Taiwan
Taiwan the Republic of China, is a state in East Asia. Neighbouring states include the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the northeast, the Philippines to the south. Taiwan is the most populous state and largest economy, not a member of the United Nations; the island of Taiwan was inhabited by indigenous peoples for thousands of years before the 17th century, when Dutch colonialists opened the island to mass Han immigration. After a brief rule by the Kingdom of Tungning, the island was annexed in 1683 by the Qing dynasty of China, ceded to Japan in 1895. Following the surrender of Japan in 1945, the Republic of China, which had overthrown and succeeded the Qing in 1911, took control of Taiwan; the resumption of the Chinese Civil War led to the loss of the mainland to the Communists and the flight of the ROC government to Taiwan in 1949. Although the ROC government continued to claim to be the legitimate representative of China, since 1950 its effective jurisdiction has been limited to Taiwan and several small islands.
In the early 1960s, Taiwan entered a period of industrialisation. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it changed from a one-party military dictatorship to a multi-party democracy with a semi-presidential system; as a founding member, the ROC represented China in the UN until it was replaced by the PRC in 1971. The PRC has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan and refused diplomatic relations with any country that recognises the ROC; as of 2019, Taiwan maintains official ties with 16 out of 193 UN member states. Most international organisations in which the PRC participates either refuse to grant membership to Taiwan or allow it to participate only as a non-state actor. Most major powers maintain unofficial ties with Taiwan through representative offices and institutions that function as de facto embassies and consulates. In Taiwan, the major political division is between parties favouring eventual Chinese unification and promoting a Chinese identity contrasted with those aspiring to independence and promoting a Taiwanese identity, though both sides have moderated their positions to broaden their appeal.
Taiwan is a high-income advanced economy, with a skilled and educated workforce. It has the 22nd-largest economy in the world, its high-tech industry plays a key role in the global economy, it is urbanised, is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with most of the population concentrated on the western coast. The state is ranked in terms of civil and political liberties, health care and human development. Various names for the island of Taiwan remain in use today, each derived from explorers or rulers during a particular historical period; the name Formosa dates from 1542, when Portuguese sailors sighted an uncharted island and noted it on their maps as Ilha Formosa. The name Formosa "replaced all others in European literature" and remained in common use among English speakers into the 20th century. In the early 17th century, the Dutch East India Company established a commercial post at Fort Zeelandia on a coastal sandbar called "Tayouan", after their ethnonym for a nearby Taiwanese aboriginal tribe Taivoan people, written by the Dutch and Portuguese variously as Taiouwang, Teijoan, etc.
This name was adopted into the Chinese vernacular as the name of the sandbar and nearby area. The modern word "Taiwan" is derived from this usage, seen in various forms in Chinese historical records; the area occupied by modern-day Tainan represented the first permanent settlement by both European colonists and Chinese immigrants. The settlement grew to be the island's most important trading centre and served as its capital until 1887. Use of the current Chinese name became official as early as 1684 with the establishment of Taiwan Prefecture. Through its rapid development the entire Formosan mainland became known as "Taiwan". In his Daoyi Zhilüe, Wang Dayuan used "Liuqiu" as a name for the island of Taiwan, or the part of it closest to Penghu. Elsewhere, the name was used for the Ryukyu Islands in general or Okinawa, the largest of them; the name appears in the Book of Sui and other early works, but scholars cannot agree on whether these references are to the Ryukyus, Taiwan or Luzon. The official name of the state is the "Republic of China".
