President Donald Trump said Sunday he has instructed his Commerce Department to help get a Chinese telecommunications company "back into business" after the US government cut off access to its American suppliers.

At issue is that department's move last month to block the ZTE Corp., a major supplier of telecoms networks and smartphones based in southern China, from importing American components for seven years. The US accused ZTE of misleading American regulators after it settled charges of violating sanctions against North Korea and Iran.

ZTE, which has more than 70,000 employees and has supplied networks or equipment to some of the world's biggest telecoms companies, said in early May that it had halted its main operations as a result of the department's "denial order."

President Trump takes part in a welcoming ceremony with China's President Xi Jinping in Beijing. REUTERS/Thomas Peter Trump, who has taken a hard line on trade and technology issues with Beijing, tweeted on Sunday that he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping "are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!"

Though it's unclear from Trump's tweet what his plan entails, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Politico in a statement that Trump expects Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to "exercise his independent judgment... to resolve the regulatory action involving ZTE based on its facts."

She added: "The administration is in contact with China on this issue, among others in the bilateral relationship."

But Trump's critics appeared less than impressed with his tweet on Sunday.

"How about helping some American companies first?" Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted.

ZTE has asked the department to suspend the seven-year ban on doing business with US technology exporters. By cutting off access to US suppliers of essential components such as microchips, the ban threatens ZTE's existence, the company has said.

During recent trade meetings in Beijing, Chinese officials said they raised their objections to ZTE's punishment with the American delegation, which they said agreed to report them to Trump.

The US imposed the penalty after discovering that Shenzhen-based ZTE, which had paid a $1.2 billion fine in the case, had failed to discipline employees involved and paid them bonuses instead.

Tex-Mex restaurant chain Chili's is the latest retailer to be impacted by a data breach.

On Saturday, its parent company Brinkler International announced that customer credit and debit card information had been "compromised" in certain Chili's restaurants. It confirmed that no personal data such as social security numbers or dates of birth was breached since it doesn't collect this information.

The company made the announcement one day after it said it discovered the breach.

It has not yet confirmed how many people have been impacted, but the company said in a statement that it believes the breach was limited between March and April 2018. It's advising customers to monitor bank statements for strange transactions during that period.

Chili's joins a long list of retailers— including Sears, Kmart, Whole Foods, and Under Armour — that have been impacted by a data breach in the past year. The majority of the retailers that experienced a breach have not confirmed exactly how many customers were impacted.

Breaches have huge repercussions, often resulting in customers losing trust in the brands. According to a study from KPMG, 19% percent of consumers said they would stop shopping at a breached retailer, and 33% would take a long-term break.

This is bad news for Chili's as it has suffered from weak sales since 2008. In its most recent quarterly results, Brinkler reported that same-store sales at the location it owns fell by 0.4%. At its franchise restaurants, same-store sales fell by 3.2%.

Disney/Marvel Studios' plan to bump up the release of "Avengers: Infinity War" (or was it Robert Downey Jr.'s idea?) a weekend earlier than originally planned has worked out perfectly.

The movie was always destined to make an incredibly large amount of money its opening weekend, but instead of one weekend between the latest Marvel hit and its biggest competition, Fox's "Deadpool 2," "Infinity War" had two weekends to shine. And that has led to a multi-record-breaking box office performance.

After becoming the quickest movie ever to $1 billion worldwide last weekend and having the second-largest second weekend ever in US theaters, "Infinity War" won this weekend's box office for a third-straight weekend and has crossed the half-billion figure domestically.

The movie took in an estimated $61.8 million, according to Exhibitor Relations, which puts its domestic total at $547 million ($1.06 billion worldwide). That makes it the second-fastest title ever to cross the $500 million mark domestically. It hit the milestone five days later than the fastest title ever to the figure, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."

"Infinity War" basically sucked the life out of the other big release of the weekend, New Line/Warner Bros.'s "Life of the Party." The latest Melissa McCarthy comedy came in second place but only took in $18.5 million.

It was the first time a release directed by her husband, Ben Falcone ("Tammy," "The Boss"), didn't open over $20 million. It also didn't help that the movie only had a 41% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

But in a respectable third place was Universal's "Breaking In." The thriller starring Gabrielle Union was only made for around $6 million, but it took in $16.5 million.

Now, "Infinity War" will have to make way. The box office will get into the full summer movie season swing when "Deadpool 2" opens next weekend to kick off a constant string of big releases. The movie's early industry projections have it opening around $150 million.

