MARTA prepping for spike in ridership for NCAA tournament | WSB-TV – WSB Atlanta

ATLANTA – Thousands of people are in Atlanta this week for the NCAA tournament and that means an expected spike in MARTA ridership.

A MARTA spokesperson told Channel 2’s Audrey Washington MARTA expects an additional 8,000 riders over the next few days.

To prepare, MARTA will offer extra trains, buses and staff for the NCAA tournament.

The additional service begins at 9 p.m. Thursday.

Two particular stations are expected to be the busiest; Philips Arena and Five Points.  

The two stations will have more staff on hand to properly load the trains.


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“We’re going to have what we call “load and go” teams at Five Points and the Dome,” said MARTA spokesperson Stephany Fisher. “And these station agents will stand on the platform, load up the trains, radio to the operator and say you can go now. It’s just a good way to prevent any platform overcrowding.”

Partners Attending IBM’s Think Conference Prepping For Big Channel Changes Coming Next Month – CRN

As IBM prepares to implement its largest channel overhaul in years, partners have been conferring all week at the Think conference in Las Vegas with Big Blue’s leadership, and each other, to ready themselves to take advantage of the program changes.

The revamped PartnerWorld program, revealed in January and going into effect next month, is being met enthusiastically by attendees of the PartnerWorld summit that’s part of the larger conference, Jacqueline Woods, chief marketing officer for IBM Global Business Partners, told CRN.

Partners had long been clamoring for a streamlined structure that breaks down barriers across partner categories and products—one that better aligns with the evolution they have seen in their practices to delivering comprehensive solutions that often include components they’ve developed themselves.

[Related: IBM Introduces First of Several Watson Data Kits To Jumpstart AI Projects]

The “2018 new generation ecosystem strategy,” which goes live April 10, pares down IBM’s channel structure to five distinct tracks, dramatically reducing the complexity of engaging with the technology stalwart.

IBM partly achieved that by marrying tracks for hardware and software resellers, which made a lot of sense given partners were typically selling integrated solutions.

Strict categorizations defining partner business models have also been abandoned, she said.

“We’re seeing business partners don’t neatly fit into one category,” Woods told CRN. “They’re not just a reseller or ISV or cloud service provider or MSP or systems integrator.”

Partners these days wear many hats, she said, often “depending on who they’re talking to and the solution that they’re selling.”

IBM’s new channel strategy looks to support the broader changes in the ecosystem across all program elements—metrics, margins, reimbursement, co-marketing, training and enablement tools.

“Our ability to offer models that can easily help a partner navigate between those specific types of business models is critically important,” Woods said. “I think the advantage of what we have now is we’re offering companies a number of different types of ecosystems that they can participate in.”

The new program also was designed to encourage partners to embed IBM’s next-gen products, especially cloud, data, analytics, and Watson artificial intelligence. 

One of the biggest changes in recent years to Big Blue’s channel is that many traditional resellers have become de facto ISVs—developing and bundling their own intellectual property.

Technology partners are no longer the only ones taking advantage of IBM’s longtail ISV program, Woods said, which enables developers embedding IBM solutions with cloud credits and a development sandbox.

One solution provider that has strayed into ISV territory is Clear Technologies, which recently marked its 25th anniversary as an IBM partner.

Phil Godwin, the Addison, Texas solution provider’s chief operating officer, joined Martin Schroeter, senior vice president for IBM Global Markets, on stage for a PartnerWorld keynote at the Think conference to discuss the journey.

Focusing on data center infrastructure “was great business for us the first 15 years,” Godwin told CRN after the keynote. But around 2008, it became hard for Clear to differentiate itself in the market.

That’s when the company’s transformation started, leading to development of a product called Visual Storage Intelligence that’s been a “huge part of our story over the last 8 years.”

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In the keynote, Schroeter talked about how 60 percent of IT decisions are now made outside of IT. Clear Technologies has seen that shift up close, Godwin said.

“We can now go have conversations with line of business people, where in the past we were focused on having technology conversation with technologists,” Godwin told CRN.

Godwin has attended PartnerWorld for the last 17 years. At every previous conference his focus was on meeting IBM staff, but this year he’s spent as much time meeting other partners.

