture of what exactly was in the air around L.A., scientists with an air monitoring project made their advanced air pollution measurements available to the public. Lead data, Los Angeles 1/1/2025-1/28/2025 [Screenshot: ASCENT Data] What doesn’t AQI capture in air pollution? The Environmental Protection Agency developed the AQI to measure five major pollutants: ground-level ozone, particle pollution (also called fine particulate matter or PM2.5, meaning particles that are 2.5 microns or less in size), carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. PM2.5 and ozone tend to be the primary pollutants. The index gives all this air pollution a value based on the total mass concentration. That means the general AQI reading can lack specificity, says Roya Bahreini, a professor of atmospheric science at University of California Riverside and a co-principal investigator of the Atmospheric Science and Chemistry mEasurement NeTwork, or ASCENT project. It’s also missing certain toxins that may be released during events like urban wildfires. “Just looking at the value of PM2.5 cannot tell you how toxic the air is.” The way many cities measure the aerosols in their air doesn’t show a full, real-time picture, she adds. While some may measure air pollutants continuously, they may only analyze the air filters every three or five days. They’re also aggregating all that data into a 24-hour period. “You don’t get these very dynamic profiles,” Bahreini says, “We don’t know if the high concentration that one filter sees is because of something that happened in the morning rush hour or the afternoon rush hour or at night.” These gaps are what the ASCENT project, which was funded by the National Science Foundation in 2021, hopes to fill. “We wanted to have a continuous look at the chemical composition of the PM2.5, and this fast, sort of state-of-the-art network has not existed in the U.S.,” Bahreini says. ASCENT set up its network at 12 sites across the country, including two locations in Los Angeles. “With this network, we see continuously how dynamic the aerosol composition can be, and also how things change.” Chlorine data, Los Angeles 1/1/2025-1/28/2025 [Screenshot: ASCENT Data] Lead and chlorine in L.A. wildfire air ASCENT’s goal is to have all its measurements public by September 2025, but it rushed to make a website with its L.A. readings available during the fires as researchers realized the importance of what they were capturing. Early on, ASCENT’s monitoring site in Pico Rivera, which is part of southeastern Los Angeles County, saw massive spikes in airborne lead—jumping, at its worst, to 472 nanograms of lead per cubic meter of air. The EPA’s safe levels for lead in the air is 150 nanograms per cubic meter averaged over three months. Before the fires began, L.A.’s levels were less than 3 nanograms. Around the same time. ASCENT’s tools also clocked spikes in chlorine to more than 13,000 nanograms per cubic meter of air, when the background level in the region is usually less than 50 nanograms. Bromine levels also saw significant spikes. Exposure to all of these can come with health impacts: Breathing in lead has been associated with brain and nervous system damage; chlorine can damage the respiratory tract and lungs, and bromine exposure can cause lung inflammation. (Though for the latter two, its difficult to know the risk given how they were distributed through the air during the fires.) Breathing in lots of particulate pollution in general can cause respiratory issues and even premature mortality. These three chemicals are “very unique” to something like an urban wildfire, Bahreini says. Lead could have gotten into the air from soil deposits that were burning, as well as lead pipes or paint from older homes. Chlorine is often added to plastics, including PVC piping, computer casings, or the insulation around wires. “You can imagine how much of that got burned,” Bahreini says. Bromine could be in all sorts of household materials, from mattresses to sofas to carpets, because it’s often used a component of flame retardants. Checking the air quality—and masking up The highest levels of those three toxins did decrease after the most active periods of the fires. Still, even once they decreased, their levels were still above normal—possibly because of wind, cleaning efforts, or other disturbances that can redistribute the particles in the air. ASCENT is planning to keep its publicly-available L.A.-area data online as long as there is interest, and fire risk, so residents can keep an eye on these pollutants with real-time data. (L.A. did recently get some rain that eased the wildfires, though officials warned that fire conditions could still persist afterwards, especially if the Santa Ana winds return.) Bahreini encourages residents to wear a mask, like an N95 or Kn95, that protects against PM2.5. View the full article