Apple CEO Tim Cook touched on hot-button political issues, including climate change and economic inequality, as he gave a commencement speech at Duke University on Sunday.

Despite the many big issues of the day, including rising political division, he said that technology still makes the present day "the best time in history to be alive" — striking an optimistic tone for graduating students in North Carolina.

"Our country is deeply divided, and too many Americans refuse to hear any opinion that differs from their own. Our planet is warming, with devastating consequences, and there are some that even deny it's even happening. Our schools and communities suffer from deep inequality. We fail to guarantee the every student the right to a good education. And yet, we are not powerless in the face of these problems. You are not powerless to fix them," Cook said.

"No generation has ever had more power than yours. And no generation has had a chance to change things faster than yours can. The pace at which progress is possible has accelerated dramatically. Aided by technology, every individual has the tools, the potential and reach to build a better world," he continued.

"That makes this the best time in history to be alive."

During the commencement speech, Cook also praised Parkland High School students and the "Me Too" movement as examples of being "fearless," a quality he encouraged the recent graduates to emulate.

"Fearless, like the students of Parkland, Florida, who refused to be silent about the epidemic of gun violence and have rallied millions to their cause," he said.

"Fearless, like the women who say "me too" and "times up." Women who cast light onto dark places and move us to a more just and equal future," Cook continued. "Duke graduates, be fearless!"

Cook has a strong connection to Duke. He graduated from Duke's business school, Fuqua, with an MBA in 1988, and remains a committed fan of Duke's basketball team. Since graduating, Cook has made good: He's been named as one of the most respected CEOs, and Apple has grown prodigiously since he took over in 2011.

Crypto exchanges are trying to step up their game to lure the fastest traders on Wall Street.

These exchanges, which helped shepherd the nascent market for digital currencies through 2017's boom, have been adding customers and making money hand-over-fist. Bloomberg estimates crypto exchanges bring in $3 million a day in fees. Still, many have failed to attract large institutional investors to the platform, relying for now on small time traders for liquidity.

In order to draw in big traders, exchanges across the space are beefing up their capabilities and rolling out new products to attract liquidity.

"How do we get Virtu, Citadel Securities, DRW, Susquehanna to make markets?" said Larry Tabb, founder of consultancy Tabb Group, said in an email to Business Insider. "Those are the things they're thinking about. It's going to be a combination of incentives, order types, connectivity, co-location, and pricing."

Block Trades

The exchange business is a volumes game with more volumes equaling more profit. Attracting large traders or investors is one way to boost volumes. But most customers of this profile have opted to trade in over-the-counter markets, rather than on retail exchanges.

That's because big trades on a crypto exchange can impact the broader price in the market, said Michael Moro, chief executive of Genesis Trading, an OTC trader and market making firm in the crypto space. Moro told Business Insider that most of his accounts would never trade on an exchange.

"As better as these exchanges have kind of gotten, 95% of what I do is OTC," Moro said. "I don't touch the exchanges for liquidity at all, but that's because OTC markets are far more efficient, especially for size."

To compete for larger orders in the crypto markets, a number of exchanges have started to offer block trades, which are executed off an exchange main order book as to not move the market in a direction against the trader.

Carl Court/Getty Images

Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, started allowing customers to buy and sell large quantities of crypto in April. Coinbase has also started supporting block trades as well. That could lure large traders to their venues, according to CoinRoutes chief executive Dave Weisberger.

"I think that there is a clear need for more tools available for block trading in Bitcoin and other crypto assets, so companies that fill that need will be rewarded," Weisberger said in an interview.

Liquidity programs

Crypto exchanges have also been flirting with different incentive programs, which provide discounts to certain market makers for adding liquidity to a venue.

The idea of providing incentive to liquidity providers is not new to trading. IEX, the upstart stock exchange, recently unveiled such a program that offers discounts on trading fees across a number of securities trading on its venue. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq offer rebates to brokers to incentivize them to send their order to their exchange.

The point of a market maker is to ensure immediacy of execution, even if there isn't natural interest in the market. With incentives, you are more likely to attract traditional market makers to the fold, executives from market making firms told Business Insider.

"It could draw in those who have only been involved in a lower capacity," one trading executive said.

The lack of liquidity in crypto is one reason behind its neck-breaking volatility.

"There's less liquidity in the marketplace than people might think," the executive added. "This last run-down can show you. People selling because of Tax Day drove this market to the ground."