The reason is his peers are bringing to market the company’s home-grown solution. And Clear is doing the same with products built by other solution providers.

“Now is the time more than ever that we need to be partnering with partners,” Godwin said.

“The ecosystem is becoming more valuable as we try to transform because our transformation journeys are all taking us to different places. We’re selling other people’s stuff and they’re selling our stuff, and the common thread that holds that all together is IBM,” Godwin told CRN.

This month, Clear Technologies is launching Clear Intelligence, Godwin said, a new product leveraging IBM technology to take the company into the future around IoT and AI.

“I think IBM is staying on the forefront of what’s taking place in the marketplace,” Godwin told CRN.

One way IBM is supporting those partners navigating massive changes in the market is through a co-marketing program it revamped last year, Woods told CRN.

IBM is investing $80 million dollars across 2,200 partners driving 12,000 campaigns annually, Woods said.

Another imminent change that has been met with enthusiasm by partners comes in the reimbursement process.

“They used to have put their leads in in order for reimbursement to happen,” Woods said.

That could be challenging, especially for small companies for whom cash flow was critically important.

“It takes time to generate pipeline, time to generate leads, so that’s not a condition of them being reimbursed anymore,” she said.

Partners now only need to provide proof of performance of an approved activity.

“They can get their money back more quickly,” Woods said.

Say it isn’t snow. Forecast has Chapel Hill prepping for morning dusting. – Durham Herald Sun

Morning commuters could face tricky driving conditions Wednesday.

Chapel Hill officials are monitoring the forecast and preparing roads and facilities for potential winter weather. The National Weather Service in Raleigh has forecast snowfall of an inch or less during the morning hours which may cause hazardous travel conditions.

Chapel Hill Transit is planning to follow normal routes and schedules Wednesday morning, the release said. It will announce changes to service promptly to give customers as much lead time as possible to plan accordingly.

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“The most important thing you can do Wednesday morning is give yourself extra time to get where you’re going,” Chapel Hill emergency management coordinator Vencelin Harris said. “Temperatures aren’t likely to drop to or below freezing, which will greatly decrease any chances of accumulation. However, roads are likely to be wet, and falling snow could present distractions for people driving.”

Conditions can change quickly, he said.

The latest Chapel Hill Transit updates on weather-related delays and detours can be found on the inclement weather page at http://www.townofchapelhill.org/town-hall/departments-services/transit/inclement-weather.

Intel Is Prepping More-Secure Chips — The Motley Fool – Motley Fool

Earlier this year, Google‘s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Project Zero disclosed three security vulnerabilities that affected many modern high-performance processors.

As it turns out, virtually every Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) processor on the market was vulnerable to the three types of attacks, referred to as Variant 1, Variant 2, and Variant 3. The chip giant has worked with key operating-system vendors to put out software workarounds to guard Intel-based systems from these attacks. 

An Intel processor.

Image source: Intel.

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Per a recent post on Intel’s website, Intel has now released workarounds for “100% of Intel products in the past five years that require protection against the side-channel method vulnerabilities discovered by Google.” 

Unfortunately, these updates come at a price: lowered performance in some cases. According to The Tech Report, the performance degradation in standard consumer applications isn’t much. However, it’s believed that some data center applications could see more pronounced performance degradation. 

The good news, though, is that on March 15, Intel announced that it plans to release hardware in the second half of 2018 that includes hardware fixes for two of the three types of attacks (the third will need to continue to be mitigated in software). 

Here are some additional details from Intel:

While Variant 1 will continue to be addressed via software mitigations, we are making changes to our hardware design to further address the other two. We have redesigned parts of the processor to introduce new levels of protection through partitioning that will protect against both Variants 2 and 3. Think of this partitioning as additional “protective walls” between applications and user privilege levels to create an obstacle for bad actors.

Let’s go over what this means for Intel. 

Minimizing the damage

There was some concern that Intel would be susceptible to a loss of market segment share, particularly in the data center processor market, as a direct result of these flaws being discovered. The thinking was that since some competing processors weren’t as susceptible to all three vulnerabilities as Intel’s processors were, some of Intel’s major customers would start shifting processor orders to those competing processors. 

