I’ve noticed a degradation in presentation styles when displaying slides on a screen. This is starting to become a pet peeve of mine, so feel free to ignore me or tell me to get over myself if you disagree with this advice.

Assume a conference room with a large screen TV (or two) on the wall at the “front” of the room. The conference table – often a long rectangle – has chairs along the side perpendicular to the TV. The classical “head of the table” is at the far end facing the TV.

Why in the world would the presenter sit anywhere other than in one of the chairs at the end of the table closest to the TV?

Assume the TV is just showing slides. Don’t you want everyone in the room looking at you and the slides?

Assume there is video conferencing. In most cases, the slides will dominate and the video conferencing participants will be in small windows on the screen anyway. And, when they are looking at their computer while you are presenting, they will mostly see the slides anyway.

The only time this doesn’t apply is when there isn’t a presentation. When you are trying to engage the people on the video conference in the room during the meeting, and there is nothing being presented on the screen, the pet peeve that I have doesn’t apply.

In the world of paper presentations with no video screens, it made sense for the presenter to sit in the middle of one of the long sides of the table to engage the whole room. But, when there is a screen with stuff on it, position yourself near the screen so the people in the room can look at you and the screen at the same time.

MasterClass founder launches Outlier, offering online courses for college credit

Twitter is trying to crack down on its trolling problem.

The social media firm announced it's testing a way to let users block all replies to their tweets – one of four planned options aimed at letting the platform's users personalize who can reply to their tweets.

We first saw the news via TechCrunch.

The other three options are: Anyone can reply; only those who a user follows can reply; and only those tagged in the tweet can reply.

Twitter revealed the plans at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas, where the firm has been hosting a media forum led by Kayvon Beykpour, its vice president of product.

"The primary motivation is control," Beykpour reportedly said. "We want to build on the theme of authors [Twitter users] getting more control and we've thought… that there are many analogs of how people have communications in life."

Suzanne Xie, Twitter's director of product, echoed Beykpour's comments. She said: "We thought, well, what if we could actually put more control into the author's hands before the fact? Give them really a way to control the conversation space, as they're actually composing a tweet?"

"The reason we're doing this is: if we think about what conversation means on Twitter, right now, public conversation on Twitter is you tweet something everyone in the world will see and everyone can reply, or you can have a very private conversation in a DM. So there's an entire spectrum of conversations that we don't see on Twitter yet."

Twitter has long been trying to boost what it calls "conversational health" on its platform or, in plain language, the amount of abuse and trolling by users.

Numerous celebrities have quit the platform over the years due to trolls, with the singer Lizzo the latest high-profile figure to bid Twitter goodbye on the grounds it "has too many trolls." Women and high-profile people of colour have particularly complained about harassment on Twitter.

According to TechCrunch, Twitter also touched upon plans to enhance a number of the platform's preexisting features, including the expansion of 'Topics.' First introduced in November, the Topics feature lets users keep abreast of latest tweets on specific themes, or topics, that interest them.

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SoftBank may finally be getting some vindication for its $100 billion Vision Fund — at least after a fashion.

Whether the tech conglomerate will profit from it, though, is still anyone's guess.

The vindication came in the form of a report Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal that food delivery service Grubhub is exploring a possible sale.

The news came in the wake of CEO Matt Maloney's announcement last fall that Grubhub needed to duplicate moves made by its chief rivals, DoorDash and Uber Eats. As a consequence of that, he warned, its revenue and profits would take a big hit.

SoftBank's strategy with the Vision Fund is to plow huge sums of money — a minimum of $100 million — into later-stage startups, in part to crown winners in particular markets and ward off competitors. It essentially uses money as a weapon, threatening potential rivals with a costly war of attrition.

Grubhub faces two money-losing SoftBank-backed companies

Unfortunately for Grubhub, it has the misfortune of facing two SoftBank-backed rivals.