In the US, dollar to crypto transactions are in the couple hundred millions of dollars a day, according to research by crypto firm MithrilX.

MithrilX

Currently GDAX, Coinbase's cryptocurrency exchange, does not charge liquidity providers for placing orders on the exchange. And it is currently looking into adding new liquidity incentive programs, according to a job advertisement for a head of market structure. Gemini provides incentive for some market makers trading in its auctions.

Circle, the fintech firm that recently acquired crypto exchange Poloniex, is also looking into new incentive programs for market makers, the company's chief executive office Jeremy Allaire told Business Insider in an interview.

"We inherited a fee structure and are obviously looking closely at that to make sure it is in line with what participants expect," Allaire said. "I think there will be multiple models and experiments tried across venues."

What else can be done?

Outside liquidity incentive programs, cryptocurrency exchanges are also looking into supporting co-location capabilities, which would allow high-frequency traders to house their servers in the same building as exchange matching engines.

The practice, which was highlighted in the hit Michael Lewis book "Flash Boys," has been controversial on Wall Street, since it provides traders with faster access to information.

"I would imagine in the upcoming year that we will see exchanges develop co-location capabilities, and it will be something of a common occurrence," Miha Gcrar, head of business development at Bitstamp, said.

Coinbase is considering co-location as well, a source told Business Insider.

To be sure, at this time, co-location isn't a "core necessity" for trading firms, Gcrar said.

What they want to see in the crypto exchange market, for the most part, according to market insiders, is outside of their control or will require years to come to fruition.

For instance, the lack of a proper prime broker is keeping Virtu Financial, the high-speed trading firm from entering the market. Here's chief executive Douglas Cifu:

We are a market maker in the Cboe and the CME futures products around [cryptocurrency], I guess they're bitcoin futures right now. We do not currently make markets in any of the [cryptocurrency] markets primarily because of our concerns round risk management. In other words our MO has always been to trade in transparent and regulated exchanges with centralized clearing or clearing though a prime broker in cash, if you will, bitcoin and other [cryptocurrencies] that is currently not available.

A prime broker would allow traders to trade across venues simultaneously without maintaining a balance on a single exchange. A prime broker would put their own funds into a crypto exchange and then extend their customers credit to trade in and out.

There also isn't a major clearing firm in crypto to act as an intermediary between banks. As a result, small banks such as Silvergate and Signature act as quasi clearing houses.

"You can only have instant clearing if your counterparty is using the same banks, " Jonathan Benassaya, founder of MithrilX, said. "The bank is becoming the clearing house."

Still, even if these things were to come to fruition, it may not be enough for some large traders. As Genesis' Moro put it: "You could poke holes in everything the exchanges are doing for not being of institutional quality."

When Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield asked April Underwood to be the company's first-ever chief product officer earlier this year, she wasn't surprised.

For most of her time at the company, Underwood, who previously managed product teams at both Twitter and Google, had worked side-by-side with Butterfield to oversee Slack's product teams. But the company had reached a size where it just didn't make sense for its CEO to be so deeply involved in what gets shipped.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield promoted Underwood to be CPO in April. Craig Barritt/Getty Images

"When I joined three years ago, Stewart was still actively involved with managing the team of people," said Underwood, while meeting with Business Insider in a conference room at Slack's San Francisco headquarters. "Now the business is 1,000 people, a lot more complex than it was, so he has a lot more hats that he has to wear these days. So over time he has entrusted me with more responsibility with what we ship, what constitutes good-enough to ship, and how we ship it."

Underwood's promotion comes as Slack is growing rapidly and preparing for more growth to come. Last week, the company announced that its number of daily active users has hit 8 million, which was up 33% from September. Additionally, the company said it now has more than 3 million paid users, up 50% from September.

"Stewart asking me to step into this role is a sign of maturity in the business and also stability in the leadership team here at Slack," Underwood said. "We think we've got a lot of the elements we need to really go for the long haul."

In the near term, Slack is focusing on further expansion — growing its team as more people and companies use its service. Assuming it goes public next year — something industry insiders are betting on — the company will also have to start placing a bigger emphasis on fiscal responsibility.

If Underwood does her job, Slack's long-term future will be intrinsically linked with that of its customers — it will be influencing how people work for generations to come.

Underwood taught herself to code, then it was on to Google and Twitter

Underwood first moved to San Francisco in 2005 from Texas, where she grew up and got an undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She had taught herself how to code in college in order to escape a bad tech-support job. Eventually she found herself working as a software engineer at Travelocity.

