Latest news with #Bazaar
Business Recorder
4 days ago
- Business
- Business Recorder
Startup reality TV show set to launch early next year
ARY Digital Network, in collaboration with PakLaunch, a platform for Pakistani startups and investors, has announced the launch of a reality television series called Bazaar aimed at supporting entrepreneurs. The show is set to air in early 2026 and will feature emerging entrepreneurs pitching their businesses to a panel of four investors (or 'gurus') and nine mentors. While it appears there will be one female and three male gurus, their identities have yet to be revealed. As for mentors, these include Naureen Hyatt – CEO, Zood; Dr Sara Khurram – Co-founder & CEO, Sehat Kahani, Omar Askari – Chief Business Officer, NayaPay and Zohaib Malik – Co-founder, Dastgyr. Additional mentors come from companies such as Daraz, Bookme, Moveit, and EZBike. Described by the organisers as a 'next-generation reality series,' Bazaar combines televised entertainment with a structured investment platform. The series is designed to provide early-stage and growth-stage startups with direct access to capital, mentorship, and national exposure. The show will include a live equity exchange model, where investors can make immediate funding offers. Startups will also have the opportunity to secure funding from a joint ARY–PakLaunch fund, as well as from regulated public crowdfunding options. After a deal is finalised, mentors will be offered a small equity stake (1%) in the startups they advise, creating an incentive-based support model. 'Bazaar is a great opportunity for startups in Pakistan to connect with investors and mentors on a national platform,' said Syed Azfar Hussain, Project Director at National Incubation Center Karachi, where the launch event took place. 'It brings visibility, funding, and expert support to entrepreneurs who are ready to scale,' he told Business Recorder, adding 'Pakistan needs more platforms like Bazaar that support innovation and entrepreneurship. This show will help promising startups grow by giving them the exposure and investment they truly deserve.' Deadlines for applications is July 20, 2025. Finalists will be selected mid-August, followed by a mentorship bootcamp. Startups from various sectors have been invited to apply. Details about the show's host and the full panel of investors are expected to be released closer to the premiere date. How will the show compare to Shark Tank? This news comes in the wake of criticism against a similar show called Shark Tank, an international franchise that took on a Pakistani spin last year. Many who participated said the pitches made by judges did not materialise, while others said their company's purpose and primary product were misrepresented. According to a report in The Friday Times, 'the global average for offers made on the show materialising into actual investment is 35-40%, and in Shark Tank Pakistan's case this may be in the region of 8-12%.' The report noted that 'the degree of documentation of companies and startups was very low, so much so that this proved (according to the sharks we spoke with) to be a major hindrance in many of the offers made verbally not being followed up.' The judges, or sharks, told the publication 'due diligence had to be done and that they found that a very high percentage of the companies selected did not have complete documentation which is a prerequisite before an investment can be made into any company'. The question on the minds of many will be: will Bazaar be different? According to the presentation given at the launch, 'unlike other shows, Bazaar ensures funding for selected startups.' While not mentioning Shark Tank, or any other competitor shows, Hussain told Business Recorder: , 'the producers have clearly taken market feedback seriously, and it's evident that a great deal of thought has gone into addressing the common pitfalls seen in similar formats'. 'The addition of a mentorship layer is a particularly strong step, helping founders refine their business models and ensuring alignment of expectations before they step into the spotlight,' he said, adding 'Bazaar has the potential to build trust and deliver genuine value to the entrepreneurial ecosystem. It's refreshing to see a format that respects the founder's journey'.
