Mediaboss Marketing

LAKELAND Lakeland officials have a choice to make about establishing a connection that could bring a newhigh-speed internet provider to the city.

City commissioners will vote on acontract with Orlando-based Summit Broadband Inc. that will create create a private-public partnership for broadband service. The meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m. Tuesday.City Manager Shawn Sherrouse presented the proposalto commissionersthe first time at Friday's agenda study.

"This is an excitingopportunity for all of us, if this is approved, with the opportunity to not only gain more speed but to be future-proofed, which is imperative," Mayor Bill Mutz said.

The proposalis for an initial 10-year contract between the city and Summit,with an automatic 10-year renewalproviding that service provider upholds its agreement.

Internet issues: 'There's an expectation': Governments realize broadband isn't just a private-sector issue

Previously: Lakeland hopes to strike broadband deal with Summit soon

Summit Broadband has agreed to invest $20 million within the next five years to build out the city's broadband network to provide internet services to residential, commercial and wholesale customers. The company will be the "exclusive" marketing and sales agent for Lakeland's existing roughly350-mile dark fiber network, or a city-owned fiber optic conduitleased out to private entities to make their own connections,and handling retail services for new customers.

Summit has also agreed to to contribute at least$20,000 annually for the first 10 years, or a total of $200,000, toward bridging the digital divide in Lakeland. This may take manyforms includingcontributing to the city's SurfLakeland grant, that help provide free wireless internet service in needed areas of the city or aiding customers, according to Kevin Coyne, CEO of Summit.

In exchange, Lakeland will receive the10% of Summit's gross revenue from internet service, or at least a minimum of $144,000 a year. Under the contract, the city has the rightto audit the provider's financial records to ensure it receivesa fair amount.

"There is a return, but it's not a giant windfall," Sherrouse told commissioners. "We want to build a partnership that brings high-speed service to the community so the community can thrive, while bringing in greater competition to the market, better services and better rates. If that's what we accomplish and a financial return, it's a success."

Lakeland will keep ownership over its existing dark fiber network and is expected to keep up with maintenance. It will retain at least 30% of the existing fiber, or a minimum of two strands, for the city's business purposes.

More on broadband: Do you have Spectrum internet? Emergency broadband program could save you money

Development: Lakeland pasture rezoned, will become 199 single-family-home housing development

Sherrouse told commissioners one caveat, not written in the contract, is the city will spend up to $250,000 a year in maintenance for the next five years to help support Summit's startup. These funds would be in addition to the roughly$1.2million a year Lakeland Electric spends on the city's network now.

Lakeland will be allowed to keep providing broadband services to its existing nine dark fiber customers, which include Lakeland Regional Health and Polk County Public Schools. This currently nets the city about $534,000 a year, according to Oscar Torres, the city's director of information technology.

Summit would have the rights to service any new customers or facilities seeking to use the city's dark fiber. Commissioner Stephanie Madden, chair of the city's Broadband Taskforce, said Lakeland Regional Health's new Center for Behavioral Health and Wellness that is under construction would be considered a new facility, and if it desired to be on the same network as the hospital, would be considered a Summit customer.

"We've excited about this partnership, we look forward to getting moving," Coyne said of Summit.

Coyne said that 13 locations havereached out to his company looking for 100 gigabit internet. Summit is ready and willing to sign those contract and begin laying fiber as soon as they have a contract signed with the city. On the residential side, he said Summit will spend a lot of time in the first year building out to about 20,000 homes, and it hopes to capture a 40% market share within three years.

If the partnership should break down, the city does have at least three ways out of thecontract: if the company does not make its annual revenue payment to the city, if Summit does not invest at least $20 million in five years, or does not contribute at least $20,000 per year to closing the digital divide.

Sara-Megan Walsh can be reached at swalsh@theledger.com or 863-802-7545.

