This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West. Shivika Sabharwal’s nerves kicked in the second she spotted the size of the crowd. It was mid-September, and Sabharwal was standing center stage inside a massive event space at Mumbai’s extravagant Jio World Convention Centre. The space, which had recently hosted the star-studded wedding between billionaire heirs Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant, had been transformed into a sea of green – green spotlights, green archways, a neon-green light display — in honor of WhatsApp’s first business summit in India. Around 1,000 lanyard-wearing executives had shown up for the event, and all eyes were trained on Sabharwal. The relatively introverted 32-year-old is a professional ceramist and not a tech expert. But she was the perfect messenger for the story that WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, has been increasingly eager to tell: how businesses of all sizes are using its messaging app to grow. Standing on stage alongside her father and business partner, Sabharwal explained how she started her company, Shivika Pottery Gallery, out of her home on the outskirts of Delhi. In the early days, she advertised her creations to her personal network from her own WhatsApp account. But as her business expanded, she needed a dedicated way to manage messages and reach new potential customers. Her father, who’d spent some of his career working in tech, suggested she try the WhatsApp Business app, a free product that allows small businesses to set up digital storefronts. Sabharwal used the app to run ads on Instagram and Facebook that allowed users to begin chatting with her on WhatsApp. It increased her reach – so much so that she expanded into teaching pottery, sometimes hosting as many as 30 classes in a single month. When WhatsApp started seeking out volunteers to test its new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot for businesses, Sabharwal and her father signed up – she was eager for new tools to manage her inbox. “This lets me remain focused on what I love,” Sabharwal told the crowd at the Mumbai summit, “which is creating pottery and teaching students.” WhatsApp may have transformed Sabharwal’s business. But Meta’s goal isn’t to sell pottery. Rather, Shivika Pottery Gallery is a tiny element in the larger solar system of services, features, and connections that make up WhatsApp. Summit attendees also learned about the Bengaluru transit system, which now lets people buy train tickets on WhatsApp, and about Max Life, a major Indian insurance company that uses WhatsApp to translate its services into seven regional languages. They heard from the co-founder of Delhi-based children’s food brand, Slurrp Farm, which now makes a quarter of its direct sales on WhatsApp, and from an executive at HDFC Bank, the 10th largest bank in the world, about how customers are now banking on the platform. “Our banking experience has to work for everyone, and this is where we find WhatsApp interesting,” Anjani Rathor, HDFC’s chief digital officer, told the crowd. WhatsApp is the world’s most widely used messaging app; the company says it has 2 billion daily users. These users send more than 100 billion messages every day in 60 languages across 180 countries. Some 400 million of those users are in India, WhatsApp’s biggest market, followed by another 120 million in Brazil. WhatsApp initially achieved that global dominance in large part by doing just one thing very well: enabling cheap, private, and reliable messaging on almost any phone, almost anywhere in the world. But in the decade since Meta acquired WhatsApp for an eye-watering $22 billion in 2014, the app has been transformed from a narrowly focused utilitarian tool into a sort of “everything app.” In countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia, WhatsApp is now also a place for scheduling doctor’s appointments and conducting real estate deals – and buying Sabharwal’s ceramic ducks. In Brazil, the beauty juggernaut L’Oréal now makes an average of 25% of its online direct-to-consumer sales on WhatsApp. The shift has been driven, of course, by money. WhatsApp has never been much of a moneymaker. While Meta makes billions off mining people’s personal data to sell more ads, WhatsApp is an encrypted app, whose founders once very publicly swore off advertising altogether. Lately, however, WhatsApp has been aggressively luring big businesses to its suite of paid messaging products for businesses, and openly flirting with the possibility of introducing ads in the not-too-distant future. True to Meta’s appetite for voracious expansion, WhatsApp’s goal is nothing short of getting “every business in the world on the platform,” Nikila Srinivasan, Meta’s head of product for business messaging, told Rest of World . During the event in Mumbai, the company announced it would soon begin physically touring smaller cities throughout India to onboard local businesses to the app. Nikila Srinivasan, head of product for business messaging, at Meta’s office in New York. George Etheredge for Rest of World. It’s still early days, but WhatsApp’s efforts to generate revenue this way are beginning to pay off. Meta now makes billions of dollars from the “click-to-message” ads that businesses purchase. Meta also charges tens of thousands of large enterprises, from Air France to Volvo, to send messages through its premium API, which includes a full suite of marketing, payment, and other features. While Meta’s paid messaging tools brought in about $1 billion last year – peanuts compared to the whopping $132 billion the company earned from ads – paid messaging revenue is growing far faster than ad revenue and has more than doubled since early 2023. For Meta, which has squeezed every cent out of Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp represents a potentially vast and largely untapped opportunity. It’s little wonder that Mark Zuckerberg has begun referring to WhatsApp as “the next major pillar” of his company. And yet, for that to be true, Meta will need to pull off a delicate balancing act. To get its money’s worth out of WhatsApp, it will need to transform it into a place where the world’s businesses want to spend their money, without sacrificing the privacy and simplicity that made the world flock to the app in the first place. Inside the MPK21 building at Meta’s vast Menlo Park headquarters. Marissa Leshnov for Rest of World Before Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, it was something like the anti-Facebook. Where Facebook had become a place for publicly posting photos and messages for all your friends to see, WhatsApp was all about one-on-one and small group messages. Where Facebook was loaded with ads, apps, and games, WhatsApp’s founders – former Yahoo engineers Jan Koum and Brian Acton – eschewed unessential features and publicly swore off ads . The company had spent no money on marketing and had just 32 engineers at the time it was acquired. ( Rest of World attempted to reach Koum and Acton, but received no replies). But perhaps most significantly, where Facebook struggled to adapt to the mobile era, WhatsApp, which launched in 2009, was a mobile-first product that had amassed roughly half a billion users in just five years – many of them in countries where several people’s first experience of the internet took place on a cellphone. It did so by offering those users a cheap workaround to the sky-high SMS prices that some telecom monopolies charged. Rather than getting hit with a bill for every message they sent, WhatsApp users spent just $1 a year for unlimited messages. That and a $250,000 seed investment were enough to keep WhatsApp financially afloat until it raised $60 million from Sequoia Capital in two separate rounds. But WhatsApp wasn’t just cheap. Working out of an unmarked, converted garage in Mountain View, California, the engineering team was laser-focused on ensuring speed and reliability – whether a user was messaging from the latest iPhone in a major American city, or BlackBerrys and Nokia feature phones operating in the most remote places. “We were trying to hit every user, everywhere, on every platform,” Chris Peiffer, one of WhatsApp’s first hires and who worked at Stanford University with Koum, told Rest of World . He recalled hiking to a cellular dead zone in the hills near Mountain View with a Nokia C3 to test WhatsApp’s durability with limited bandwidth. Reliable messaging for everyone, everywhere, wasn’t just altruism – it was a business strategy. WhatsApp’s most likely users weren’t in Silicon Valley, where unlimited texting plans were already widespread, Peiffer said. Instead, the greatest opportunity was in countries like India , where the cost of SMS was out of reach for huge segments of the population, or in tiny European countries like the Netherlands , where cross-border communication was far more common, and therefore, more costly. Making the app work in all of those places meant building a lightweight product, which wouldn’t drain users’ data, by gathering tons of information about them. “The overall mantra from Jan was: This is the user’s data. They paid for it. We should not be using it wastefully,” Michael Donohue, WhatsApp’s former engineering director, told Rest of World . The founders’ commitment to knowing virtually nothing about its users was such that, in 2013, WhatsApp began plans to bring end-to-end encryption to users’ chats. This trifecta of cost, reliability, and privacy quickly made WhatsApp a global phenomenon, with users exchanging 10 billion messages a day around the world by 2012. None of this escaped Zuckerberg, who was rushing to ensure the mobile revolution didn’t pass Facebook by. “WhatsApp is already ahead of us in messaging in the same way Instagram was ‘ahead’ of us in photos,” Zuckerberg wrote in April 2012, according to internal documents revealed as part of a federal lawsuit in the US. It was around the same time that Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, and Zuckerberg wrote that he’d gladly shell out another billion for WhatsApp “if we could get them”. When Facebook did finally acquire WhatsApp – two years later and for a whole lot more money than $1 billion – investors naturally wondered how the social networking giant planned to make a return on this huge investment. Zuckerberg vowed that WhatsApp would “continue to operate independently”, and that its product roadmap would “remain unchanged.” Koum, meanwhile, assured