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Simple Ways to Survive and Rebuild Your Business after COVID-19

Since coronavirus has become a full-blown pandemic, the unemployment rate has rapidly increased as businesses are forced to close their doors for the sake of public health. It has wreaked financial havoc across the world, leaving many small-business owners struggling in its wake.

No doubt, this is a stressful time mainly for small business entrepreneurs who have smaller coffers to sustain them. While the short-term outlook for start-ups varies as per the industry, it is vital to consider what recovery mode will look like once the economy begins to return to a state of normalcy.

But having an exit strategy after the pandemic will help you to be prepared to hit the ground running and recreate. In case, you are not so sure what your present and exit plan should be during and after COVID-19 situation, here are some ways to sustain and get your business back on the track.

Make a Backup Plan

Present-day, businesses are putting safeguards in place to ensure the security of their companies and employees the major precaution many business owners are taking includes creating an emergency preparedness plan. This plan includes major steps to protect employees, what to do if this outbreak occurs at your company, how your employees can contact you, and what will happen to company function if it is infected.

Communication with Employees

Communication is an important part of doing business. This time, your employees are likely concerned about their health and how they can continue working as more things. Whether you have a small team or a big team, try to be in constant touch with them- via. Email, text, or call.

Connect on a Personal Level

This is a perfect time to encourage your community to follow, like, and share information about your business and to leave reviews on Google and Yelp. Utilize this time to connect on a personal level, so when things get back to normal, they feel that connection and become a lifelong customer.

This period is also great to focus on customer service like handwritten letters, manual and personalized emails instead of automatic flows, and tries to respond to more comments on social media. Anything to help make these customers feel appreciated for still helping you when everyone is struggling.

Stay Prepared for the Next Crisis

While the COVID pandemic may seem like an once-in-a-lifetime event, the reality is that an emergency can come along to disrupt your small businesses at any time. Use what you have learned during this current situation for them to prepare for the next crisis, it would help you to insulate your business from future shocks.

For example, building up liquid savings may be a priority for your business if you had little or nothing aside before the coronavirus begins.

Consider Whether You Need Funding to Recover

Unless you had a large amount of cash on hand going into the pandemic, this is likely that you may need some working capital to start your business operations coming out of it.

When it comes to financing your small business, there are various options to consider. If you are considering financing to help rebuild, keep in mind that borrowing may be competitive, as leaders want some reassurance that loans can be rapid. Review your business and personal credit scores and also your business and personal finances to gauge how likely you are to get approved for funding.

Bottom Line

The COVID pandemic has impacted businesses and industries of all sizes. The lessons we are taking from the crisis in the global sense- supporting each other, keeping each other safe, learning new ways to connect, and banding together in a common effort and learning new ways to connect.

Trump signs bill that creates the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

US President Donald Trump signed today a bill into law, approving the creation of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The bill, known as the CISA Act, reorganizes and rebrands the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), a program inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as CISA, a standalone federal agency in charge of overseeing civilian and federal cybersecurity programs.

The NPPD, which was first established in 2007, has already been handling almost all of the DHS’ cyber-related issues and projects.

As part of the DHS, the NPPD was the government entity in charge of physical and cyber-security of federal networks and critical infrastructure, and oversaw the Federal Protective Service (FPS), the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM), the Office of Cyber and Infrastructure Analysis (OCIA), the Office of Cybersecurity& Communications (OC&C), and the Office of Infrastructure Protection (OIP).

As CISA, the agency’s prerogatives will remain the same, and nothing is expected to change in day-to-day operations, but as a federal agency, CISA will now benefit from an increased budget and more authority in imposing its directives.

“Elevating the cybersecurity mission within the Department of Homeland Security, streamlining our operations, and giving NPPD a name that reflects what it actually does will help better secure the nation’s critical infrastructure and cyber platforms,” said NPPD Under Secretary Christopher Krebs. “The changes will also improve the Department’s ability to engage with industry and government stakeholders and recruit top cybersecurity talent.”

With its promotion to the rank of federal agency, CISA is now on the same level as the US Secret Service or FEMA, but still under the DHS’ oversight. The new agency is expected to improve the cyber-security defenses across other US federal agencies, coordinate cyber-security programs with states, and bolster the government’s overall cyber-security protections in the face of mundane criminals and nation-state hackers.

The Amazing Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Genomics and Gene Editing

By 2021, consultant firm Frost & Sullivan expects that artificial intelligence (AI) systems will generate $6.7 billion in revenue from healthcare globally. One area that machine learning is significantly evolving is genomics the study of the complete set of genes within an organism. While much attention has been paid to the implications for human health, genetic sequencing and analysis could also be ground-breaking for agriculture and animal husbandry. When researchers can sequence and analyze DNA, something that artificial intelligence systems make faster, cheaper and more accurate, they gain perspective on the particular genetic blueprint that orchestrates all activities of that organism. With this insight, they can make decisions about care, what an organism might be susceptible to in the future, what mutations might cause different diseases and how to prepare for the future.