Arabian Post
09-06-2025
- Business
- Arabian Post
Canonical Ends Bazaar Hosting on Launchpad
Canonical will cease all Bazaar code hosting on its Launchpad platform in two stages, culminating on 1 September 2025. The legacy version control system, once the backbone of many Ubuntu-related projects, will see its web interface retired soon, followed by full removal of backend functionality. Users of Bazaar, including developers relying on Ubuntu Engineering, must migrate to Git or other supported systems ahead of the deadline to preserve continuity. Bazaar, created by Martin Pool and sponsored by Canonical, never matched Git in popularity. With its last stable release in 2016, it gradually lost traction among open‑source communities. Today, Git has become the standard, hosting the vast majority of collaborative software development activity. Canonical itself acknowledged that maintaining Bazaar consumed significant development, operational, and infrastructure resources, resources now better allocated to modernising Ubuntu and Launchpad. Launchpad's rollback of Bazaar support will begin with the immediate shutdown of the Loggerhead web frontend, used for browsing Bazaar code repositories. Canonical cited declining legitimate traffic, with much of the web interface usage now coming from scrapers and automated bots. At this stage, developers will still be able to interact with repositories via command‑line tools, with pushes, pulls, and merges unaffected. The second phase, starting 1 September 2025, will eliminate the Bazaar backend entirely. After this date, Launchpad will no longer host Bazaar repositories, meaning developers cannot push, pull, merge, or browse code via Bazaar. Canonical has urged all users to migrate their code before this shutdown to avoid service disruption. ADVERTISEMENT Migration instructions have been made available on Ubuntu's Discourse platform and Launchpad's documentation site. The recommended method relies on native Bazaar‑to‑Git interop, using tools like 'brz push' that convert Bazaar revisions into Git history. Users have reported this process to be slower but more reliable than older export‑import methods. Not all Bazaar users are fluent with Git. In community discussions, one long‑time developer lamented that 'I love the simplicity of bazaar/launchpad… I really do not get git.' Another emphasised the invaluable contributions of Jezmer Vernooij, the maintainer of the Breezy fork, describing him as 'probably the most tangible act of generosity that can be made among strangers in the open source world'. Ubuntu and Launchpad gained prominence through Bazaar because it was once the only version control system supported for packaging and PPAs. Over time, Git's features, performance, branching model, and ecosystem—spanning GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket—made it the clear choice for modern development. Canonical highlighted its decision to deprecate Bazaar as part of its broader effort to modernise development workflows. By reallocating resources from maintaining outdated infrastructure like Bazaar, Canonical intends to better support Ubuntu's core development and implement improvements to Launchpad as a whole. Despite the shift, Bazaar will not disappear entirely from the world of open source. Users who wish to continue using Bazaar beyond Launchpad's support cutoff can host their repositories with services like GNU Savannah, which remains committed to Bazaar support. Breezy, the active fork of Bazaar, will also continue to receive maintenance, ensuring the version control system endures for those who prefer it. ADVERTISEMENT The discontinuation of Bazaar on Launchpad marks a significant moment in the history of Ubuntu's development tools. Once tightly integrated into canonical workflows for building DEBs, PPAs, snaps and Ubuntu itself, Bazaar's sundering from Launchpad symbolises the retreat of niche VCS in favour of universally supported tools. It speaks to broader shifts in software development culture, aligning Ubuntu with prevailing industry practices centred on Git. Canonical has emphasized that Ubuntu Engineering will receive migration support, and developers with unique needs are encouraged to reach out via Launchpad's feedback channels or Matrix. The company aims to collaborate closely to remove reliance on Bazaar-specific integrations used in Ubuntu's engineering systems. As the 1 September deadline approaches, developers must act swiftly to export their repositories. Migrating preserves their revision histories, branches, and tags, ensuring continued project development. Those who delay risk losing remote access to their code and may face complex manual recovery efforts after Bazaar support ends. Bazaar's sunset also underscores the dominance of Git in open‑source workflows. According to the 2024 Stack Overflow developer survey, approximately 98 per cent of developers use Git, everyone from hobbyists to large enterprises. Git's extensive ecosystem of CI/CD tools, integrations, and community support has entrenched it as the developer standard. Despite familiarity with Bazaar among legacy projects, the broader open‑source ecosystem has migrated towards Git. Organisations seeking to maintain compatibility with the wider community, attract contributors, and leverage automated development pipelines will find Git essential. Enterprises relying on Bazaar must reevaluate their infrastructure and workflows to align with this reality. Canonical's decision reflects both pragmatic resource allocation and alignment with community norms. By removing Bazaar support, it simplifies the development stack, reduces maintenance burden, and clarifies the path forward for Ubuntu's development ecosystem. While the transition brings uncertainty for long‑time Bazaar users, structured migration pathways and continued community support via Breezy and alternative hosts offer continuity. This move also signals potential future efforts by Canonical to deprecate other legacy services on Launchpad, focusing the platform on components with active developer and user bases. By streamlining services, Canonical may enhance Launchpad's relevance in contemporary software engineering workflows.