Since Intel appears to be set to launch processors with hardware fixes for the Variant 2 and Variant 3 attacks in the second half of 2018, the window of opportunity for competitors to capitalize on Intel’s vulnerability to these attacks is small — and closing. 

Turning lemons into lemonade?

What I think will be particularly interesting to see is whether this entire fiasco winds up being a net positive for Intel. Since older Intel processors are likely to suffer from some degree of performance degradation as a result of the workarounds, major data center operators could be more inclined to upgrade to the company’s improved processors later this year. 

Not only would those customers get the typical performance jump that they’d expect from a new product generation, but that performance improvement would also be amplified because the new chips wouldn’t suffer the performance loss from the workarounds that the older processors do.

On top of that, Intel tends to sell a few generations of processors concurrently. For example, Intel currently sells its latest Xeon Scalable processors, but it also offers its prior generation Xeon E5/E7 v4 chips. When Intel releases the fixed processors later this year, customers that previously might have purchased prior-generation chips to save money might instead buy the latest-generation parts to get the hardware fixes for Variant 2 and Variant 3. 

Newer processor generations tend to sell for more than older processor generations do, so Intel could actually see a boost in average selling prices for its data center processors in its coming product cycle as a result. 

 

Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Ashraf Eassa owns shares of Intel. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A shares) and Alphabet (C shares). The Motley Fool recommends Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Prepping for the Big Day – The Hillsdale Daily News

Since Oct. 8, a to-do list has guided my life.

Not a checklist of daily tasks; a list laying out the next nine months of my life in decisions.

In November, I posed for pictures. In February, a tent was rented. In July, I’ll take a weekend trip.

Each task is accompanied by a dollar amount, and sometimes that amount stretches into the thousands.

The upside of getting engaged in the social media age is that there are dozens of different lists available online outlining the steps between getting on one knee and standing at the altar. Since I popped the question to Audrey in the Nichols Arboretum last fall, we’ve slowly worked through that list.

Our proudest moment was that day in November; the day we posed for our engagement pictures. I took the day off from work — Audrey has Tuesdays off — and we took out chunk out of our to-do list.

First, we traveled to her grandparents’ house in the Thumb which we were leaning toward using as our venue. Within a few minutes, we found the perfect spot: a patch of grass nestled between the woods and the banks of the large pond that spans the length of their backyard. Nitroglycerin medicines Nitroprusside medicines Amyl Nitrate (Recreationally known as poppers)* Organ Donor Recipient medicines* Azole antifungal medicines taken orally (topical viagra professional australia creams for treatment of low sex drive. When the cause of the condition is yet to be discovered cialis wholesale online http://raindogscine.com/?attachment_id=561 and there are a lot to be done in order to help them enjoy their sexual encounters. Making date paste is a order levitra online article order levitra online very simple technique, and it can be made at home as well. This eventually deprives many women of the past had viagra without prescription fuller sizes of breast. We traveled around the block to a bed-and-breakfast that we were considering for our reception venue, and in little more than a half-hour had locked it down for our date.

Then, we drove less than a mile to Kingston’s only pizza parlor, Beagio’s. Having pizza as the entree at our reception was a to three priority for both of us, and with the dearth of options in the area, we were nervous that something would have to give.

But, we loved Beagio’s, and booked their services for our reception — and shaved hundreds of dollars off our expected spending in the process.

From there, we drove down to Ann Arbor, to pose for pictures around town and in the arboretum where we got engaged a month earlier. And (SPOILER ALERT) they turned out great.

Most planning doesn’t go as  smoothly as it did that day. We had been trying to figure out what the groomsmen should wear for months before we finally settled on a charcoal gray J. Ferrar suit on Tuesday night. We’ve talked about booking our honeymoon, and saved up money for it, since we got engaged, but still haven’t bit the bullet. And, on Monday, Audrey will move to DeKalb, Illinois to start a new job as Curator of Education and Interpretation at the Ellwood House Museum.
We’ll be doing the rest of our wedding planning with 250 miles in between us.

But, when it’s all said and done, we’ll be married.

And, I’m told it will be smooth sailing from there.

