Author: azeeadmin

Do you want to purchase a chair for your child? Have you been searching and yet can’t seem to find anything that would perfectly fit your kid’s needs and preferences? Don’t worry! Skyline Furniture offers a wide variety of options that will surely tickle and please your kid.

From bean bags, rockers, rocking chairs, swivel chairs, recliners to even movie theatre seats for kids – Skyline Furniture offers great deals on all of these. However, if your child’s favorite hangout is the dining table with you guys, then you can go ahead and pick up a matching chair that will match their taste.

If you are thinking of a formal dining chair, you should go for a Windsor adjustable height folding stool. Its arms are flared, and it has a mahogany frame that will surely match the rest of your furniture. It is fully upholstered as well as its cushion is padded with foam that has been dacron wrapped to make your child even more comfortable.

In this article, you will learn more about the brand and why it is so popular before we show you the most popular kids’ chairs from Skyline Furniture. Maybe your next chair for kids come from Skyline Furniture?

About Skyline Furniture

Skyline Furniture is one of the top furniture retailers for a reason. They offer a wide variety of styles and price points all in one place. You can find everything from contemporary to casual in wood, leather, fabric, metal and even upholstery there.

You can also find kids’ chairs that will perfectly match your home’s interior. From Windsor, adjustable height folding stool chairs for your formal dining room to rocking chairs, swivel chairs and recliners for relaxing with your little one. If you want a chair that will suit your child’s tastes, Skyline Furniture has got you covered!

Did we mention that they also sell fantastic patio furniture? So if you are looking to spruce up your outdoor area, you should check out their products.

Skyline Furniture has been a trusted brand in the furniture industry for decades, and they continue to serve customers not only with high-quality but also affordable products.

Why Skyline Furniture is So Popular

So what makes Skyline Furniture so popular? Well, for one, they only sell the best. With the many products that they offer, you can be sure that all of them are made with the finest materials and passed thorough quality checks before reaching your home. They make use of cutting edge tools and machines to ensure that their products meet a high standard.

To make things easier for their customers, they have a dedicated team of customer support representatives who answer any questions or concerns. You can give them a call or visit their website (https://skylinefurnituremfg.com/) if you want to know more about their products and services.

The 5 Most Popular Kids’ Chairs from Skyline Furniture

Now let’s go ahead and take a quick look at the most popular kids’ chairs from Skyline Furniture. We will provide you with descriptions, pros, cons, and customer reviews of each one so that you can make an informed decision on which product to pick for your little ones.

1. Skyline Kids Armless Chair

If you want a kids’ armless chair, then this is the best choice you can go for. It has a simple yet contemporary design that will perfectly match your kid’s room or playroom.

The Skyline Kids Armless Chair is engineered wood with a mahogany finish, and PU cushioned seat and backrest. Its padding is fully upholstered with dacron wrapped foam that has been kiln-dried to make it reliable and comfortable.

Its seat is covered with vinyl for easy cleaning, while you can easily wipe down its PU fabric as well. The chair also provides excellent back support thanks to the curved edges of its high-density foam padding. And if you want to keep it from rolling, then you can simply adjust its front casters.

ASIN: B00KFPD5LQ

Buy on Amazon.com

2. Skyline Furniture Kids Chair, Pattern, One size

If you want a chair that’s perfect for your little one, then this is the best choice. It comes with a flat-pack design, so it will be easy to carry and set up. Its seat has a round edge which provides better comfort compared to other chairs out there.

The Skyline Furniture Kids Chair, Pattern, One size is made from solid wood with a maple finish and polyester upholstery. It has a fully padded seat and backrest to provide comfort even when your little one sits on it for an extended period.

It also features rubber caps at the bottom of its legs to prevent it from scratching your floor, while its bentwood design makes it sturdy enough to endure children’s activities without breaking or tipping over.

This kids’ chair is the perfect choice for your playroom, reading nook or even your child’s bedroom. It can easily match any colour scheme you have at home, and it will make a great addition to different areas of your house where you want to sit down with your little one.

If you want a stylish kids’ chair that will last for years, this is the perfect pick. It has a solid build, and it comes with a 4-year warranty from the manufacturer and complimentary white glove delivery.

ASIN: B079Z88M6S

Buy on Amazon.com

3. Skyline Furniture Kids Chair, Pink, One size

This is the perfect kids’ chair if you want something that can stand up to your child’s rough and tough playtime. It’s made from solid wood and polyester fabric so it will definitely last for years.

Its seat and backrest are fully padded with dacron wrapped foam which provides comfort even when your little one spends countless hours sitting on it while drawing and reading.

The Skyline Furniture Kids Chair, Pink, One size has a fully upholstered seat and backrest that is perfect for keeping your kid comfortable and happy. It also features 4 caster wheels to prevent it from tipping over while its bentwood legs provide better stability to the whole chair.

Its seat and backrest are upholstered with polyester fabric that is easy to clean. You can simply wipe it down when your little one spills something on it or spills food and drinks on the chair. It’s best used in playrooms, but you can place it anywhere in the house such as your child’s bedroom and living room.

It’s perfect for your daughter’s bedroom or playroom because it comes in different colors; you can pick the pink one, purple one or even the green one depending on their room décor. Its simple design makes it great for all kids’ rooms and playrooms, while its solid build makes it a reliable addition that will last for years.

This kids’ chair is easy to move around because it has smooth-rolling casters, and you can also adjust its height when your kid grows taller. It’s a great addition for your playroom, bedroom or even your living room where you want to spend quality time with your child playing board games and watching movies together.

ASIN: B079Z3M2KK

Buy on Amazon.com

4. Skyline Kids Armless Chair, Broadway Purple

This is the best kids’ furniture that you will find out there because it’s made from solid wood and high-density foam for better comfort. And not only that, but your little one will love this chair, even more, thanks to its fun design. You can choose between different colors because Skyline Furniture Kids Armless Chair, Broadway Purple, One size is available in purple, pink and green.

It comes with a fully upholstered seat and backrest that is padded with dacron wrapped foam for superior comfort. What’s more, it’s built with bentwood legs to make the whole chair sturdier while its casters provide ease of movement around your home.

