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What is Ryan Day’s future? Ohio State AD faces that tough questionThis 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.1. Strengthening Training and Skill Development Programs:
BALTIMORE — Fortune finally smiled on the Baltimore Ravens in their heated rivalry with Pittsburgh. The Ravens recovered three of their own fumbles — and one big one by the Steelers. And when the game seemed to be going down to the wire like so many others in this series, Marlon Humphrey broke it open by returning an interception for a touchdown. “It was big. That’s what you want to be able to do to put out that fire. Our offense has bailed us out so many times. Over the past, we’d give up a touchdown, then they’d go score,” Humphrey said. “It felt good to be able to return that favor.” The Ravens beat Pittsburgh 34-17 on Saturday, clinching a playoff berth and pulling into a first-place tie with the Steelers in the AFC North. Baltimore had lost eight of the previous nine games against Pittsburgh. Humphrey has a career-high six interceptions this season, and few defensive players have had his impact in terms of changing the complexion of games. — On Oct. 6 at Cincinnati, he intercepted a pass in the fourth quarter that helped the Ravens rally to win in overtime. — On Oct. 21 at Tampa Bay, he intercepted two passes in the second quarter — one in the end zone — as Baltimore rallied from an early deficit to win comfortably. Baltimore Ravens running back Derrick Henry (22) runs with the ball as Pittsburgh Steelers defensive tackle Dean Lowry tries to stop him during the second half of an NFL football game, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024, in Baltimore. Credit: AP/Stephanie Scarbrough — On Nov. 7 against Cincinnati and the Ravens down 21-7, Humphrey forced a third-quarter fumble. Baltimore ended up winning by one. — On Nov. 17 at Pittsburgh, Humphrey intercepted a pass in the end zone with the Ravens down five in the fourth quarter, although Baltimore lost anyway. Then there was Saturday's pick-6, the first of his career. “I think I put my goals for this year a little too low. I think I had on there six interceptions and one pick-6 and some forced fumbles, and I can’t remember everything,” Humphrey said. "Coming into this game, I had zero interception yards, so I was like, ‘Man, hopefully I’m not the first guy to have five or six picks with zero yards,’ so it was good to try to get that average up.” Baltimore's other takeaway Saturday was a big one too. Ar'Darius Washington forced a fumble by Russell Wilson as he was bearing down on the Baltimore end zone. "That was huge. The defense has been preaching turnovers, punching the ball out, picking off passes (and) fourth down stops," tight end Isaiah Likely said. “That mantra of creating turnovers came through for us today, and that was a big reason why we won that game.” What's working When the Ravens avoid self-inflicted problems, their offense remains really tough to stop. Lamar Jackson threw touchdowns to three different players against the Steelers, and Derrick Henry ran for 162 yards. What needs help Aside from those two big turnovers, Wilson gave the Ravens problems, moving the ball pretty well against them for much of the game. Stock up The Ravens showed much better discipline on defense. Baltimore was flagged only twice for 10 yards in the game — a couple of false starts on offense. “We covered better. They had a couple downfield throws that we defended without grabbing,” coach John Harbaugh said. "So, I thought we did a good job.” Stock down Baltimore fumbled three times, but was lucky to recover them all. Two of those miscues were by Desmond Kane, who appeared to have taken over the punt returning duties after a good performance the previous week but looked shaky against Pittsburgh. Injuries Baltimore's running back depth took a hit when Justice Hill left the game because of a concussion. Rookie Rasheen Ali had 2 yards on his only carry. Key numbers Henry (1,636) became the fifth player in NFL history with 1,500 yards rushing in four different seasons. The others were Hall of Famers Barry Sanders, Eric Dickerson, Edgerrin James and Walter Payton. Henry also joined Dickerson and Clinton Portis as the only players with 1,500-yard seasons for multiple franchises. Up next The Ravens wrap up a stretch of three games in 11 days when they play a Christmas Day game at Houston on Wednesday.Title: Biden: United States Will Engage with All Syrian Groups to Help Facilitate TransitionAmarlin's background as a player also gives him a keen insight into the tactical aspects of the game. He is able to analyze situations from a player's perspective, making strategic decisions that take into account the players' strengths and weaknesses. This understanding creates a sense of trust and camaraderie within the team, as players feel valued and respected for their individual contributions to the team.