Shortly after the ROC's establishment in 1912, while it was still located on the Chinese mainland, the government used the short form "China" to refer to itself, which derives from zhōng and guó, a term which developed under the Zhou dynasty in reference to its royal demesne, the name was applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and to China's Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state during the Qing era. During the 1950s and 1960s, after the government had withdrawn to Taiwan upon losing the Chinese Civil War, it was referred to as "Nationalist China" to differentiate it from "Communist China", it was a member of the United Nations representing "China" until 1971, when it lost its seat to the People's Republic of China. Over subsequent decades, the Republic of China has become known as "Taiwan", after the island that comprises 99% of the territory under its control. In some contexts ROC government publications, the name is written as "
Jack Ma
Jack Ma is a Chinese business magnate and philanthropist. He is the co-founder and executive chairman of the Alibaba Group, a multinational technology conglomerate; as of January 2019, he is one of China's richest men with a net worth of $39.1 billion, as well as one of the wealthiest people in the world. Ma's primary ideology was for an market-driven economy. A prominent business figure, Ma is seen as a global ambassador for Chinese business and as such is listed as one of the world's most powerful people by Forbes, he serves as a role model for startup businesses. In 2017, he was ranked second in the annual "World's 50 Greatest Leaders" list by Fortune. On 10 September 2018, he announced that he will retire from Alibaba and pursue educational work, effective in one year with Daniel Zhang succeeding him as executive chairman. Ma resigned from the position of the CEO of Alibaba Group and decided to resign as chairman to focus on philanthropy. Ma was born on 10 September 1964 in Hangzhou, China.
He began studying English at a young age by conversing with English-speakers at Hangzhou international hotel. He would ride 70 miles on his bicycle to give tourists tours of the area to practice his English for nine years, he became pen pals with one of those foreigners, who nicknamed him "Jack" because he found it hard to pronounce his Chinese name. In his youth, Ma struggled attending college; the Chinese entrance exams are held only once a year and Ma took four years to pass. Ma attended Hangzhou Teacher's Institute and graduated in 1988 with a B. A. in English. While at school, Ma was head of the student council. After graduation, he became a lecturer in English and International Trade at Hangzhou Dianzi University. Ma got rejected by all. "I went for a job with the police. "I went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted. I was the only guy...". In addition to this, he got rejected. In 1994, Ma heard about the Internet. In early 1995, he went to the US with his friends.
Although he found information related to beer from many countries, he was surprised to find none from China. He tried to search for general information about China and again was surprised to find none. So he and his friend created an "ugly" website related to China, he launched the website at 9:40 AM, by 12:30 PM he had received emails from some Chinese investors wishing to know about him. This was. In April 1995, Ma, his wife Cathy and a friend started their first company, their company was dedicated to creating websites for companies and he named it "China Pages". Within three years, the company had made 5,000,000 Chinese Yuan which at the time was equivalent to US$800,000. Ma began building websites for Chinese companies with the help of friends in the US, he said that "The day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house", on a slow dial-up connection, "we waited three and a half hours and got half a page", he recalled. "We watched TV and played cards, waiting.
But I was so proud. I proved the Internet existed". At a conference in 2010, Ma revealed that he has never written a line of code nor made one sale to a customer, he acquired a computer for the first time at the age of 33. From 1998 to 1999, Ma headed an information technology company established by the China International Electronic Commerce Center, a department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. In 1999, he quit and returned to Hangzhou with his team to found Alibaba, a China-based business-to-business marketplace site in his apartment with a group of 18 friends, he started a new round of venture development with 500,000 yuan. In October 1999 and January 2000, Alibaba twice won a total of a $25 million foreign venture capital investment; the program was expected to improve the domestic e-commerce market and perfect an e-commerce platform for Chinese enterprises small and medium-sized enterprises, to address World Trade Organization challenges. Ma wanted to improve the global e-commerce system and from 2003 he founded Taobao Marketplace, Ali Mama and Lynx.
After the rapid rise of Taobao, eBay offered to purchase the company. However, Ma rejected their offer, instead garnering support from Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang with a $1 billion investment. In September 2014 it was reported Alibaba was raising over $25 billion in an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Alibaba became one of the most valuable technology companies in the world after raising the full $25 billion, the largest initial public offering in US financial history. Ma served as executive chairman of Alibaba Group, a holding company with nine major subsidiaries: Alibaba.com, Taobao Marketplace, Tmall, eTao, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Juhuasuan, 1688.com, AliExpress.com and Alipay. In November 2012, Alibaba's online transaction volume exceeded one trillion yuan; as of 2016, Ma is the owner of Château de Sours in Bordeaux, Chateau Guerry in Côtes de Bourg and Château Perenne in Blaye, Côtes de Bordeaux. On 9 January 2017, Ma met with United States President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower, to discuss potential 1 million jobs openings in the following five years through Alibaba's interest in the country.