North Wales Live
08-06-2025
- Business
- North Wales Live
I paid a visit to a North Wales seaside resort's unique garden centre and café
A garden centre and cafe with a difference was officially opened last month. Bryn Euryn Nursery and Café in Dinerth Road in Rhos-on-Sea had already been operating for some time - but the site may have flown under the radar for some. So what can customers expect? This garden centre and café, with an adjoining shop, provides employment mentoring to people with disabilities wanting to get into paid work. Cllr Charlie McCoubrey, Conwy Council's Leader, has said he is proud that investment by the local authority, with extra money from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, will enable the team to help people with learning disabilities to learn useful skills. The nursery and cafe are at the very bottom of Dinerth Road, before you get to the underpass, and the site is well-signposted. Around the corner, in fact, is Bron-y-Nant Cemetery by Colwyn Bay Crematorium and Mochdre Recycling Centre. You can park on Dinerth Road, although it's quite a slope. You can walk straight down a ramp or steps to the nursery itself or go through the shop into a bright, colourful cafe. There are lots of square tables in blue, green, orange, pink and yellow so there are plenty of places to sit. I went to the counter and was told meals weren't being served due to a staffing issue, I believe. But coffee and cake were available. There were lots of "homemade" scones, bara brith and other desserts. So I chose a slice of vanilla sponge cake with mixed berries, paid and sat down by the window. When the waitress came over the cake tasted light and soft. It was very pleasant although I would have liked a thicker piece. A latte washed it down which was fine. The menu shows they normally serve traditional fare with some nice touches. For breakfast you can have a breakfast bap for £6 - comprising bacon, sausage, tomato, hashbrown and an egg - or cheesey beans in a slice of bloomer toast for £4.50. For lunch there are sandwiches and lite bites, including Welsh rarebit (£5), or layered hummus (£6), topped with red onion, tomato, pomegranate and coriander with crispy bread. There is also a Speciality Ciabatta with Italian meats, mozzarella, pickles, rocket and mustard (£7). Or try a Reuben one (for £7) with thin beef, cheese, sauerkraut and thousand island dressing. The cafe itself is in a large, hangar like room. Colourful paper balls dangle above the window and ribbons are festooned across the ceiling. It looks like there's been a permanent party. I particularly liked the coffee table, cookery style books left on each table for you to peruse. On mine was Sabrina Ghayour's Persiana Everyday with recipes for dishes like Bazaar, spiced, chickpea & feta salad, and Sticky tamarind, garlic and tomato green beans. On another table was Mary Berry's "Classic" recipe book. There were lots of ideas for amateur cooks to take inspiration from: Pan-fried cauliflower steaks, anyone? But I think that the main attractions of an informal lunch or coffee break at Bryn Euryn are the purpose of this place and its setting. Not only are you supporting the staff to mentor those needing a helping hand, you can do so while enjoying the wonderful array of plants on sale. Wandering around the adjoining nursery before or after the food is a lovely thing to do. It puts you in a good mood and soothes you. In the shop are a plethora of seed packets on sale - spinach, radish, kohl rabi and so on - as well as pots of freesias and sweet peas. Outside, below a terrace, there are a range of products on display from Cordyline to orange, climbing sunblaze roses. The facts Location: Bryn Euryn Nursery and Cafe, Dinerth Road, Rhos-on-Sea, Conwy, LL28 4YN is open from 9.30pm till 4pm most days. 01492 577530.