Link:
Lakeland City Commissioners to vote on broadband deal Tuesday - The Ledger

So when Ms. Park was pricing a house in Millbrook, N.Y., that needed updating but sat on a quiet country road on five bucolic acres, she listed it at $287,000 and had 62 showings and 32 offers. The house is selling for way over asking price, she said, declining to give the figure because it hadnt closed yet. A comparable house in Millbrook, with far less acreage, was listed in May for $310,000, reduced in June to $299,999 and is still for sale.

For buyer clients, Ms. Park looks intensely at houses that have been sitting like lumps, including those for sale by their owners and even listings that have been withdrawn. If she spots a rough gem, she jumps in and offers a lower price before the seller makes a formal reduction online that triggers multiple bids. I just got a client into a deal for $35,000 under asking that very way, she said. Her clients call her Swoop Sandi.

When it comes to pricing, third-party websites like Zillow and Realtor offer useful transparency (to a point), but also contribute to the problems of sluggish properties, agents say. Buyers see a houses sales history and draw their own conclusions about why a price has been reduced. But sometimes the story is more complicated than a few stats suggest, and the agent may never get a chance to explain it. Zillows habit of reporting how many people look at or save a listing further shapes negative perceptions. If the numbers are skimpy, viewers might assume something is wrong and move on.

Then again, a house that isnt smothered with interest has its own charms. If enthusiasm for a home is dampened, Peggy Bellar in Margaretville said, it may be for no other reason than buyer fatigue. Lots of people have been in numerous competitive bidding situations and are gun shy at this point.

Ms. Bellar had one final explanation for a moribund listing: when everything has been done correctly (including the all-important pricing), then it may simply be a factor of the real estate market adjusting slightly.

For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.

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Finding a Home in This Overheated Market - The New York Times

Kevin Walthall| Columnist

I hope yall are all staying cool out there. Heres some positive perspective: it could be worse.

Last week's "heat dome" weather reminds me of Texas, except in Texas we dont call it a heat dome, we just call it summer. Thankfully Kitsap has been spared the Texas humidity that turns the air into a sticky mosquito soup. That humid air doesnt get cool in the shade, and Texas breezes are just the state trying to suffocate you with a dank pillow. Add Dallas or Houston smog to the soup for subtle tasting notes of Exxon-Mobile byproduct. Yum.

Think you can escape the heat in a Texas lake like you can a Kitsap lake? For a good/terrible time, Google "cottonmouth snakes." Oralligator gar, a Cretaceous-era Satan-fish inexplicably still living in the tepid brown pools Texans call lakes.

So it isnt all bad. You can thank your lucky stars you arent in Texas.

With the heat wave giving a scary glimpse of our climate change future, it seems like a good time to think about streets built for heat waves and telecommuting.

Thats right. Another article about complete streets.

Complete streets are streets built for everyone. Wide sidewalks, bike lanes or shared lanes, bus pull-outs, and ADA ramps are common features of complete streets.

Theyre generally showcase streets, attractive boulevards with landscaping and public art. They arent just tools for getting from A to B, theyre pleasant places to be, destinations in their own right. They attract investment and redevelopment. They give people transportation options outside the car. Complete streets are beneficial to the people who live next to them.

The conventional wisdom for the last 50 years or so has been that streets are for moving as many cars as fast as possible, and nothing else. The result has been stroads, byways that dont know if theyre neighborhood streets or inter-city roads. Some stroads, like 11th Street through West Bremerton, actually handle a large volume of carsand legitimately need to be four lanes wide. Others, like 6th Street or Naval Avenue, dont. Stroads are dangerous and ugly concrete rivers that divide neighborhoods and suck the life (and property values) out of their surroundings with high speed traffic. Maybe that works for commuters who see Bremerton as an obstacle between themselves and work, but for the people who actually live with stroads and pay for them with their taxes, its not worth it. Transportation budgets are slowly becoming more about transporting people than transporting cars.