On 8 September 2017, to celebrate Alibaba's 18th year of establishment, Ma appeared on stage and turned the event into a'Thrille
Traditional Chinese characters
Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most the characters in the standardized character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong and Macau, in the Kangxi Dictionary; the modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han Dynasty, have been more or less stable since the 5th century. The retronym "traditional Chinese" is used to contrast traditional characters with Simplified Chinese characters, a standardized character set introduced by the government of the People's Republic of China on Mainland China in the 1950s. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau. In contrast, Simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China and Malaysia in official publications. However, several countries – such as Australia, the US and Canada – are increasing their number of printed materials in Simplified Chinese, to better accommodate citizens from mainland China.
The debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. A large number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both character sets. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of China, there is no prohibition against the use of traditional characters. Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China in handwriting and used for inscriptions and religious text, they are retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear. Nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China is dominated by simplified characters. In Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, simplified Chinese characters in Hong Kong and Macau has appeared to accommodate Mainland Chinese tourists and immigrants; this has led to concerns by many residents to protect their local heritage. Taiwan has never adopted simplified characters.
The use of simplified characters in official documents is prohibited by the government of Taiwan. Simplified characters are understood to a certain extent by any educated Taiwanese, learning to read them takes little effort; some stroke simplifications that have been incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting. For example, while the name of Taiwan is written as 臺灣, the semi-simplified name 台灣 is acceptable to write in official documents. In Southeast Asia, the Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative regarding simplification. While major public universities are teaching simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications like the Chinese Commercial News, World News, United Daily News still use traditional characters. On the other hand, the Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified. Aside from local newspapers, magazines from Hong Kong, such as the Yazhou Zhoukan, are found in some bookstores.
In case of film or television subtitles on DVD, the Chinese dub, used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan. This is because the DVDs belongs to DVD Region Code 3. Hence, most of the subtitles are in Traditional Characters. Overseas Chinese in the United States have long used traditional characters. A major influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States occurred during the latter half of the 19th century, before the standardization of simplified characters. Therefore, United States public notices and signage in Chinese are in Traditional Chinese. Traditional Chinese characters are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world; the government of Taiwan calls traditional Chinese characters standard characters or orthodox characters. However, the same term is used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard and traditional characters from variant and idiomatic characters. In contrast, users of traditional characters outside Taiwan, such as those in Hong Kong and overseas Chinese communities, users of simplified Chinese characters, call them complex characters.
An informal name sometimes used by users of simplified characters is "old characters". Users of traditional characters sometimes refer them as "Full Chinese characters" to distinguish them from simplified Chinese characters; some traditional character users argue that traditional characters are the original form of the Chinese characters and cannot be called "complex". Simplified characters cannot be "standard" because they are not used in all Chinese-speaking regions. Conversely, supporters of simplified Chinese characters object to the description of traditional characters as "standard," since they view the new simplified characters as the contemporary standard used by the vast majority of Chinese speakers, they point out that traditional characters are not traditional as many Chinese characters have been made more elaborate over time. Some people refer to traditional characters as "proper characters" and modernized characters as "simplified-stroke characters" (sim
Alibaba Group
Alibaba Group Holding Limited is a Chinese multinational conglomerate specializing in e-commerce, retail and technology. Founded 4 April 1999, the company provides consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer, business-to-business sales services via web portals, as well as electronic payment services, shopping search engines and cloud computing services, it owns and operates a diverse array of businesses around the world in numerous sectors, is named as one of the world's most admired companies by Fortune. At closing time on the date of its initial public offering – US$25 billion – the world's highest in history, 19 September 2014, Alibaba's market value was US$231 billion; as of 19 December 2018, Alibaba's market cap stood at US$352.28 billion. It is one of the top 10 biggest companies in the world. In January 2018, Alibaba became the second Asian company to break the US$500 billion valuation mark, after its competitor Tencent; as of 2018, Alibaba has the 9th highest global brand value. Alibaba is the world's largest retailer and e-commerce company, one of the largest Internet and AI companies, one of the biggest venture capital firms, one of the biggest investment corporations in the world.