The Raiders entered this season riding an eight-game winning streak over the Broncos. Denver ended its losing streak to the Raiders in emphatic fashion in a 34-18 victory in Week 5, and bettors are all over the Broncos to win and cover again in Sunday’s AFC West rematch at Allegiant Stadium. Denver is a consensus 6-point favorite after the look-ahead line was 3 at the Westgate SuperBook and reopened at 4 after the Broncos blew out the Falcons 38-6 on Sunday and the Raiders lost 34-19 to the Dolphins. “There has been an avalanche of money on the Broncos,” Westgate vice president of race and sports John Murray said. “The most one-way game of the week is Denver. The Raiders are going to be our biggest sweat. Denver is a hot team right now. They’re playing some really good football, and everybody is going to bet on the Broncos.” The action also has been one-sided in favor of the Broncos at Station Sports, where 82 percent of the tickets are on Denver. “That’s really surprising, but the Raiders are just a team right now trending the wrong way, though they’ve had a history of success against the Broncos in recent years,” Red Rock Resort sportsbook director Chuck Esposito said. “We’re clearly going to be Raiders fans.” The consensus total is 41, with the number at 411⁄2 at Circa Sports. The Raiders are on a 7-2 over run, and the Broncos are on a 5-2 over run. The Raiders (2-8, 4-6 ATS) are tied for the NFL’s second-worst record behind the Jaguars (2-9) and have the league’s longest losing streak at six games. Denver (6-5, 8-3 ATS) is one of the NFL’s biggest surprises. It already has topped its season win total of 51⁄2 and is tied for the second-best spread record in the league behind the Lions (8-2 ATS). Broncos rookie quarterback Bo Nix has thrown for 14 touchdowns and only two interceptions in his last nine games. The former Oregon star is the +325 second choice at Circa to win the NFL’s Offensive Rookie of the Year award behind Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels, the heavy -510 favorite. “Bo Nix has played great, they’re really good defensively, they’ve got a good offensive line and a coach (Sean Payton) that has a quarterback very similar to what he had (in New Orleans) in Drew Brees,” Esposito said. “These teams are definitely trending in opposite directions.” Best bets Professional sports bettor Jeff Whitelaw bet on the Broncos at -4 on Monday before the line shot up Wednesday to 6. “I don’t really see anything at this number (-6). This is about what I made it,” he said. “These teams are going in different directions. Denver is playing really well, and their defense is very, very good. The Raiders just seem to be in total disarray.” Three-time Review-Journal NFL Challenge champion Doug Fitz, 32-23 ATS in the contest this season, made the Raiders +6 his best bet this week. “The Raiders showed some signs of life on offense in offensive coordinator Scott Turner’s first game replacing Luke Getsy,” said Fitz (Systemplays.com). “The Broncos are obviously the better team, but this is a home division game for the Raiders. “I think the Raiders keep this close, and I expect a bit of a letdown from the Broncos after their dominant performance last week against a good Falcons’ team.” Contact reporter Todd Dewey at tdewey@reviewjournal.com. Follow @tdewey33 on X. Player to score first touchdown At Caesars Sportsbook Up to 30-1 Javonte Williams 6-1 Courtland Sutton 7-1 Brock Bowers 11-1 Jakobi Meyers 11-1 Devaughn Vele 12-1 Audric Estime 12-1 Bo Nix 13-1 Tre Tucker 14-1 Jaleel McLaughlin 17-1 Marvin Mims, Jr. 18-1 Lil'Jordan Humphrey 18-1 Troy Franklin 19-1 Adam Trautman 21-1 DJ Turner 22-1 Gardner Minshew 30-1
KUWAIT CITY — The 45th Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Summit will take place in Kuwait on Sunday, bringing together leaders and representatives from member states to discuss pressing regional and international issues. The summit, hosted at Bayan Palace, aims to bolster sustainable development, regional security, and stability. The summit will focus on a range of critical issues, including regional security, economic integration, and responses to mounting regional and international challenges. Leaders are expected to deliberate on enhancing the GCC joint market, fostering technology cooperation, advancing infrastructural linkages, and addressing political files such as Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. Established in 1981, the GCC includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman, with an annual goal of