Both DoorDash and Uber have been beneficiaries of the Vision Fund's largesse. And both have spent that money liberally on their food delivery operations. 

DoorDash was on track to lose $450 million last year, not including taxes, amortization and depreciation, on about $1 billion in sales, according to a report in The Information.

Meanwhile, on a similar basis, Uber's Eats business lost $911 million in the first nine months of last year on $1.8 billion in sales, according to the company's latest quarterly report.

By contrast, up until last year, Grubhub had been solidly — if not spectacularly — in the black. The company has been profitable at least since 2011, according to the financial statements it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2018, for example, it earned $78 million on $1 billion in sales.

Part of the reason for the difference was that, even though Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash were all in the same business, Grubhub had a fundamentally different model.

Since its founding in 2004, Grubhub has focused on teaming up with small and medium-sized restaurant businesses, typically ones that already had their own delivery drivers. Grubhub essentially acted as a marketplace, creating a central spot where consumers had a lot of choice, and helping its restaurant partners take online and app-based orders.

By contrast, DoorDash and Uber Eats have focused on offering food from restaurants that didn't have their own delivery service, in many cases without establishing a formal partnership with those companies. That required each to have its own stable of delivery drivers — with all the attendant costs involved in attracting and paying them.

Although Grubhub eventually started offering delivery services of its own for some restaurants, most of its business involved simply connecting consumers with restaurants, and charging a commission to the restaurants for each order. Unlike Uber and DoorDash, it intentionally wasn't trying to become a logistics company.

Grubhub is now facing direct competition from Uber and DoorDash

Grubhub was also able to succeed because it didn't face direct competition from the other players. It was generally focused on urban markets that had numerous restaurants that had delivery drivers.

DoorDash was largely focused on suburban eateries that had never offered delivery before. Uber also focused on restaurants that previously didn't offer a delivery service.

But Maloney believes the days of the three big services all thriving in their own niches is over, as he told Business Insider in an interview late last month.

Increasingly, there's overlap among the services in terms of where their offerings are available and the restaurants from which they deliver.

The result for Grubhub, as Maloney explained in his letter, is that its customers — especially its newer ones — were becoming less loyal and weren't ordering as frequently. In response, he laid out a plan for Grubhub to essentially duplicate its rivals' offerings.

It would add thousands of new restaurants to its service. Most would be ones with which it didn't have a relationship, meaning the company would need its own delivery drivers. And it would use incentives — discounts, essentially — to convince consumers to use its service rather than those of its rivals.

"The green fields are over," Maloney said in the interview with Business Insider last month. "You have three heavily capitalized firms at scale. It's going to be a street fight until something breaks."

Uber and DoorDash have plenty of money to continue the war

Assuming the Journal's report is correct — Maloney did not respond to an email seeking confirmation — it looks like Grubhub may be the one that broke first.

In the wake of Maloney's announcement in October that the company's new strategy would sink its sales and earnings, pressure has been mounting on him and Grubhub to explore a sale.

The day after his letter, Grubhub's shares fell 43%. Although they made back some of that, they still were down 17% from their pre-announcement level before the news Wednesday of a potential sale sent the shares skyrocketing.

Consolidation could be good for the remaining players. But it won't necessarily rationalize the industry right away.

Uber and DoorDash remain a long way from profitability. At the same time, they both have copious amounts of cash. At the end of September, Uber had $12.6 billion in the bank. DoorDash, meanwhile, has raised some $2 billion to date, with more than $1 billion of that coming just last year.

So, with or without Grubhub, the war of attrition could well continue, fueled in part by SoftBank cash.

The one consolation for SoftBank CEO and Vision Fund visionary Masayoshi Son? He has a good chance that one of his companies will be the eventual winner. Of course, one may also be a big loser.

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Zume, the SoftBank-backed robotic pizza startup valued at $1 billion, just lost a third of its executive team hours after announcing that 360 of its employees were being terminated, Business Insider has learned. 