She had just accepted a promotion to be a product manager in Travelocity's San Francisco office when she found out she was accepted to the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. From that point on, she was in San Francisco to stay.

Underwood spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011 while working at Twitter. Araya Diaz/Stringer

"It took me a really long time to get used to the fact that you need to wear a coat on the 4th of July," Underwood said about her adopted city. "It took me years to acquire the proper number of sweatshirts."

After getting her MBA from Haas, Underwood joined Google as a partner technology manager. She then joined Twitter, where she spent nearly five years working on its product team, helping scale the company from 150 to 4,000 people.

Though Twitter has always been a consumer company with an advertising-based revenue model, Underwood credits her time there with preparing her for her job at Slack. At Twitter she worked on features including messaging and search and even led a marketing team when there was a gap in the roster.

Then, like many of her peers, she found her way into the less-sexy world of enterprise software.

"When I worked at Twitter, it felt like all of the consumer companies had moved to San Francisco. But now I know so many people like me that had worked in consumer that transitioned to working in enterprise, because there is a lot of interesting work to do there, and a lot of business opportunity," Underwood said, adding that people get worn out having to "wrestle with the monetization challenges" of consumer tech.

"I think there are a lot of people finding that working in enterprise, you build the best software you can and sell it for what feels like a fair price," she said. "It's a simplification in a way because you're not balancing for two different audiences. You're just building for your customers."

Her vision: Slack as the working world's communication hub

Underwood has already made an impact on how Slack's product works. Under her guidance, Slack launched Enterprise Grid, an administrative service that makes it easier for companies with tens of thousands of employees to use the app across their organizations. That feature could be crucial for the company as it seeks paying customers in its quest for profitability.

Slack users can get data stored in Workday sent directly into the Slack chat window. Workday

She also oversaw the launch of non-English versions of Slack, something she said was "pretty obvious, but it's a ton of work." Those have helped spur the company's international growth. More than half of Slack users now are located outside of the US, and Japan just passed the United Kingdom as its second biggest market by daily active users.

"We launched all of these big things last year that were really critical for audience expansion," Underwood said. "So a lot of what we are doing now is because we have this bigger audience that we can address, and we need to take steps to help them get value out of how they're using Slack and help them understand."

Underwood and her team are now focused on building into Slack more ties to other services, particularly those that are targeted at enterprises. The company wants users to be able to tap into services such as those offered by companies including Box and Workday from within the Slack app, without having to open another program.

"We're making it so that Slack is a communication hub, and you spend all day in it. Not because we're trying to make you spend all day in it, but because that's where people are," Underwood said. "It just makes sense that you get notifications from your expense reporting system."

But she recognizes that she and Slack will need to balance adding new features and attracting new users with keeping existing users happy.

"People see the product, and they want to use it, so I've got a big responsibility on my shoulders to extend that and make it even more valuable to them but also to protect why they loved it in the first place," she said.

Amazon is leaving no stone unturned in its quest for global domination.

The company's latest foray into uncharted territory occurred Wednesday when it announced a collaboration with homebuilder Lennar. The two firms are joining forces to create so-called smart homes enabled by Alexa, Amazon's wildly popular voice-activated digital assistant.

They're launching a chain of showrooms called Amazon Experience Centers designed to showcase the usefulness of Amazon's various technologies in a residential setting. Such advancements include voice assistants, auto-deliveries of household products, and entertainment like Prime Video and Music, according to a news release.

Curious consumers can stroll into one of the model homes — which are now open in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC — and learn exactly what it would be like to have a completely Alexa-powered residence. That includes using the technology to control the television, lights, thermostat, and shades, among other things.

And while the collaboration may seem unusual on first glance, it's not that surprising when you consider Amazon's aggressive pushes into a wide variety of industries.

In February, Amazon said it would launch its own package-delivery service to compete with the likes of UPS and FedEx. A month earlier, Amazon announced a collaboration with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway to reduce healthcare costs for US workers. And in June of last year, the company said it would buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion.

And that's just scratching the surface.

So what do all of those announcements have in common? Stock prices in the affected industries immediately tumbled afterward, destroying billions of dollars of value in the process.

But homebuilders were fortunate to avoid such drastic weakness after Wednesday's announcement.