Genome Sequencing and Gene Editing

Since the illnesses an individual experiences in a lifetime are largely determined by their genetics, there has been significant interest to better understand our genetic makeup for years. Our progress was stalled by the complexity and enormity of the data that needed to be evaluated. With advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, researchers are better able to interpret and act on genomic data through genome sequencing and gene editing.

A genome sequence is a specific order of DNA building blocks (A, T, C, G) in a living organism; the human genome is made up of 20,000 genes and more than 3 billion base pairs of these genetic letters. Sequencing the genome is a critical first step to understanding it. The latest technology called high-throughput sequencing (HTS) allows the sequencing of DNA to occur in one day—a process that once took a decade when it was first done.

When changes are made to DNA at a cellular level, it’s called gene editing.

Personalized medicine and life-saving therapies

One of the most exciting prospects about gene technology is the development of precision or personalized medicine. The field, which enables interventions specific to a patient or population of genetically similar individuals, is expected to reach $87 billion by 2023. Historically, cost and technology limited the implementation of personalized medicine, but machine learning techniques are helping to overcome these barriers. Machines help identify patterns within genetic data sets and then computer models can make predictions about an individual’s odds of developing a disease or responding to interventions.

Microsoft acquires conversational AI and bot development firm

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft has announced to acquire a conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) and bot development company XOXCO for an undisclosed sum.

Texas-based XOXCO has been paving the way in conversational AI since 2013 and was responsible for the creation of Howdy, the first commercially available bot for Slack that helps schedule meetings.

“It also developed Botkit which provides the development tools used by hundreds of thousands of developers on GitHub. Over the years, we have partnered with XOXCO and have been inspired by this work,” said Lili Cheng, Corporate Vice President, Conversational AI at Microsoft on Thursday.

Conversational AI is quickly becoming a way in which businesses engage with employees and customers — from creating virtual assistants and redesigning customer interactions to using conversational assistants to help employees communicate and work better together.

According to Gartner, “by 2020, conversational artificial intelligence will be a supported user experience for more than 50 percent of large, consumer-centric enterprises”.

The Microsoft Bot Framework, available as a service in Azure and on GitHub, today supports over 360,000 developers.

“With this acquisition, we are continuing to realise our approach of democratising AI development, conversation and dialog, and integrating conversational experiences where people communicate,” said Cheng.

Over the last six months, Microsoft has made several strategic acquisitions to accelerate the pace of AI development.

The acquisition of Semantic Machines in May brought a revolutionary new approach to conversational AI.

In July, it acquired Bonsai to help reduce the barriers to AI development by combining machine teaching, reinforcement learning and simulation.

In September, Microsoft acquired Lobe, a company that has created a simple visual interface empowering anyone to develop and apply deep learning and AI models quickly, without writing code.

“The acquisition of GitHub in October demonstrates our belief in the power of communities to help fuel the next wave of bot development,” Microsoft said.

How to make AI less biased

With machine learning systems now being used to determine everything from stock prices to medical diagnoses, it’s never been more important to look at how they arrive at decisions.

A new approach out of MIT demonstrates that the main culprit is not just the algorithms themselves, but how the data itself is collected.

“Computer scientists are often quick to say that the way to make these systems less biased is to simply design better algorithms,” says lead author Irene Chen, a PhD student who wrote the paper with MIT professor David Sontag and postdoctoral associate Fredrik D. Johansson. “But algorithms are only as good as the data they’re using, and our research shows that you can often make a bigger difference with better data.”

Looking at specific examples, researchers were able to both identify potential causes for differences in accuracies and quantify each factor’s individual impact on the data. They then showed how changing the way they collected data could reduce each type of bias while still maintaining the same level of predictive accuracy.

“We view this as a toolbox for helping machine learning engineers figure out what questions to ask of their data in order to diagnose why their systems may be making unfair predictions,” says Sontag.

Chen says that one of the biggest misconceptions is that more data is always better. Getting more participants doesn’t necessarily help, since drawing from the exact same population often leads to the same subgroups being under-represented. Even the popular image database ImageNet, with its many millions of images, has been shown to be biased towards the Northern Hemisphere.

According to Sontag, often the key thing is to go out and get more data from those under-represented groups. For example, the team looked at an income-prediction system and found that it was twice as likely to misclassify female employees as low-income and male employees as high-income. They found that if they had increased the dataset by a factor of 10, those mistakes would happen 40 percent less often.