Starbucks Corporation Prepping for a New Growth Phase – Investorplace.com

Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ: SBUX) offered an interesting glimpse of the future at the J.P. Morgan Gaming, Lodging, Restaurant and Leisure Management Access Forum last week. Rather than resting on its laurels, Starbucks is doing its best to maintain its current robust business while actively leveraging its consumers and platforms to fuel a new growth phase. If this all plays out as Starbucks hopes, we could be looking at a new growth phase for SBUX stock lasting 10 years.

SBUX stock seems to be enjoying exceptional success from its loyalty program, the Starbucks Rewards program. Loyalty programs are supposed to generate additional purchases, obviously, because people wish to take advantage of whatever rewards the program may have.

What’s interesting is that SBUX stock arguably does not need such a program. While there is always going to be competition in coffee, Starbucks is the leading brand name in the area. It’s not like the airlines who are fighting over every last customer.

The name “Starbucks Rewards” is actually a far better description of what the program is, as opposed to it being a “loyalty” program. You actually get rewards and that is actually pushing more revenue to Starbucks stock. We are seeing that in SBUX stock same-store sales growth from those who have been participating in the rewards program.

Growth Through Personalization

And this is what Starbuck wants to leverage. Starbucks wants to leverage personalization into growth. It can do this by looking at spending data and analyzing it. Company officials are very early in this process.

At the same time, Starbucks’ own data shows that only about 20% of its consumers are in the rewards program. the company is wondering why the other 60 million people haven’t joined and want to address that.

As Starbucks management pointed out in the presentation, consumers that spend through the program are getting a discount of 7% to 8%. That’s pretty incredible, as 5% cash back on limited purchases is the best we see with credit cards.

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So, Starbucks wants to really focus on getting users into the program, because when they start crunching the data, they will be able to more effectively steer customers towards purchases that they might like — and to develop products that would be of greater interest to these customers.

Starbucks is also looking at how employees are deployed in its stores. The idea here is that if consumers visit their local store at the same time every day, they form a more personal relationship with the employees, which, in turn, encourages them to return.

This is all about forming personal relationships with the customers. That is the core goal of every successful business.

The Key to Future Success for SBUX Stock

But there’s also careful analysis of what is going on at the store level. In the movie The Founder, which is about how Ray Kroc essentially stole the McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE:MCD) franchise from its true originators, there are great scenes about how he had the vision to reorganize how employees moved around the store. It was all centered around making the customer experience as fast and efficient as possible. Starbucks is looking to do exactly the same type of thing.

The entire transcript of the event is worth the read. What it communicates is that management is constantly looking to improve the experience. That is a hallmark of companies that grow and experience great success over a very long time.

It shows that Starbucks stock price today doesn’t just reflect a wait-for-CEO-Howard-Schultz-to-roll-out-the-new-rates macro concepts of the chain, but that SBUX is looking to use every strategy it can think of to squeeze as much growth out of the existing business as possible, while making additions and other changes along the way.

Lawrence Meyers is the CEO of PDL Capital, a specialty lender focusing on consumer finance and is the Manager of The Liberty Portfolio at www.thelibertyportfolio.com. He does not own any stock mentioned. He has 23 years’ experience in the stock market, and has written more than 2,000 articles on investing. Lawrence Meyers can be reached at TheLibertyPortfolio@gmail.com.

Trump lawyers prepping for potential Mueller interview – Politico

President Donald Trump’s lawyers are gaming out possible questions and answers for a potential interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, according to two people familiar with the strategy.

The preparations reflect an understanding that negotiations with the lead Russia investigator, which have been ongoing since January, will eventually culminate in a sit-down meeting between Mueller and the president. One source said the discussions about the terms of a possible interview may soon even reach a conclusion.

Story Continued Below

“I don’t think it’s months and months out. I don’t think it’s in a week,” said the person familiar with the negotiations. “But I think it’s moving toward closure.”

But even given the high stakes of a potential meeting with Mueller, Trump’s lawyers face a challenge in prepping a president who resists following scripts and who has deep trust in his own improvisational instincts.

