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Peak Season: How to Remain Mighty on Main Without Holiday Foot Traffic

Smart Hustle Magazine

McKinsey & Co found that 25 to 36 percent of small businesses could close permanently as a result of the change in shopping behavior and disruption from just the first four months of the COVID-19 outbreak. And now that peak season is upon us, competing with retail giants for holiday shopping dollars is going to be an uphill battle.

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The Duolingo EC-1

TechCrunch

From humble origins a decade ago as a translation platform for news agencies, it’s now used by 500 million people across the world to learn Spanish, English, French and more, all while generating bookings of $190 million in 2020. The Duolingo EC-1 comprises four main articles numbering 12,200 words and a reading time of 48 minutes.

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How Parfait is using AI to upend the $13B custom wig industry

TechCrunch

A group of four Black women, two with MBAs from Wharton, and the other two with PhDs from MIT, founded Parfait because they believed they could build a better and more efficient way to design and build these wigs using technology. They brought the idea to market and have gotten a $5 million seed investment led by Upfront Ventures.

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TechCrunch+ roundup: Construction tech survey, founder-CEO friction, diversify your cap table

TechCrunch

Configuring a robot to mix cement is easy, but delivering a CementTron 3000 to a job site, training employees on its use, and keeping it maintained are not the kinds of disruptions builders are looking for, especially when margins are so thin and experienced workers are hard to find. Sungjoon Cho, general partner, D20 Capital.

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Extra Crunch roundup: first-check myths, Miami relocation checklist, standout SaaSy startups

TechCrunch

.” Despite the hype about ease of use, enterprise companies always ask customers to abandon familiar tools so they can learn something new. Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members. Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members. It’s nice to see some other cities put points on the board.

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A look at the budding market for the text that prompts AI systems

TechCrunch

Writing the text strings that instruct AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 to generate essays, articles, images and more has become a veritable profession, commanding salaries well into the six-figure range. However, I quickly realized that creating coherent images using just words was a challenge.” Move over, software.

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Optibus taps $100M at a $1.3B valuation for its AI-based mass transit operations platform

TechCrunch

Optibus , which uses AI to help public transportation bodies and their mass transit partners plan and operate their networks, has raised $100 million, funding that it will be using to continue expanding its product set and wider business footprint, CEO and co-founder Amos Haggiag said in an interview in London this week.