April 4, 2021
Spelman College has always had a robust recruiting season, with around 700 recruiters from companies and graduate schools coming to campus over the course of an academic year. But last year, the school saw a similar level of interest in just one semester.
In response to last year’s resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following another spate of killings of Black Americans by police, various companies large and small have committed to recruiting fresh graduates, making donations, or finding other ways to get involved with America’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), including Spelman.
Harold Bell, director of Spelman’s office of career planning and development, says his seven-person department has been flooded with emails and phone calls from hundreds of companies, each armed with a list of diversity recruitment initiatives. The increased outreach has been “stressful,” he says, as handling recruiters is only part of his office’s
March 17, 2021
The market for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, has been racking up plenty of firsts. The first NFT artwork to be auctioned by Christie’s. The first Oscar-nominated movie to be released as an NFT. The first tweet by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, sold as an NFT. The first NFT album: Kings of Leon’s
When You See Yourself.
Let it never be said that Quartz is behind the curve. We converted an article this very article, in fact into an NFT, a digital asset that essentially serves as its own certificate of ownership and authenticity.
The Associated Press was the first news organization to sell an NFT, for a work of art titled “The Associated Press calls the 2020 Presidential Election on Blockchain A View from Outer Space.” But we’re quite certain ours is the first piece of text journalism to be put up for sale in this manner.
March 17, 2021
Quartz is auctioning an article converted into a non-fungible token, or NFT, giving its eventual buyer unimpeachable, blockchain-verified proof of ownership. The process to do this, we found, was surprisingly easy.
Prospective buyers if there are any will be bidding for an image file in an SVG format. Think of it like a trading card. The front of a basketball card, for instance, holds an image and basic information about the player. What Quartz is selling has the story’s headline, the names of the authors, the text of the piece, and a QR code linking to the story on our website. While there’s no flipping a digital object over to see more detailed information, we’ve embedded into the file plenty of information about the post that only the buyer can see: the authors’ email addresses and Twitter handles, for example; the person who last edited the post before the token was created; and other metadata contained in our story database.
March 15, 2021
The wealthiest countries in the world have blocked the latest effort by poor nations to speed access to Covid-19 vaccines and treatments by temporarily lifting World Trade Organization rules protecting intellectual property.
Sponsored by South Africa and India and backed by 57 nations, the waiver proposal under discussion since last autumn would have suspended, for the duration of the pandemic, portions of the TRIPS (Trade Related Protections for Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement covering medical necessities. This would allow developing economies to begin manufacturing medical goods without waiting for or adhering to licensing agreements with pharmaceutical companies that own the underlying intellectual property for medicines and vaccines.
March 15, 2021
Stripe’s valuation has more than doubled from a year ago to $95 billion, putting the fintech into the upper echelons of the world’s most valuable payment companies.
Despite the highflying fundraising round, age still comes before beauty in the business of digital transactions. At 11 years old, the quickly diversifying Stripe can hardly be called a startup any longer, but it’s still much younger than Visa, the credit card network, and PayPal, which pioneered payments for online commerce, each of which have market capitalizations in the hundreds of billions. It can take many years to build a payments network, but the companies that avoid disruption long enough to do so can become profoundly valuable, with massive protective moats around their businesses.