Friday 10th May 2024

Remember the SPAC Craze? More Than a Third of Them Have Liquidated Since 2020

New research from SPAC Track, an independent monitor of the SPAC market, suggests that the craze was ill-fated for more than a third of the companies that made the jump: Of the 986 U.S. SPACs that have IPO'd since 2020, 362 have liquidated, according to the research shared exclusively with Inc. 

As low interest rates and surging public markets set the temperature during the pandemic, investors sought an opportunistic approach, and SPACs became a lucrative fad between 2020 and 2021. This backdoor route -- when a public holding company is created with the sole purpose of acquiring a private company and taking it public -- accounted for 613 IPOs, or 59 percent of all new listings in 2021, according to Nasdaq.


Continued here

More Banks Tightened Lending Terms in the First Quarter of This Year. Some Are Charging More, Too

Getting a bank to approve your loan application is a tough proposition in this still chilly credit environment--and it's getting even more difficult. Over the first three months of this year, 21 percent of banks tightened lending standards for small businesses with less than $50 million in annual sales, according to the Federal Reserve's most recent Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey released on Monday. That marked an increase from the fourth quarter of last year when 19 percent of banks tightened loan standards. Only two percent of banks eased lending standards for small businesses during the first three months of this year.

What may be most troubling to entrepreneurs is the type of banks that are stiffening their criteria for small business lending. The credit pullback was most pronounced in small and medium banks, which tend to be the go-to lenders for small businesses, with 30 percent of non-large banks tightening their loan standards for small businesses.


Continued here

Biden Announces New $3.3 Billion Wisconsin AI Data Center...and It's the Ultimate Jab at Trump

That locale might ring a bell: It's the same site that was supposed to host a new Foxconn facility, a Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer that invested $10 billion in the region. Former president Donald Trump once lauded the project as "the eighth wonder of the world," but it ultimately failed when Foxconn ditched the deal.

The Biden administration estimates that the new center will create 2,300 union construction jobs, plus 2,000 full-time jobs at the center on Microsoft's payroll. The center is also anticipated to create pipelines to new industry in town, according to Jon Donenberg, the deputy director of the White House's National Economic Council.


Continued here

When Someone You Manage Isn't Following the Return-to-Office Policy

What should you do if some of your team members still don’t want to come into the office after your company has imposed a mandate? How do you strike the right balance between following company policies and understanding the needs of your employees? In this article, the author shares advice from two experts on how to navigate this complicated situation. 

Continued here

How to Rethink Your Career as an Empty Nester

When children leave the house for college or other opportunities, the sudden change and loss of predictability can be disruptive for working parents and their careers. It’s common for parents to feel grief when kids leave the house. Perhaps you’ve been caught unaware: you haven’t fully anticipated this time and season, and now your life looks like a blank canvas. How do you fill it? If you’re an empty nester (or will be soon), this article offers some questions for you to reflect on and strategies help you re-shape your life and find meaning — both personally and professionally — during this time.

Continued here

Dynamic Pricing Doesn't Have to Alienate Your Customers

Inflation-fatigued shoppers are witnessing prices fluctuate across categories with unprecedented scale and frequency — a trend often seen as yet another cunning commercial scheme. Is the extra profit companies see from dynamic pricing worth the risk of alienating customers? If done well, companies shouldn’t be making that trade-off — dynamic pricing should serve the long-term interest of companies and customers alike. This can only happen under two conditions. First, it must represent a better alternative to static prices. Second, companies must view dynamic pricing as an integral part of customer centricity, not something antithetical to it.

Continued here

Mexico is in a crisis. Political candidates are busy dancing on TikTok

One afternoon in late March, Jorge Álvarez Máynez swayed to the beat of a vallenato tune before climbing off the stage, jumping over a barricade, and walking into a crowd of women.

To the untrained eye, the 38-year-old might have come off as a nascent rock star. In reality, Álvarez Máynez is a presidential hopeful, dancing his way across Mexico as the country prepares to head to the polls.

Continued here

The Best Kindle to Buy in 2024

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED

We love Kindles here at WIRED. They're simple, reliable, and perfect at what they do—in one palm-sized device, you can bring thousands of books with you to the park or mountain, and they typically get a month of battery life per charge. You can subscribe to get unlimited books from Amazon or get free books from your local library (more on those below). But what's the best Kindle? Our guide will help you decode the differences.


Continued here

Acer Chromebook Plus 514 Review: A Great Budget Laptop

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED

Last year, Google trotted out a new “Chromebook Plus” label, ensuring Chromebooks meet specific hardware requirements so that they have a certain threshold of quality and—importantly—a starting price of $400. It's been fairly successful. Chromebooks from companies like Acer and Lenovo perform well for the money—functional, affordable hardware that does the job.


Continued here

8 Best Online Photo Printing Services (2024): Tips, Print Quality, and More

Suburban America used to contain roughly one 1-hour photo lab for every 500 people. Little kiosks were sprinkled across strip mall parking lots like pepper on a bad steak. Then came the digital camera, and suddenly there was no film to develop. Those kiosks abruptly disappeared, taking our photo printing options with them. Developing film isn't commonplace today, but the desire to have our favorite photos on the wall has never faded. In place of the 1-hour photo booths, there are endless online printing services, most of which produce far better results than those kiosks ever did. Unfortunately, some of them are truly awful at printing your images.

To make sure you don't end up with prints of your kids with orange skin against green skies (yes, that happened in one test), we assembled a collection of photos designed to test color, tonal range, blacks, whites, and more, and fired them off to dozens of services. Here are the best places to print your photos. All prices listed are for standard 4 x 6 prints, but all of these services can also do large prints, canvas prints, acrylic prints, and loads more. For more immediate results, be sure to check out our Best Instax Cameras and Printers guide.


Continued here