users that the acquisition wouldn’t betray WhatsApp’s ethos. “There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision, and our product,” he said at the time. As Acton would later tell Forbes , Zuckerberg was supportive of the company’s plans to encrypt the app. Koum and Acton also slipped what was effectively a no-advertising clause into the deal terms, stipulating that they could cash out their remaining shares if Facebook ever tried to make money on WhatsApp without their consent. But before long, former employees say, culture clashes began between the Facebook and WhatsApp teams. “WhatsApp was just like: We are focused on doing this communication thing, and that’s all we’re going to do. We’re not going to think about six different things we could build at the same time,” said Donohue, the former engineering director. “I think that was one of the differences.” Brian Acton and Jan Koum at a conference in Laguna Beach, California, in October 2016. Credit: Reuters. The clearest physical metaphor for the way that the Meta machine has subsumed WhatsApp is located right inside the company’s vast Menlo Park headquarters. MPK21, as the building is known, is a nearly 49,000-square-meter behemoth that boasts its own redwood forest. Reaching WhatsApp’s section of the building involves a labyrinthine journey – past the twee reading nooks marking Instagram territory, the conference rooms with nerdcore names like Lorem Ipsum, the spotless mini-kitchens stocked with prebiotic soda, and the motivational posters bearing mottos like “Begin Anywhere”. After a five-minute trek, a bright green wall with the WhatsApp logo appears in the distance, with its own inspirational poster to match: “Move Fast, Stay Simple”. On a Wednesday in September, the space was nearly empty, save for WhatsApp’s vice president of product, Alice Newton-Rex, who sat in a sunlit conference room dressed in a brand-appropriate green blazer. Newton-Rex joined the company in 2019, when Facebook itself was in the midst of a radical rethink of its role in the world. That year, Zuckerberg announced plans for a new “privacy-focused vision for social networking.” While the Facebook of old had been akin to a digital town square, Zuckerberg argued, “people increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room”. This shift, which became derisively known as Facebook’s “ pivot to privacy ”, meant overhauling the way its news feed functioned. But it also meant that WhatsApp, the most private of all of Facebook’s apps, would take a more prominent role within the company’s orbit. “We began to expand our vision for the product,” Newton-Rex told Rest of World . A big part of that vision involved seizing on what Meta believes is a fertile opportunity in business messaging. While mobile adoption and social media use have exploded around the world, e-commerce still lags in many top mobile markets. Only about a third of social media users in India shop online, according to a recent Bain & Company study conducted in partnership with Meta. And yet, other studies Meta has commissioned have found that 90% of Indian consumers now message with a business at least once a week, and 66% report being frustrated with businesses that don’t offer messaging. The company has found similar results in studies of WhatsApp’s other top markets, including Indonesia and Brazil. For Meta, these two trends combined created an opening to incorporate more transactions into messaging itself. Alice Newton-Rex, vice president of product at WhatsApp. Marissa Leshnov for Rest of World “What we realised is, as people were using WhatsApp to talk with friends and family, they were slowly also using it to talk to the local community around them, which meant local businesses,” Srinivasan, Meta’s head of product for business messaging, told Rest of World . She noted that her own mother in Chennai, India, has used WhatsApp for years to schedule deliveries of fresh milk. Similar to messaging, the business use cases for WhatsApp were growing fastest in international markets. WhatsApp’s first business tool – the free WhatsApp Business app that allows companies to advertise and message users – launched in early 2018, and has since grown to 200 million users around the world. Later that year, the company came out with an API that, for the first time, charged companies to send larger volumes of messages over longer periods of time. The product has since expanded to include features that enable appointment booking, subscription sign-ups, loan approvals, personalized promotions, and more within a WhatsApp chat. Though it’s available to businesses of all sizes, it was designed to serve companies that need more tools than the free app has to offer. That includes multinational giants like L’Oréal. According to Guilherme Eler, the company’s social commerce director for Latin America, Brazil was always behind other mature markets in terms of e-commerce sales for beauty products. Door-to-door sales , meanwhile, are common. “When it comes to beauty, people used to buy through conversations,” Eler said. When Covid-19 hit, consumers had little choice but to begin buying products online, and according to Eler, many turned to WhatsApp – a platform used by 90% of Brazilians . “We