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Business Standard
04-06-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Amazon India adds flat ₹5 fee on all customer orders, Prime included
Amazon has introduced a uniform ₹5 fee on every customer order placed through its platform in India, a change that now applies even to Prime subscribers. The decision brings the e-commerce giant in step with rival quick-commerce services such as Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart, all of which have implemented comparable surcharges in recent months. Flipkart, a key competitor, began levying a ₹3 fee on orders earlier this year, in mid-2024. 'Amazon is doing it as part of its monetisation strategy and following an industry standard set by others such as Blinkit, Swiggy and Zepto,' said Satish Meena, an advisor at Datum Intelligence, a consumer technology-focused market research firm. 'Customers don't have any other option not to pay.' Industry experts observe that many platforms are introducing small fees on each order as a way to manage the growing costs of delivery operations, including transportation, staffing and fuel. 'E-commerce companies also have the confidence that customers are willing to pay for convenience,' said Meena. 'We may expect a further increase in this fee in the future by various e-commerce players.' Amazon India has introduced the marketplace fee of ₹5 on every order since May. This flat fee will apply to all orders, with exceptions for specific purchase categories such as gift cards and digital services, according to a company blog post. The marketplace fee, which Amazon says is a common industry practice, supports the firm's commitment to offer millions of products from diverse sellers. 'It enables Amazon to offer a vast range of products from millions of sellers,' said Amazon. At launch, the marketplace fee will not apply to gift card purchases, Amazon Business and Bazaar orders, or orders on Amazon Now and Fresh. It also excludes digital purchases like mobile recharges, bill payments, travel and movie bookings, insurance, Alexa skills, Fire TV apps, Prime Video rentals or purchases, subscriptions, and digital products delivered by email (e.g. software or Apple Store codes). For Pay on Delivery orders or prepaid orders with other applicable fees (such as offer processing or exchange fees), the marketplace fee will not appear as a separate charge for now, as outlined in updated terms and conditions. It may still be combined with other fees, either fully or partially. Amazon India does not disclose daily order volumes, but analysts say activity surges sharply during major sales events. In July last year, Amazon India said that Prime Day 2024 was the biggest Prime Day shopping event ever, with the e-commerce firm getting the highest-ever Prime member engagement and new membership sign-ups. Amazon India said a peak of 24,196 orders were placed by Prime members in a single minute (2024) as compared to 22,190 orders in 2023. In November last year, Amazon India said its month-long Amazon Great Indian Festival (AGIF) 2024 witnessed 1.4 billion customer visits, the highest ever. More than 85 per cent of customers were from non-metro cities. Last year, Amazon India saw 1.1 billion customer visits on the platform during the event, with almost 4 million new customers.
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Can Celibacy Unlock Heightened Levels of Pleasure?
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." What if abstaining from sex and romance wasn't a retreat from intimacy but a pathway to deeper self-knowledge, creative clarity, and radical autonomy? In The Dry Season, writer Melissa Febos chronicles a year of intentional celibacy—an experiment that began in the wreckage of a devastating breakup and transformed into a radical reclamation of self. What started as a 90-day pause from sex and dating in 2016 extended into a full year of disentanglement from romantic attachment. But rather than deprivation, Febos discovered joy, clarity, and sensual fulfillment on her own terms. Her celibacy was not an escape but a deep inquiry into desire, intimacy, and autonomy—a way to interrogate how socialized narratives of love and devotion had shaped her identity as a queer woman. Abstaining from romance didn't mean denying pleasure—it meant redefining it. Through solitude, Febos reconnected with neglected friendships, deepened her creative life, and uncovered new modes of intimacy outside the bounds of romance or sex. Using what she describes as a '12-step-style inventory' of her romantic past, she traced how her relationships had often been marked by performance, self-erasure, and dependence. Far from isolating, her celibate year became rich with connection. Seeking models beyond the cultural obsession with coupledom, Febos turned to a lineage of women who embraced solitude as a source of power, from 11th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen and the beguines of medieval Europe to 20th-century icons like Virginia Woolf and Octavia Butler. These figures served as both companions and intellectual ancestors, helping her situate her experience within a feminist tradition of resistance to conformity and the marriage-industrial complex. A memoirist by trade, Febos has previously written about