Trump has said he is eager to meet with Mueller. “I’m looking forward to it, actually,” he told reporters in the White House on Jan. 24, adding that his lawyers had informed him the interview could happen in “about two to three weeks.” But his attorneys quickly ratcheted back his remarks, saying he was “speaking hurriedly” before departing for a European trip, and they have since addressed the subject cautiously.

The president’s timeline has since blown by, and Trump’s personal lawyers and some associates have urged him to refuse a sit-down interview that does not include ground rules on the kinds of questions he’d face.

It is standard practice for attorneys to anticipate prosecutors’ likely questions and craft draft responses for their clients. If an interview between Mueller and Trump is scheduled, Trump and his lawyers may even war-game the session in advance, much as candidates stage mock debates to prepare themselves for opponents.

But Trump is not known for studious preparation. He is an impatient reader and spent little time preparing for the 2016 presidential debates. That raises the question of how challenging it might be for his lawyers to ready him for a high-stakes session with Mueller and his crack team of prosecutors.

Trump is hardly a stranger to legal proceedings: In one 2012 deposition, according to The Atlantic, Trump said he had participated in more than 100 depositions.

But that doesn’t mean Trump is always well-prepared to field complex legal questions under oath. During a 2016 deposition tied to his lawsuit against a chef who backed out of a deal to open a restaurant at Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel, Trump was asked what he did to prepare for the hearing.

“I would say virtually nothing,” he replied. “I spoke with my counsel for a short period of time. I just arrived here, and we proceeded to the deposition.”

Trump added that he didn’t study any documents beforehand.

Before any interview, Trump and his lawyers must complete their sensitive negotiations with Mueller over its terms. Among other things, Trump’s lawyers have argued that the burden is on Mueller to show that his investigation can’t be completed without an interview with the president. They have also studied the feasibility of answering questions in writing, as President Ronald Reagan did during the Iran-Contra scandal. And they have made clear their resistance to Mueller questioning Trump more than once.

In his document requests, Mueller has expressed an interest in subjects ranging from Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey to how he responded to the theft and leaks of Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“It’s a tug of war both internally and probably with Mueller,” said a senior Republican who recently met with the president. “The end goal for the White House is to get as narrow a discussion as can be possibly negotiated, including maybe just answering written questions like Reagan.”

The Republican argued that it’s in Mueller’s interests to narrow the scope of any interview to ensure it isn’t just seen as a fishing expedition. “Otherwise it’s pointless,” the Republican said. “You can’t prepare him. And he can’t be prepared. And Mueller gets nothing out of it except a perjury charge. Is that all he’s trying to get out of this?”

Some of the bargaining between Trump’s lawyers and Mueller has spilled into the media. A Wall Street Journal story published last Friday said Trump’s lawyers were considering offering the special counsel a sit-down interview — but only with conditions, such as a deadline for Mueller to wrap up portions of the probe specifically involving Trump.

Solomon Wisenberg, a former deputy on Kenneth Starr’s independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton, said that idea would be a non-starter for Mueller.

“That’s bullshit,” he said. “You accommodate the president, but you don’t change the rules for him in a substantive way.”

One defense attorney working on the Russia probe speculated that the Journal article may have represented a tactical ploy by Trump’s lawyers: an offer Mueller is sure to reject designed to show the president that they had tried to bargain with the special counsel to no avail.

“It’s a strategy by the lawyers,” the defense attorney said. “Either Mueller will agree to the terms in some fashion, and at least they get something out of it, or he won’t, and then they can convince the president not to sit for the interview.”

The lawyer added that Mueller is also at a crossroads in his pursuit of a Trump interview. If the special counsel pushes too hard, he could end up in a long legal fight that goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and where there’s no guarantee the ruling on the other end is favorable to the probe.

“They’ve let themselves be drawn into a sort of a Pyrrhic war,” the attorney said. “The problem they have is that they don’t they don’t know for sure what would happen if they try to subpoena the president.”

Mueller’s office declined comment about the status of talks with Trump lawyers.

Wisenberg said it would be reasonable for Mueller to provide Trump with general topics he wants to discuss. But he said the special counsel has adopted aggressive tactics before — including an early-morning search of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s home — and doubted Mueller would hesitate to subpoena Trump if the president’s lawyers balk at a meeting. “If Trump does not sit down and talk, he’s going to subpoena him,” Wisenberg said.