The company hosts the largest B2B, C2C, B2C marketplaces in the world. Its online sales and profits surpassed all US retailers combined since 2015, it has been expanding into the media industry, with revenues rising by triple percentage points year on year. It sets the record on the 2018 edition of China's Singles' Day, the world's biggest online and offline shopping day; the company's name came from the character Ali Baba from the Middle Eastern folk tale collection One Thousand and One Nights because of its universal appeal. As Jack Ma, one of the founders, explained: One day I was in San Francisco in a coffee shop, I was thinking Alibaba is a good name, and a waitress came, I said, "Do you know about Alibaba?" And she said yes. I said, "What do you know about?", she said, "Open Sesame". And I said, "Yes, this is the name!" I went on to the street and found 30 people and asked them, "Do you know Alibaba?" People from India, people from Germany, people from Tokyo and China... they all knew about Alibaba.
Alibaba – open sesame. Alibaba is a kind, smart business person, he helped the village. So... easy to spell, globally known. Alibaba opens sesame for small- to medium-sized companies. We registered the name "Alimama", in case someone wants to marry us!" On 4 April 1999, Jack Ma and his team of 17 friends and students founded Alibaba.com, a China-based B2B marketplace site, in his Hangzhou apartment. In October 1999, Alibaba received a US$25 million investment from Goldman SoftBank. Alibaba.com was expected to improve the domestic e-commerce market and perfect an e-commerce platform for Chinese enterprises small and medium-sized enterprises, to help export Chinese products to the global market as well as address World Trade Organization challenges. In 2002, Alibaba.com became profitable three years after launch. Ma wanted to improve the global e-commerce system, so from 2003 onward, Alibaba launched Taobao Marketplace, Alimama.com, Lynx. When eBay announced its expansion into China in 2003, Ma viewed the American company as a foreign competitor and rejected eBay's buyout of Alibaba's subsidiary Taobao.
Through applying existing technologies and gaining trust in the Chinese e-commerce market, as well as expanding through dominating the market at a loss before making a return on additional services, Alibaba's subsidiaries outperformed eBay in the Chinese e-commerce market, claiming a growing percentage of consumers from eBay. Alibaba subsidiary Taobao would force eBay out of the Chinese market, with eBay closing its unprofitable China Web unit, though the two companies would break six years later. In 2005, Yahoo! Invested in Alibaba, buying a 40% stake in the company for US$1 billion; this would as a result net in US$10 billion in Alibaba's IPO alone to Yahoo!. According to Li Chuan, a senior executive at Alibaba, the company was planning in 2013 to open traditional brick and mortar retail outlets in partnership with Chinese real estate company Wanda Group. Additionally, Alibaba purchased a 25% stake in Hong Kong-listed Chinese department store chain Intime Retail in early 2014. In early 2017, Alibaba and Intime's founder Shen Guojun agreed to pay as much as HK$19.8 billion to take the store chain private.
Alibaba's stake—28% from 2014's US$692 million investment—would rise to about 74% after the deal. In April 2014, Coatue Management, Andreessen Horowitz led a US$250 million Series D financing round, completed by on-demand transportation company Lyft, bringing its total amount raised to $332.5 million. On 5 June 2014, Alibaba bought a 50% stake of Guangzhou Evergrande F. C. from Evergrande Real Estate Group Ltd. in a deal, worth 1.2 billion yuan. On 5 September 2014, the group—in a regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission—set a US$60- to $66- per-share price range for its scheduled initial public offering, the final price of which would be determined after an international roadshow to gauge the investor interest in Alibaba shares to shareholders. On 18 September 2014, Alibaba's IPO priced at US$68, raising US$21.8 billion for the company and investors. Alibaba was the biggest US IPO in history, bigger than Google and Twitter combined. On 19 September 2014, Alibaba's shares began trading on the NYSE at an opening price of $92.70 at 11:55 am EST.