realised this was a singular opportunity to emulate the door-to-door experience,” he said. L'Oréal began relying on WhatsApp as a tool for offering beauty tips and promoting products to users based on their individual skincare needs. The company soon found that open rates for messages on WhatsApp could be six times higher than on email. Customers also spent more and made more frequent purchases when they shopped via WhatsApp. “We didn't choose WhatsApp. The Latin American population chose WhatsApp,” Eler said. “We chose to be where the consumers were.” For Shauravi Malik, co-founder of Slurrp Farm, the path to marketing and selling on WhatsApp began even earlier. Nearly six years ago, at one of her investors’ suggestions, the self-proclaimed WhatsApp super-user began adding a WhatsApp number to the packaging of her company’s snacks and cereals. It was early days for WhatsApp’s business products, and companies still needed separate phones for each dedicated WhatsApp account. But the platform was an essential way to reach mothers, who are Slurrp Farm’s primary customers, Malik told Rest of World . “We are in the core business of changing behavior about how we eat,” she said. “It’s so important to do this at the level of each individual parent.” Slurrp Farm’s operations on WhatsApp have since grown more sophisticated. As Malik told the crowd at the summit in Mumbai, the company now segments its audience by their city or the age of their child, in order to send more personalised promotions via WhatsApp. Slurrp Farm has also used WhatsApp’s checkout features to allow people to shop directly on the platform. According to Malik, about 25% of direct-to-consumer sales now take place on WhatsApp. There are likely even more shoppers who buy their products elsewhere after having chatted with Slurrp Farm’s customer service team, which Malik said is increasingly becoming more like a sales team. “They are the closest touch point to the consumer, and suited to it,” she said. And yet, for all of the success that brands have had on WhatsApp, Eler from L'Oréal believes the platform still has a long way to go in terms of the breadth of the e-commerce tools it offers. He’s still waiting for WhatsApp to introduce customer reviews and other more sophisticated e-commerce tools to its product catalogs. “I’m not fully happy,” Eler said. But, if anything, that should be encouraging news for WhatsApp, he said, because it shows “it can get way bigger”. WhatsApp’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Marissa Leshnov for Rest of World. One innovation that Meta hopes will boost WhatsApp’s value with businesses is generative AI. WhatsApp executives argue it will multiply what companies get done on the platform. Part of the reason WhatsApp has taken off as a customer service and sales channel in countries like India and Brazil, Srinivasan said, is because the price of labour there is low enough that businesses can afford to have call centers full of workers responding to WhatsApp chats. But AI, she argued, could make that possible for just about any company, anywhere. “We’re really, really bullish about the power of AI,” she told Rest of World . “A few years from now, I can see a world where every small business has an AI agent that’s representing them.” The list of AI features now packed into WhatsApp seems to grow by the month: Meta AI is now baked into the WhatsApp search bar , allowing users to start a conversation with a Meta chatbot. Businesses, meanwhile, are beginning to use a customer service version of the chatbot that can automatically generate responses to inquiries, as well as tools that help them craft AI-generated ad campaigns for Facebook and Instagram. Meta has also built a new AI marketing tool for its ad portal. That feature allows any business to upload a list of phone numbers for customers who have opted in to receive messages. The tool then matches that list against numbers that have been shared on Facebook and Instagram, and uses AI to determine which subset of customers would be the best fit for a given message. “This means that businesses are going to see better ROI [return on investment] and people will see more relevant messages,” Zuckerberg told an audience in São Paulo this summer when he introduced the tool. And yet, with each new revenue-boosting feature, WhatsApp has added a little asterisk to its core privacy promises, according to Nathalie Maréchal, co-director of the privacy and data program at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C. “It’s not necessarily that those asterisks are illegitimate. It’s that they’re complicated,” she told Rest of World , “and many users are either not going to take the time, or aren’t going to prioritize, fully understanding it”. Meta has stood by its commitment to end-to-end encryption – so much so that it’s threatened to pull the app from India if the government forces the company to break encryption, as it’s currently trying to do. Meta has also expanded privacy tools for users, including enabling disappearing messages , encrypting backups , and protecting people’s IP addresses in calls . But while its dedication to encryption isn’t in doubt, Maréchal said, the new features Meta has introduced for businesses are a “departure