This kids’ armchair is a stylish addition for your child’s bedroom or playroom because of its cool design. It won’t take up too much space in the room and your little one will love playing on it while eating snacks with their friends.

It’s going to be a great addition to any home with kids as it cleans easily just by wiping it down. And when you’re not using it, simply fold the entire chair and store it until the next time you need it.

Its solid construction will ensure that your kid’s chair will last for years, while its simple design makes it perfect for any room in your house – from bedrooms to playrooms and even living rooms. Your kid will appreciate this great chair even more once they find out that you got it for them as a surprise.

You can easily keep it clean because of its fully upholstered seat and backrest that only requires cleaning with a damp cloth if your little one spills something on it or just gets their snack all over the place.

ASIN: B00KFPD6EM

Buy on Amazon.com

5. Skyline Kids Tub Chair, Premier Lilac

If you’re looking for a kids’ armchair that will offer maximum comfort, then the Skyline Kids Tub Chair, Premier Lilac, is a great choice. It’s upholstered in plush white fabric, and its seat is filled with high-density foam to provide your kid with extra comfort while sitting on it.

It has been built from solid wood to ensure that it will last for years while its bentwood legs provide stability and support.

This kids’ tub chair is an excellent addition to your little one’s bedroom or playroom because of its vibrant, fun design. They’ll love having their favorite TV show playing in the background while relaxing on this armchair.

It’s the perfect place for your kid to enjoy their snacks and drinks with friends because it has smooth-rolling casters that make this armchair easy to move around. You can also adjust its height depending on your child’s size.

Made from solid wood, you can rest assured that the Skyline Kids Tub Chair, Premier Lilac, is an excellent addition to your child’s playroom.

It doesn’t take up too much space in the room, so you can easily keep it there even if you have limited floor space, but its wheels will allow you to move it around when needed. You can also fold the chair flat when you’re not using it and just keep it in a corner until the next time you need to entertain your little one.

It has been built with bentwood legs to ensure that this kids’ armchair is sturdy even if your child jumps on it while playing. Its high-density foam provides extra comfort for your kid.

ASIN: B00KFPD4AI

Buy on Amazon.com

The post Skyline Furniture: Kids’ Chairs That You Will Love appeared first on Comfy Bummy.

Payments made a huge shift to digital platforms during the Covid-19 pandemic — purchasing moved online for many consumers and businesses; and a large proportion of those continuing to buy and sell in-person went cash-free. Today a startup that has been focusing on one specific aspect of payments — recurring billing — is announcing a round of funding to capitalize on that growth with expansion of its own. Billogram, which has built a platform for third parties to build and handle any kind of recurring payments (not one-off purchases), has closed a round of $45 million.

The funding is coming from a single investor, Partech, and will be used to help the Stockholm-based startup expand from its current base in Sweden to six more markets, Jonas Suijkerbuijk, Billogram’s CEO and founder, said in an interview, to cover more of Germany (where it’s already active now), Norway, Finland, Ireland, France, Spain, and Italy.

The company got its start working with SMBs in 2011 but pivoted some years later to working with larger enterprises, which make up the majority of its business today. Suijkerbuijk said that in 2020, signed deals went up by 300%, and the first half of 2021 grew 50% more on top of that. Its users include utilities like Skanska Energi and broadband company Ownit, and others like remote healthcare company Kry, businesses that take invoice and take monthly payments from their customers.

While there has been a lot of attention around how companies like Apple and Google are handling subscriptions and payments in apps, what Billogram focuses on is a different beast, and much more complex: it’s more integrated into the business providing services, and it may involve different services, and the fees can vary over every billing period. It’s for this reason that, in fact, even big companies in the realm of digital payments, like Stripe, which might even already have products that can help manage subscriptions on their platforms, partner with companies like Billogram to build the experiences to manage their more involved kinds of payment services.

I should point out here that Suijkerbuijk told me that Stripe recently became a partner of Billograms, which is very interesting… but he also added that a number of the big payments companies have talked to Billogram. He also confirmed that currently Stripe is not an investor in the company. “We have a very good relationship,” he said.

It’s not surprising to see Stripe and others wanting to more in the area of more complex, recurring billing services. Researchers estimate that the market size (revenues and services) for subscription and recurring billing will be close to $6 billion this year, with that number ballooning to well over $10 billion by 2025. And indeed, the effort to make a payment or any kind of transaction will continue to be a point of friction in the world of commerce, so any kinds of systems that bring technology to bear to make that easier and something that consumers or businesses will do without thinking about it, will be valuable, and will likely grow in dominance. (It’s why the more basic subscription services, such as Prime membership or a Netflix subscription, or a cloud storage account, are such winners.)

Within that very big pie, Suijkerbuijk noted that rather than the Apples and Googles of the world, the kinds of businesses that Billogram currently competes against are those that are addressing the same thornier end of the payments spectrum that Billogram is. These include a wide swathe of incumbent companies that do a lot of their business in areas like debt collection, and other specialists like Scaleworks-backed Chargify — which itself got a big investment injection earlier this year from Battery Ventures, which put $150 million into both it and another billing provider, SaaSOptics, in April.

The former group of competitors are not currently a threat to Billogram, he added.

“Debt collecting agencies are big on invoicing, but no one — not their customers, nor their customers’ customers — loves them, so they are great competitors to have,” Suijkerbuijk joked.

This also means that Billogram is not likely to move into debt collection itself as it continues to expand. Instead, he said, the focus will be on building out more tools to make the invoicing and payments experience better and less painful to customers. That will likely include more moves into customer service and generally improving the overall billing experience — something we have seen become a bigger area also during the pandemic, as companies realized that they needed to address non-payments in a different way from how their used to, given world events and the impact they were having on individuals.

“We are excited to partner with Jonas and the team at Billogram.” says Omri Benayoun, General Partner at Partech, in a statement. “Having spotted a gap in the market, they have quietly built the most advanced platform for large B2C enterprises looking to integrate billing, payment, and collection in one single solution. In our discussion with leading utilities, telecom, e-health, and all other clients across Europe, we realized how valuable Billogram was for them in order to engage with their end-users through a top-notch billing and payment experience. The outstanding commercial traction demonstrated by Billogram has further cemented our conviction, and we can’t wait to support the team in bringing their solution to many more customers in Europe and beyond!”