Sometimes, cities will call these road diets. I dont like that term. Complete streets are fun, diets arent. Sure, 6th Street is chonky, but I dont just want it to become slimmer, I want it to become an asset to the community. As Ive said before, I would like complete streets to be accompanied by some type of complete street zoning, which would create small-town Main Streets along complete streets, providing opportunities for employment and recreation within walking distance of neighborhoods, creating a non-motorized, low-emissions transportation network throughout the city and affordable market-rate housing based on that transportation network rather than expensive parking and parkings attendant traffic.

In light of Mondays scorching heat and the economic shifts from the pandemic, I think two aspects of complete streets need to come into focus: street trees and high-speed internet.

Perhaps by now weve all read about the effects of heat bubbles or heat islands in urban areas. Heat bubbles are caused by the suns heat being reflected off of roads, parking lots, and buildings. When all that asphalt and roofing heats up in a concentrated urban area, it creates pockets of extreme heat, as in the case of Seattle and Bremerton.

Theres no way to avoid having roads, parking lots, and rooftops in urban areas, but we can mitigate their effects to a degree with vegetation in various forms. Landscaping in parking lots helps with stormwater runoff, absorbing and purifying rainwater as it runs from oil-slicked parking lots into aquifers and seas. Trees extend their branches over asphalt, catching the suns rays and capturing its energy. We can even go so far as to have green roofs, which are specially designed to host moss and lichens, succulents, or grasses. Plants take the energy of the sun and pollution from cars and use it in photosynthesis to create the plants energy. Its the best deal in the history of deals.

The recent heat wave makes street trees seem like an essential component of complete streets. Street trees are pretty. Humans have a biological and neurological need to see trees and greenery. Trees improve property values. Trees are the Swiss Army Knife of urban improvement but theyre also essential to making Bremerton more resilient towards climate change. According to the U.S. Forest Service Center for Urban Forest Research, street trees can lower the temperature of streets by 6 to 10 degrees, mitigating the heat island effect. Street trees also absorb CO2 emissions, helping with the root causes of climate change. When planted in the right places, trees can even diminish home cooling costs by 30%, for those of you who have air conditioning already.

These can be trees planted in medians or by sidewalks, but if we want Bremerton to roll with the punches of climate change, we need to view trees as a necessity for combating the heat bubble effect. The good news is that trees are cheap, abundant, pretty, efficient, and easy to maintain. Deciduous trees shade us in the summer and let light in during winter. Its really quite a polite thing for Mother Nature to do, if you think about it.

Second, I want to update the notion of complete streets to include fiber optic cable for high speed internet. This has largely come across my radar since Covid due to the rise and apparent permanence of remote working. We should absolutely be jumping on this. Every major disruption is an opportunity to pivot faster than the competition, and Covid is no exception. We can come out of this thing on top if were willing to think outside the box and make lemonade out of these catastrophic lemons.

With so many working from home and daily commutes nixed, people are realizing they can live anywhere they want, so theyre moving. Theres an extremely silver lining to that reality: we no longer have to offer tax breaks to attract major employers in order to import wealth. Major marketing and tech companies now effectively have offices through coworking spaces in Bremerton (Spark Commons, Bremerton Workspace), Silverdale (Have-A-Space), Poulsbo (Vibe Coworks, The Creative Consortium), and Bainbridge Island (Knack Coworking). Quality, high-paying jobs are located practically everywhere.

The question now becomes is this the sort of place people with good jobs want to live? If Bremerton is awesome, people with high-paying jobs will stay and their salaries will circulate in the local economy. If Bremerton keeps betting that Sears Roebuck is making a comeback, theyll move on.

Being awesome has never made more fiscal sense than it does right now. And weve got a great start on that front, with miles of beautiful coastline, fantastic parks, a farmers market, craft breweries, and the upcoming Quincy Square. Add in some leafy pedestrian boulevards lined with townhomes and boutique shops and restaurants, and these are the things that attract the high earners of the new economy, who splurge on experiences.

I think were only going to see more co-working spaces, and their presence means any web-based employer can be in any neighborhood. All co-working spaces need to succeed is a building for commercial use and access to high speed internet hence I think high-speed fiber internet should become the next ingredient in any complete street.