from the original expectations that were set by WhatsApp’s founders”. When businesses upload lists of their customers’ numbers to the AI marketing tool, for example, Meta can use data from people’s Facebook and Instagram activities to select which customers to target, a Meta spokesperson told Rest of World . And, since chats with Meta AI are, by definition, chats with Meta, they are not encrypted, the spokesperson said. WhatsApp discloses this in the app, but it still means that the things people say and search there can be used to train Meta’s AI models. Meta declined to comment on whether these unencrypted chats with Meta AI could also be subject to government requests for data. That would be relevant context for users, particularly in a country like India, where government data requests are on the rise and where Meta has said its AI chatbot is especially popular on WhatsApp. Namrata Maheshwari, the India-based encryption policy lead for digital rights group Access Now, told Rest of World that while WhatsApp’s pushback against encryption-threatening laws “is a good sign for users”, there “continue to be concerns” due to Meta’s privacy policy, user data sharing, and transparency reporting. “Establishing and maintaining a separation from other Meta apps like Facebook and Instagram will be the difference between the privacy that WhatsApp offers, and the gold standard for private messaging,” Maheshwari said. Newton-Rex said privacy is “in the DNA” of WhatsApp and that the company is trying to clearly communicate with users about what privacy protections WhatsApp offers and where. That includes AI products. “The cornerstone of this is transparency. We’re not relying on the expectation that people have,” she told Rest of World . “We’re investing in user education.” Newton-Rex also said that while Meta is considering allowing ads on WhatsApp, those ads will never appear in users’ main inboxes. Instead, she said, the company is assessing incorporating ads into WhatsApp’s Channels feature, which allows users to publicly broadcast messages to lists of followers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, WhatsApp’s gradual Meta-morphosis over the last few years has drawn sharp criticism from the app’s original team. “It’s a shadow of the product we poured our hearts into, and wanted to build for the world,” Neeraj Arora, a former WhatsApp executive who orchestrated the Facebook deal, wrote in a lengthy LinkedIn post in 2022. At the time, Arora was running his own social media app along with Donohue. He did not respond to Rest of World ’s requests for comment. Peiffer, meanwhile, said he understands why the product has had to change. “It’s very hard to keep a software product at the forefront of consumer attention for 15 years,” he said. “That is an extraordinary balancing act.” While Peiffer left WhatsApp prior to the Facebook acquisition, he later returned to the company to help build the business messaging products. As WhatsApp evolves, the company’s executives are keenly aware of the risk of turning the app into the junk drawer of the mobile era, overloaded with too many features and AI chatbots hawking products and driving away users. “That is actually the central tension,” Newton-Rex said. “How do we keep it simple? How do we make sure we’re designing for everyone, even as we add new things?” That tension is top of mind for WhatsApp’s business customers, too. “We need to be really cautious about not replicating what email became,” said Eler from L'Oréal. Right now, WhatsApp is working, he said. “I don’t want to spoil it.” The big question, of course, is whether WhatsApp’s billions of users want it to change. So far at least, the data suggests they haven’t been turned off. According to Meta, 1 billion users now message with a business each week across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. WhatsApp is even growing aggressively in one particular market that has always eluded it: the United States, where the app surpassed 100 million monthly active users in July. For Meta, that’s a major breakthrough in its ambitions to turn WhatsApp into a cash cow. As Zuckerberg told investors in July, “All of the work that we’re doing to grow the business opportunity there over time is just going to have a big tailwind if the US ends up being a big market.” Of course, that future is a long way off. While Meta doesn’t disclose how much revenue WhatsApp brings in, it’s safe to say that, even after all this investment, it still accounts for a tiny slice of Meta’s revenue. But to the company’s leadership, that may be more of a feature than a bug, because it means it still has ample opportunity to grow. As Srinivasan put it, albeit perhaps optimistically, “The only way for this to go is up.” Issie Lapowsky is a tech journalist based in Philadelphia. This is the first of a three-part series. This article was originally published in Rest of World , which covers technology’s impact outside the West.panalo999 vip 。