On 22 September 2014, Alibaba's underwriters announced t
Hangzhou
Hangzhou romanized as Hangchow, is the capital and most populous city of Zhejiang Province in East China. It sits at the head of Hangzhou Bay, which separates Ningbo. Hangzhou grew to prominence as the southern terminus of the Grand Canal and has been one of the most renowned and prosperous cities in China for much of the last millennium; the city's West Lake, a UNESCO World Heritage site west of the city, is among its best-known attractions. A study conducted by PwC and China Development Research Foundation saw Hangzhou ranked first among "Chinese Cities of Opportunity". Hangzhou is considered a World City with a "Beta+" classification according to GaWC. Hangzhou is classified as a sub-provincial city and forms the core of the Hangzhou metropolitan area, the fourth-largest in China. During the 2010 Chinese census, the metropolitan area held 21.102 million people over an area of 34,585 km2. Hangzhou prefecture had a registered population of 9,018,000 in 2015. In September 2015, Hangzhou was awarded the 2022 Asian Games.
It will be the third city in China to host the Asian Games after Beijing 1990 and Guangzhou 2010. Hangzhou, an emerging technology hub and home to the e-commerce giant Alibaba hosted the eleventh G20 summit in 2016; the celebrated neolithic culture of Hemudu is known to have inhabited Yuyao, 100 km north-east of Hangzhou, as far back as seven thousand years ago. It was during this time. Excavations have established that the jade-carving Liangzhu culture inhabited the area around the present city around five thousand years ago; the first of Hangzhou's present neighborhoods to appear in written records was Yuhang, which preserves an old Baiyue name. Hangzhou was made the seat of the prefecture of Hang in AD 589, entitling it to a city wall, constructed two years later. By a longstanding convention seen in other cities like Guangzhou and Fuzhou, the city took on the name of the area it administered and became known as Hangzhou. Hangzhou was at the southern end of China's Grand Canal; the canal evolved over centuries but reached its full length by 609.
In the Tang dynasty, Bai Juyi was appointed governor of Hangzhou. An accomplished poet, his deeds at Hangzhou have led to his being praised as a great governor, he noticed that the farmland nearby depended on the water of West Lake, but due to the negligence of previous governors, the old dyke had collapsed, the lake so dried out that the local farmers were suffering from severe drought. He ordered the construction of a stronger and taller dyke, with a dam to control the flow of water, thus providing water for irrigation and mitigating the drought problem; the livelihood of local people of Hangzhou improved over the following years. Bai Juyi used his leisure time to enjoy the West Lake, visiting it daily, he ordered the construction of a causeway connecting Broken Bridge with Solitary Hill to allow walking, instead of requiring a boat. He had willows and other trees planted along the dyke, making it a beautiful landmark; this causeway was named "Bai Causeway", in his honor. It is listed as one of the Seven Ancient Capitals of China.
It was first the capital of the Wuyue Kingdom from 907 to 978 during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Named Xifu at the time, it was one of the three great bastions of culture in southern China during the tenth century, along with Nanjing and Chengdu. Leaders of Wuyue were noted patrons of the arts of Buddhist temple architecture and artwork; the dyke built to protect the city by King Qian Liu gave the Qiantang its modern name. Hangzhou became a cosmopolitan center, drawing scholars from throughout China and conducting diplomacy with neighboring Chinese states, with Japan and the Khitan Liao dynasty. In 1089, while another renowned poet Su Shi was the city's governor, he used 200,000 workers to construct a 2.8 km long causeway across West Lake. The lake was once a lagoon tens of thousands of years ago. Silt blocked the way to the sea and the lake was formed. A drill in the lake-bed in 1975 found the sediment of the sea. Artificial preservation prevented the lake from evolving into a marshland.
The Su Causeway built by Su Shi, the Bai Causeway built by Bai Juyi, a Tang dynasty poet, once the governor of Hangzhou, were both built out of mud dredged from the lake bottom. The lake is surrounded by hills on the western sides; the Baochu Pagoda sits on the Baoshi Hill to the north of the lake. Arab merchants lived in Hangzhou during the Song dynasty, due to the fact that the oceangoing trade passages took precedence over land trade during this time. There were Arabic inscriptions from the 13th century and 14th century. During the period of the Yuan dynasty, Muslims were persecuted through the banning of their traditions, they participated in revolts against the Mongols; the Fenghuangshi mosque was constructed by an Egyptian trader. Ibn Battuta is known to have visited the city of Hangzhou in 1345. During his stay at Hangzhou, he was impressed by the large number of well-crafted and well-painted Chinese wooden ships with colored sails and silk awnings in the canals, he attended a banquet held by Qurtai, the Yuan Mongol administrator of the city, who according to Ibn Battuta, was fond of the skills of local Chinese conjurers.