If mayoral candidate Bill Broughton has one big idea to campaign on, its his proposal to make the City of Bremerton a provider of high-speed fiber optic internet in the mold of Chattanooga, Tennessee. He sees this as a way to attract traditional office-based employers downtown, but I think it also has the potential to open up new high-paying employment opportunities in outlying neighborhoods as well. Competition is always a good thing, and Im looking forward to seeing him compete with incumbent Mayor Greg Wheeler. I think the idea of using the City to spread high speed internet has legs.

While street trees are an important adaptation to climate change, bringing employers to employees has the potential to dramatically reduce auto emissions from commuters, which is the number one source of carbon emissions both nationally and in Washington. We need to be thinking now about a hotter future with more expensive resources.

Kevin Walthall is a Bremerton resident and a regular contributor tothe Kitsap Sun. He also writes for the blog Urban Bremerton. Contact him atkswalthall@gmail.com.

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How tree-lined streets and high-speed internet can help with a warming climate - Kitsap Sun

Just like any other business, betting firms underwent unprecedentedchallenges that were brought about by the outbreak of Covid-19

A triple whammy has hammered the Italian sector if that saying applies to a national market.

First, there was a prohibition on all gambling-related marketing, followed by the pandemic's impactand attendant lockdowns, and lastly, to add insult to injury, a tax hike while the virus was still raging. However, the internet sector has shown remarkable resiliency, and recent M&A activity in the industry suggests that future prospects are bright, at least at the top of the tree.

It may seem strange that when talking about the status of the Italian internet market in the previous year, the lines of a long-dead popular British legend spring to mind. Nonetheless, some of the lines delivered by Gus Elen, a cockney singer and comic, seems to be appropriate.

Similarly, the Italian gaming industry would argue it'd be doing OK if it weren't for the virus (Covid-19), its accompanying lockdowns, restrictions on gambling marketing, and recently increased taxes. Recent data backs up this assertion. Per Ficom Leisure, revenue from all internet sectors increased about 95% in February in comparison to the same period in the previous year, before the initial lockout.

The gross gaming revenue (GGR) for February was just 351 million, shy of the previous high of 359 million established in December. Almost all non-AAMS casinos and sports betting sites listed at Siti Scommesse Non-AAMS remained up upwards of 160 per cent year-on-year in March, and online casinos had their second-highest sum since the regulation began.

This backs the overall optimistic image for online or virtual gaming and, since sports resumed in June of the previous year, online sports income. "Due to the result of the lockdowns, a bulk of additional players have registered online accounts," explains Senior partner at Ficom Leisure in Rome, Christian Tirabassi.

'We expect this trend will continue since many gamers have (grown acclimated to) wagering and gambling on the internet and on smartphones."

According to Fabio Schiavolin, CEO of Snaitech, 2020 demonstrated clearly the consumer appeal of online gaming, with Snaitech'ssales jumping 58 per cent over the last year, which was considered a record-breaking year.

He adds that "2020 data demonstrated a clear indication of the digitalization of demand for all goods and services, supported by the 2020 retail lockdown with consumers enjoying the digital offer with greater confidence."

Betting shop managers at Snaitech are among the converts. "We have been concentrating a lot on acquiring online gamers via our points of sale for a long time now, sharing the income with the shop managers and establishing a true omnichannel perspective of the customers," Schiavolin explains.

"Even the most hesitant retailers have realized the significance of capitalizing on business digitalization, which has been their sole source of income in the months following the pandemic. We have been able to boost compensation to aid the retail network to deal with the problem and recover stronger when the opening is permitted, as we always concentrate on partnerships."

The Covid-19 outbreak and AAMS influence on Italian football clubs were one of the most visible challenges the gaming industry has faced in the last 12 months. Land-based gambling and gaming, in particular, were subjected to lengthy unavoidable closures and, as of the moment of writing this content, had yet to see any signs of returning.