Amid a broader strategy shift away from its famous pizza-making robots towards compostable packaging, Zume now finds itself without a chief business officer, a chief financial officer, a chief technology officer, and a chief revenue officer. According to its website, that leaves CEO and cofounder Alex Garden, Chief People Officer Mike McMahon, Executive Vice President of Packaging Annette Groenink, and managing director of India Vaibhav Goel to run the company, which was reportedly pursuing funding tied to a $4 billion valuation.

It is not clear which executives were terminated as part of the restructuring and which chose to leave voluntarily. No replacements have been announced as of Wednesday.

"Today's announcement included a wide reduction in staff including our executive team," a Zume spokeswoman told Business Insider.

R.P. Eddy joined Zume as the chief business officer in June 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile. Eddy was a long-time government employee, which icluded stints in the Clinton administration and at the United Nations. 

Meredith Whitney took over as chief financial officer for ousted Zume executive Kartik Ramachandran in April. Whitney was widely seen as an unusual choice to run the financial portion of the business, multiple sources told Business Insider, given she had not previously held an executive position at a public or private company. However, Whitney's background was a good fit for Garden, who sources said had a penchant of hiring under-qualified executives who held high-profile positions or worked for well-known companies. Whitney, for instance, is widely known as one of the financial analysts who predicted the mortgage lending crisis in 2008.

Chris Satchell had previously run operations at Nike and Comcast and held the chief technology officer position at Zume since April 2018. Satchell was not present in any office when layoffs were announced on Wednesday, even though his engineering division was one of the hardest hit, multiple sources told Business Insider. A Zume spokeswoman confirmed that Satchell was not on-site to announce the changes to affected employees.

Adrian Agostini only joined Zume in May as chief revenue officer and will be departing in "early 2020." An exact departure date is not known. Agostini was previously head of revenue at Uber, Amazon, and Oracle.

The departures are the most recent in a string of high-profile executive departures that have rocked Zume since June, including general counsel, former chief financial officers, and head of HR, among others. Sources have told Business Insider that some executives struggled to get along with Alex Garden, cofounder and CEO of Zume. Those that disagreed with Garden tended to have only a limited tenure at the company, sources said.

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In a fiery Instagram post with a fetus photoshopped onto her stomach, singer Grimes may have announced that she was pregnant. Or she could simply be teasing her new album "Miss Anthropocene," set to be released in February. 

But the post, in which Grimes appeared topless, has made waves on social media. People have speculated whether the pregnancy is real and whether Grimes was having the baby with her on-again off-again partner Elon Musk. Friends and feuders alike have congratulated the couple. And a number of people have found the news easy fodder to crack alien jokes. 

US presidential candidate Andrew Yang kept it simple, tagging Musk and Grimes in a congratulatory tweet. Musk has endorsed Yang before. 

 

Rapper Azealia Banks told Business Insider's Kate Taylor that she was "tremendously proud of C. Elon is extraordinary." Perhaps in reference to Grimes' ambiguous post, she added, "They are the first of their kind to do such a thing. The merging of Tech & Art pushed thru Pop Culture's lens."

Banks has a sometimes-rocky relationship with the couple, posting on Instagram once that "staying in Elon musks house has been like a real like episode of 'Get Out.'" A series of Instagram stories in August 2018 detailing Banks' weekend with the couple now provided fodder for commentators looking to crack jokes about the maybe-baby online. 

 

Still others opted to crack jokes about how alien any child of Grimes and Musk's would be. Musk, who is also the CEO of SpaceX, is a proponent of colonizing Mars: 

 

 

 

 

Impossible Foods, a leading manufacturer of plant-based meat, has not abandoned its pursuit of a potentially lucrative deal with McDonald's, CEO Patrick Brown told Business Insider in an interview Wednesday.

"We're very deliberate in how we approach customers but we would never blow off or disrespect a potential customer and any suggestion that we would do that is complete nonsense," Brown said. 