Wisenberg also predicted Mueller would win if the case was decided by the Supreme Court. “He’s going to lose 9-0, and Gorsuch is going to write the opinion,” he said, referring to Trump’s appointee, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Trump’s lawyers noted that the president has made no claims of executive privilege, and his lawyers have turned over thousands of pages of White House and campaign documents.

“It’s been the most transparent inquiry of this type in history,” said Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s personal lawyers.

Asked about the progress of the talks with Mueller, John Dowd, who is serving as the president’s lead negotiator on the interview, had nothing to say.

“None of your business,” he replied.

How Meghan Markle Is Secretly Prepping for Royal Life – Travel+Leisure

How Meghan Markle Is Secretly Prepping for Royal Life | Travel + Leisure

Bohls: Sergio Garcia busy prepping for Masters defense, fatherhood – MyStatesman.com

While I got ya, here are nine things and one crazy prediction:

1. Sergio Garcia was close to adding a new title Tuesday: el papa. After becoming the Masters champion last April and a husband last July, the adopted Texan will soon become a father. At the start of a conference call to promote this year’s Masters, Garcia announced that he and Angela were at an undisclosed Austin hospital a week before their first-born daughter was to arrive, but there was no update late Tuesday afternoon. Garcia isn’t approaching this year’s Masters any differently but isn’t superstitious by nature. But he added, “We need a little bit of a bigger house now with the baby coming. I’m not that superstitious to try to do everything like I did last year. It’s not that if you walk out on Sunday with your left foot first, you should do it again.” … When I asked what kind of impact Tiger Woods will have on Augusta, he said, “It’s obviously been a big impact. We all know what kind of player he can be when he’s healthy. I’m sure he’s excited to come back to Augusta, and it’s a place where he’s done well, so I would expect him to do fairly well.” Woods’ presence just might help Garcia’s chances of repeating because Tiger will take much of the scrutiny off him.

2. Shaka Smart lost out in recruiting Nevada twins Caleb and Cody Martin twice — once at VCU and once at Texas. Smart recruited both when they decided to transfer from North Carolina State, but they went to Nevada, which will play Texas in the NCAA opening round Friday. “Cody is a phenomenal ballhandler and is very athletic,” Smart said. “Caleb’s a better shooter and a more natural scorer. But they’re both 6-7 and can play multiple positions, anywhere from the 1 to the 4.” … The Martins aren’t the only transfers for the Wolf Pack. Hallice Cook played a year at Oregon State and a year at Iowa State. Kendall Stephens made 173 3-pointers in three years at Purdue. Jordan Caroline transferred from Southern Illinois. “He’s a load,” Smart said. “He’s tough. He’s aggressive. He’s a great rebounder with great feet.” Asked how many NBA players Nevada has, Smart said, “At least four.” Yikes.

3. Kerwin Roach II, the lone Texas player with any NCAA Tournament experience (12 minutes, six points and three rebounds as a freshman reserve against Northern Iowa in 2016), said sophomore Jacob Young could be the Horns’ secret weapon. There will be no player in the field as fearless as Young. “He definitely could be our X-factor,” Snoop said. … Mo Bamba said he first watched the NCAAs in 2010 because his brother was being recruited by Arizona, which in 2011 bounced Texas in the second round because of a controversial five-second call. And why didn’t he go to Arizona to join Deandre Ayton in a formidable frontcourt? “I like Texas better,” Bamba said. “I knew all the pressure here would be on me this season because I’m the so-called Mr. Recruit Guy, but I told the team I’m not taking over this program. I’m going to do my part.” … Bamba raves about Jericho Sims, who is so athletic he played wide receiver/tight end/safety until the ninth grade (his high school didn’t offer football). Bamba said: “People sleep on Jericho. I can easily see Jericho playing at the next level and doing well at the next level.”

4. Fran Fraschilla sees a wide-open field in this year’s NCAAs, “as balanced as I’ve seen in the last few years.” The ESPN color analyst told me in Kansas City, Mo., that between 20 and 25 teams could reach this year’s Final Four. “Virginia’s certainly very good, and Villanova looks like a juggernaut. But … a team can come from the Big Ten and get there. Michigan is a hot team that’s playing well when the attention all year has been on Michigan State and Purdue. Or a team like Nevada. Rhode Island can make noise in the tournament, and this is a year when we could see a George Mason- or VCU-type team advance to the Final Four.”