strengthening cooperation across economic, political, and security domains. Experts and officials have highlighted the significance of the summit, particularly during a period of heightened regional and international instability. The GCC leaders are expected to reiterate their commitment to unity and collaboration, ensuring that the council continues to play a central role in addressing the region’s evolving challenges while fostering stability and prosperity for member states. — KUNA < Previous Page Next Page >Amidst the frantic efforts to secure provisions, there were also discussions and rumors circulating within the community about the possibility of using fishing boats as a means of escape. The idea of sailing away from the conflict zone via the Mediterranean Sea was seen as a desperate but potentially viable option for those seeking to avoid the dangers of staying in the war-torn region.
Titans S Julius Wood suspended 6 games for PEDs
Shares of MRS Oil Nigeria Plc (CHEVRON) have increased by over 36% month-to-date on the Nigerian stock exchange, bringing its year-to-date performance to 71.42%. On October 29, the company released its third-quarter earnings report, showing a pre-tax profit of N6.2 billion—an increase of 108.9% from N3 billion in 2023. Revenue rose by 141.90% to N169.5 billion, contributing to a year-to-date total of N248.7 billion, with sales of Premium Motor Spirit representing over 85% of the revenue. Related Stories Weekly Market Wrap: Nigerian stock market soars 1.76% as All-Share surpasses N61 trillion, MRS Oil and ETERNA PLC lead gains Nigerian All-Share shatters 100,000 barrier as MRS (Chevron) and WAPIC top gainers Following the earnings announcement, the stock experienced a period of stagnation throughout November, with little notable price movement. However, on December 12, bullish activity resumed, leading to four consecutive days of gains and positioning MRS Oil Nigeria Plc among the top advancers on the Nigerian Exchange for the third week of December. Market trend MRS Oil began 2024 on a positive note, continuing the momentum from the previous year. The stock opened in January at N105 per share and rose to N126, with a trading volume of 2 million shares. February saw further gains, closing at N135 as it entered the N130 range. However, from March to November, the stock experienced limited price movement, reflecting decreased market activity in the second and third quarters. In mid-December, the stock gained traction again, closing strongly for four consecutive days, which resulted in a month-to-date trading volume of 4.1 million shares as of December 20, 2024. Several key factors likely contributed to the bullish price movements of MRS Oil in late 2024. Notably, the release of the earnings report on October 29 was likely a catalyst, revealing a pre-tax profit of N6.2 billion—a remarkable 108.9% increase from N3 billion in 2023. This impressive financial performance was driven by a 141.90% growth in revenue for the quarter, consisting mainly of Premium Motor Spirit sales, which accounted for 85% of the total nine-month revenue of N248.7 billion. Moreover, the recent successful completion of the Federal Government’s inaugural oil bid under the Petroleum Industry Act 2021 further bolstered the company’s prospects. MRS Oil, alongside other major players like TotalEnergies and Sifax, secured Petroleum Prospecting Licenses, outbidding NNPC. These licenses empower the company to explore, develop, and extract hydrocarbons from both onshore and deep offshore oil blocks, likely contributing to the surge in its stock price during the latter part of Q4. MRS Oil recently slashed the pump price of petrol to N935 in its outlets in Lagos, as against the N1,000 sold in early December.In conclusion, the ESG "Chase Green Movement" spearheaded by Ricoh China, PConline, and Rock Park represents a bold and innovative approach to promoting sustainability, social responsibility, and ethical governance in the workplace. By embracing hybrid offices as a new trend and leveraging technology, innovation, and collaboration, participants in the movement are driving positive change and making a lasting impact on the environment and society. As the movement gains momentum, it is inspiring others to join the journey towards a greener, more sustainable future.Bengaluru: Success in research requires a combination of motivation, resilience and access to proper infrastructure, renowned Indian-American experimental physicist Chandrashekhar Joshi told TOI in an exclusive