In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, Brown said it would be "stupid" for Impossible Foods to be pursuing a customer as large as McDonald's, citing a need to further scale up its production first. Shares of the company's largest rival, Beyond Meat, soared following the comments.

However, a company spokesperson told Bloomberg later that day that the company had not stopped talks with the fast-food giant and that Brown's comments had been misinterpreted.

Brown reiterated that to Business Insider, saying that "anyone who is going to be in the meat businesses in the future selling to consumers is a target customer for us." He repeatedly and emphatically denied having no interest in doing business with McDonald's, at another point in the interview dismissing the notion as "complete bulls**t."

Brown also confirmed that Impossible Foods still needs to increase its production capacity. He said that the company learned a "hard lesson" after demand for its products spiked following last year's International Consumer Electronics Show, leaving it unable to keep up with orders.

"Part of that hard lesson is that we are obviously not going to commit to some very, very large scale until we have certainty about our ability to maintain supply," Brown said.

Jefferies Financial Group again cut the value of its small WeWork stake, the investment bank said in an earnings release on Wednesday. 

Its merchant banking unit had invested $9 million in the company for a stake that it said was worth $269 million as of May 31.

In September, the bank said it had slashed the estimated value of the stake by $146 million on August 31, more than two weeks before WeWork shelved its plans to go public.

The September adjustment reflected a "significant discount due to uncertainty regarding the timing and pricing of We's IPO," CEO Rich Handler and President Brian Friedman said in the third-quarter earnings release. "As the facts at We become clearer, further adjustments may be made in future periods." 

The company did not comment on the latest writedown or offer any additional information in the statement on Wednesday reporting fourth-quarter earnings. 

WeWork's valuation plummeted from $47 billion a year ago to less than $5 billion in November. In September, intense scrutiny of its finances and leadership from investors and the media forced WeWork to remove cofounder Adam Neumann as CEO and scrap its IPO plans. 

In September, Jefferies said it had earned $31 million in cash from the $9 million investment in WeWork, and retained a 0.8% stake in the company. 

Other investors could follow Jefferies' lead with further disclosures about their own WeWork writedowns in coming earnings. In October, Goldman Sachs said it took an $80 million hit from its investment. SoftBank, meanwhile, wrote down $4.6 billion from WeWork, it said in November earnings. 

The Japanese investor is now trying to right WeWork after the company's tumultuous autumn.

The Japanese investor's chief operating officer, Marcelo Claure, took the helm of WeWork as chairman after founder Adam Neumann was ousted. Last month, the company overhauled its compensation plan, cut various non-core businesses, and launched a newspaper ad campaign to restore confidence in its shaken business. 

Jefferies reported $196 million in overall net income for the quarter ending November 30. 

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Segway's personal "transporting pod" was shown off this week at CES 2020 for the first time since the company debuted the egg-shaped scooter as its newest product.

The S-Pod is essentially an electric wheelchair. It can hit speeds of up to 24 mph, and comes with a navigation pad to manually point the vehicle in the direction you want to go.

Although the vehicle is not available to the public, the S-Pod was unveiled this week at CES 2020, the year's biggest consumer tech show taking place in Las Vegas. I was able to test drive the S-Pod around a small track, where I was got a sense of how the vehicle's steering and acceleration works. 

Here's my experience testing at the Segway-Ninebot S-Pod, which is not yet up for sale to consumers:

Paige Leskin contributed to this story.

Influential comedy website CollegeHumor has lost its financial backing from its parent company IAC, CollegeHumor's Chief Creative Officer Sam Reich tweeted Wednesday. More than 100 employees have lost their jobs amid the company's massive restructuring. 

But the company will avoid shuttering entirely. Reich has bought CollegeHumor and its other comedy and culture sites, and plans to keep the new CH Media afloat. 

