BCN News

Whimstay is dedicated to offering the best deals on last-minute vacation rentals. We offer the biggest discounts on bookings made within 30 days of check-in, but we also ensure great deals year-round compared to other major booking sites. We do this by partnering with professional property managers to offer exclusive discounts on properties that might otherwise remain unrented. On average, guests save nearly 25%, and over $200 per booking. Featuring an extensive selection of vacation rental homes, condos, cabins, villas, and resorts, Whimstay is becoming the go-to choice for savvy travelers.

Whimstay recently emerged as the industry leading travel site for booking last-minute vacation rentals at fantastic rates. If of interest I can look into getting a media rate discount if you (or someone else from your team) if you want to try Whimstay to book a getaway yourself. US based start-up Whimstay announced last month that bookings are up 400% last year compared with 2022 and that it attracted 1.2 million unique users to its site in 2023. The improved growth is attributed to new features, functionality, doubling its number of listings and forming several strategic partnerships. Whimstay has significantly outperformed other online travel agencies and booking sites, emerging as the marketplace leader for bookings made within 30 days of check-in.

Creating fun and accessible chemistry stories has been a labor of love for Colleen as a retired University of Arizona chemistry professor and author of a series of kid’s chemistry comic books. In 2023, the PBS short documentary, “Comic Book Chemistry” was awarded an Emmy. This documentary centered around Colleen’s vision, chemistry comic book series and her success with teaching college-level chemistry concepts to kids. During Colleen’s 30 years of teaching chemistry, she became aware that her students were struggling with basic concepts, including fluency with the symbols for the elements themselves. These comic books, videos, and activities are Colleen’s gift to all future scientists – one that will help them succeed in college chemistry. Colleen holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Penn State University, was awarded a Chateaubriand Fellowship to conduct research at the Universite Pasteur in Strasbourg, France under the direction of Nobel Prize Winner, Jean-Marie Lehn. Colleen was a tenured faculty member with research expertise in environmental toxicology, medicinal chemistry, and chemistry education. She has published four chemistry textbooks, over 30 peer-reviewed articles, and has presented her work globally.

Karl talks to Michael Steiner, Marty Strong and Dr. Jens Hartmann in our NEW series Masters of Disruption, which was the brain child of Marty Strong who is a Board Member of BEST Robotics. Our spotlight shines on Dr. Jens Hartmann who is an award winning executive focusing on change management and culture change. Dr. Jens Hartmann talks about the science of culture, and how the brain has a huge part to play in preparing individuals and organizations for changing the dynamics of the future performances.

In this new series from BEST Robotics, Masters of Disruption, we bring some of the greatest minds from Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to hear their take on how students, and the future workforce are working together to drive innovation and learning environments. Karl spoke to Michael Steiner, Marty Strong and Vinay Kunwar and they had an insightful conversation about this subject to start the series off. Vinay, the CEO of India First joined the conversation from his office in India and he talked about the collaboration with his organization and BEST Robotics.

Acquisition integrations are when the parent company takes over the target (acquired business), right? Well… not exactly. There are different approaches used to merge, or integrate an acquisition. Here’s an overview of them, looking at it from our specialty of working with lower-mid and mid-size businesses (i.e. those with less than 1000 employees).

You’ve completed an acquisition, have an integration plan ready to go, and Day One has arrived: you’re ready to tell the world about the deal and the bright new future. Let’s tell everyone, right? Not so fast… not everyone wants to hear the same message. Different groups of people have different perspectives and different interests. You need to create a Communication Plan to tell different audiences what is relevant to them. A basic integration communication plan should cover the following: READ MORE

When you acquired a business, you had an intention, a strategy, of what you wanted to do with it. For example, you wanted take advantage of a very specialized team and the product that they develop, so that you can increase sales revenue. Acquiring a business is a set of intensive stressful activities that culminate in closing a deal. However, in many ways, buying a business is the easier part of realizing your acquisition strategy. You should now prepare for a major change in how you work on this merger. Acquisition Integration is a campaign of concurrent activities focused on a set of common objectives (known as Key Objectives), that take place over a long period, while continuing the activities of the general business. READ MORE https://www.bcn.news/feature/intista/ive-just-bought-a-company-now-what/

Karl talks about the importance of pre-qualifying your sales prospects, and creating intelligent lead campaigns to maximize your closing efficiencies

In this weeks segment, Karl talks to Terry Toomey on the status of business resources that are designed to help businesses grow and thrive, especially in rural America.