Hangzhou was chosen as the new capital of the Southern Song dynasty in 1132, wh
Evernote
Evernote is application software designed for note taking, task lists, archiving. It is developed by the Evernote Corporation, headquartered in California; the app allows users to create notes, which can be formatted text, web pages or web page excerpts, voice memos, or handwritten "ink" notes. Notes can have file attachments, they can be sorted into notebooks, annotated, given comments and exported. Evernote is cross-platform, including support for iOS, Microsoft Windows and macOS. Evernote is free to use with monthly usage limits, offers paid plans for expanded or lifted limits. Founded by Stepan Pachikov, the Evernote Web service launched into open beta on June 24, 2008 and reached 11 million users in July 2011. In October 2010, under former CEO Phil Libin, the company raised a US$20 million funding round led by DoCoMo Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Since the company raised an additional $50 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures, another $70 million in funding led by Meritech Capital and CBC Capital.
On November 30, 2012, Evernote raised another $85 million in funding led by AGC Equity Partners/m8 Capital and Valiant Capital Partners. On November 9, 2014, Evernote raised an additional $20 million in funding from Inc.. On May 7, 2013, TechCrunch reported that Evernote launched Yinxiang Biji Business into the Chinese market at the Global Mobile Internet Conference. Linda Kozlowski was named the Chief Operating Officer of Evernote in June 2015, after more than two years with the company, but left before the end of the year. Libin stepped down as CEO in July 2015 and was replaced by former Google Glass executive Chris O'Neill. In October 2015, the Evernote Corp. announced that the company was laying off 18 percent of its workforce and would be closing three out of 10 global offices. In February 2017, CEO O'Neill stated in a blog post. Sequoia Capital, one of Evernote's equity owners, said, "It's great when a company starts to raise non-dilutive capital every day, called revenue."In August 2018, Chief Technical Officer Anirban Kundu, Chief Financial Officer Vincent Toolan, Chief Product Officer Erik Wrobel, head of HR Michelle Wagner left the company.
Wrobel and Wagner both joined in 2016. On September 18, 2018, 54 employees—about 15 percent of the workforce—were laid off. In a blog post, O'Neill said, "After a successful 2017, I set aggressive goals for Evernote in 2018. Though we have grown, we committed too many resources too quickly. We built up areas of our business in ways. Going forward, we are streamlining certain functions, like sales, so we can continue to speed up and scale others, like product development and engineering."On October 29, 2018, Evernote announced that Ian Small, former CEO of TokBox, would replace O'Neill as CEO of Evernote. In 2010, the coding language for the suite was changed from C# for version 3.5 to C++ in version 4.0 to improve performance. As well as the keyboard entry of typed notes, Evernote supports image capture from cameras on supported devices, the recording of voice notes. In some situations, text that appears in captured images can be recognized using annotated. Evernote supports touch and tablet screens with handwriting recognition.
Evernote web-clipping plugins are available for the most popular Internet browsers that allow marked sections of webpages to be captured and clipped to Evernote. If no section of a webpage has been highlighted, Evernote can clip the full page. Evernote supports the ability to e-mail notes to the service, allowing for automated note entry via e-mail rules or filters. Where suitable hardware is available, Evernote can automatically add geolocation tags to notes; as of November 2018, Evernote Pro integrates directly with Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Evernote Pro adds an integration with Salesforce. All versions of Evernote support integrations through IFTTT and Zapier. In 2013, Evernote deprecated its direct integration with Twitter in favor of these third-party services. On supported operating systems, Evernote allows users to store and edit notes on their local machine, using a SQLite database in Windows. Users with Internet access and an Evernote account can have their notes automatically synchronized with a master copy held on Evernote's servers.