sex, gender, and power through the lens of her own life. In 2010, she published Whip Smart, about her three and a half years working as a dominatrix, while 2021's Girlhood, a collection of essays about the pressures and societal conditioning females face, which remains a best-seller. Ahead of The Dry Season's release, Bazaar spoke with Febos about how celibacy reshaped her relationship to self-expression, attention, pleasure, and artistic purpose. Ultimately, the memoir asks readers to consider what our lives might look like if we stopped orienting them around the desire to be desired. From the age of 15 into my early 30s, I'd been in nonstop committed monogamous partnerships. I had a story about myself that I was a romantic, that I was a very passionate person; I just fell in love a lot. But in my early 30s, I got into a relationship that I think is safe to characterize as addicting. At that point, I had been sober for 10 years, but I experienced depths of addiction in that relationship that were worse than anything I'd ever experienced when I was a heroin addict. It was very obsessive. I was crying all the time. I lost friends. I crashed my car. My health suffered, and when the relationship finally ended, I looked around and I thought, Damn, I feel like I should be better at this, having been doing it for so long. How did I get here? So I thought, okay, let me take stock and see what's actually going on here, because this was the most painful experience of my life, and I would not like to repeat it. So, I started with 90 days celibate. That was laughable to some of my friends, but it was a familiar unit of time; 90 days is seen as a good metric for how long it takes to let go of a habit and see your situation more clearly. But it was also as long as I could imagine going. My [version of] abstinence included no sex, no dating, no flirting, no sexually charged friendships. And three months was a pretty radical length of time in the context of my life up until that point. It took a minute for me to figure out what celibacy was. In the first few weeks, I definitely had some flirtations and got some texts and was like, Wait a minute, this feeling inside me that's releasing these delicious brain chemicals and making me want to keep doing whatever it is I'm doing is actually the thing I need to stay away from. I had to redraw the contours of what my definition of celibacy was, but once I did that, it was not very hard; almost immediately, I was so much happier. My life got better instantly. All my other relationships started to flourish. I had vastly underestimated the amount of time and energy I had been devoting to these romantic pursuits for my entire adult life, and when I recouped that time and energy for myself, I got to spend it on every other passion that I had. I was having long, fun, languorous conversations on the phone with my friends. I was visiting family. I was writing more. I was exercising more. I donated a bunch of clothes, got a haircut, hit all my deadlines, taught better classes than I had been before. It really felt like I got infused attention and energy into every other area of my life, and I started having a great time. at I had much more emotional capacity. I had this joke when I was spending that time celibate where I started saying to my friends, 'Yeah, I'm making celibacy hot again,' which is really corny and kind of embarrassing but also was very true. I think our culture suffers from an obsession with categories. We consider our sex life and our home life and our work life as separate, but they're not; we're the same person in all of those parts of our lives, and they're deeply intertwined. I had designated sex and love as the area where I experienced some sensual pleasures of being human and living in a body, and it's where I had also located emotional intimacy. And when I sort of shut down that category, those experiences started to surface in so many other areas of my life. I had erotic experiences eating watermelon that summer that I was celibate; I had incredibly romantic experiences with dear friends of mine that were not sexual but that had a similar quality. I realized that I had been dramatically limiting myself and narrowing the aperture of my own experiences by only looking for the erotic or the sublime in lovers, when actually there were opportunities for it everywhere I looked. I also went dancing more that year than any other year of my life. I started an email list of all my friends, and every weekend, I was like, 'Who's coming dancing with me?' We would go dancing until, like, two in the morning. I also had a really fun time exploring and redefining my relationship to food and clothes. I had identified as a high femme for most of my adult life, and I had almost every day since my late teens. And during my celibacy, I started wearing sneakers all the time, and the clothes I was wearing suddenly started to change and get more comfortable and weirder. I had no idea how much my personal style was actually defined based on the imagined gaze of strangers or potential lovers or how I might appeal to the other instead of myself. And in the absence of that, I was actually trying to repel the gaze of others. After the first few weeks [of celibacy], I started to understand how deeply entrenched and embedded in my