Reading chairs are wonderful pieces of furniture that provide a special place for reading, watching TV, playing games and much more. When your child grows older they will use it as a desk chair or lounge chair in their room. When they are little, the best way to make them enjoy reading is by making them comfortable with a cosy spot where they can enjoy their book in peace.

Reading chairs are great for the bedroom or living room, so you can use them in different areas of your house. Some children prefer to be enclosed when they read and others like to sit up high with enough space around them. The perfect chair will help your child enjoy reading more easily and you can find many types that are suitable for several years of use.

Although there are many types of reading chairs available, like bean bag chairs, swings and hammocks, we will focus on more traditional models made to fit all rooms.

We have put together a list of the 8 most comfortable and nice-looking reading chairs out there to help you decide on the best kids’ reading chair for your family.

1. KidKraft Mid-Century Kid Upholstered Reading Chair & Ottoman with Storage

This is a stylish reading chair with an armrest, so your kid can cuddle up in it and enjoy their book. The bright fabric provides a great contrast with the dark wood base and it has an ottoman for extra comfort.

It is perfect to use in any room of the house because of its classic style and will work in the living room, bedroom or study. The KidKraft Mid-Century Kid Upholstered Reading Chair is made of sturdy materials to last for years and the cushions are removable so you can wash them in your washing machine at home.

It has a storage compartment with locks so it doesn’t pop open when your child leans back on it.

ASIN: B07ZV51MMM

Buy on Amazon.com

2. Melissa & Doug Denim Fabric Child’s Armchair

Melissa & Doug is a popular brand in the furniture industry and this armchair for kids is no exception when it comes to quality. It has been designed to provide comfort with its soft and durable denim fabric and rounded edges on the arms of the chair.

The foam fill ensures that your kid will be comfortable while reading or listening to stories and it comes with a slipcover for easy cleaning.

The kid’s armchair is great to use in the bedroom or playroom and has an average weight of 15 pounds, so it isn’t easily tipped over by kids. The best thing about the Melissa & Doug Denim Fabric Child’s Armchair is that it can be used by several kids in the same family, so everyone can enjoy it.

ASIN: B071H85C5F

Buy on Amazon.com

3. Keet Roundy Children’s Chair Microsuede

The Keet Roundy Children’s Chair is the perfect reading chair for both girls and boys. It has a mesh back and seat covered with soft microsuede fabrics to ensure your little one’s comfort, while the armrest provides additional support when they need it most.

It is very easy to clean thanks to its removable slipcover and it comes in 9 different colors, so you can choose the one that matches your house decor.

The Keet Roundy Children’s Chair is a simple model with rounded edges to provide safety for your kid’s arms, but it has some decorative stitching on the back for extra style. Depending on the age of your child, this chair can be used as a desk chair or lounge chair and it is great for kids aged 2 to 8.

ASIN: B07K57DH67

Buy on Amazon.com

4. Single Linen Fabric Kids Armchair, Toddler Sofa and Couch with Wooden Legs

This armchair for kids is both stylish and comfortable, so your little one will love it. It has a straight back with soft cushions to provide support when they read or play games on their tablet.

The wooden legs of the chair are great for durability and stability while the removable slipcover can be used in the washing machine at home to keep it clean.

The Single Linen Fabric Kids Armchair, Sofa and Couch is a great choice for the living room because of its neutral style and it can be used by kids aged 2 to 8 years. It won’t take much space in your house as well, because it has a slim profile that measures only 21 inches wide.

ASIN: B07HRL95CY

Buy on Amazon.com

5. THE CREW FURNITURE Traditional Kids Chair, Small

This is a traditional reading chair for kids made of hardwood with a comfortable upholstered seat and backrest. The wooden frame ensures that the chair will be sturdy enough to hold your little one, while the dark espresso finish gives it style.

It has an average weight of 13 pounds so it won’t tip over easily and comes fully assembled, so you can place it in your kid’s bedroom or playroom right away.

The cushion is removable and machine washable for convenience and the synthetic leather fabric doesn’t stain as easy as real leather does. The legs of this kids armchair are also protected with non-marking caps to avoid scratches on the floor.

ASIN: B006CRE9PW

Buy on Amazon.com

6. Amazon Basics Swivel Foam Lounge Chair

This kids’ armchair is suitable for teenagers and it has a stylish design that will surely impress your guests.

It can swivel to 360 degrees as well as recline and the arms of the chair are at just the right height for your kid’s comfort.

The Amazon Basics Swivel Foam Lounge Chair has a weight capacity of 250 pounds and it has been tested to ensure that it doesn’t tip over easily, so your kid’s safety is guaranteed.

The armchair can be used as a lounge chair or reading chair and the seat features extra padding for comfort. It comes with synthetic leather upholstery that is easy to clean and this kids’ armchair has an average weight of 18 pounds.

ASIN: B07Q2PGH2P

Buy on Amazon.com

7. HollyHOME Modern Fabric Lazy Chair

If you’re looking for a nice reading chair for teenagers, the HollyHOME Modern Fabric Lazy Chair is a great choice.

It has an ergonomic design with a seat shape that provides support to your kid’s lower back and it is very easy to assemble without tools.

The armchair can swivel 360 degrees as well as recline and it has a weight capacity of 100 pounds.

The armchair itself weighs only 15 pounds and it comes with durable synthetic leather upholstery that is easy to wipe clean. The wide base makes sure that your kid’s feet won’t touch the floor when they relax, but the back of this kids’ chair isn’t high enough for lazing around.

ASIN: B07SGDH2Z6

Buy on Amazon.com

8. Delta Children Chelsea Kids Upholstered Chair with Cup Holder

If you need a simple and functional kids’ armchair for your living room, the Delta Children Chelsea Kids Upholstered Chair with Cup Holder is a great choice.

This chair can hold up to 110 pounds of weight and it has an attached cup holder as well as a padded seat and backrest for extra comfort. The dark grey color of the chair is stylish and it will match any decor.