Yes, shares of big industry players like DR Horton, Toll Brothers, and PulteGroup were seeing losses exceeding 3% on Wednesday. But Michael Antonelli, an institutional equity sales trader and managing director at Robert W. Baird, said that had more to do with historically high lumber costs and rising interest rates than any fear of Amazon's Alexa-driven initiative.

In the longer run, he sees Lennar benefiting from its team-up with Amazon.

"It's almost certainly an advantage," Antonelli told Business Insider by phone. "Millennials are the new generation of home-buyers, and if you show them a home fully wired with Alexa and other gadgets, they're going to go nuts for it."

Amazon, which has climbed 36% in 2018, rose 0.5% in regular trading.

Markets Insider

Prime is Amazon's crown jewel. But some customers are claiming the company has been failing in its promise of providing free, two-day delivery for members.

Customers who spoke with Business Insider said they noticed in recent months that their Amazon shipments were coming later and later. They claimed that guaranteed delivery times were being missed, orders were being delayed with little explanation, and packages were taking longer to get packed and passed off to carriers.

While it seems unlikely that that's true across the board, the perception that Amazon is slowing even for Prime members could be a real concern, especially considering that the company just raised the price of an annual membership, to $119 from $99, and the monthly membership, to $12.99 from $10.99. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently revealed that more than 100 million people around the world pay for Prime.

The complaints reveal Prime's limitations and how different the two-day-shipping guarantee is from what some customers perceive it to be.

A common response from Amazon's customer-service Twitter account reiterates Prime's guarantee after customer complaints: that two-day shipping ensures only that customers will get it in two days from the time it's handed over to the carrier, not two days from the time of ordering, which is often incorrectly assumed.

"Prime Two-Day Shipping refers to the amount of time it takes for your item to arrive once it's been processed and shipped. Some items have longer processing times than others," the guarantee reads.

Some customers say that they used to get their packages reliably in two days, and now it's taking longer.

"What they've done is set an expectation for Prime ... that people would get the items they ordered very quickly, and certainly within two days typically of order," Brandon Muramatsu, a frequent Amazon customer, told Business Insider. "They're now underdelivering on their promise, whereas they may have been overdelivering before."

Data of Amazon's shipping times also notably shows that the company, in aggregate, is actually getting faster with its shipping times.

Either way, the customer confusion is not great news for Amazon, which is trying to attract even more people to Prime.

Mapistry is a "weird" startup, as readily admitted by Allie Janoch, its CEO and founder. It works in a not-well-understood industry, had to lay off workers as it figured out a business model, and ended up going from a software company to a tech-powered environmental consulting business.

The Berkeley, CA-based software company seeks to solve an obscure, niche problem: helping companies comply with stormwater regulations. Its customers are mostly waste management or constructional materials companies. Even people who work in environmental compliance sometimes have tro ube wrapping their heads about what exactly Mapistry is, Janoch said.

When it came time to raise money, Janoch had an even more difficult time explaining what Mapistry is in a way that investors could understand. After several iterations of the same pitch, and five years after Mapistry was originally founded, the company raised $2.5 million in December.

Mapistry's software tracks the minutiae of sometimes hard-to-follow stormwater regulations, like the necessity of regular inspections and tracking the results of water samples. Those regulations are put in place to protect against rain or snow collecting pollutants from surfaces, like rooftops, and spilling into bodies of water.

Janoch found that explaining the details of stormwater regulations was too confusing for investors. They couldn't connect with the problem. She also learned that talking broadly about the industry didn't necessarily translate into talking about her product. She needed to talk about her customers.

"I tried to simplify things and I really honed in on talking a lot about our customers," Janoch said. "I tried to simplify the problem on a very high level and only get into the details if I was probed."

Janoch founded Mapistry with her husband, Ryan Janoch, in 2013. Her husband, a civil engineer at the time, was frustrated with the mapping software available on the market. Janoch, a software engineer who had just completed a stint at a company acquired by Yahoo, thought she could build something that was as simple as Google Maps, but with the power demanded by engineers.

The pair soon found they couldn't sell the software at a price point that made sense. After noticing several customers were using the mapping software for stormwater compliance, though, they decided to pivot towards that specific usage. But even then, the couple had a difficult time finding a business model that worked, and was forced to lay off some of its staff while it revamped its approach.

Inspiration struck when AC Transit, a Bay Area public transit agency, asked if Mapistry was equipped to go beyond software and start taking water samples themselves.