5. Count former Longhorns wide receiver Mike Davis among those who will compete in the Spring League in Austin later this month. Davis, who scored a huge touchdown against Oklahoma in 2013, earned his degree at Texas and has been training young kids in both football and basketball. He once envisioned playing both sports for Texas.

6. Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said the league will put out requests for proposals “soon” for the league basketball tournaments in 2021 and beyond. Will other cities bid? “I would expect they would,” he said. The league plans to hold the men’s and women’s tournaments in the same city, and I cannot imagine that not being Kansas City again. It’s the perfect host, although I gained 10 pounds from Oklahoma Joe’s ribs and Stroud’s fried chicken. Bowlsby also said he’d like to get another person from the Big 12 on the basketball selection committee because the league has not been represented for three straight years.

7. Heard Jackie Sherrill talk about the benefits of stem cell therapy and how it helped him deal with a rotator cuff injury. The former Texas A&M football coach said a lot of NFL players have gone to Cancún and taken advantage of the treatment to help with chronic pain, knee injuries and the effects of CTE. John Hunewell, vice president of marketing at Celltex Therapeutics, said, “The U.S. is behind other countries.” Sherrill said he thinks approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will come “pretty soon.”

8. Heard an interesting idea to help stop tanking in the NBA to get better chances at a higher lottery pick: Give each of the 14 teams that do not make the playoffs one pingpong ball. One team, one chance. I like it. … Speaking of not making the playoffs, there’s a chance the San Antonio Spurs could miss the postseason for the first time since 1997. The Spurs have been the most consistent sports franchise in the past quarter-century but are currently sitting in 10th place in the West.

9. Rented “The Neighbor.” Please do not follow my lead. One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Gave it one duck, and only because of the red Corvette in the movie.

10. Crazy prediction: Kyler Murray, projected to be the starting quarterback for Oklahoma this fall, will consider signing a major league baseball contract this summer.



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Sunrun Keeps Growing, While Prepping for a Whole New Grid Services Business – Greentech Media

Sunrun has maintained growth and cash flow amid industry turbulence. And it’s done so while building out infrastructure to add future revenue streams to its rooftop solar business: energy storage and grid services.

In 2018, the rate of solar customers opting to add home batteries via Sunrun’s BrightBox package reached 20 percent in California. The company has expanded its offering to Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, New York and, last week, to Massachusetts.

The firming ability of storage turns the company’s portfolio of rooftop solar installations into a far more valuable asset, and Sunrun is working to monetize that by bidding on grid services contracts with utilities; it has won a few already, and will hear back on more procurements throughout the year. This won’t bring in revenue immediately, but will over the coming years, as the contracts enter into force.

Unlike some top-five residential installers, Sunrun might be around long enough to see those plans to fruition.

The quarterly earnings report released last week revealed a cash-flow-positive business with expectations of steady growth through the coming year. In 2017, Sunrun increased its deployments 15 percent year-over-year, from 282 megawatts to 323 megawatts.

Company executives expect to deliver another 15 percent deployment increase in 2018, and to grow cash generation even faster than that.

Total revenue grew by 17 percent or $75.8 million, yielding net income available to common stockholders of $124.5 million. That amounts to $1.15 per share in diluted net earnings available to common shareholders.

Sunrun’s stock price has rebounded from a four-month stretch at or below $6. In early February, it bumped up above $7, and has been hovering around there since.

Weathering the storm

Both solar tariffs and tax reform brought downsides for the residential solar industry in recent months.

The White House’s 30 percent tariff on imported solar modules will bring less disruption for the residential sector compared to tight-margin utility-scale projects, but it is still material.

The tax reform passed in December provided Sunrun a one-time benefit of $33 million, more fortuitous than the situation that befell developer First Solar, which had to pay upward of $400 million as a result. In the long term, the corporate tax cuts reduce the amount of available tax equity searching for a home in solar assets.