The Delta Children Chelsea Kids Upholstered Chair has a narrow profile that takes little space in your living room, while the armrests can be adjusted so your kid’s arms won’t get tired. The slipcover of this kids’ lounge chair for the bedroom or playroom can also be removed and cleaned in the washing machine.

ASIN: B07JV8DVGF

Buy on Amazon.com

Summary

I am sure that your kid will love to read or play with Lego on any of these comfy kids’ armchairs! This 8 reading chairs for kids has a nice design and it suits the bedroom, living room as well as other spaces in your home like the family room. They can be swivelled, reclined and adjusted so they will be pretty comfortable for your kids. The foam lounge chair is also easy to clean and dust-proof!

The post 8 Reading Chairs Your Kids Will Love appeared first on Comfy Bummy.

Health insurance is the kind of thing people usually only think about only when they need it. Otherwise, their policies are just paperwork in their files or cards in their wallet. Indonesian insurtech Rey Assurance is taking a new approach. Once someone becomes a member, they also get access to a platform of health services, including AI-based self-assessment tools, 24/7 telemedicine consultations for no added fee and pharmacy deliveries. The startup is launching out of stealth today, having already raised $1 million in pre-seed funding from the Trans-Pacific Technology Fund (TPTF). 

Rey was founded this year by Evan Tanotogono, former head of digital channel at Sequis, one of Indonesia largest insurers, and Bobby Siagian, who held lead engineering roles at companies including Tokopedia and Sea Group. They are joined by insurance industry veteran David Nugrho as their chief business officer. 

They created Rey to address the low penetration of life and health insurance in Indonesia. “When you look at the root causes and pain points, you are looking at problems that are systemic here,” Tanotogono said. These include low awareness, expensive distribution channels like agents and telemarketing, high premiums and complicated policies.

“People feel like the product is really complex, the process is difficult and they don’t get the best value for the money. It’s been that way for many, many years,” he told TechCrunch. “We believe that we cannot just go into the market and digitize part of the value chain.”

Plans start from about $4 USD per month and are available for individual or groups, like families, and small businesses. Rey’s wellness ecosystem was created to give customers more value for their money, and help differentiate it from other companies in Indonesia’s growing insurtech industry. Some other startups that have recently raised funding include Lifepal, PasarPolis and Qoala.

“Right now, if you look at insurance in Indonesia, if the premium is high, maybe 80% or 90% of that is used for the distribution channel. Now if we optimize something for digital distribution, then we can reduce the price and use the rest for the wellness features,” Tanotogono added. 

TPTF managing partner Glenn Kline told TechCrunch that Rey’s founding team was “really the driver” for its investment. “We felt these people really know where the pain points are and they understand clearly how not to try to change the legacy system, but create a whole new platform from the very beginning, where the core value proposition is an integrated solution that is simple and hassle-free.” 

Instead of doing the underwriting themselves, Rey works with insurance partners to design proprietary policies. The goal is to have an onboarding process that is completely online and only takes about five minutes, and a mostly cashless claim and reimbursement system through Rey’s payment cards. If its payment card can’t be used at healthcare provider, claims can be submitted by uploading receipt photos to the app. 

Tanotogono said this is much faster than traditional insurance providers, which can take up to 14 working days to reimburse a claim, and made possible with Rey’s proprietary claim adjudication technology. 

Rey’s wellness ecosystem currently covers primary care services, including chats and video calls with medical providers. In the future, it plans to add specialists to the platforms.

Customers can also link their health wearables for incentives. For example, if they hit certain step or activity goals, they get rewards like discounts or shopping vouchers. Rey’s long-term plan is to link wearables more deeply to its insurance policies, using data to personalize policies and premiums.

Southeast Asia’s funding boom is set to continue, with Jungle Ventures announcing today the $225 million first close of its fourth fund. Fund IV started raising in mid-May and is targeting a total of $350 million.

The majority of its limited partners are returning from previous funds, and include Temasek Holdings, IFC (which put $25 million in Fund IV), DEG and Asian and global family offices. The firm says this makes Fund IV the largest fund across all early-stage funds in Southeast Asia this year.

Founded in 2012, Jungle Ventures launched with a $10 million debut fund. Then in 2016, it announced a $100 million second fund, followed in 2019 by its $240 million third fund.

Fund IV fits in with Jungle Ventures’ pace of raising a new fund every 2.5 to 3 years, founding partner Amit Anand told TechCrunch. It also happens to come at a time when the region is getting more attention—and capital.

“If you look at Southeast Asia, where we are today, the ecosystem has been in the works for a long time. We started the journey back in 2012. We’re one of the oldest funds in the region and we haven’t seen as good a time as today to be in the tech ecosystem in Southeast Asia,” he said.

“Opportunity and talent were always obvious in the region, and I think capital has followed. But the recent exit announcements, whether acquisitions or the domestic and global IPOs, in many ways has completed the picture of Southeast Asia and made it a lot more attractive to everyone,” Anand added.

Jungle Ventures takes a concentrated approach and tends to invest in about 12 to 13 companies per fund. It’s relatively stage-agnostic, writing seed to Series B checks and builds long-term partnerships with many of its investments. The firm has invested in every round of several companies, including buy now, pay later startup Kredivo.

This approach has worked out well, said Anand. Companies from its 2016 Fund II include unicorns FinAccel and Moglist, and it is paying about 7x on the fund today. “A similar pattern is emerging out of the 2019 vintage,” he added, which includes investments like beauty e-commerce platform Sociolla and KiotVet, the largest point-of-sale and store management system for small retailers in Vietnam.

Fund IV will write checks ranging from about $1 million, to $15 million for Series B funds, and participate in follow-on rounds, too.

“We typically invest in a company when it has a little bit of a product-market fit in its home market, and then we can help regionalize the business,” Anand said. “This could be at seed, it could be A, it could be at B, it doesn’t matter to us.”

Jungle Ventures’ limited partners also do a significant amount of co-investments; in the last three to four years, LPs have invested close to $400 million in its portfolio startups.

In terms of sectors, Anand is particularly excited about social commerce. “I think social commerce is going to eclipse e-commerce by a huge margin in a market like Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is not just a story about the metro cities, it’s a story about multiple Tier 2, Tier 3 cities across different islands, different geographies. It’s also a geography where the social fabric is deeply engrained within communities.”