interview. Joshi, who currently works at University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA ), is on a short visit to India. Known for his pioneering work in plasma-based particle acceleration techniques for which he won the 2006 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics and the 2023 Hannes Alfvén Prize with two other researchers, Joshi discussed how young scientists must cultivate a deep passion for their work, as this will sustain them through inevitable challenges and failures, and that emerging technologies like AI and quantum computing are poised to revolutionise virtually every scientific discipline. Excerpts: What challenges do students from developing countries face? Students from developing nations, including India, face several obstacles, ranging from financial constraints to societal and cultural expectations. Many families in these regions view education as a means to secure stable, well-paying jobs, often sidelining fields like research and fundamental sciences in favour of more "practical" career options. This societal pressure can deter young minds from pursuing their genuine interests, especially in less conventional fields like plasma physics. Additionally, while language proficiency in English gives Indian students an advantage, exposure to diverse career paths and cutting-edge research remains limited. Access to high-quality mentorship and advanced infrastructure is another significant barrier. Govts and institutions must address these challenges by offering more scholarships, research grants, and platforms for global exposure. Programmes that combine mentorship with hands-on research experience, both domestically and internationally, can bridge these gaps and enable students to realise their full potential. How important is international collaboration in research? It's indispensable, as breakthroughs often come from diverse ideas and methodologies. India's English-speaking population and young researchers are major advantages. Projects like ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) demonstrate successful collaboration possibilities. How will AI and quantum computing impact plasma physics research? These technologies will revolutionise the field by enabling complex simulations, data analysis and modelling. They'll accelerate scientific discovery, particularly in areas like fusion reactor plasma confinement, potentially leading to breakthroughs in energy production and materials science. Stay updated with the latest news on Times of India . Don't miss daily games like Crossword , Sudoku , and Mini Crossword .
GIK Institute arranges alumni reunion SWABI: The Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (GIK) hosted its alumni reunion, celebrating its former students as its ambassadors.The event brought together alumni, faculty, and officials to reminisce and honour the institute’s legacy. The first batch of GIK students joined in September 1993, a moment witnessed by the late Ghulam Ishaq Khan, Pakistan’s former president and founder of the institute, alongside renowned nuclear scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan and other distinguished leaders. Held in the auditorium, the colourful gathering featured Engr. Salim Saifullah Khan, President of SOPREST (GIK’s parent body), Acting Rector Prof Dr Syed Muhammad Hasan Zaidi, Pro-Rector Admin and Finance Sardar Aminullah Khan, faculty, and students. Attendees enjoyed musical performances, panel discussions, and a funfair, creating a nostalgic atmosphere. The GIK Institute Alumni Association (GIKIAA), with over 6,000 members in 70 countries, highlighted its role in supporting students, awarding Rs. 115 million in scholarships over the past three years. Engr Salim Saifullah Khan emphasized the importance of alumni in enhancing higher education, pledging continued support.Prof Zaidi lauded the achievements of GIK alumni, who have excelled globally as CEOs, engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. “You have proven that Pakistan has no talent shortage,” he said.
Real Madrid's acquisition of the €120 million superstar was no small feat, with intense competition from rival clubs vying for his signature. However, in the end, it was the allure of wearing the famous white jersey and playing in front of the passionate fans at the Santiago Bernabéu that convinced him to choose Real Madrid as the next step in his career. His signing represents a statement of intent from the club and showcases their ambition to continue competing at the highest level.