In another dataset, the researchers found that a system’s ability to predict intensive care unit (ICU) mortality was less accurate for Asian patients. Existing approaches for reducing discrimination would basically just make the non-Asian predictions less accurate, which is problematic when you’re talking about settings like healthcare that can quite literally be life-or-death.

Chen says that their approach allows them to look at a dataset and determine how many more participants from different populations are needed to improve accuracy for the group with lower accuracy while still preserving accuracy for the group with higher accuracy.

“We can plot trajectory curves to see what would happen if we added 2,000 more people versus 20,000, and from that figure out what size the dataset should be if we want to have the best of all worlds,” says Chen. “With a more nuanced approach like this, hospitals and other institutions would be better equipped to do cost-benefit analyses to see if it would be useful to get more data.”

You can also try to get additional kinds of data from your existing participants. However, that won’t improve things either if the extra data isn’t actually relevant, like statistics on people’s height for a study about IQ. The question then becomes how to identify when and for whom you should collect more information.

One method is to identify clusters of patients with high disparities in accuracy. For ICU patients, a clustering methods on text called topic modeling showed that cardiac and cancer patients both had large racial differences in accuracy. This finding could suggest that more diagnostic tests for cardiac or cancer patients could reduce the racial differences in accuracy.

The team will present the paper in December at the annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in Montreal.

Officials to Approach Strong Local Economy in the State Real Estate

F.C. Tucker Commercial Thursday presented its annual State of Real Estate program, a panel discussion about recent trends and predictions in the region’s residential, retail and industrial real estate markets. F.C. Tucker officials and Evansville Mayor Lloyd Winnecke participated. A few of the highlights:

Officials said 2017 saw significant activity in local industrial real estate, and the plastics industry was a major driver. Two former Whirlpool warehouses on St. George Road were bought last year for distribution of plastics, and a $2.1 million sale last May on St. Joseph Industrial Park Drive is facilitating a plastics company expansion.

An empty building in the Vander burgh Industrial Park drew an Israeli-owned company in the plastics industry. “The economic impact of the plastics industry is huge, and as the economy stays strong, I look for the industrial demand to stay strong as well,” said Ken Newcomb, president of F.C. Tucker Commercial.
New comb also noted another recent industrial development win for the region, a TaylorMade golf equipment distribution center at 4400 Garrison Drive.
There tail market has been busy as well, although the continued trend to online shopping has caused some hits, such as the pending loss of Evansville’s Sears store in Washington Square.

Fresh Thyme has opened at The Promenade, and Dick’s Sporting Goods just opened its new store in the former Gordman’s store at East Lloyd Commons, relocating from the Pavilion shopping center further east.

Dick’s will have lower rent and an additional 15,000 square feet at the new site, said Aaron Kendall, F.C. Tucker Commercial vice president.
The new year is expected to bring the arrival of Costco at The Promenade, a relocation of Burlington Coat Factory, the arrival of At Home in Burlington’s former space and a few Eastland Mall additions, such as Box Lunch and Carters/Oshkosh B’gosh.

There’s been quite a bit of new office development in the region, but a lot of B or C class space remains vacant in Downtown Evansville and elsewhere.
Energy Systems Group moved into a new building, just east of Interstate 69 in Warrick County. New burgh Family Dental built on Ruffian Lane, and a new medical office facility is going on adjacent to Target Pavilion on Evansville’s East Side.

The former ITT Tech building is now occupied by Approval Payment Solutions. Commerce Bank opened a new branch at Lloyd and Eagles Crest Drive and relocated its corporate headquarters to nearby 320 Eagle Crest Drive.

The high level of vacancy “speaks to the need of those landlords to adapt and change to the new workforce taking over these spaces,” said Kyle Bernhardt, who works in F.C. Tucker Commercial in commercial sales and leasing.

The region’s tallest building, at 420 Main St., is back on the open market. A purchase option and redevelopment plan was announced at the 2017 State of Real Estate event, but it did not materialize.

“Although we are sad to see this potential project put on hold, we are still very excited about how this property could truly transform Downtown,” Bernhardt said.
Locally and nationally, new home construction starts are well below demand, said John Briscoe, vice president of F.C. Tucker’s residential division.

Vanderburgh and Warrick counties saw 535 housing starts in 2017. That number will likely grow about 10 percent in 2018, Briscoe said.
The local residential market saw record low inventory levels in 2017. Briscoe said houses were on the market an average of 56 days, and it was common during the spring and summer to see multiple offers on houses and offers above the asking price.

Winnecke said the region’s economy is strong. He pointed to major publicly supported projects in Downtown Evansville and organic growth elsewhere in the community.