Jungle Ventures’ social commerce investments include Evermos, which sells halal and Sharia-compliant goods through agents to their communities.

The firm focuses primarily on Southeast Asia, but it also makes investments in India.

“The cross pollination of talent and ideas, learning and capital between Southeast Asia and India is very strong,” Anand said. “Southeast Asia, even though the ecosystem is growing a lot, the tech talent here in the region is still emerging, whereas India is a great source of tech talent, and we’ve enabled a lot of our portfolio companies to leverage that by opening up tech hubs in India.”

He added that “the focus for Indian investments is to help them expand to Southeast Asia as well and capture this opportunity, too.” One example from Jungle Ventures’ portfolio is interior design platform Livspace, which was founded in India, expanded in Singapore and will enter other Southeast Asia markets.

Olympus said in a brief statement Sunday that it is “currently investigating a potential cybersecurity incident” affecting its European, Middle East and Africa computer network.

“Upon detection of suspicious activity, we immediately mobilized a specialized response team including forensics experts, and we are currently working with the highest priority to resolve this issue. As part of the investigation, we have suspended data transfers in the affected systems and have informed the relevant external partners,” the statement said.

According to a person with knowledge of the incident, Olympus is recovering from a ransomware attack that began in the early morning of September 8.

A ransom note left behind on infected computers claimed to be from the BlackMatter ransomware group. “Your network is encrypted, and not currently operational,” it reads. “If you pay, we will provide you the programs for decryption.” The ransom note also included a web address to a site accessible only through the Tor Browser that’s known to be used by BlackMatter to communicate with its victims.

Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at Emsisoft, told TechCrunch that the site in the ransom note is associated with the BlackMatter group.

BlackMatter is a ransomware-as-a-service group that was founded as a successor several ransomware groups, including DarkSide, which recently bounced from the criminal world after the high-profile ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, and REvil, which went silent for months after the Kaseya attack flooded hundreds of companies with ransomware. Both attacks caught the attention of the U.S. government, which promised to take action if critical infrastructure was hit again.

Groups like BlackMatter rent access to their infrastructure, which affiliates use to launch attacks, while BlackMatter takes a cut of whatever ransoms are paid. Emsisoft has also found technical links and code overlaps between Darkside and BlackMatter.

Since the group emerged in June, Emsisoft has recorded more than 40 ransomware attacks attributed to BlackMatter, but that the total number of victims is likely to be significantly higher.

Ransomware groups like BlackMatter typically steal data from a company’s network before encrypting it, and later threaten to publish the files online if the ransom to decrypt the files is not paid. Another site associated with BlackMatter, which the group uses to publicize its victims and touts stolen data, did not have an entry for Olympus at the time of publication.

It’s not known if Olympus paid the ransom, or what amount was demanded by the ransomware group.

Japan-headquartered Olympus manufactures optical and digital reprography technology for the medical and life sciences industries. Until recently, the company built digital cameras and other electronics until it sold its struggling camera division in January.

Olympus said it was “currently working to determine the extent of the issue and will continue to provide updates as new information becomes available.”

Christian Pott, a spokesperson for Olympus, did not respond to emails and text messages requesting comment.

If Gutenberg were alive today, he’d be a very busy angel investor.

With book sales booming during the COVID-19 lockdowns last year, the humble written word has suddenly drawn the limelight from VCs and founders. We’ve seen a whole cavalcade of new products and fundings, including algorithmic recommendation engine BingeBooks, book club startups like Literati and the aptly named BookClub, as well as streaming service Litnerd. There have also been exits and potential exits for Glose, LitCharts and Epic.

But the one company that has captured the imagination of a lot of readers has been Bookshop.org, which has become the go-to platform for independent local bookstores to build an online storefront and compete with Amazon’s juggernaut. The company, which debuted just as the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading in January 2020, rapidly garnered headlines and profiles of its founder Andy Hunter, an industrious publisher with a deep love for the reading ecosystem.

After a year and a half, how is it all holding up? The good news for the company is that even as customers are returning to retail including bookstores, Bookshop hasn’t seen a downturn. Hunter said that August sales this year were 10% higher than July’s, and that the company is on track to do about as many sales in 2021 as in 2020. He contextualized those figures by pointing out that in May, bookstore sales increased 130% year over year. “That means our sales are additive,” he said.

Bookshop now hosts 1,100 stores on its platform, and it has more than 30,000 affiliates who curate book recommendations. Those lists have become central to Bookshop’s offering. “You get all these recommendation lists from not just bookstores, but also literary magazines, literary organizations, book lovers, and librarians,” Hunter said.

Bookshop, which is a public-benefit corporation, earns money as all ecommerce businesses do, by moving inventory. But what differentiates it is that it’s fairly liberal in paying money to affiliates and to bookstores who join its Platform Seller program. Affiliates are paid 10% for a sale, while bookstores themselves take 30% of the cover price of sales they generate through the platform. In addition, 10% of affiliate and direct sales on Bookshop are placed in a profit-sharing pool which is then shared with member bookstores. According to its website, Bookshop has disbursed $15.8 million to bookstores since launch.

The company has had a lot of developments in its first year and a half of business, but what happens next? For Hunter, the key is to build a product that continues to engage both customers and bookstores in as simple a manner as possible. “Keep the Occam’s razor,” he says of his product philosophy. For every feature, “it’s going to add to the experience and not confuse a customer.”

That’s easier said than done, of course. “For me, the challenge now is to create a platform that is extremely compelling to customers, that does everything that booksellers want us to do, and to create the best online book buying and book selling experience,” Hunter said. What that often means in practice is keeping the product feeling “human” (like shopping in a bookstore) while also helping booksellers maximize their advantages online.

For instance, Hunter said the company has been working hard with bookstores to optimize their recommendation lists for search engine discovery. SEO isn’t exactly a skill you learn in the traditional retail industry, but it’s crucial online to stay competitive. “We now have stores that rank number one in Google for book recommendations from their book lists,” he said. “Whereas two years ago, all those links would have been Amazon links.” He noted that the company is also layering in best practices around email marketing, customer communications, and optimizing conversion rates onto its platform.