This gave Janoch an idea: What if Mapistry started selling more than just software that identifies problems? Now, Mapistry also has a variety of consulting services that help clients figure out how, exactly to start complying with regulations before getting fined by the EPA. At its start, Mapistry employed five people; now 17 people work there.

"In order to be really valuable for customers, we needed to do more than just software; there's so much going on in the physical world that's necessary to monitor and fix that's it's almost impossible for everything to be in software," Janoch said.

Once Mapistry started expanding into consulting, the startup started to land more customers. The company's clients now include the city of Fresno, California and some of the largest recycling and construction materials companies in the world.

"We've been through a lot of ups and downs, but it's important to be persistent," Janoch said.

Even if you don't know who Mark Ulriksen is, you've probably seen his work.

His "gracefully awkward" art has graced several magazine covers, including a widely praised New Yorker cover featuring Martin Luther King kneeling with Colin Kaepernick from earlier this year.

But despite his success in the field with pen and paint, recently he's taken up a new challenge: Drawing with an iPad.

Mark Ulriksen Mark Ulriksen "I'm technologically illiterate and I'm still trying to learn how to paint," the San Francisco-based artist joked.

"But I really wanted to eventually work digitally because it seems like that's what the art buying public is looking for in the world of illustration these days, and I like the speed of it," he said.

Ulriksen is just one of a new batch of professional artists who have embraced tablets like Apple's iPad and its Pencil stylus to make illustrations easier, faster, and more ready for the computers and screens most art is consumed on these days.

There was also a professional reason: the world is going digital.

"For almost 20 years I did inside work for The New Yorker as well and then Condé Nast got a new creative director and it was out with the old in with the new and the new is all digital art," Ulriksen said. "So almost all the The New Yorker art these days save for a couple of people, it's digital."

So he ended asking some friends what he should get, and last October, he ended up buying an iPad Pro, Apple's $100 Pencil stylus, an app called Procreate, and started playing around.

As soon as he started experimenting with digital art, he found out that a lot of the techniques he admired from a distance were actually pretty easy to pull off.

"When I would see digital work in a publication, I go, 'how do they do that, how do they get that that texture, how do they get the splatter? How they get it to look so, you know, rough and tumble, because you know because I don't know how to do that as a painter so well," he said.

After experimenting with every brush in Procreate, he had his answer.

"And so all of a sudden it's like, it's the brushes! That's how they do it. There's texture brushes and there's splatter brushes and there's paint roller brushes," Ulriksen said. "Now I've learned that secret."

Victory cards

Marik Ulriksen One of his first projects with digital art is a series of "victory cards." Every time the San Francisco Giants win, he recreates an old-school Topps baseball card in his signature style.

It's the continuation of a series that he stared back in 2014 — only back then, it was on ink and paper.

"The season's coming up, why don't I redo the Giants baseball card idea but now I can do it in color and I can also use it as an exercise to try to learn this tool," Ulriksen said.

Since he already had some drawings from before, his process was a streamlined. He take a photo of his old work with the iPad, changes the opacity to make it lighter, and then makes a new layer and draws on top of it. "I've already got my black and white drawing and now it's just a matter of rendering it in color," he said.

He uses the opportunity to experiment with texture, with focus, and with making hyper-flat images. He's also found that adapting work or making changes on the fly is much easier digitally than with paper or paint. "You do a painting you're kind of committed to the painting," he said.

"I want to make it look like this is in shadow. I'm not really good at that as a painter. But with the iPad it's just like I'll just make it more of a transparent layer," he continued.

Another advantage to digital art is that it makes follow-up pieces much more economical for working artists. Ulriksen recenly did a full-page piece for Mother Jones, but at the last moment, the art director realized the magazine needed a horizontal version for the website.

"What might have taken a few days to do (with a smidgen more money and even less desire) instead took a little over an hour. I copied the art, placed it in the requested format and then added to the background," Ulriksen said.

Check out some of his work below:

The Chevy Colorado ZR2 is, quite simply, a nicer pickup. But for this matchup, I strangely came away with a better impression of the TRD Pro.

Why? It certainly wasn't the ride quality, which would send most folks screaming for the nearest tractor. Nor was it the interior appointments, and it certainly wasn't the infotainment.

Both pickups are also made in the US — the Chevy Colorado in Missouri and the Toyota Tacoma in Texas. So what pushed me in TRD Pro fandom?