IAC's sale may continue to herald drastic changes to CollegeHumor and its sister sites, Dorkly, Drawfee, and Dropout, in the future. Turning a profit will be a greater concern to the company than ever, Reich said on social media.

"Of course, I can't keep it going like you're used to. While we were on the way to becoming profitable, we were nonetheless losing money — and I myself have no money to be able to lose," Reich tweeted, hinting that "bold new creative directions" may be on the horizon for parts of the company. 

CollegeHumor isn't alone in its fight to turn a profit. A fast-changing media landscape has left video-streaming sites struggling to compete. To help keep the company afloat, Reich called for Twitter users to stay subscribed to Dropout, CH Media's streaming service for comedy videos from CollegeHumor. 

"I need your support now more than ever," he wrote, adding, "Independent comedy lives on -- just now more independent (gulp) than ever before."

 

IAC confirmed the sale in a statement to Business Insider.

"Sam was the best choice to acquire CH Media and define its next chapter. The decision places CH Media with an owner who is beloved by fans, passionate about the business and sees a future we believe in," an IAC spokesperson said.

The 20-year-old comedy website created over-the-top sketches and pranks, and helped launch the careers of innumerable internet stars. It was acquired by IAC in 2006. 

IAC has been looking to sell the company since October, Bloomberg reported. The media and internet company owns more than 150 brands and products, including dating site conglomerate the Match Group, video-sharing platform Vimeo and new site, The Daily Beast. IAC will continue to remain a minority shareholder in CH Media, the company confirmed Wednesday. 

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has found some lavish ways to spend his money — he spent $57 million on a Basquiat painting and has reserved every seat on SpaceX's first flight around the moon. Now, he has promised to give 1,000 of his Twitter followers 1 million yen ($9,000) each.

Maezawa, who made his fortune in fashion, announced Sunday that he will select the recipients at random from a group of followers who retweeted a post of his on January 1. 

He said he views the offer as a "serious social experiment" to see if free money can boost people's happiness.

The give-away, Maezawa added, is driven by a curiosity about universal basic income — a system that essentially pays someone simply for being alive. The concept has been touted by presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who has vowed to give $1,000 a month ($12,000 a year) to every adult US citizen over 18 if he gets elected. 

Maezawa said he will track the results of his experiment through regular surveys of the recipients.

The payments aren't exactly basic income 

Maezawa previously offered to distribute 100 million yen ($917,000) among 100 of his followers in 2019. According to Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, Maezawa coordinated with the winners via direct message on Twitter.

His latest offer came just two months after Maezawa sold his online fashion business, Zozo Inc, to SoftBank for $900 million.

But the money doesn't really qualify as a basic income, since the recipients get a one-time payment instead of a consistent stipend.  

"Basic means a regular minimum amount offering a sense of security," Toshihiro Nagahama, a senior economist at the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute, told Reuters. "What Maezawa is offering is totally different."

Still, Maezawa's offer doesn't come with any strings attached or stipulate any eligibility requirements (winners don't have to earn below a certain income, for example). In that sense alone, the payments resemble a basic income more than certain government-backed welfare initiatives. 

An ongoing basic-income trial in the city of Stockton, California, by contrast, gives $500 per month to 125 residents, but recipients must reside in a neighborhood where the median household income is the same as or lower than the city's overall — $46,033 — in order to qualify for the program.

Andrew Yang's basic-income proposal, meanwhile, would replace some Americans' monthly stipends and existing welfare benefits. (Retirement benefits like Social Security would be preserved, though, and veterans and differently abled citizens would continue to receive their current benefits alongside a basic income.)

Other basic-income experiments, such as a trial conducted from January 2017 to December 2018 in Finland, have also required participants to forgo certain benefits in order to receive the money. In Finland's case, participants had to give up part of their standard conditional benefits — things like housing allowances and illness compensation — to receive payments of 560 euros ($640) per month. They also had to be unemployed.

By the end of the experiment, many of the participants remained jobless.