Business Class News has partnered with The Industry Hub to help new and existing businesses grow and scale. Each month in 2023, BCN will showcase businesses that are either growing or just launching. The Industry Hub will share tips and advice on how to succeed in business. We will be giving you an advanced preview to an interactive program that is being launched, which has been developed for all types businesses from the start-up to the mature and ready to grow. SPONSORED BY THE INDUSTRY HUB Terry Toomey, the Executive Director of The Industry Hub will be a regular contributor on BCN and our podcast shows. We are also inviting business owners to register their business for consideration in our series “Business Sunrise”. These are 3 minute snapshots that allow the business owners and leaders present there companies.

Karl spoke to Janie Bordner, Executive Director of New Horizons and talked about the amazing vision and mission of the organization. Janie talks about their goals, and objectives and also about the amazing Celebrity Chef Smackdown event they are holding to raise funds so that they can achieve them. You can get more information by visiting their website Celebrity Chef Smackdown Event - https://newhorizonsofntx.org/celebrity-chef-smackdown-2022/ About New Horizons In 2002, Bob and Ellen Nichols saw a need to reach children with the message of Jesus Christ in a small neighborhood in Bonita Springs, FL. Ellen was local elementary school teacher, and Bob was a professional boat captain. They began their ministry by going door to door inviting kids to come to the “Super Kids Church,” which would meet every Sunday morning at Manna Christian RV Park. This kids-only church became a huge success! The Nichols’ began praying for God’s direction on how to reach more children. Seeing the problems in the neighborhoods and recognizing the tremendous need to help the children from non-English speaking homes with their school work, Bob and Ellen were led to find a place to provide free after school tutoring. In January 2003, they opened the first Super Kids Club in Rosemary Park and also founded New Horizons of Southwest Florida, a non-profit organization. From its first day with 20 children meeting on Wednesday afternoons, New Horizons Super Kids Club has expanded to four locations open Monday through Thursday. The Super Teens Club opened in 2006 in order to continue meeting the needs of students through high school graduation. As the impact in Southwest Florida expanded, New Horizons Programs, Inc. was created in 2015 to launch the first affiliate location – New Horizons of North Texas. The visionary efforts of Tom and Nancy Cooper were instrumental in bringing the affiliate organization to their home town of Dallas to create faith-based after-school programs throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. By God’s amazing grace, New Horizons now includes eight different programs that operate throughout the year providing more than 60,000 hours annually of tutoring, mentoring, and faith to over 500 at-risk youth in Southwest Florida and North Texas.

Entrepreneurs designing solutions utilizing technology can get feedback, recognition and $20K from Tech Titans and enterprise companies on the cutting edge. In a new Grand Challenge, entrepreneurs submit an application which will be judged by representatives of technology companies, and finalists will be showcased for a virtual pitch in front of a panel of celebrity judges on Thursday, October 13, 2022. The challenge will be open to entrepreneurs nationwide. The 2022 Tech Titans Innovation Collider Grand Challenge is seeking innovation solutions, systems or applications that advance sustainability and drive technology innovation for one or more of the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs https://www.sdgactioncampaign.org/17goals/) that you believe are most important for America. Entrepreneurs, start-ups, small and MBE/WBE-certified technology companies should be pre-revenue to revenue less than $2 million. There is no cost to participate. Participating companies can be located anywhere in the United States, and do not have to be Tech Titans members. Deadline for applications to be submitted is September 5, 2022 at 5:00 pm CT. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION Last year’s Grand Challenge recipient, Dr. Corey Clark, CTO of BALANCED said, “As a result of winning the Grand Challenge we were able to push further into our research and development for a distributed privacy preserving machine learning platform. We expanded our work within the area, bringing on more researchers and developers to further our capabilities in this space. We have made significant progress in developing a fully privacy preserving machine learning infrastructure that is capable of scaling and training a neural network within a volunteer distributed grid environment while maintaining privacy of data and the model being trained. The support from Tech Titans and the Grand Challenge award allowed BALANCED to move toward creating a commercial model that brings privacy preserving machine learning to our proprietary HEWMEN platform.” Awardees will receive: The hope is that the entrepreneur/start-up will negotiate some form of: The Tech Titans Innovation Collider offers myriad services that enable large companies to partner with entrepreneurs, university researchers and thought leaders to collide, connect, collaborate and create groundbreaking solutions that accelerate business value. These services include providing executive e