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NEW YORK (AP) — Top-ranked chess player Magnus Carlsen is headed back to the World Blitz Championship on Monday after its governing body agreed to loosen a dress code that got him fined and denied a late-round game in another tournament for refusing to change out of jeans . Lamenting the contretemps, International Chess Federation President Arkady Dvorkovich said in a statement Sunday that he'd let World Blitz Championship tournament officials consider allowing “appropriate jeans” with a jacket, and other “elegant minor deviations” from the dress code. He said Carlsen's stand — which culminated in his quitting the tournament Friday — highlighted a need for more discussion “to ensure that our rules and their application reflect the evolving nature of chess as a global and accessible sport.” Carlsen, meanwhile, said in a video posted Sunday on social media that he would play — and wear jeans — in the World Blitz Championship when it begins Monday. “I think the situation was badly mishandled on their side,” the 34-year-old Norwegian grandmaster said. But he added that he loves playing blitz — a fast-paced form of chess — and wanted fans to be able to watch, and that he was encouraged by his discussions with the federation after Friday's showdown. “I think we sort of all want the same thing,” he suggested in the video on his Take Take Take chess app’s YouTube channel. “We want the players to be comfortable, sure, but also relatively presentable.” The events began when Carlsen wore jeans and a sportcoat Friday to the Rapid World Championship, which is separate from but held in conjunction with the blitz event. The chess federation said Friday that longstanding rules prohibit jeans at those tournaments, and players are lodged nearby to make sartorial switch-ups easy if needed. An official fined Carlsen $200 and asked him to change pants, but he refused and wasn't paired for a ninth-round game, the federation said at the time. The organization noted that another grandmaster, Ian Nepomniachtchi, was fined earlier in the day for wearing sports shoes, changed and continued to play. Carlsen has said that he offered to wear something else the next day, but officials were unyielding. He said “it became a bit of a matter of principle,” so he quit the rapid and blitz championships. In the video posted Sunday, he questioned whether he had indeed broken a rule and said changing clothes would have needlessly interrupted his concentration between games. He called the punishment “unbelievably harsh.” “Of course, I could have changed. Obviously, I didn’t want to,” he said, and “I stand by that.”Photo: Josh Dawson Findlay's Vacuum and Sewing held its last day of operation on Saturday, Dec. 28. While it's the end of an era for Findlay's Vacuum and Sewing on the North Shore, the location won't be vacant for long as Lee's Music is primed to take over the building by next spring. Findlay 's storefront has been at its location at 249 Tranquille Road since 1983. Owner and operator Patti Montpetit said she has worked at the store since 2002, bought the business in 2004 and has run it with her family since. It's last day of operation was Saturday, Dec. 28. “I’m ready for retirement, I have two wonderful grandchildren and I want to move back to the Island. I miss the ocean,” said Montpetit. “The community is impacted every time a family business closes down, of course it does. But unfortunately, we have to live our lives too.” With Findlay’s vacating the location, a deal was struck with Lee’s Music, which will be moving in some time next year. Bitter sweet Montpetit said The Sewing Machine Doctors will be taking over the business’ sewing machine repair contracts and Hi-Tech Vacuums will be doing vacuum repairs “We wanted to make sure we didn’t leave everybody in the lurch, we are the last sewing machine sales people here,” Montpetit said. While the business had searched for a new owner, Montpetit said no buyer could be found. She said she's always had to compete with online shopping. “It’s a sign of change, and change happens and we have to allow that in life. It’s sad when you’re not shopping local, you notice Amazon prices are starting to rise because there’s no competition,” she said. “Nowadays I almost feel obsolete.” Montpetit said since the store announced it was closing she has heard from hundreds in the community wishing her the best. “The North Shore is amazing, the storefront’s been here forever, it seems like, and our community has always supported us,” she said. “I’m going out on a happy note, because I know that my clients appreciated this, and a sad note, because we're leaving them.” New home for Lee’s Music Mike Miltimore of Lee’s Music and Riversong Guitar says he has been consolidate his operations at his location at 13th Avenue and Battle Street, selling off the former Riversong Guitar location on Lorne Street two years ago. As part of a post-pandemic expansion , Riversong Guitar has found a new guitar factory in Sicamous in a former houseboat manufacturing facility. Miltimore said he sold his Battle Street location three years ago, making way for a five-storey condominium complex, and Lee’s Music will have to make the move to the North Shore by April 1, 2025 when his lease is up. “When you’re in a place for 22 years, things like your office get pretty stagnant and sometimes you need those changes just to go through and clean and reorganize and have a refresh," Miltimore said. “We are excited to go