This approach lets a user access and edit their data across multiple machines and operating system platforms, but still view and edit data when an Internet connection is not available. However, notes stored on Evernote servers are not encrypted. Where Evernote client software is not available, online account-holders can access their note archive via a web interface or through a media device; the service allows selected files to be shared for viewing and editing by other users. The Evernote software can be downloaded and used as "stand-alone" software without using the online portion of an Evernote account, but it will not be able to upload files to the Evernote server, or use the server to synchronize or share files between different Evernote installations. No image or Image-PDF recognition and indexing will take place if the software is used offline. Evernote is a free online service that allows users to upgrade to Plus*, Premium, or a Business account. Free, Plus * and Premium Evernote accounts have a maximum limit of 250 notebooks.
Basic customers can upload 60 MB of data each month. Plus* customers get a 1 GB upload limit, offline notes on mobile devices, as well as passcode lock for mobile devices. Ema
Initial public offering
Initial public offering or stock market launch is a type of public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and also retail investors. Through this process, colloquially known as floating, or going public, a held company is transformed into a public company. Initial public offerings can be used: to raise new equity capital for the company concerned. After the IPO, shares traded in the open market are known as the free float. Stock exchanges stipulate a minimum free float both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the total share capital. Although IPO offers many benefits, there are significant costs involved, chiefly those associated with the process such as banking and legal fees, the ongoing requirement to disclose important and sometimes sensitive information. Details of the proposed offering are disclosed to potential purchasers in the form of a lengthy document known as a prospectus. Most companies undertake an IPO with the assistance of an investment banking firm acting in the capacity of an underwriter.
Underwriters provide several services, including help with assessing the value of shares and establishing a public market for shares. Alternative methods such as the Dutch auction have been explored and applied for several IPOs; the earliest form of a company which issued public shares was the case of the publicani during the Roman Republic. Like modern joint-stock companies, the publicani were legal bodies independent of their members whose ownership was divided into shares, or partes. There is evidence that these shares were sold to public investors and traded in a type of over-the-counter market in the Forum, near the Temple of Castor and Pollux; the shares quaestors. Mere evidence remains of the prices for which partes were sold, the nature of initial public offerings, or a description of stock market behavior. Publicani lost favor with the rise of the Empire. In the early modern period, the Dutch were financial innovators who helped lay the foundations of modern financial systems; the first modern IPO occurred in March 1602 when the Dutch East India Company offered shares of the company to the public in order to raise capital.
The Dutch East India Company became the first company in history to issue bonds and shares of stock to the general public. In other words, the VOC was the first publicly traded company, because it was the first company to be actually listed on an official stock exchange. While the Italian city-states produced the first transferable government bonds, they did not develop the other ingredient necessary to produce a fledged capital market: corporate shareholders; as Edward Stringham notes, "companies with transferable shares date back to classical Rome, but these were not enduring endeavors and no considerable secondary market existed."In the United States, the first IPO was the public offering of Bank of North America around 1783. When a company lists its securities on a public exchange, the money paid by the investing public for the newly-issued shares goes directly to the company as well as to any early private investors who opt to sell all or a portion of their holdings as part of the larger IPO.
An IPO, allows a company to tap into a wide pool of potential investors to provide itself with capital for future growth, repayment of debt, or working capital. A company selling common shares is never required to repay the capital to its public investors; those investors must endure the unpredictable nature of the open market to price and trade their shares. After the IPO, when shares are traded in the open market, money passes between public investors. For early private investors who choose to sell shares as part of the IPO process, the IPO represents an opportunity to monetize their investment. After the IPO, once shares are traded in the open market, investors holding large blocks of shares can either sell those shares piecemeal in the open market or sell a large block of shares directly to the public, at a fixed price, through a secondary market offering; this type of offering is not dilutive. Once a company is listed, it is able to issue additional common shares in a number of different ways, one of, the follow-on offering.
This method provides capital for various corporate purposes through the issuance of equity without incurring any debt. This ability to raise large amounts of capital from the marketplace is a key reason many companies seek to go public. An IPO accords several benefits to the private company: Enlarging and diversifying equity base Enabling cheaper access to capital Increasing exposure and public image Attracting and retaining better management and employees through liquid equity participation Facilitating acquisitions Creating multiple financing opportunities: equity, convertible debt, cheaper bank loans, etc. There are several disadvantages to completing an initial public offering: Significant legal, account
