UCLA has a $10B endowment. I find it bollocks that they and these other academic institutions can't just dip into that for their researchers to (hopefully) ride out the current funding situation at a minimum.
I don't think they officially support leasing to individuals directly, but it's very easy to setup a leasing/biz account with them as a business. I think any Apple store has a POC there that can help / see: https://www.apple.com/shop/finance/business-financing
You can very easily setup an LLC and obtain an EIN. It's been a minute since I've setup an Apple financing account, so I don't recall what they require on the finance side. I'm certain they will want to see some sort of financial proof, but I doubt they will care much if you're not a proper operating biz. I'm not sure if proof of finances will need to be linked to a banking account under the business name, but if so, that's easy enough to setup with an ebank once you have an EIN.
All of that being said, the tradeoff will be if you're willing to deal with the potential state/federal tax and biz reporting requirements of having the business. It's not hard esp if it's not a real active business, but just another thing to deal with.
Also speaking from similiar experience, ^^^ this is the best combo. Where both parties have a certain degree of humility and self-awareness and understand how their skills, personalities, and personal circumstances (ability to travel, life stage, etc.) compliment one another.
I like the idea as someone working in a regulated environment. We just paid ~$10k to a counsel to help craft our documents, but they are highly bespoke to our needs.
That being said, I don't know how much I'd trust the results without having a human legal review in the loop. Perhaps that could be an up-charge/add-on: partner with a few firm/counsel that has deep experience different niche regulated areas (e.g. FDA), and then say e.g. for an add'l $500, get a stamp of approval on the document from a counsel who is well-versed in the space.
They were one of the earliest to adopt bitcoin and monero payments--if they didn't convert all those payments immediately to cash, they're probably sitting pretty right now.
Even if it seems like everyone is saying this, it's just statistically not true / in the aggregate, at least in the context of direct online ads. Otherwise the direct ad industry would be totally dead (ad performance is measured to death by companies).
Conversion (getting someone to purchase) at scale with ads is not so simple as person sees ad, clicks, and buys. There are many steps along the funnel and sometimes ads can be used in concert with other channels (influencer content, sponsored news articles, etc). Within direct ads you typically have multiple steps depending on how cold or warm (e.g. have they seen or interacted with your content previously) the lead is when viewing the ad and you tailor the ad content accordingly to try to keep pushing the person down the funnel.
Generally if you know your customer persona well and have good so-called product-market-fit, then (1) you will be able to build a funnel that works at scale. So then (2) the question is does the cost to convert a customer / CAC fit within the profit margin, which is much more difficult to unpack.
However, it's worth keeping in mind that digital ad costs are essentially invented by the ad platform. There is a market-type of force. If digital ads become less effective and the CAC goes too high across an industry/sector, the platform may be forced to reduce the cost to deliver ads if the channel just doesn't make enough financial sense for enough businesses.
All this is to say, the system does/can work. Tends to work better for large established companies or startups with lots of funding. In general, not a suggested approach as a first channel for a small startup/small business. Building up effective funnels is incredibly expensive and takes a lot of time in my depressing personal experience.
Yeah this is a weird one where their m.o. on privacy/security are at odds with their first amendment side of things...sounds like the latter won out. I also disagree with them on this. This isn't something like net neutrality. It's one of many privately-owned social media platforms and one such with deeply privacy-invasive software that has adversarial foreign ties against the US.
I signed up for the hosted version to try things out. Some quick feedback is that the dashboard copy (text) could be crystallized a bit more or provide a hint tooltip to help explain things a bit better.
Some examples:
* "Set up return email to return an email to users who submit your forms." - this is pretty clear what it means, but the phrasing is a bit awkward. -> "Set up automated response email for form submissions"
* "Allowed Domains": allowed for what? Allowed to receive form submissions from?
* When giving numbers (e.g. under API Usage), suggest adding units (e.g. "submissions") to the end.
* "Recipient Email" This seems a bit too ambiguous. suggest something more like ->"Address for receiving form submissions"
I wonder if we will see (or already are/have been seeing) the XR/smart glasses space heat up. Seems eventually like a great way to generate and hoover up massive amounts of fresh training data.
I'm somewhat embarrassed to post this (not being a professional dev by any stretch) and I'm sure there are embarrassing bugs and code hiding in this.
I found that getting up-and-running with Google Appsheet's API in Python was not straightforward from their limited documentation. I suspect Appsheet's demographic is geared less towards professional developers and more towards scrappy individuals in orgs trying to build internal tools (i.e. people like me).
You might wonder: why would anyone use Google Appsheet when all sorts of other great low-code/no-code products exist like Bubble, Xano, Glide, etc. Especially for its database features?
Quite simply: it's by far-and-away a total steal of deal if you're developing any sort of applications where HIPAA matters. I work at a small biotech startup. Other than Google and MSFT offerings, the cost to get a BAA in place is just obscene and total price gauging of the highest order (shout-out to Jotform for actually being reasonably priced in this department). The second you need a BAA, all of these companies say you need to get on their enterprise plan. Many of which start out at $XXXX/year.
It's absolutely insane how far we've come in DIY/Maker capabilities. Short of making your own ICs (thankfully a rapidly developing space), this is an incredible demonstration of what's now achievable by a single person.