consciousness the issues in my relationship to love and sex were, and if I really wanted long-term change, I had to take a more active role in it. For me, because I had a lot of experience [with the] 12-step [program] and because I love making lists, I thought, okay, let me start by really taking stock and seeing what I've actually been up to. It was becoming clear to me that the story I had about myself and relationships was probably not true, because there was a common denominator among them all, and it was me. If I was the romantic, devoted partner that I had always thought myself to be, why was I bottoming out in such an ugly way? And why were all my relationships ending on similar grounds? So I started making a list of everyone I had ever been in a relationship with: major crushes, entanglements, one-night stands, everybody. I was looking for patterns, and they very quickly emerged. I found when I really committed to an honest accounting of my own behavior and relationships, it started to become really clear to me that I hadn't been honest with my partners and that, in fact, the behavior that I've characterized as devoted and self-sacrificing and accommodating of other people had actually been a form of manipulation. My project of celibacy had almost everything to do with the emotional part of it. The sexual symptoms that I wanted to change were consequences of the emotional dynamics more than anything else. Not having sex with other people for a year was not very hard. There were only a couple of times where I felt tempted and I clicked back into my old operating system, but for the most part, I was incredibly relieved to set down those preoccupations and all of the energy and the inner conflicts that I experienced around them. The emotional part of it was a lot harder. Making a conscious decision to change your own orientation to a part of life for which we have really, really strong cultural stories is challenging. If I'm honest, a huge part of that work has happened since my celibacy. It wasn't until I engaged in relationships with other people that the rubber really hit the road, and I got to learn how to actually practice those things. My marriage has been the greatest education of putting ideals into practice, and I got really lucky to have a good collaborator in that. The emotional rewards of doing that work has made it entirely worth it, and nothing has brought me closer to other people. I started doing research during my celibate year because once I was celibate for a while and I started to change my ideal for who I wanted to be in relationships, I realized that I needed some new role models. Before that, I had looked to women who had been artistically fulfilled but had also been really messy and chaotic in their love lives, like me. I wanted to find some people whose behavior, not just in their romantic lives but in their lives, was really aligned with what they believed. I wanted my actions and my beliefs to be more congruent. I started by reading about women who were voluntarily celibate, and almost immediately I got deeply obsessed with a lot of nuns and spiritual ladies, especially those living in medieval times, like Hildegard von Bingen, who was a naturalist and a politician and an artist and wrote a language for her nuns to speak. This lady was tied to the Catholic Church, and she lived in a stone room for 35 years and managed to do all of that after she got out. I also became super obsessed with the set of religious laywomen called the Belgian beguines, who flourished in Europe in the 13th century. They lived in separatist communes and were financially independent and made art, wrote poetry, preached; they did a lot of service in their communities. They worked as nurses and teachers and performed last rites for the dying. It was unheard of at the time for women to be living that independently. It was actually illegal in multiple ways. And eventually, a lot of the beguines were burned as heretics. At a time when it's so easy to feel discouraged by the erosion of civil rights in our country and other countries, I am so grateful to have the touch of these women who were living against the grain and leading these incredibly brave, self-actualized, joyful, fulfilled lives at a time when their lives were in danger because of it. If they could do it in the Middle Ages, I can muster the gumption today to enjoy so many of the freedoms that they didn't. After the first three months, I extended it, and then I extended it again, and when I got past the nine month mark, I was so happy and so disinclined to re enter that world that I stopped counting. I just thought, I am deeply uninterested in being in a relationship with another person. But shortly after the year mark, I started corresponding with a woman who would become my wife. Our communication didn't start as flirtation. We had read each other's work and became friends out of a sense of mutual artistic admiration. When we met, it was instant chemistry. I thought, Okay, I want to pursue this, but I want to do it really differently. I communicated that to her right off the bat, and she was like, that sounds really cool. We've been together ever since. You Might Also Like 4 Investment-Worthy Skincare Finds From Sephora The 17 Best Retinol Creams Worth Adding to Your Skin Care Routine