Each of those stresses will, in theory, reduce project value by about $0.10/watt. Compare that to Sunrun’s record $1.22/watt unlevered net present value (project value minus creation costs) in the fourth quarter of 2017. All else held equal, tariffs and tax reform will send project value back to where it was a year ago.

Sunrun won’t hold all else equal, however; it will continue chasing cost reductions and cheaper sources of capital. In the end, the leadership expects net present value to stay above $1.00/watt in 2018.

Without federal interference in the competitive landscape, Sunrun could have posted even better unit economics. Instead, it must work to keep things steady in the face of external negative forces.

Looking ahead, Sunrun will face a different kind of headwind: actual competition from Tesla and Vivint.

The second- and third-largest installers shrank their deployments in recent quarters as they sought to improve profitability.

“It was a somewhat easier time for Sunrun to have a breakout year, given that Tesla and Vivint were struggling and there was market share to take,” said Allison Mond, solar analyst at GTM Research. “Both Tesla and Vivint are projecting a return to growth this year, though, which I believe will make it that much harder for Sunrun to continue to grow 15 percent again.”

Weathering actual storms…with batteries

Residential solar competition may heat back up, but Sunrun is striving to move beyond that particular market.

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For Sunrun, BrightBox amounts to a more valuable, higher-margin product than standalone solar. But it also creates the opportunity to work with utilities on grid service contracts.

“Overall, if I look five years into the future, it wouldn’t surprise me if 80 percent of solar systems had battery storage,” Executive Chairman Ed Fenster said in an interview. “Change is going to happen much faster than people think, and the speed of battery deployments is going to surprise people.”

The rash of major storms and outages over the last year have only accentuated the customer benefit of clean backup power, he added.

“There are millions of people without power as we speak in the Northeast,” he said.

The recent nor’easter demonstrates the value proposition of BrightBox in Massachusetts. Sunrun has highlighted the resilience value, contrasting the battery system to “dirty, noisy diesel generators” that otherwise serve as backup.

That framing may be necessary to justify the $1,000 upfront cost that Sunrun is charging in Massachusetts, unlike in its other markets. The argument is that it’s cheaper than a diesel genset, and then the customer gets electricity for three-quarters of the retail price. Still, the upfront charge changes the payback calculus compared to markets like California and Hawaii, where pro-storage policies offer more favorable economics.

The launch itself caps Sunrun’s efforts to work with regulators and policymakers to clear up permitting and interconnection rules so that the company feels confident entering the state.

The company also plans to wade into the state’s ongoing debate over how to procure clean energy, which is required by recent legislation.

The state’s choice of a massive, centralized transmission line from Quebec stalled when a New Hampshire regulator denied a crucial construction permit. Fenster positioned BrightBox as a localized antidote to permitting risk and transmission constraints associated with mass-scale projects.

“We can just build it and it’s going to be lower cost,” he said. “What customers want is reliable, affordable power, and we really believe distributed power is going to provide that better than centralized power. We’re pleased to be leading the effort there.”

Grid services revenue expected

In the call with investors, CEO Lynn Jurich teased that the move into grid services will eventually produce a “customer-created utility” that could tap into the $500 billion market cap of the 20 biggest utilities.

Grid services isn’t expected to add substantial revenue this year, though; instead, Sunrun is bidding on a large number of RFPs for grid services, Fenster said.

“We will start adding contracted revenue in the near term,” he noted.

The company got an early win for aggregated capacity in California’s Demand Response Auction Mechanism last summer, as did Tesla.

Utilities typically award grid services contracts several years ahead of when the power is needed, so winning a bid won’t mean cash starts flowing immediately. However, if Sunrun locks down more contracts this year, it can count on years of contracted revenue streams in the future.

Having maintained steady growth through a period of industry upheavals, Sunrun has an opportunity to seize the first-mover advantage in pursuing grid services in earnest.

“While Tesla and Vivint still need to work on figuring out the kinks in their solar businesses, Sunrun is able to focus its efforts on further strategic initiatives,” Mond said.

Looking to figure out where residential solar is headed next? You need to come to GTM’s Solar Summit. We’ll have many of the top executives in the industry there to provide insight on the evolution of the market.