For customers, a huge emphasis for Bookshop going forward is eschewing the algorithmic recommendation model popular among top Silicon Valley companies in lieu of a far more human-curated experience. With tens of thousands of affiliates, “it does feel like a buzzing hive of … institutions and retailers who make up the diverse ecosystem around books,” Hunter said. “They all have their own personalities [and we want to] let those personalities show through.”

There’s a lot to do, but that doesn’t mean dark clouds aren’t menacing on the horizon.

Amazon, of course, is the biggest challenge for the company. Hunter noted that the company’s Kindle devices are extremely popular, and that gives the ecommerce giant an even stronger lock-in that it can’t attain with physical sales. “Because of DRM and publisher agreements, it’s really hard to sell an ebook and allow someone to read it on Kindle,” he said, likening the nexus to Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer on Windows. “There is going to have to be a court case.” It’s true that people love their Kindles, but even “if you love Amazon… then you have to acknowledge that it is not healthy.”

I asked about whether he was worried about the number of startups getting funded in the books space, and whether that funding could potentially crowd out Bookshop. “The book club startups — they are going to succeed by putting books — and conversations about books — in front of the largest audience,” Hunter believes. “So that is going to make everyone succeed.” He is concerned though with the focus on “disruption” and says that “I do hope they succeed in a way that partners with independent bookstores and members of the community that exist.”

Ultimately, Hunter’s strategic concern isn’t directed to competitors or even the question of whether the book is dead (it’s not), but a more specific challenge: that today’s publishing ecosystem ensures that only the top handful of books succeed. Often dubbed “the midlist

problem,” Hunter is worried about the increasingly blockbuster nature of books these days. “One book will suck up most of the oxygen and most of the conversation or the top 20 books [while] great innovative works from young authors or diverse voices don’t get the attention they deserve,” he said. Bookshop is hoping that human curation through its lists can help to sustain a more vibrant book ecosystem than recommendation algorithms, which constantly push readers to the biggest winners.

As Bookshop heads into its third year of operations, Hunter just wants to keep the focus on humans and bringing the rich experience of browsing in a store to the online world. Ultimately, it’s about intentionality. “I really want people to understand that we are creating the future we live in with all of these small decisions about where we shop and how we shop and we should remain very conscious about how we deliberate about those,” he said. “I want Bookshop to be fun to shop at and not just a place to do your civil duty.”

If Gutenberg were alive today, he’d be a very busy angel investor.

With book sales booming during the COVID-19 lockdowns last year, the humble written word has suddenly drawn the limelight from VCs and founders. We’ve seen a whole cavalcade of new products and fundings, including algorithmic recommendation engine BingeBooks, book club startups like Literati and the aptly named BookClub, as well as streaming service Litnerd. There have also been exits and potential exits for Glose, LitCharts and Epic.

But the one company that has captured the imagination of a lot of readers has been Bookshop.org, which has become the go-to platform for independent local bookstores to build an online storefront and compete with Amazon’s juggernaut. The company, which debuted just as the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading in January 2020, rapidly garnered headlines and profiles of its founder Andy Hunter, an industrious publisher with a deep love for the reading ecosystem.

After a year and a half, how is it all holding up? The good news for the company is that even as customers are returning to retail including bookstores, Bookshop hasn’t seen a downturn. Hunter said that August sales this year were 10% higher than July’s, and that the company is on track to do about as many sales in 2021 as in 2020. He contextualized those figures by pointing out that in May, bookstore sales increased 130% year over year. “That means our sales are additive,” he said.

Bookshop now hosts 1,100 stores on its platform, and it has more than 30,000 affiliates who curate book recommendations. Those lists have become central to Bookshop’s offering. “You get all these recommendation lists from not just bookstores, but also literary magazines, literary organizations, book lovers, and librarians,” Hunter said.

Bookshop, which is a public-benefit corporation, earns money as all ecommerce businesses do, by moving inventory. But what differentiates it is that it’s fairly liberal in paying money to affiliates and to bookstores who join its Platform Seller program. Affiliates are paid 10% for a sale, while bookstores themselves take 30% of the cover price of sales they generate through the platform. In addition, 10% of affiliate and direct sales on Bookshop are placed in a profit-sharing pool which is then shared with member bookstores. According to its website, Bookshop has disbursed $15.8 million to bookstores since launch.

The company has had a lot of developments in its first year and a half of business, but what happens next? For Hunter, the key is to build a product that continues to engage both customers and bookstores in as simple a manner as possible. “Keep the Occam’s razor,” he says of his product philosophy. For every feature, “it’s going to add to the experience and not confuse a customer.”

That’s easier said than done, of course. “For me, the challenge now is to create a platform that is extremely compelling to customers, that does everything that booksellers want us to do, and to create the best online book buying and book selling experience,” Hunter said. What that often means in practice is keeping the product feeling “human” (like shopping in a bookstore) while also helping booksellers maximize their advantages online.

For instance, Hunter said the company has been working hard with bookstores to optimize their recommendation lists for search engine discovery. SEO isn’t exactly a skill you learn in the traditional retail industry, but it’s crucial online to stay competitive. “We now have stores that rank number one in Google for book recommendations from their book lists,” he said. “Whereas two years ago, all those links would have been Amazon links.” He noted that the company is also layering in best practices around email marketing, customer communications, and optimizing conversion rates onto its platform.

For customers, a huge emphasis for Bookshop going forward is eschewing the algorithmic recommendation model popular among top Silicon Valley companies in lieu of a far more human-curated experience. With tens of thousands of affiliates, “it does feel like a buzzing hive of … institutions and retailers who make up the diverse ecosystem around books,” Hunter said. “They all have their own personalities [and we want to] let those personalities show through.”

There’s a lot to do, but that doesn’t mean dark clouds aren’t menacing on the horizon.

Amazon, of course, is the biggest challenge for the company. Hunter noted that the company’s Kindle devices are extremely popular, and that gives the ecommerce giant an even stronger lock-in that it can’t attain with physical sales. “Because of DRM and publisher agreements, it’s really hard to sell an ebook and allow someone to read it on Kindle,” he said, likening the nexus to Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer on Windows. “There is going to have to be a court case.” It’s true that people love their Kindles, but even “if you love Amazon… then you have to acknowledge that it is not healthy.”

