Facebook created a chatbot called “Liam Bot” that teaches employees official company talking points for responding to friends and family critiquing the company — The “Liam Bot” teaches employees what to say if friends or family ask difficult questions about the company over the holidays.
In the United States, electricity generation accounts for nearly 30% of our carbon emissions. Some states have responded to that by setting aggressive renewable energy standards; others are hoping to see coal propped up even as its economics get worse. Complicating matters further is the fact that many regional grids are integrated, meaning power generated in one location may be exported and used in a different state entirely.
Tracking these electricity exports is critical for understanding how to lower our national carbon emissions. In addition, power from a dirty source like coal has health and environment impacts where it's produced, and the costs of these aren't always paid by the parties using the electricity. Unfortunately, getting reliable figures on how electricity is produced and where it's used is challenging, leaving some of the best estimates with a time resolution of only a month.
Now, three Stanford researchers—Jacques A. de Chalendar, John Taggart, and Sally M. Benson—have greatly improved on that standard, and they have managed to track power generation and use on an hourly basis. The researchers found that, of the 66 grid balancing areas within the United States, only three have carbon emissions equivalent to our national average, and they have found that imports and exports of electricity have both seasonal and daily changes. de Chalendar et al. have found that the net results can be substantial, with imported electricity increasing California's emissions/power by 20%.
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Want to get professional feedback about your pitch deck, marketing assets, or immigration issues? Attending Disrupt Berlin?
We’ve brought in experts from around Europe (and Silicon Valley) to help you directly.
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The Top 3 Immigration Mistakes Startups Make
11:25 – 11:35, Wednesday, Dec. 11
Sophie Alcorn (Alcorn Immigration Law)
Sophie Alcorn has helped hundreds of startups worldwide navigate the complexities of United States immigration law. She’ll be leading a talk on top mistakes, participating in a panel on global scaling, and providing 1:1 immigration advice sessions for any attendee who is interested.
You can now sign up for a time slot with her using our CrunchMatch offering. Attendees can request appointments through CrunchMatch in the TechCrunch events app, available upon registration.
Pitch Deck Teardown
16:45 -17:25, Wednesday, Dec. 11
Russ Heddleston (DocSend)
Karen Stafford (Intel)
Sitar Teli (Connect Ventures)
How can you make your deck bring in the funding? Two top European investors and a startup founder with a special data set about will be reviewing submitted decks live on the Extra Crunch stage.
Want to see what they think about yours? Just fill out this form.
Growth Marketing 2020
14:05 – 14:45, Thursday, Dec. 12
Asher King Abramson (Demand Curve)
Even the biggest tech companies do marketing wrong — and startups you haven’t heard of (yet) are doing it right. Demand Curve works with dozens of top companies coming out of Y Combinator, and a long list of others around the world. Asher King Abramson has seen it all, including the best practices going into the new year.
He’ll be critiquing a selection of efforts on stage, and you can have yours included if you submit your ad and landing page assets here.
Media historians, tech designers, science fiction writers, and activists on how and why “slow media” curated by humans should replace today's social media — My quest to imagine a different reality.
Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia : MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's...