into the North Shore, which we believe has had a lot of investment and it's becoming the arts and culture centre of Kamloops." He said music lessons, the retail music store and some guitar manufacturing will be moved to the new North Shore location. With the new digs also comes new possibilities. “Maybe we have an outdoor stage in the parking lot on the side, because we’re right on Tranquille,” he said. “We got all sorts of ideas like that, running around and working with the NSBIA [North Shore Business Improvement Association].” Founded in 1974, the announcement of the move coincides with the 50th anniversary of Lee's Music. Another family business While she plans on possibly doing some travelling and design work in retirement, Montpetit said she was happy that Lee’s Music will be taking over her location. “It's nice to know that another family business is moving into my old family building,” she said. With Miltimore required to be out of his Battle Street location by the beginning of April, he said he’ll be clearing out some of his stock. “We have an absolute ton of gear that we don’t want to move,” he said. “If anybody is looking for a musical instrument or has a need for something kind of old, we’ve got 50 years of stock that we’re willing to make some deals on.”Intel awarded 7.865 bln USD CHIPS Act grant

Analysis: Barkley is NFL's version of Ohtani‘I’m fighting for my family’: Relatives of Israeli hostages to speak at 2 South Florida eventsDecember 17, 2024 This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlightedthe following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: fact-checked peer-reviewed publication trusted source proofread by Nanyang Technological University Leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics, quantum computers can perform calculations at lightning-fast speeds, enabling them to solve complex problems faster than conventional computers. In quantum technology applications such as quantum computing, light plays a central role in encoding and transmitting information. NTU researchers have recently made breakthroughs in manipulating light that could potentially usher in the era of quantum computing . Details of this research have been published in Nature Photonics , Physical Review Letters , and Nature Communications . Emitting photons on demand Quantum information can be carried in particles of light called photons. Single photon emitters that emit precisely one photon at a time are important components for many quantum technologies, including quantum computing. However, it is challenging for a photon emitter to achieve high quantum efficiency—the ability of the device to emit a photon on demand. It is also difficult to have high collection efficiency, meaning the emitted photon is easily collected and routed for application. Using ultrathin two-dimensional (2D) materials that are one atom thick, a team of researchers led by Prof. Gao Weibo of NTU's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) and School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (SPMS) has devised photon emitters that reached a quantum efficiency of 76.4% on average and more than 90% for some, approaching what is known as a unity quantum efficiency of 100%. Prof. Gao is also a President's Chair Professor in Physics at NTU and principal investigator at the Center for Quantum Technologies (CQT). This result is the first time that near unity quantum efficiency has been achieved in 2D materials. The emitters are made by overlaying a 2D layer of tungsten diselenide (WSe 2 ) on top of an array of gold pillars. To get a single photon from the 2D WSe 2 , the researchers first used a laser to generate excited particles called excitons. As an exciton decays back to its ground state, it undergoes either radiative or non-radiative decay. A photon is emitted only if the decay is radiative. According to Dr. Abdullah Rasmita, research fellow at NTU's EEE, who was the co-first author of the research paper together with Dr. Cai Hongbing, research fellow at the Center for Disruptive Photonics Technologies at NTU, near-unity efficiency can be achieved if the probability of non-radiative decay is close to zero. To suppress non-radiative decay, the researchers applied an electric field to separate positive and negative charges from the exciton. This depletion of charges enabled the device to achieve near-unity efficiency. "Our on-demand quantum emitter is desirable for many applications, including quantum communications and scalable optical quantum computation," said Prof. Gao. Putting the brakes on light Slowing down the speed at which light travels is also vital for quantum information processing as it enables quantum information encoded in photons, known as qubits, to be processed effectively. Photonic chips are usually used to slow down light. Light passing through the chip interacts with it and slows down. However, light is frequently backscattered in conventional photonic chips due to diffraction—the bending of light as it passes around corners or through narrow openings. The slower the light is, the more backscattering it suffers. This limits the range of frequencies that can be used for slow light, reducing its transmission efficiency. To address this