It was the MUD! With four-wheel-drive engaged the TRD Pro meandered through a large and gummy expanse of mud as if it were freshly applied tarmac. I thought I heard the Taco softly laughing beneath the rumble of its torquey V6. "Is that the best you can do?"

The thousands of dollars of difference between the TRD Pro and the TRD Sport comes down to offroad setup. You get better, beefier everything. That's why the TRD Pro is an awful truck for tooling around town, while the ZR2 is just fine. The Colorado is versatile. The TRD Pro wants trouble.

Not that the ZR2 is a slouch on the trails. But the TRD Pro craves them. In fact, it makes so sense for this truck to be rolling anywhere but on the dirt and rocks.

So there you have it. The ZR2 outdid the TRD Sport — but the Sport's big brother, the Pro, came to town and showed us how it's done.

You could say I've been around the diet block. I've been vegan, restricted my eating to an 8-hour window as part of an intermittent fast, and given ketogenic and vegetarian meal plans a spin — all in an attempt to give myself more energy, feel healthier, and power through the various activities I enjoy, like yoga, hiking, and rock climbing. The one regimen I've never tried, however, is the one I write about the most: the Mediterranean Diet.

The plan's cornerstones are vegetables, fish, olive oil, beans, nuts, and whole grains; items like processed foods, red meat, poultry, and dairy get slashed.

With studies suggesting that people who eat this way have a reduced risk of diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and some types of cancer, it's no surprise that dietitians and clinicians say the approach is a great way to fuel the body.

Leafy greens provide key vitamins and minerals that are needed for healthy skin, hair, and nails; whole grains support good digestion; fish and nuts provide protein to maintain muscle and keep energy levels steady.

The Mediterranean Diet is also rich in several ingredients that may be critical to a healthy mind.

Two types of healthy fat — monounsaturated and omega-3 fatty acids — are staples of the plan, as well as several antioxidants found in berries and dark chocolate. Previous studies have found a link between both of these ingredients and a reduced risk of dementia as well as higher cognitive performance. Research has also suggested that two other Mediterranean ingredients — leafy greens and berries — could help protect against a phenomenon called neurodegeneration which often characterizes diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Still, as I'm a sample size of just one person rather than the hundreds or thousands typically required for scientific research, it's worth taking my findings with a grain of salt. That said, I learned a ton on the plan. Here's a glimpse.

Vitalik Buterin is the programmer and writer primarily known as a co-founder of Ethereum and as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. Getty/John Phillips Are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and other cryptocurrencies considered securities?

This hot-button question keeps coming at me on social media and from clients in the Email so I'd like to present my opinion here in this open forum.

There are a few concurrent stories right now that hinge on this. There is a rising speculation that the SEC could start calling some cryptos securities and if they do that, it creates some rather sticky legal issues for the founders and holders.

Here's a post that explains why this is such an issue.

And this is a big case that may be the decision maker from a legal standpoint in the US.

Anyway, if the SEC does end up classing them as securities it could cause some extreme volatility in the crypto market, I mean, even more than usual.

If something is classified as a security then it has to be subject to the usual laws and regulations regarding traditional financial assets. Meaning, it needs to be registered with the authorities according to the laws already set in place and be taxable as such. Anyone who has made profits in crypto, and converted those profits into cash, could be liable to pay taxes on those profits.

For example, any new ETF like the one that the Winklevoss twins have just secured a patent for will be classified a security.

Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, are a different ball of wax. We're talking about a brand new asset class here and the coins themselves will likely require new sets of rules that are more versatile and designed to encompass this new technology.

Because we live in a moderately diversified world, the laws could end up being different in every country. The Swiss have actually set an excellent precedent in their ICO guidelines, which breaks down the crypto classification into three different categories:

FINMA

Bitcoin would certainly fall under the first category as it is designed to be a means of payment and store of value.

Ethereum and Ripple's XRP are classic examples of Utility Tokens. They were designed to interact with their respective blockchains in order to provide access/payment to an application or service within the network.

Asset Tokens, or Securities, implies that the token holder will be entitled to partial ownership in the company or foundation. This can manifest itself as a share of the company's profits or voting rights within the company.

Though the Ethereum network often holds votes using ETH tokens, the act of holding the token itself does not give the hodler the right to influence the network's actions. Ripple's XRP is managed by a private company called Ripple Labs and XRP holders are not entitled to any piece of that company.

The original DAO tokens in 2016, for those of you who remember that experiment, were considered Securities as confirmed by the SEC.