Can basic income improve happiness?

Though Finland's trial was widely considered a flop, it yielded some interesting results about the relationship between basic income and well-being.

On average, the participants reported that they were happier and healthier overall than other unemployed residents. It's worth noting, however, that the participants' response rate to a government survey was extremely low — around 25%, on average — which gives the experiment an unacceptable level of uncertainty, according to standards set by the US Department of Education.

But other basic income experiments have produced similar results. 

In the 1970s, Canada guaranteed a minimum annual income to families in the city of Winnipeg and rural Manitoba. Decades later, University of Manitoba professor Evelyn Forget analyzed the results and found that recipients made fewer doctor visits for mental-health issues and were less likely to be hospitalized for these issues compared to the control group, which didn't receive the minimum annual income. 

As to Maezawa's question about whether money can buy happiness more generally, a 2010 Gallup poll explored the subject through a daily survey of 1,000 US residents. The survey found that having a low income exacerbated emotional pain during negative life events like divorce or illness. Americans with high incomes, by contrast, tended to be more satisfied with their lives. 

The survey also found that money did lead to happiness — up to a certain point. Americans earning more than $75,000 did not report being happier than those who earned that amount. 

Some basic-income recipients report being less stressed

At the very least, many basic income trials show reductions in participants' stress about finances. 

"The funny thing about basic income is that it has to be one of the most tested welfare policies in history that hasn't in fact been implemented," Michael Stynes, CEO of the nonprofit Jain Family Institute, told Business Insider.

Stynes is currently working with the Brazilian city of Marica to study the effects of its new basic-income program, which gives $33 monthly stipends to about one-third of the city's residents (around 52,000 people). He hopes the program will encourage participants to join the labor market.

Critics of basic income argue that regular payments can reduce the incentive for people to find job. But the idea's proponents argue that workers who receive a stipend to cover basic needs are more inclined to pursue work that interests them, as opposed to a low-skill, menial job.

Stynes said he also expects participants in the Marica program to invest the money their homes and businesses over time.

Early results from Stockton's trial, meanwhile, have shown that participants are spending the majority their stipends on food and other basic necessities. 

The money is "allowing people to breathe again," Stockton's 29-year old mayor, Michael Tubbs, told Business Insider.

One participant in the program, Virginia (she declined to give her last name for privacy reasons), told Business Insider that the payments have eased her stress about buying everyday necessities. The 61-year-old recently used some of the money to make Christmas dinner for her family and members of her local Bible college. She's also using it to go visit her older sister, who is ill, in Oregon. 

"I appreciate the program a whole, whole, whole lot," Virginia said. "I'm going to see a loved one who I don't know how much longer I'm going to have. It was hard for me to do that before this money came."

Maezawa said his payments are meant to inspire more debate about basic income in Japan.

"I think what everyone wants is not money, but fulfilling dreams," he wrote on Twitter last year. 

Founder Ryan Rzepecki and other members of the original Jump Bikes team, purchased by Uber in 2018, have departed the company.

At least three other members of the Jump team that joined Uber through the acquisition have also departed recently, including Justin Wiley, Jump's third employee and former head of business development.

Rzepecki confirmed his December exit to Business Insider, and an Uber representative said: "Ryan has helped make new mobility a core part of the Uber platform in over 30 cities around the world. We thank him for all his work and wish him best of luck in the future."

While the handful of exits come two months after a big reorganization at Uber, some of which affected Jump and its larger New Mobility unit, much of the original team is still in place more than a year and a half after the merger. These original employees still at Uber include Nick Foley, Jump's second employee, and general counsel Avra van der Zee.

New Mobility, which houses Uber's bike and scooter efforts, has raised prices and abandoned some cities in recent months as the ride-hailing giant fights tooth-and-nail to turn a profit.

Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi in November touted bikes and scooters as a "strong customer acquisition channel" on a conference call with investors, noting that unit economics continue to improve.

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