"Online sales have indeed been greater over the last 12 months, but they've not been sufficient to reimburse for the sector losses caused by shop closures," Alexander Martin, CEO of SKS365 explains.

However, the omnichannel endeavour was critical to the Italian business a long time before the new coronavirus came into the country in early 2020.

The Italian gambling industries were dealt a major hit when the Dignity Decree was passed in 2019, and practically all casino sales promotion was banned. However, the gambling businesses also had a role to play in the abrupt low level of awareness.

Lacking the formerly accessible assortment of advertising stimuli, the necessity to discover ways to push clients online prompted a more determined effort to use the retail presence as a lead generation tool. As a result, even when the latest marketing limits took effect in Italy, there was a seemingly counterintuitive increase in GGR.

The restriction on betting-related promotion appears to have had the effect of consolidating market share amongst those half-dozen major companies. Martin points out that SKS365 has become one of the big six sports betting operators holding a market share of over 10%, accounting for approximately three-quarters of total GGR.

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Revealed: How Italian bookies survived tough year - Goal.com

California-based Digital Marketing Agency Lyfted Studios has announced the expansion of its services to provide solutions for lawyers, automotive dealerships, doctors, and other medical professionals

COVID-19 has had an unprecedented toil on the corporate world. Today, everyone is seeking to go online, generate leads, and close sales without physical interaction. Digital marketing agencies worldwide have been on their toes, providing strategies for businesses in several industries. However, certain businesses and professionals have been overlooked by digital marketers.

Despite the prevalence of digital marketing, businesses and professionals in the medical, law, and automotive fields have not shared in the new trend sweeping through the corporate world. To end this backdrop, Lyfted Studio, a digital marketing agency in Orange County, CA, has announced that it would extend the frontiers of its services to provide tailored solutions for lawyers, automotive dealerships, doctors, and other medical professionals.

Over the years, Lyfted Studios has helped businesses in and around California with digital marketing strategies. The solutions offered by Lyfted Studios creative and industry-specific marketing strategies, social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), Google AdWords, professional branding, web design and development, and eCommerce marketing.

Some of the reviews from happy customers shared on the Lyfted Studios website reads:

What can I say? We couldnt have even made it past the first month of business without the team at Lyfted Agency. They could create an insane marketing strategy that boosted our sales by over 100% within the first three weeks Breezy Delivery.

Lyfted Agency went above and beyond to create a complete digital solution that covered everything from our website, business cards, flyers, and everything we needed to launch our law firm MVP Law Group.

I couldnt be happier with the results Ive been getting since Ive started using Lyfted Agency. Our dealership leads have been steadily increasing, and they did an amazing job creating our new logo, Private Collection Motors.

Alex and the team at Lyfted Agency created a beautiful new website and developed a new digital marketing strategy that skyrocketed our school registrations LB Bartending School.

As Doctors, Lawyers, and Automotive Dealers are turning to marketing agencies to help them get online, Lyfted Studios hopes to be a companion to these professionals, providing top-rated and tailored digital marketing solutions.

Visit https://lyftedagency.com/ to get a digital marketing proposal.

About Lyfted Studios

Lyfted Studios is a full-service digital agency based out of Orange County, California, that provides a full range of services, including web design, web development, eCommerce design, internet marketing, graphic design, and more. Through a team of professionals who have years of experience in various aspects of digital marketing, Lyfted Studios has helped hundreds of clients ranging from small businesses, lawyers, doctors, mechanic shops, automotive shops, fitness studios, and more.

To learn more, please visit https://lyftedagency.com/our-services/ or send an email to info@lyftedagency.com.

Media ContactCompany Name: Lyfted AgencyContact Person: Media RelationsEmail: Send EmailPhone: (949) 667- 4420Country: United StatesWebsite: http://www.lyftedagency.com/

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Lyfted Studios Announces Digital Marketing Services for Medical Professionals, Lawyers, and Automotive Dealerships - Virtual-Strategy Magazine