This content is provided for information and educational purposes only and should not be considered to be investment advice or recommendation.

The outlook presented is a personal opinion of the analyst and does not represent an official position of eToro.

Past performance is not an indication of future results. All trading involves risk; only risk capital you are prepared to lose.

Cryptocurrencies can widely fluctuate in prices and are not appropriate for all investors. Trading cryptocurrencies is not supervised by any EU regulatory framework.

Mati Greenspan is the Senior Market Analyst at eToro, a global social trading and investment platform. Mati is a licensed portfolio manager in the European Union and his main focus is on macroeconomic analysis, portfolio diversification and cryptocurrencies.

On a cold winter night in New York last January, the founding members of app analytics company AppDynamics were in a celebratory mood.

In 26 hours, the San Francisco-based company that many of them had helped grow from a struggling startup to a multi-billion dollar business, was set to IPO on the Nasdaq. Many of the executives were laying out their suits, tailor-made for the occasion, to ring the bell on opening day.

But the mood of AppDynamic's CEO, Jyoti Bansal, wasn't so triumphant.

Bansal hadn't slept in four days. Unbeknownst to AppDynamic's jubilant staff, for the past 96 hours, their company's chief executive had been running back and forth to 14-hour board meetings, visiting his lawyer's offices, and worriedly pacing around his dining room floor in between video conference calls.

What AppDynamic's staff did not yet know was that their company might not be going public after all.

Just five days before AppDynamic's IPO, Bansal had received an offer. Cisco, a global IT provider, was interested in acquiring his company. At first, Bansal and his team rejected the offer.

But Cisco was persistent.

"They came back with a second offer," Bansal told Business Insider. Once again, AppDynamics declined.

Cisco tried a third time. This time, the offer was set at $3.7 billion, nearly twice the size of what the company had offered originally, Bansal said.

"It was a surprise number, definitely," said Bansal. "I think I thought that $2 billion would be our market cap. That was what we were expecting with our IPO. If that's the price you IPO at, then how much more do you sell your company for?"

"No one slept. I was drinking tons of coffee."

With the clock ticking ever closer to AppDynamic's imminent IPO, Bansal and his team were under enormous pressure.

Should they sell? If they sold, would they disappoint their entire team? How would the acquisition be structured? Was it in their best interest to hold onto their company and go through with the IPO?

"There was a lot of debate about whether or not we would take it," said Bansal. "No one slept. I was drinking tons of coffee — jugs and jugs of coffee, and taking a lot of Advil. I maybe slept for two hours in four days. "

To add to the pressure even more, it was imperative that meetings took place in absolute secrecy so that AppDynamics wouldn't derail their IPO if they decided not to sell.

"It was all very secret," said Bansal. "Even our bankers didn't know this was going on. We didn't want any of this to distract from the IPO, so we continued doing the roadshow."

The decision to sell

In considering the offer, Bansal said it was his employees he was most concerned about.

"AppDynamics has thousands of employees," said Bansal. "They have to continue their journey with this company. We were concerned about what the acquisition would do to the company's identity, to the company's culture."

But ultimately, Bansal said he believed the move to sell was in the favor of the majority of the company's employees.

"As a founder, yes, it makes a financial difference to sell, but it doesn't really effect you as much," he said. "We had at least 400 employees who would make more than a million dollars if we sold. You have to do the right thing for them. A million dollars is life changing."

The day before the IPO, Bansal called his team in New York. Over a video conference meeting, Bansal said that AppDynamics would not be going public after all, and that there would be no ringing of the bell the following day.

"We said, 'Hey, come back from New York," said Bansal. "I think people didn't know what to think. They were really sad. We were so euphoric about the IPO, and it took some time for the news settle in."

For Bansal, the moment was bittersweet.

"It's hard to give up a company you've built yourself," he said. "I felt that I had to do the right thing, and this was the right thing."

It's been a little over a year since Bansal sold AppDynamics. The founder says he's still involved in the company, but only as an occasional mentor. Still, he believes he made the right choice.

There was an additional silver lining to AppDynamic's sell, as well.

"We made a deal with Cisco that we would get to ring the bell if we sold," said Bansal. "Cisco is a big stock for Nasdaq, so they pulled some strings."

And so, two months later, when the deal closed, Bansal and his staff rang the bell in New York together.

These days, Bansal has moved on to other things. Already, he has another project in the works, a software automation company called Harnass.io that Bansal hopes to turn into his second multi-billion dollar company.