The Multi-Institutional Academic Health Science and Research Center, a Downtown building that will house academic programs from three universities, is more than 70 percent completed and will be open for classes in August. Construction on the campus’ second building could begin this year.

“Strong regions have strong cores in their primary cities, but it’s not just Downtown where that is happening,” Winnecke said. “Literally, there is hundreds of millions of dollars of investment underway in our city right now … I think 2018 will be another banner year for the community. I hope people are documenting how the city is changing for the better.”

Developers, Investors Takes Flight to Industrial Real Estate

Industrial real estate is fast emerging as the go-to asset class for investors and developers, as demand for special economic zones (SEZ) wanes and India’s consumption and e-commerce story gets a boost from the government’s Make in India initiative and the goods and services tax (GST).
In a bid to build industrial, logistics and warehousing parks, industrial clusters and townships, there is a rush to buy land across states, something that hasn’t happened since the SEZ frenzy more than a decade ago. The warehousing and logistics sector, which attracted investments of more than a billion dollars in 2017, is gearing up for the next round which is expected to witness higher interest in building businesses around steady rental income.

At the top of the list is Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management Inc., which has invested in residential and commercial office real estate and is now evaluating opportunities in the industrial space.

“Brookfield is looking to invest in logistics parks. It may invest in a company or buy the facility or park itself,” said a person familiar with the company’s plans, who did not wish to be named.

A Brookfield spokesperson declined to comment.
Scouting for land is on in western India, including Mumbai and Pune, as well as in the national capital region (NCR), Gujarat, Chennai and Bengaluru. Sydney’s LOGOS Group and Assetz Property Group from Singapore, which partnered in 2017 to invest $400 million to build logistics and industrial parks in India, is shopping for land. Ben Salmon, co-founder and chief executive officer of Assetz Property Group, said they are planning to close at least three or four transactions in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

“We have a customer-focused, long-term, annuity model approach where we will build logistics parks which get less rent but are focused on servicing companies, and may also do industrial parks for non-polluting, light manufacturing which attract higher rent and are more specialised,” Salmon said.
Niranjan Hiranandani-promoted Hiranandani Communities is planning to launch a 250-acre industrial park in Talegaon, Pune after it recently got approval for an integrated industrial area. The firm has another 300 acres near Chennai and 77 acres in Nashik.

“It’s a big opportunity for us and we are in it for the long run. India wasn’t ready for this even five years back but with the government’s push to promote manufacturing and GST this is the right time,” said Hiranandani.

Maharashtra’s industrial policy is in fact based on the premise of providing an exit route to developers stuck with SEZs owing to difficulties in land acquisition, changes in tax laws by the central government. Last week, in a major policy bailout for long-stuck Navi Mumbai Special Economic Zone Pvt. Ltd, the Maharashtra government allowed the promoters to convert the 1,842-hectare SEZ into an “integrated industrial township”.

“There was a lot of exuberance around SEZs but not many gained from them due to less demand, more supply leading to the inevitable fall. A lot many things are in order today, making industrial real estate more practical and doable,” said Sanjay Dutt, CEO, operations and private funds, Ascendas-Singbridge India.
Ascendas-Singbridge Group manages 30 million sq. ft of industrial space across Asia-Pacific, and plans to build 15-16 million sq. ft of warehousing and logistics space in India in the next five to six years with Firstspace Realty, jointly investing $600 million. Embassy Industrial Parks Pvt. Ltd, a collaboration between realty firm Embassy Group and an affiliate of Warburg Pincus, is looking to buy land in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi, the sweet spot being 25-30 acres in each city. By March-April, it would have 10 million sq. ft of developable land.

“Buying land is not easy but we are building our business the way Embassy built its office park portfolio. It helps that we are allowed to draw long-term, cheaper debt after the logistics space was granted infrastructure status,” said Anshul Singhal, CEO, Embassy Industrial Parks.
Lodha Group is also planning to develop a 150-acre logistics and value-added industries park in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), as part of its aim to have $1 billion of assets under management by 2021. The location is 45 minutes from Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) and half an hour from the upcoming airport in Navi Mumbai.

“We are in the process of finalizing our business plan and partner and expect to start work on the site in the next few months,” said Abhishek Lodha, managing director, Lodha Group.

Mahindra Lifespace Developers Ltd will develop two industrial clusters – 264 acres in north Chennai (with Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo Corporation) and 268 acres near Ahmedabad, apart from earmarking 500 acres in Mahindra World City, Jaipur for industrial development and aggregating land outside Pune.
“The larger question is how will manufacturing demand play out in India?” said Anita Arjundas, managing director and CEO, Mahindra Lifespace Developers.