drawback, researchers co-led by Prof. Zhang Baile of NTU's SPMS proposed a design strategy in 2021. This year, building on that idea, they have developed a chip that enhances light-matter interactions, slowing down light without backscattering over a wide range of frequencies. Using an electromagnetic material called a photonic Chern insulator, they demonstrated that light could be slowed down over a broad range of frequencies. Like water swirling down a drain, the light winds around points in the imaginary space of the crystal lattice of the material, known as Brillouin zones, which slows it down. According to the researchers, the chip overcomes the limitations of conventional slow-light devices, enabling applications such as quantum memory, which is essential for quantum information processing. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. Sign up for our free newsletter and get updates on breakthroughs, innovations, and research that matter— daily or weekly . Enhancing light-matter interactions at room temperature In superconducting quantum circuits, the interplay between light and matter is critical for quantum information processing. However, these circuits are traditionally operated at ultra-low temperatures, requiring significant energy for cooling and resulting in high costs. Now, researchers—co-led by Prof. Wang Qi Jie of NTU's EEE and SPMS and Assoc Prof. Wei Lei of NTU's EEE—have observed ultra-strong coupling between excitons in tungsten disulfide (WS 2 ) flakes and surface plasmons at room temperature. Surface plasmons are generated when light interacts with electrons on a metal surface. This is the first observation of such a phenomenon. The team achieved this by transferring an ultrathin layer of WS 2 onto an array of gold nanostructures with densely packed nanometer-sized gaps on a flexible polymer substrate. By applying mechanical strain, they successfully tuned the coupling strength between the WS 2 excitons and the gold plasmons. "Strong and stable light-matter interactions at room temperature open the door to quantum computing applications at ambient temperatures, reducing the stringent cooling requirements for quantum computers," said Prof. Wang. "Our work could also pave the way for more exotic light-matter interactions and lead to new insights in fundamental science," added Assoc. Prof. Wei. Simulating molecules to discover new drugs Light can also help quantum computers solve complicated problems, such as predicting the chemical properties of molecules to discover new drugs. NTU scientists have devised a quantum processing chip that uses photons to deduce the chemical properties of molecules, opening the door to faster drug discovery. Molecules vibrate, and each of their vibronic modes is associated with some energy levels. Understanding the probability that a molecule will transit from one level to another can uncover its chemical characteristics. Prof. Kwek Leong Chuan of NTU's EEE and Prof. Liu Ai Qun, who was an NTU researcher at the time of the study, together with an international team of researchers, calculated these transition probabilities using the integrated photonic chip. As a proof-of-concept, they simulated the vibronic spectra of several molecules, including formic acid and thymine. The researchers used a technique known as scattershot boson sampling to simulate the molecules' vibronic spectra. In boson sampling, photons enter and travel through a circuit to output channels. As the photons travel, they interfere with each other in a way that can be programmed. By programming the circuit to simulate the vibronic modes of a molecule, the researchers could obtain the vibronic spectra by measuring the output distribution of the photons. As quantum photonic chips provide greater computation power than classical computers, they are vital for solving larger molecules, said Prof. Kwek, co-director of NTU's Quantum Science and Engineering Center and a professor at the National Institute of Education and NTU's EEE. He is also a CQT principal investigator. Another advantage of the chip is that it is compact and can operate at room temperature. The researchers are now working on simulating complex molecules and studying the transitions between the excited states of a molecule. More information: Hongbing Cai et al, Charge-depletion-enhanced WSe2 quantum emitters on gold nanogap arrays with near-unity quantum efficiency, Nature Photonics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-024-01460-9 Fujia Chen et al, Multiple Brillouin Zone Winding of Topological Chiral Edge States for Slow Light Applications, Physical Review Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.156602 Tingting Wu et al, Ultrastrong exciton-plasmon couplings in WS2 multilayers synthesized with a random multi-singular metasurface at room temperature, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-47610-z Hui Hui Zhu et al, Large-scale photonic network with squeezed vacuum states for molecular vibronic spectroscopy, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-50060-2 Journal information: Nature Photonics , Physical Review Letters , Nature Communications Provided by Nanyang Technological University

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