I asked about whether he was worried about the number of startups getting funded in the books space, and whether that funding could potentially crowd out Bookshop. “The book club startups — they are going to succeed by putting books — and conversations about books — in front of the largest audience,” Hunter believes. “So that is going to make everyone succeed.” He is concerned though with the focus on “disruption” and says that “I do hope they succeed in a way that partners with independent bookstores and members of the community that exist.”

Ultimately, Hunter’s strategic concern isn’t directed to competitors or even the question of whether the book is dead (it’s not), but a more specific challenge: that today’s publishing ecosystem ensures that only the top handful of books succeed. Often dubbed “the midlist

problem,” Hunter is worried about the increasingly blockbuster nature of books these days. “One book will suck up most of the oxygen and most of the conversation or the top 20 books [while] great innovative works from young authors or diverse voices don’t get the attention they deserve,” he said. Bookshop is hoping that human curation through its lists can help to sustain a more vibrant book ecosystem than recommendation algorithms, which constantly push readers to the biggest winners.

As Bookshop heads into its third year of operations, Hunter just wants to keep the focus on humans and bringing the rich experience of browsing in a store to the online world. Ultimately, it’s about intentionality. “I really want people to understand that we are creating the future we live in with all of these small decisions about where we shop and how we shop and we should remain very conscious about how we deliberate about those,” he said. “I want Bookshop to be fun to shop at and not just a place to do your civil duty.”

We live during a time of live, real-time culture. Telecasts, spontaneous tweetstorms, on-the-scene streams, rapid-response analysis, war rooms, Clubhouses, vlogging. We have to interact with the here and now, feel that frisson of action. It’s a compulsion: we’re enraptured by the dangers that are terrorizing whole segments of the planet.

Just this past month, we saw Hurricane Ida strike New Orleans and the Eastern Seaboard, with some of the fiercest winds in the Gulf of Mexico since Hurricane Katrina. In Kabul, daily videos and streams show up-to-the-minute horrors of a country in the throes of chaos. Dangers are omnipresent. Intersect these pulses to the amygdala with the penchant for live coverage, and the alchemy is our modern media.

Yet, watching live events is not living, and it cannot substitute for introspection of both our own condition and the health of the world around us. The dangers that sprawl across today’s headlines and chyrons are often not the dangers we should be spending our time thinking about. That divergence between real-time risks and real risks has gotten wider over time — and arguably humanity has never been closer to the precipice of true disaster even as we are subsumed by disasters that will barely last a screen scroll on our phones.

Toby Ord, in his prophetic book The Precipice, argues that we aren’t seeing the existential risks that can realistically extinguish human life and flourishing. So he has delivered a rigorous guide and compass to help irrational humans understand what risks truly matter — and which we need to accept and move on.

Ord’s canvas is cosmic, dating from the birth of the universe to tens of billions of years into the future. Humanity is but the smallest blip in the universal timeline, and the extreme wealth and advancement of our civilization dates to only a few decades of contemporary life. Yet, what progress we have made so quickly, and what progress we are on course to continue in the millennia ahead!

All that potential could be destroyed though if certain risks today aren’t considered and ameliorated. The same human progress that has delivered so much beauty and improvement has also democratized tools for immense destruction, including destructiveness that could eliminate humanity or “merely” lead to civilizational collapse. Among Ord’s top concerns are climate change, nuclear winter, designer pandemics, artificial general intelligence and more.

There are plenty of books on existential risks. What makes The Precipice unique is its forging in the ardent rationality of the effective altruism movement, of which Ord is one of its many leaders. This is not a superlative dystopic analysis of everything that can go wrong in the coming centuries, but rather a coldly calculated comparison of risks and where society should invest its finite resources. Asteroids are horrific but at this point, well-studied and deeply unlikely. Generalized AI is much more open to terrifying outcomes, particularly when we extend our analysis into the decades and centuries.

While the book walks through various types of risks from natural to anthropogenic to future hypothetical ones, Ord’s main goal is to get humanity to take a step back and consider how we can incorporate the lives of billions — maybe even trillions — of future beings into our calculations on risk. The decisions we make today don’t just affect ourselves or our children, but potentially thousands of generations of our descendants as well, not to mention the other beings that call Earth home. In short, he’s asking the reader for a bold leap to see the world in geological and astronomical time, rather than in real-time.

It’s a mission that’s stunning, audacious, delirious and enervating at times, and occasionally all at the same time. Ord knows that objections will come from nearly every corner, and half the book’s heft is made up of appendices and footnotes to deflect arrows from critics while further deepening the understanding of the curious reader or specialist. If you allow yourself to be submerged in the philosophy and the rigorous mental architecture required to think through long-termism and existential risks, The Precipice really can lead to an awakening of just how precarious most of our lives are, and just how interwoven to the past and future we are.

Humanity is on The Precipice, but so are individuals. Each of us is on the edge of understanding, but can we make the leap? And should we?

Here the rigor and tenacity of the argument proves a bit more elusive. There isn’t much of a transition available from our live, reality-based daily philosophy to one predicated on seeing existential risks in all the work that we do. You either observe the existential risks and attempt to mitigate them, or you don’t (or worse, you see them and give up on protecting humanity’s fate). As Ord points out, that doesn’t always mean sacrifice — some technologies can lower our existential risk, which means that we should accelerate their development as quickly as possible.

Yet, in a complicated world filled with the daily crises and trauma of people whose pained visages are etched into our smartphone displays, it’s challenging to set aside that emotional input for the deductive and reductive frameworks presented here. In this, the criticism isn’t so much on the book as on the wider field of effective altruism, which attempts to rationalize assistance even as it effaces often the single greatest compulsion for humans to help one another: the emotional connection they feel to another being. The Precipice delivers a logical ethical framework for the already converted, but only offers modest guidance to persuade anyone outside the tribe to join in its momentum.

That’s a shame, because the book’s message is indeed prophetic. Published on March 24, 2020, it discusses pandemics, gain-of-function research, and the risks of modern virology — issues that have migrated from obscure academic journals to the front pages. There really are existential risks, and we really do need to confront them.

As the last year has shown, however, even well-known and dangerous risks like pandemics are difficult for governments to build up capacity to handle. Few humans can spend their entire lives moored to phenomenon that happen once in 100,000 years, and few safety cultures can remain robust to the slow degradation of vigilance that accompanies any defense that never gets used.

The Precipice provides an important and deeply thought-provoking framework for thinking about the risks to our future. Yet, it’s lack of engagement with the social means that it will have little influence on how to slake our obsession for the risks right before us. Long-termism is hard, and TikTok is always a tap away.

---

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord
Hachette, 2020, 480 pages

See Also

• The Vulnerable World Hypothesis by Nick Bostrom
• Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow

We live during a time of live, real-time culture. Telecasts, spontaneous tweetstorms, on-the-scene streams, rapid-response analysis, war rooms, Clubhouses, vlogging. We have to interact with the here and now, feel that frisson of action. It’s a compulsion: we’re enraptured by the dangers that are terrorizing whole segments of the planet.

Just this past month, we saw Hurricane Ida strike New Orleans and the Eastern Seaboard, with some of the fiercest winds in the Gulf of Mexico since Hurricane Katrina. In Kabul, daily videos and streams show up-to-the-minute horrors of a country in the throes of chaos. Dangers are omnipresent. Intersect these pulses to the amygdala with the penchant for live coverage, and the alchemy is our modern media.

Yet, watching live events is not living, and it cannot substitute for introspection of both our own condition and the health of the world around us. The dangers that sprawl across today’s headlines and chyrons are often not the dangers we should be spending our time thinking about. That divergence between real-time risks and real risks has gotten wider over time — and arguably humanity has never been closer to the precipice of true disaster even as we are subsumed by disasters that will barely last a screen scroll on our phones.

Toby Ord, in his prophetic book The Precipice, argues that we aren’t seeing the existential risks that can realistically extinguish human life and flourishing. So he has delivered a rigorous guide and compass to help irrational humans understand what risks truly matter — and which we need to accept and move on.

Ord’s canvas is cosmic, dating from the birth of the universe to tens of billions of years into the future. Humanity is but the smallest blip in the universal timeline, and the extreme wealth and advancement of our civilization dates to only a few decades of contemporary life. Yet, what progress we have made so quickly, and what progress we are on course to continue in the millennia ahead!

All that potential could be destroyed though if certain risks today aren’t considered and ameliorated. The same human progress that has delivered so much beauty and improvement has also democratized tools for immense destruction, including destructiveness that could eliminate humanity or “merely” lead to civilizational collapse. Among Ord’s top concerns are climate change, nuclear winter, designer pandemics, artificial general intelligence and more.

There are plenty of books on existential risks. What makes The Precipice unique is its forging in the ardent rationality of the effective altruism movement, of which Ord is one of its many leaders. This is not a superlative dystopic analysis of everything that can go wrong in the coming centuries, but rather a coldly calculated comparison of risks and where society should invest its finite resources. Asteroids are horrific but at this point, well-studied and deeply unlikely. Generalized AI is much more open to terrifying outcomes, particularly when we extend our analysis into the decades and centuries.

While the book walks through various types of risks from natural to anthropogenic to future hypothetical ones, Ord’s main goal is to get humanity to take a step back and consider how we can incorporate the lives of billions — maybe even trillions — of future beings into our calculations on risk. The decisions we make today don’t just affect ourselves or our children, but potentially thousands of generations of our descendants as well, not to mention the other beings that call Earth home. In short, he’s asking the reader for a bold leap to see the world in geological and astronomical time, rather than in real-time.

It’s a mission that’s stunning, audacious, delirious and enervating at times, and occasionally all at the same time. Ord knows that objections will come from nearly every corner, and half the book’s heft is made up of appendices and footnotes to deflect arrows from critics while further deepening the understanding of the curious reader or specialist. If you allow yourself to be submerged in the philosophy and the rigorous mental architecture required to think through long-termism and existential risks, The Precipice really can lead to an awakening of just how precarious most of our lives are, and just how interwoven to the past and future we are.

Humanity is on The Precipice, but so are individuals. Each of us is on the edge of understanding, but can we make the leap? And should we?

Here the rigor and tenacity of the argument proves a bit more elusive. There isn’t much of a transition available from our live, reality-based daily philosophy to one predicated on seeing existential risks in all the work that we do. You either observe the existential risks and attempt to mitigate them, or you don’t (or worse, you see them and give up on protecting humanity’s fate). As Ord points out, that doesn’t always mean sacrifice — some technologies can lower our existential risk, which means that we should accelerate their development as quickly as possible.

Yet, in a complicated world filled with the daily crises and trauma of people whose pained visages are etched into our smartphone displays, it’s challenging to set aside that emotional input for the deductive and reductive frameworks presented here. In this, the criticism isn’t so much on the book as on the wider field of effective altruism, which attempts to rationalize assistance even as it effaces often the single greatest compulsion for humans to help one another: the emotional connection they feel to another being. The Precipice delivers a logical ethical framework for the already converted, but only offers modest guidance to persuade anyone outside the tribe to join in its momentum.

That’s a shame, because the book’s message is indeed prophetic. Published on March 24, 2020, it discusses pandemics, gain-of-function research, and the risks of modern virology — issues that have migrated from obscure academic journals to the front pages. There really are existential risks, and we really do need to confront them.

As the last year has shown, however, even well-known and dangerous risks like pandemics are difficult for governments to build up capacity to handle. Few humans can spend their entire lives moored to phenomenon that happen once in 100,000 years, and few safety cultures can remain robust to the slow degradation of vigilance that accompanies any defense that never gets used.

The Precipice provides an important and deeply thought-provoking framework for thinking about the risks to our future. Yet, it’s lack of engagement with the social means that it will have little influence on how to slake our obsession for the risks right before us. Long-termism is hard, and TikTok is always a tap away.

---

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord
Hachette, 2020, 480 pages

See Also

• The Vulnerable World Hypothesis by Nick Bostrom
• Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow