The 10 Best Desktop Computers for Small Businesses and Offices

A modern business needs to be flexible, offering employees options for mobile working. However, in many cases, a desktop PC is still the best option. They often come with more powerful processors and can support a range of peripherals like large monitors and ergonomic keyboards.

If you’ve just started a small business, or if you’re looking to add more computers to your existing workspace, take a look at our selection of the best business computers in 2020.

1. Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micro

Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micro Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micro Buy Now On Amazon $622.69

Don’t be deceived by the small form factor of Dell’s OptiPlex 3070 Micro; this Windows PC is suitable for a range of business activities. It has a small physical footprint—it is only as wide as a thick hardcover book—making it perfect for snug offices. This fast-performing PC couples an Intel Core i5 processor with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD.

It comes with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed, and you can expand the RAM to 32GB. While the PC is quite small, it doesn’t skimp on ports. You’ll find six USB inputs, an HDMI port, an Ethernet adaptor, a DisplayPort, and a card reader.

2. Dell Inspiron

Dell Inspiron Dell Inspiron Buy Now On Amazon $1,399.00

The Dell Inspiron is an all-in-one PC that combines reliability with modern design. The 27-inch Full HD display stands out in the office thanks to its narrow bezels and silver finish. It comes equipped with an 8th-generation Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB SATA hard drive, and Intel UHD Graphics 630.

Aside from the specifications, Dell has been a longtime workplace standard, thanks to the reliability of its machines and low-cost relative to its internals and finish. The Inspiron range is no different and is highly rated, making it one of the best business computers available today.

3. Acer Aspire C24

Acer Aspire C24 Acer Aspire C24 Buy Now On Amazon $859.99

The Acer Aspire C24 is a budget-friendly all-in-one business PC. It comes equipped with an Intel Core i5 CPU, 12GB of RAM, and a 1TB SATA hard drive. There is a built-in Wi-Fi adaptor, and the PC comes pre-loaded with Windows 10.

The computer features an ultra-thin design and a brushed aluminum finish. As such, it makes for a good all-in-one PC highly visible, or customer-facing areas of your business.

4. Apple iMac

Apple iMac Apple iMac Buy Now On Amazon $2,299.00

If your workplace isn’t solely tied into the Windows ecosystem, then the entry-level Apple iMac may be the best desktop computer for small business. The iMac is a flexible and attractive machine, suitable for both the boardroom and the reception. The base configuration iMac comes with a Full HD 21.5-inch screen, 2.3 GHz dual-core i5 processor, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640, and a 1TB hard drive.

All those components come housed in a body that’s just 5mm thick. Apple’s stylish Magic Keyboard 2 and gesture-based Magic Mouse 2 are also included in the package. While all iMac PCs run macOS as standard, there is support for Windows 10 through Apple’s Boot Camp software.

5. Dell OptiPlex 7470

Dell OptiPlex 7470 Dell OptiPlex 7470 Buy Now On Amazon $1,199.99

The Dell OptiPlex 7470, with its plastic body and matte black finish, may not be the most aesthetically pleasing business computer. However, under that exterior lies a powerful core.

The OptiPlex 7470 comes with a six-core Intel Core i7 CPU, a 256GB SSD, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. There is a 23.8-inch Full HD screen, and Intel UHD Graphics 630. It comes with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed.

6. Lenovo ThinkCentre M720

Lenovo ThinkCentre M720 Lenovo ThinkCentre M720 Buy Now On Amazon $719.95

Lenovo’s ThinkCentre M720 is a great option for businesses looking for a fast, future-proof desktop that is also compatible with existing infrastructure.

It features a hexa-core Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM Gigabit Ethernet, and six USB ports. You also get a 250GB SSD hard drive and Windows 10 Pro pre-installed. The back of the machine has both a DisplayPort and an HDMI port.

7. Apple Mac mini

Apple Mac mini Apple Mac mini Buy Now On Amazon $759.00

The Apple Mac mini is an attractive, small computer that weighs just 2.9lbs. The Mac mini can be plugged into any monitor, and operates silently, in part thanks to its efficient SSD. It has a 3.6GHz quad-core i3 processor and an Intel UHD Graphics 630 card.

The Mac mini comes as a single unit without peripherals. As with most of the company’s products, it has still been designed with Apple’s accessories in mind. The computer runs Apple’s operating system, macOS, but can run Windows 10 using the company’s Boot Camp software.

8. HP ProDesk 400

HP ProDesk 400 HP ProDesk 400 Buy Now On Amazon $799.00

The HP ProDesk 400 is a mid-range Windows-based mini PC. HP’s offering comes equipped with an Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. It is a little heavier than the Mac mini, coming in at 11lbs, but it is still easily portable; handy when it comes to office reorganizations.

The ProDesk 400 comes with Windows 10 Professional pre-installed. There are eight USB ports to attach all your peripherals and accessories to. For those with a mind for backward compatibility, there is even a built-in DVD-writer.

9. ASUS AiO Desktop PC

ASUS AiO Desktop PC ASUS AiO Desktop PC Buy Now On Amazon

The ASUS AiO Desktop PC is an excellent example of a modern all-in-one Windows PC. It features a 23.8-inch Full HD touchscreen with a 90 percent screen-to-body ratio. It’s one of the few ultra-thin desktops to ship with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 GPU and a six-core Intel Core i5 CPU.

The AiO’s display is touchscreen capable too and comes with an array of ports. The webcam, a potential security issue, is hidden as a pop-up to protect your privacy. For the complete package, it comes equipped with a keyboard and mouse included too.

10. Dell Precision 3630

Dell Precision 3630 Dell Precision 3630 Buy Now On Amazon $1,046.67

The Dell Precision 3630 is another of the best desktop computer for small businesses. It is one of the few off-the-shelf business computers designed with productivity in mind. The Precision 3630 comes with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed, an Intel 3.2GHz processor, a 256GB SSD hard drive, and 16GB of RAM.

It’s also one of the few business computers that you can buy directly from the manufacturer that has Linux pre-installed. The distro of choice is Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

The Best Business Computer for Your Workplace

Finding the best business computer for your business will ultimately come down to your workplace’s needs. This list has a range of options that suit different budgets and uses, suitable for any number of business situations.

Once you’ve found the right computer for you or your employees, you might want to consider investing in one of the best ergonomic keyboards to improve computer comfort.

Read the full article: The 10 Best Desktop Computers for Small Businesses and Offices

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Daily Crunch: WhatsApp launches payments

WhatsApp is adding support for in-app payments, Apple is upgrading the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro desktop and we argue about the future of startup hubs.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 15, 2020.

1. WhatsApp finally launches payments, starting in Brazil

After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp has finally pulled the trigger on payments. Users in Brazil will be the first to be able to send and receive money through the messaging app, using Facebook Pay.

WhatsApp says that the payments service — which currently is free for consumers to use, but comes with a 3.99% processing fee for businesses receiving payments — will work by way of a six-digit PIN or fingerprint to complete transactions.

2. Apple adds new MacBook Pro graphics option and Mac Pro SSD upgrade kit

A week before kicking off WWDC, Apple introduced a pair of upgrades to its pro-level hardware lines. Both the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro desktop are getting select internal upgrades, starting today.

3. 3 perspectives on the future of SF and NYC as startup hubs

Three TechCrunch writers address one of the big questions about the future: Will tech continue to centralize in hubs like San Francisco and New York City, or will remote work and all the other second-order effects lead to a more decentralized startup ecosystem? (Extra Crunch membership required.)

4. Interstellar Technologies’ privately developed MOMO-5 rocket falls short of reaching space

The company first launched a vehicle in 2017, but the launch didn’t go exactly as planned and failed to reach space. In 2019, its MOMO-3 sounding rocket did break the Karman line, though just barely, and unfortunately its MOMO-5 sounding rocket launched over the weekend did not make space, as planned.

5. Introducing The Exchange, your daily dive into the private markets

The Exchange is Alex Wilhelm’s regular dive into the financial side of the startup world, and how the public markets exert gravity (or lift) on private companies. These themes might sound familiar to Daily Crunch readers, since we’ve linked to plenty of Alex’s pieces, but now it’s an official column with an official name.

6. Tesla’s US-made Model 3 vehicles now come equipped with wireless charging and USB-C ports

Tesla Model 3 vehicles produced at its Fremont, Calif. factory will reportedly come standard with a wireless charging pad and USB-C ports, upgrades that were first spotted by Drive Tesla Canada.

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest full-length episode of Equity discusses Facebook’s new startup venture fund, while the Monday news roundup covers the latest problems at Quibi. Over at Original Content, we review the latest season of “Queer Eye.”

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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SlideCasts - Sync YouTube Videos with your Google Slides Presentation

SlideCasts let you combine YouTube videos and Google Sides / PowerPoint presentations in a single-player. The speaker video and the slides appear side-by-side and, as the video progresses, the slides auto-change in sync with the video.

You can try a live demo of SlideCasts here. Just hit the play button on the YouTube video and you’ll notice that the slides will change at the 10s, 25s and 30s mark (configurable).

SlideCasts can be really useful for educators involved in remote teaching. The teacher’s “talking head” video can be uploaded to YouTube and the lecture slides can be hosted on Google Slides.

If your course slides are available as a PowerPoint presentation that will work as well since you can directly upload your PPT and PPTX files to Google Slides.

How to Sync Presentation Slides with Video

The first step is to install Creator Studio. Next go to slides.google.com and open any existing presentation.

Go to the Addons menu inside Slides, choose Creator Studio and then select Create Slidecasts. Here specify the URL of the YouTube video and your Google Slides deck (both should be public).

Next, specify the timestamps in mm:ss format (minute seconds) when the slides should change in sync with the video.

For instance, if you want the second slide to show at the 15s point in the video, the 3rd slide at the 45s mark and the 4th slide at 1 minute, 20 second mark, your markers would be written as:

0, 15, 45, 1:20

That’s pretty much it. Click the Generate button and copy-paste the HTML code into your website.

The SlideCast player is responsive so the video and slides will auto-resize based on the size of the visitor’s screen.

Download Creator Studio

How to Embed Google Slides Like a Pro!

It takes 2 easy steps to embed any Google Slides deck in your website. Open Google Slides, go to the File Menu and choose Publish to web. Your presentation becomes public and you are presented with an IFRAME HTML tag that you can copy-paste in any web page.

<iframe
  src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/xxxx/embed"
  frameborder="0"
  width="800"
  height="600"
></iframe>

Customize your Google Slide Embeds

The embedded Google Slides player can be easily customized by modifying the src attribute of the IFRAME tag.

Auto Start the Embedded Slideshow

Append start=true to the URL and the slideshow will auto-play as soon as someone opens your webpage. Or set start=false and the slideshow will only play when the visitor click the play icon in the slides player.

Change the duration of slides

With start set to true, you can add delayms=1000 to the URL to specify the time (in milliseconds) for which each slide should display before auto-advancing to the next one. For instance, start=true&delayms=6000, the slideshow will autoplay and the slides will auto-advance every 6 seconds (6000 ms).

Play the slideshow in Loop

Add restart=true to the slideshow URL and it will play in a loop, meaning it will auto-advance to the first slide after the last one.

Start from a Specific Slide

Your embedded Google Slides presentation will always start from the first slide in the deck. You can however customize the URL to start the slideshow from a specific slide by adding slide=id.p# to the URL, where # is the slide number.

For instance, if you wish to embed a slideshow with 8 seconds gap and starting from the 4th slide, your URL would be:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/xxxx/embed?start=true&delayms=8000&slide=id.p4

Remove the Google Branding and Player Control

The Google Slides player displays the controls and Google branding in the bottom bar. However, if you wish to play the slideshow in kiosk mode without any player controls or Google Branding, just adding rm=minimal to the IFRAME link (rm = Render Mode)

Make the Google Slides player Responsive

The embed code provided by Google Slides has a fixed height and width and will thus display at the same size on both desktops and mobile screens. You can however make the player responsive with a little bit of CSS as detailed below.

1. Remove the height, width and other parameters from the IFRAME tag:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/xxxx/embed"></iframe>`

2. Add this CSS to your HTML page. The padding-bottom is set to 56.25% for 16x9 ratio (9/16*100) so the height of the player would be 56.25% of the player’s width. Set the value to 75% for a 4:3 ratio.

<style>
  .responsive-google-slides {
    position: relative;
    padding-bottom: 56.25%; /* 16:9 Ratio */
    height: 0;
    overflow: hidden;
  }
  .responsive-google-slides iframe {
    border: 0;
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100% !important;
    height: 100% !important;
  }
</style>

3. Wrap the original IFRAME inside the responsive class and you are good to go. Here’s a live demo.

<div class="responsive-google-slides">
  <iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/xxxx/embed"></iframe>
</div>

Also see: 🦋 Secret Google Docs URL Tricks

Daily Crunch: WhatsApp launches payments

WhatsApp is adding support for in-app payments, Apple is upgrading the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro desktop and we argue about the future of startup hubs.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 15, 2020.

1. WhatsApp finally launches payments, starting in Brazil

After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp has finally pulled the trigger on payments. Users in Brazil will be the first to be able to send and receive money through the messaging app, using Facebook Pay.

WhatsApp says that the payments service — which currently is free for consumers to use, but comes with a 3.99% processing fee for businesses receiving payments — will work by way of a six-digit PIN or fingerprint to complete transactions.

2. Apple adds new MacBook Pro graphics option and Mac Pro SSD upgrade kit

A week before kicking off WWDC, Apple introduced a pair of upgrades to its pro-level hardware lines. Both the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro desktop are getting select internal upgrades, starting today.

3. 3 perspectives on the future of SF and NYC as startup hubs

Three TechCrunch writers address one of the big questions about the future: Will tech continue to centralize in hubs like San Francisco and New York City, or will remote work and all the other second-order effects lead to a more decentralized startup ecosystem? (Extra Crunch membership required.)

4. Interstellar Technologies’ privately developed MOMO-5 rocket falls short of reaching space

The company first launched a vehicle in 2017, but the launch didn’t go exactly as planned and failed to reach space. In 2019, its MOMO-3 sounding rocket did break the Karman line, though just barely, and unfortunately its MOMO-5 sounding rocket launched over the weekend did not make space, as planned.

5. Introducing The Exchange, your daily dive into the private markets

The Exchange is Alex Wilhelm’s regular dive into the financial side of the startup world, and how the public markets exert gravity (or lift) on private companies. These themes might sound familiar to Daily Crunch readers, since we’ve linked to plenty of Alex’s pieces, but now it’s an official column with an official name.

6. Tesla’s US-made Model 3 vehicles now come equipped with wireless charging and USB-C ports

Tesla Model 3 vehicles produced at its Fremont, Calif. factory will reportedly come standard with a wireless charging pad and USB-C ports, upgrades that were first spotted by Drive Tesla Canada.

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest full-length episode of Equity discusses Facebook’s new startup venture fund, while the Monday news roundup covers the latest problems at Quibi. Over at Original Content, we review the latest season of “Queer Eye.”

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Read Full Article

Google at CVPR 2020

Posted by Emily Knapp, Program Manager and Benjamin Hütteroth, Program Specialist

This week marks the start of the fully virtual 2020 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2020), the premier annual computer vision event consisting of the main conference, workshops and tutorials. As a leader in computer vision research and a Supporter Level Virtual Sponsor, Google will have a strong presence at CVPR 2020, with nearly 70 publications accepted, along with the organization of, and participation in, multiple workshops/tutorials.

If you are participating in CVPR this year, please visit our virtual booth to learn about what Google is actively pursuing for the next generation of intelligent systems that utilize the latest machine learning techniques applied to various areas of machine perception.

You can also learn more about our research being presented at CVPR 2020 in the list below (Google affiliations are bolded).

Organizing Committee

General Chairs: Terry Boult, Gerard Medioni, Ramin Zabih
Program Chairs: Ce Liu, Greg Mori, Kate Saenko, Silvio Savarese
Workshop Chairs: Tal Hassner, Tali Dekel
Website Chairs: Tianfan Xue, Tian Lan
Technical Chair: Daniel Vlasic
Area Chairs include: Alexander Toshev, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Boqing Gong, Caroline Pantofaru, Chen Sun, Deqing Sun, Dilip Krishnan, Feng Yang, Liang-Chieh Chen, Michael Rubinstein, Rodrigo Benenson, Timnit Gebru, Thomas Funkhouser, Varun Jampani, Vittorio Ferrari, William Freeman

Oral Presentations

Evolving Losses for Unsupervised Video Representation Learning
AJ Piergiovanni, Anelia Angelova, Michael Ryoo

CvxNet: Learnable Convex Decomposition
Boyang Deng, Kyle Genova, Soroosh Yazdani, Sofien Bouaziz, Geoffrey Hinton, Andrea Tagliasacchi

Neural SDE: Stabilizing Neural ODE Networks with Stochastic Noise
Xuanqing Liu, Tesi Xiao, Si Si, Qin Cao, Sanjiv Kumar, Cho-Jui Hsieh

Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset
Pei Sun, Henrik Kretzschmar, Xerxes Dotiwalla‎, Aurélien Chouard, Vijaysai Patnaik, Paul Tsui, James Guo, Yin Zhou, Yuning Chai, Benjamin Caine, Vijay Vasudevan, Wei Han, Jiquan Ngiam, Hang Zhao, Aleksei Timofeev‎, Scott Ettinger, Maxim Krivokon, Amy Gao, Aditya Joshi‎, Sheng Zhao, Shuyang Chen, Yu Zhang, Jon Shlens, Zhifeng Chen, Dragomir Anguelov

Deep Implicit Volume Compression
Saurabh Singh, Danhang Tang, Cem Keskin, Philip Chou, Christian Haene, Mingsong Dou, Sean Fanello, Jonathan Taylor, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Philip Davidson, Yinda Zhang, Onur Guleryuz, Shahram Izadi, Sofien Bouaziz

Neural Networks Are More Productive Teachers Than Human Raters: Active Mixup for Data-Efficient Knowledge Distillation from a Blackbox Model
Dongdong Wan, Yandong Li, Liqiang Wang, and Boqing Gong

Google Landmarks Dataset v2 - A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval (see the blog post)
Tobias Weyand, Andre Araujo, Jack Sim, Bingyi Cao

CycleISP: Real Image Restoration via Improved Data Synthesis
Syed Waqas Zamir, Aditya Arora, Salman Khan, Munawar Hayat, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Ling Shao

Dynamic Graph Message Passing Networks
Li Zhang, Dan Xu, Anurag Arnab, Philip Torr

Local Deep Implicit Functions for 3D Shape
Kyle Genova, Forrester Cole, Avneesh Sud, Aaron Sarna, Thomas Funkhouser

GHUM & GHUML: Generative 3D Human Shape and Articulated Pose Models
Hongyi Xu, Eduard Gabriel Bazavan, Andrei Zanfir, William Freeman, Rahul Sukthankar, Cristian Sminchisescu

Search to Distill: Pearls are Everywhere but not the Eyes
Yu Liu, Xuhui Jia, Mingxing Tan, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Yukun Zhu, Bradley Green, Xiaogang Wang

Semantic Pyramid for Image Generation
Assaf Shocher, Yossi Gandelsman, Inbar Mosseri, Michal Yarom, Michal Irani, William Freeman, Tali Dekel

Flow Contrastive Estimation of Energy-Based Models
Ruiqi Gao, Erik Nijkamp, Diederik Kingma, Zhen Xu, Andrew Dai, Ying Nian Wu

Rethinking Class-Balanced Methods for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition from A Domain Adaptation Perspective
Muhammad Abdullah Jamal, Matthew Brown, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Liqiang Wang, Boqing Gong

Category-Level Articulated Object Pose Estimation
Xiaolong Li, He Wang, Li Yi, Leonidas Guibas, Amos Abbott, Shuran Song

AdaCoSeg: Adaptive Shape Co-Segmentation with Group Consistency Loss
Chenyang Zhu, Kai Xu, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Li Yi, Leonidas Guibas, Hao Zhang

SpeedNet: Learning the Speediness in Videos
Sagie Benaim, Ariel Ephrat, Oran Lang, Inbar Mosseri, William Freeman, Michael Rubinstein, Michal Irani, Tali Dekel

BSP-Net: Generating Compact Meshes via Binary Space Partitioning
Zhiqin Chen, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Hao Zhang

SAPIEN: A SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment
Fanbo Xiang, Yuzhe Qin, Kaichun Mo, Yikuan Xia, Hao Zhu, Fangchen Liu, Minghua Liu, Hanxiao Jiang, Yifu Yuan, He Wang, Li Yi, Angel Chang, Leonidas Guibas, Hao Su

SurfelGAN: Synthesizing Realistic Sensor Data for Autonomous Driving
Zhenpei Yang, Yuning Chai, Dragomir Anguelov, Yin Zhou, Pei Sun, Dumitru Erhan, Sean Rafferty, Henrik Kretzschmar

Filter Response Normalization Layer: Eliminating Batch Dependence in the Training of Deep Neural Networks
Saurabh Singh, Shankar Krishnan

RL-CycleGAN: Reinforcement Learning Aware Simulation-To-Real
Kanishka Rao, Chris Harris, Alex Irpan, Sergey Levine, Julian Ibarz, Mohi Khansari

Open Compound Domain Adaptation
Ziwei Liu, Zhongqi Miao, Xingang Pan, Xiaohang Zhan, Dahua Lin, Stella X.Yu, and Boqing Gong

Posters
Single-view view synthesis with multiplane images
Richard Tucker, Noah Snavely

Adversarial Examples Improve Image Recognition
Cihang Xie, Mingxing Tan, Boqing Gong, Jiang Wang, Alan Yuille, Quoc V. Le

Adversarial Texture Optimization from RGB-D Scans
Jingwei Huang, Justus Thies, Angela Dai, Abhijit Kundu, Chiyu “Max” Jiang,Leonidas Guibas, Matthias Niessner, Thomas Funkhouser

Single-Image HDR Reconstruction by Learning to Reverse the Camera Pipeline
Yu-Lun Liu, Wei-Sheng Lai, Yu-Sheng Chen, Yi-Lung Kao, Ming-Hsuan Yang,Yung-Yu Chuang, Jia-Bin Huang

Collaborative Distillation for Ultra-Resolution Universal Style Transfer
Huan Wang, Yijun Li, Yuehai Wang, Haoji Hu, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Learning to Autofocus
Charles Herrmann, Richard Strong Bowen, Neal Wadhwa, Rahul Garg, Qiurui He, Jonathan T. Barron, Ramin Zabih

Multi-Scale Boosted Dehazing Network with Dense Feature Fusion
Hang Dong, Jinshan Pan, Lei Xiang, Zhe Hu, Xinyi Zhang, Fei Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Composing Good Shots by Exploiting Mutual Relations
Debang Li, Junge Zhang, Kaiqi Huang, Ming-Hsuan Yang

PatchVAE: Learning Local Latent Codes for Recognition
Kamal Gupta, Saurabh Singh, Abhinav Shrivastava

Neural Voxel Renderer: Learning an Accurate and Controllable Rendering Tool
Konstantinos Rematas, Vittorio Ferrari

Local Implicit Grid Representations for 3D Scenes
Chiyu “Max” Jiang, Avneesh Sud, Ameesh Makadia, Jingwei Huang, Matthias Niessner, Thomas Funkhouser

Large Scale Video Representation Learning via Relational Graph Clustering
Hyodong Lee, Joonseok Lee, Joe Yue-Hei Ng, Apostol (Paul) Natsev

Deep Homography Estimation for Dynamic Scenes
Hoang Le, Feng Liu, Shu Zhang, Aseem Agarwala

C-Flow: Conditional Generative Flow Models for Images and 3D Point Clouds
Albert Pumarola, Stefan Popov, Francesc Moreno-Noguer, Vittorio Ferrari

Lighthouse: Predicting Lighting Volumes for Spatially-Coherent Illumination
Pratul Srinivasan, Ben Mildenhall, Matthew Tancik, Jonathan T. Barron, Richard Tucker, Noah Snavely

Scale-space flow for end-to-end optimized video compression
Eirikur Agustsson, David Minnen, Nick Johnston, Johannes Ballé, Sung Jin Hwang, George Toderici

StructEdit: Learning Structural Shape Variations
Kaichun Mo, Paul Guerrero, Li Yi, Hao Su, Peter Wonka, Niloy Mitra, Leonidas Guibas

3D-MPA: Multi Proposal Aggregation for 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation
Francis Engelmann, Martin Bokeloh, Alireza Fathi, Bastian Leibe, Matthias Niessner

Sequential mastery of multiple tasks: Networks naturally learn to learn and forget to forget
Guy Davidson, Michael C. Mozer

Distilling Effective Supervision from Severe Label Noise
Zizhao Zhang, Han Zhang, Sercan Ö. Arik, Honglak Lee, Tomas Pfister

ViewAL: Active Learning With Viewpoint Entropy for Semantic Segmentation
Yawar Siddiqui, Julien Valentin, Matthias Niessner

Attribution in Scale and Space
Shawn Xu, Subhashini Venugopalan, Mukund Sundararajan

Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Sub-category Exploration
Yu-Ting Chang, Qiaosong Wang, Wei-Chih Hung, Robinson Piramuthu, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Speech2Action: Cross-modal Supervision for Action Recognition
Arsha Nagrani, Chen Sun, David Ross, Rahul Sukthankar, Cordelia Schmid, Andrew Zisserman

Counting Out Time: Class Agnostic Video Repetition Counting in the Wild
Debidatta Dwibedi, Yusuf Aytar, Jonathan Tompson, Pierre Sermanet, Andrew Zisserman

The Garden of Forking Paths: Towards Multi-Future Trajectory Prediction
Junwei Liang, Lu Jiang, Kevin Murphy, Ting Yu, Alexander Hauptmann

Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification
Qizhe Xie, Minh-Thang Luong, Eduard Hovy, Quoc V. Le

EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection (see the blog post)
Mingxing Tan, Ruoming Pang, Quoc Le

ACNe: Attentive Context Normalization for Robust Permutation-Equivariant Learning
Weiwei Sun, Wei Jiang, Eduard Trulls, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Kwang Moo Yi

VectorNet: Encoding HD Maps and Agent Dynamics from Vectorized Representation
Jiyang Gao, Chen Sun, Hang Zhao, Yi Shen, Dragomir Anguelov, Cordelia Schmid, Congcong Li

SpineNet: Learning Scale-Permuted Backbone for Recognition and Localization
Xianzhi Du, Tsung-Yi Lin, Pengchong Jin, Golnaz Ghiasi, Mingxing Tan, Yin Cui, Quoc Le, Xiaodan Song

KeyPose: Multi-View 3D Labeling and Keypoint Estimation for Transparent Objects
Xingyu Liu, Rico Jonschkowski, Anelia Angelova, Kurt Konolige

Structured Multi-Hashing for Model Compression
Elad Eban, Yair Movshovitz-Attias, Hao Wu, Mark Sandler, Andrew Poon, Yerlan Idelbayev, Miguel A. Carreira-Perpinan

DOPS: Learning to Detect 3D Objects and Predict their 3D Shapes
Mahyar Najibi, Guangda Lai, Abhijit Kundu, Zhichao Lu, Vivek Rathod, Tom Funkhouser, Caroline Pantofaru, David Ross, Larry Davis, Alireza Fathi

Panoptic-DeepLab: A Simple, Strong, and Fast Baseline for Bottom-Up Panoptic Segmentation
Bowen Cheng, Maxwell Collins, Yukun Zhu, Ting Liu, Thomas S. Huang, Hartwig Adam, Liang-Chieh Chen

Context R-CNN: Long Term Temporal Context for Per-Camera Object Detection
Sara Beery, Guanhang Wu, Vivek Rathod, Ronny Votel, Jonathan Huang

Distortion Agnostic Deep Watermarking
Xiyang Luo, Ruohan Zhan, Huiwen Chang, Feng Yang, Peyman Milanfar

Can weight sharing outperform random architecture search? An investigation with TuNAS
Gabriel Bender, Hanxiao Liu, Bo Chen, Grace Chu, Shuyang Cheng, Pieter-Jan Kindermans, Quoc Le

GIFnets: Differentiable GIF Encoding Framework
Innfarn Yoo, Xiyang Luo, Yilin Wang, Feng Yang, Peyman Milanfar

Your Local GAN: Designing Two Dimensional Local Attention Mechanisms for Generative Models
Giannis Daras, Augustus Odena, Han Zhang, Alex Dimakis

Fast Sparse ConvNets
Erich Elsen, Marat Dukhan, Trevor Gale, Karen Simonyan

RetinaTrack: Online Single Stage Joint Detection and Tracking
Zhichao Lu, Vivek Rathod, Ronny Votel, Jonathan Huang

Learning to See Through Obstructions
Yu-Lun Liu, Wei-Sheng Lai, Ming-Hsuan Yang,Yung-Yu Chuang, Jia-Bin Huang

Self-Supervised Learning of Video-Induced Visual Invariances
Michael Tschannen, Josip Djolonga, Marvin Ritter, Aravindh Mahendran, Neil Houlsby, Sylvain Gelly, Mario Lucic

Workshops

3rd Workshop and Challenge on Learned Image Compression
Organizers include: George Toderici, Eirikur Agustsson, Lucas Theis, Johannes Ballé, Nick Johnston

CLVISION 1st Workshop on Continual Learning in Computer Vision
Organizers include: Zhiyuan (Brett) Chen, Marc Pickett

Embodied AI
Organizers include: Alexander Toshev, Jie Tan, Aleksandra Faust, Anelia Angelova

The 1st International Workshop and Prize Challenge on Agriculture-Vision: Challenges & Opportunities for Computer Vision in Agriculture
Organizers include: Zhen Li, Jim Yuan

Embodied AI
Organizers include: Alexander Toshev, Jie Tan, Aleksandra Faust, Anelia Angelova

New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement workshop and challenges on image and video restoration and enhancement (NTIRE)
Talk: “Sky Optimization: Semantically aware image processing of skies in low-light photography”
Orly Liba, Longqi Cai, Yun-Ta Tsai, Elad Eban, Yair Movshovitz-Attias, Yael Pritch, Huizhong Chen, Jonathan Barron

The End-of-End-to-End A Video Understanding Pentathlon
Organizers include: Rahul Sukthankar

4th Workshop on Media Forensics
Organizers include: Christoph Bregler

4th Workshop on Visual Understanding by Learning from Web Data
Organizers include: Jesse Berent, Rahul Sukthankar

AI for Content Creation
Organizers include: Deqing Sun, Lu Jiang, Weilong Yang

Fourth Workshop on Computer Vision for AR/VR
Organizers include: Sofien Bouaziz

Low-Power Computer Vision Competition (LPCVC)
Organizers include: Bo Chen, Andrew Howard, Jaeyoun Kim

Sight and Sound
Organizers include: William Freeman

Workshop on Efficient Deep Learning for Computer Vision
Organizers include: Pete Warden

Extreme classification in computer vision
Organizers include: Ramin Zabih, Zhen Li

Image Matching: Local Features and Beyond (see the blog post)
Organizers include: Eduard Trulls

The DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation
Organizers include: Alberto Montes, Jordi Pont-Tuset, Kevis-Kokitsi Maninis

2nd Workshop on Precognition: Seeing through the Future
Organizers include: Utsav Prabhu

Computational Cameras and Displays (CCD)
Talk: Orly Liba

2nd Workshop on Learning from Unlabeled Videos (LUV)
Organizers include:Honglak Lee, Rahul Sukthankar

7th Workshop on Fine Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC7) (see the blog post)
Organizers include: Christine Kaeser-Chen, Serge Belongie

Language & Vision with applications to Video Understanding
Organizers include: Lu Jiang

Neural Architecture Search and Beyond for Representation Learning
Organizers include: Barret Zoph

Tutorials

Disentangled 3D Representations for Relightable Performance Capture of Humans
Organizers include: Sean Fanello, Christoph Rhemann, Jonathan Taylor, Sofien Bouaziz, Adarsh Kowdle, Rohit Pandey, Sergio Orts-Escolano, Paul Debevec, Shahram Izadi

Learning Representations via Graph-Structured Networks
Organizers include:Chen Sun, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Novel View Synthesis: From Depth-Based Warping to Multi-Plane Images and Beyond
Organizers include:Varun Jampani

How to Write a Good Review
Talks by:Vittorio Ferrari, Bill Freeman, Jordi Pont-Tuset

Neural Rendering
Organizers include:Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Rohit K. Pandey, Sean Fanello,Maneesh Agrawala, Dan B. Goldman

Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics and Computer Vision
Organizers: Timnit Gebru, Emily Denton

Sinch to buy India’s ACL Mobile for $70 million

Sinch said on Monday it has agreed to buy Indian firm ACL Mobile for £56 million (roughly $70 million) in what is the fourth acquisition deal the Swedish mobile voice and messaging firm has entered into at the height of a global pandemic.

The Swedish firm said acquiring ACL Mobile will enable it to leverage the Indian firm’s connections with local mobile operators in the world’s second largest internet market, as well as in Malaysia and UAE, to expand its end-to-end connectivity without working with a third-party firm.

Twenty-year-old ACL Mobile, which has headquarters in Delhi, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur, enables businesses to interact with their customers through SMS, email, WhatsApp and other channels. In a press statement, the Indian firm said it serves more than 500 enterprise customers, including Flipkart, OLX, MakeMyTrip, HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank.

“With ACL we gain critical scale in the world’s second-largest mobile market. We gain customers, expertise and technology and we further strengthen our global messaging product for discerning businesses with global needs,” said Sinch chief executive Oscar Werner.

The Indian firm, which employs 288 people, reported gross profits of $14.2 million on sales of about $65 million in the financial year that ended in March. During the same period, ACL Mobile claims it delivered 47 billion messages on behalf of its enterprise customers.

“Although the long-term growth outlook is favorable, lower commercial activity in India due to the COVID-19 pandemic means that the near-term growth outlook is less predictable,” Sinch said of ACL Mobile’s future outlook.

ACL Mobile is the fourth acquisition Sinch has unveiled since March this year. Last month the company said it was buying SAP’s Digital Interconnect for $250 million. In March, it announced deals to buy Wavy and Chatlayer.

Sinch, founded in 2008, employs more than 700 people in over 40 locations worldwide and is increasingly expanding to more markets. Last month it said acquiring SAP’s Digital Interconnect will help it expand in the U.S. market. The company says it is profitable.

“Together with Sinch we are scaling up to become one of the leading global players in our industry. I’m excited about this next chapter and the many new opportunities that we can pursue together,” said Sanjay K Goyal, founder and chief executive of ACL Mobile.

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3 secrets of resilient people | Lucy Hone

3 secrets of resilient people | Lucy Hone

Everyone experiences loss, but how do you cope with the tough moments that follow? Resilience researcher Lucy Hone shares three hard-won strategies for developing the capacity to brave adversity, overcome struggle and face whatever may come head-on with fortitude and grace.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

The 4 Best Sites to Find Abandoned Places and Old Ghost Towns

Many people love to hunt for treasure. Some meet their needs through the practice of geocaching, while others like to visit abandoned buildings; there’s something poignant about remembering the things that have been lost to time and neglect.

However, some of us can’t visit these locations in person. This is either due to the fact that these locations are too far away, or because we just don’t know where to look. Fortunately, there’s a whole online subculture devoted to documenting derelict areas. Here’s a list of great websites on how to find abandoned places, wherever you might be.

1. Abandoned Places

First, let’s start off with a really old website that’s been documenting abandoned places for ages. When we say this website is old, we mean ancient. It hasn’t been updated since the early 2010s, so if you’re looking for a digital trip down memory lane, check out abandoned-places.com.

While the Abandoned Places website is old and not exactly user-friendly, it’s pretty simple to use once you figure out the main navigation wheel. Essentially, the whole website was designed to look like a mechanical contraption. You can click on different gears within the central wheel in order to learn about a new building.

The website also features locations from around the world, with each post including historical information and photos for those locations when possible. One area, called The Graffiti Place, includes a description on the size of the ghost town, along with its location along the river Scheldt. The photographs documenting it are detailed and definitely worth a look.

If you’re searching for other weird, wonderful, sometimes-very-old websites, then check out this list of the most bizarre websites you haven’t seen.

2. Abandoned America

Looking for a more modern website with a distinct focus? Then you need to check out Abandoned America, a website put together by documentarian Matthew Christopher.

Over the years, Christopher has made it his mission to record the American dream in decay. On his about page, he states that he’s been fascinated with abandoned places since he was a child.

Additionally, he wants to share the stories behind these abandoned places, and bring light to the lives that were upended through historical atrocities. One such atrocity was America’s use of insane asylums in the 20th century, with ruins now scattered across the country from coast to coast.

The website also makes it very clear that some location information has been withheld, due to the fact that these abandoned buildings are on private property.

Even with that factor in play, however, this website is still one of the most comprehensive resources on this list. The attention to detail can help you satisfy that urge to “find abandoned places near me,” without having to go there in person.

3. Urbex Playground

Looking for a website that combines the topic of urban exploring with the history of abandoned buildings? Then you need to check out Urbex Playground.

With twin sections devoted to urban and rural exploring, Urbex and Rurex, this website aims to document abandoned buildings in both high and low-density areas.

For each place that this website explores, the team photographs and records the history behind those buildings. They also talk about how these buildings have come to be abandoned in the present day. As such, this website is an excellent source of inspiration and knowledge for writers working on a variety of different topics.

Although Urbex admits that its documentation process sometimes involves trespassing (an activity we do not recommend), its meticulous documentation practices and its attention to detail have to be commended.

4. Freaktography

Looking for a website that is a little more “daring” with the ways that it photographs abandoned places? Then you need to check out Freaktography, a website run by an urban explorer.

Starting in the early 2010s, Freaktography began to record abandoned buildings and old ghost towns, and post those pictures online. The explorer who runs this website has amassed a giant collection of images on the subject.

He also talks about his exploits on the Freaktography YouTube channel.

Like the other sites on this list, Freaktography strongly urges readers to not follow the photographer’s example. If you plan to document any abandoned places or retrace the photographer’s steps either through a website or an abandoned places app, then you need to avoid trespassing on private property.

Other Abandoned Places to Check Out

While we’ve been going over websites that you can use to learn about abandoned places, there are also a variety of individual blog posts that cover the topic, too. We’ve rounded up a list of the most relevant.

• Daddu has a post called The Poetry of Forgotten Places, featuring a photo gallery.
• Web Urbanist has a blog post on 100+ Abandoned Buildings, Places, and Property. It details a series of derelict areas and old ghost towns.
• On English Russia, you can read a picture-heavy post called Abandoned Trains of the Soviet Era. It’s perfect for anyone who wants to research old objects that are not buildings.
• Kathmandu & Beyond has a roundup of abandoned places that they’ve explored.
• Urban75 also a section with lots of old photos detailing old trains and train stations.

Once again, all these links are really interesting to check out.

Find Abandoned Places From Your Own Home

Now that you know about this collection of websites devoted to the subject of exploring abandoned places, you can start to check out some of these websites yourself. Maybe you can even use the idea of urban exploration as a jumping point for a new project that you plan to research.

If you want to explore other places around the world, abandoned or not, then we recommend our list of Google Earth virtual torus that you’ll want to check out. It’ll allow you to venture into areas you’ve never even heard of, all from the comfort of your own home.

Read the full article: The 4 Best Sites to Find Abandoned Places and Old Ghost Towns

5 Ways to Make Money Online With Your Webcam

Everyone has a camera at their fingertips thanks to smartphones. You might also have a webcam that you use to video chat with people. Have you ever considered how to make money using your webcam? It will require some real effort, but it’s definitely possible.

That said, it’s very difficult to make a true living with a webcam job, so consider the approach of “making money with your webcam” as a source of bonus income.

Without further ado, here are some great ways that you can use to earn money with your webcam or smartphone camera.

1. Tutorial Videos

If you’re an expert in a field, creating tutorials and how-to videos can be a great way to build an audience. These can be in different formats, like lengthy lectures that take a deep dive on educational subjects, or more casual and fun videos for hobbies like card tricks and origami.

The best subject for these types of videos is a field that’s visual in nature—like pottery, fashion, instruments—so viewers don’t get bored. If you want to talk at them, you’ll need to have a captivating voice or personality.

How to make money: You can always upload to YouTube and hope to achieve a large enough following to make money with the YouTube Partner Program. If you’re feeling entrepreneurial, you could set up a website and sell your videos yourself. Or combine the two ideas: set up a website with ads and keep the videos free.

2. Review Videos

If you have access to a steady source of new products, you could try your hand at product reviews. Video reviews are great for prospective buyers because they can see much more compared to reading reviews or seeing static images. These reviews can be serious, humorous, or some blend of the two.

Before you go ahead with this idea, you need to know what you’re talking about. You need to be critical and analyze what makes a product good or bad and different from its competitors. Be thorough; missing key aspects of a product can destroy your credibility and enrage viewers. Finally, be engaging, because there’s nothing worse than a boring reviewer.

How to make money: If you gather a large enough audience, the YouTube Partner program is always a choice. Setting up a review website (start with our Best Web Hosting Services page) that supplements your videos with text reviews can turn into a hit, but make sure you avoid saturated markets (like most electronics). Reviews are a wonderful platform for jump-starting an affiliate marketing campaign, too.

3. Personality Videos

Since we’ve been talking about the YouTube Partner Program, we should consider one of the most popular video types that you’ll see on YouTube: the personality video. These are video series that revolve around the personality rather than the content.

For these videos, you can give advice, provide a running commentary, do comedy, news for a community, or any number of other ideas. Content is important here, but personality is just as important. Your audience will be coming back time and time again to hear what you’ve created.

How to make money: By this point, the YouTube Partner Program should be a no-brainer. However, there are alternative video sites that will pay you for successful content, like Dailymotion and Vimeo. Once you’ve built up a large community, you can create a website and make more money with ad revenue and merchandise sales.

4. Live Online Tutoring

Live tutoring is similar in concept to making tutorial videos, except instead of recording a video and uploading it to YouTube, you connect directly to one or more students and teach them in real-time. There are sites that facilitate all of this for you using their in-house software (typically a web-based platform) like Tutor.com, Chegg, and Club Z. You can also try finding your own students using Craigslist or something similar.

In order to do well with tutoring, you need to be intelligent, articulate, and knowledgeable on whichever subjects you teach. Basically, if you’d make a good offline tutor and you have a decent webcam and microphone, online tutoring could be worth it. If you’re doing this on your own, a program like Skype or an alternative could be helpful.

How to make money: If you’re employed by an online tutoring service, they’ll typically pay hourly. If you run it as a private venture, you can set your own rates.

5. Live Stream Games

If you have a propensity towards video games, one of the many ways you could make money playing video games is to stream yourself playing those games. There are free screen streaming programs and many of them include webcam picture-in-picture functionality, which is useful for connecting with your audience and talking with them. If video games aren’t your thing and you’d prefer live Dungeons and Dragons or board game sessions, that’s a possibility too.

One thing to note is that video streaming can be intensive on your computer, particularly the CPU. If you don’t have a powerful computer, you’ll need to sacrifice frames-per-second or video quality or both, which can result in a video stream that no one wants to watch.

How to make money: If you can build up a sizeable audience, Twitch has a Partner program where you can earn some ad revenue on your stream and you can enable a subscription feature for your fans. In addition, there’s always the option of putting up a donation link and having your fans donate, which can prove quite lucrative for engaging streamers with large audiences.

Make Money With Surveys Too

Don’t expect to become rich overnight. There’s very little barrier to entry, so lots of people are trying to make their mark alongside you. Consider these methods as a hobby and be passionate about them, or you will lose steam.

If you want other ways to make money online, check out these legit survey websites to earn extra cash.

Image Credits: Masterchief_Productions/Shutterstock

Read the full article: 5 Ways to Make Money Online With Your Webcam

6 Creative Ways to Give Money as a Gift Online

When your friend or family member is celebrating a holiday or special event, circumstances can sometimes prevent you from celebrating with them. No matter how far you are away from your loved ones, you should still let them know you care. Fortunately, sending gift cards or money online is easier than ever.

You probably know how to send money as a gift through wire transfers, but what if you want to get a little more creative? These thoughtful money-gifting methods will put a guaranteed smile on your recipient’s face.

1. Send a Prepaid Visa Gift Card

If you don’t know what exactly a person wants as a gift, you can never go wrong with a prepaid credit card. On the Vanilla Gift section of Visa’s site, you can easily purchase a gift card in the $10-$500 range.

Thanks to Visa’s wide array of prepaid card designs, you can find a card for just about any occasion—birthdays, baby showers, weddings, and graduations are just some of the milestones that the cards are designed for. Plus, Visa gives you the option of writing a custom message on the card at no extra charge.

Once you pick out a design, simply choose the amount of money to put on it, enter the recipient’s email address, and check out. Visa activates the card as soon as you buy it, so your recipient can start spending as soon as possible. The only downside to these cards is that they’re only usable for merchants located within The United States.

2. Give the Gift of an Amazon eGift Card

Perhaps you don’t just want to send money, you want to send a gift that’s a little bit more personal. Maybe the person that you’re sending the gift to is a bookworm, a fashion lover, or an avid techie. Thankfully, Amazon has something for just about everyone. From video games to home goods, pet supplies, and clothes, your recipient is bound to find something they’ve been looking for.

Amazon has a large selection of gift card designs, making it one of the best ways to send money for Christmas, birthdays, weddings, graduations, and many more occasions. Better yet, some of the card designs are animated, and you can even upload your own pictures to certain cards.

You have the option of sending an eCard with money over text message, or by email. Amazon also lets you set a date for delivery. That means you can buy the card now and have Amazon send it on the date of your choice.

3. Buy a Gift Card for Local Restaurants

Maybe your gift recipient isn’t really a shopper but loves to dine at local restaurants. In that case, the obvious choice is to buy a gift card through OpenTable.

Not only is OpenTable is a great restaurant picker app and website, but you can also use the site to buy and send digital gift cards for nearby eateries. It’s a great way to support local businesses, while also showing your recipient that you care.

When you type in a specific location, you’ll see a list of partnered restaurants. Click Buy gift card for any restaurant, and you’ll get redirected to a purchase page where you can customize and send your gift.

4. Send Money Through PayPal

If you have a PayPal account, you can send an eCard with money through PayPal. The only catch is that your gift recipients need to have a PayPal account as well, but creating an account is free, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

To send money as a gift, simply follow the above link and sign in to your PayPal account. You can then enter your recipient’s email or mobile number, as well as the amount of money you want to send.

As for card designs, PayPal only gives you six to choose from, so you might not find the theme for the specific occasion you’re looking for. Despite this, it’s still one of the best ways to send graduation money or cash for a birthday gift.

5. Buy Gift Cards on GiftCards.com

GiftCards.com has a huge library of digital gift cards. It’s packed with gift cards for major clothing stores, restaurants, airlines, department stores, online shops, and much more.

If you aren’t sure what type of gift card to send to your friend or family member, Giftcards.com is where you should start your search. As you browse, you’ll see small icons below each gift card option—the smartphone icon means the card is available as a digital gift.

You can opt to email your gift right away, or set the delivery date in the future. In addition to letting you customize a message, Giftcards.com also lets you choose a celebratory video to go along with your eCard.

6. Gift Home-Cooked Meals With Blue Apron

You probably know Blue Apron as one of the best ways to get fresh and healthy food delivered to your home. Upon signing up, Blue Apron will send you all the ingredients you need to create a healthy and delicious meal. Anyone who enjoys cooking, or wants to learn how to cook better can benefit from a Blue Apron subscription.

On Blue Apron’s site, you can buy a digital gift card for $60, $120, $240, or a custom amount. The $60 card covers a one-week meal plan, while the $120 amount covers two weeks, and the $240 value covers four weeks.

When you purchase a Blue Apron gift card, you can send it directly to the recipient’s email. Blue Apron might not give you any fancy card design options, but at least you can still write a custom message in the email.

Learn How to Send Money as a Gift Creatively

One of the most stressful parts about holidays and special events is gift-giving. Although money isn’t the most personal gift, when you prepare it with a kind message on a digital card, it becomes a lot more meaningful.

Want to send a friend or family member a physical gift instead? You might want to check out these online shopping sites with free international shipping.

Image Credit: Kesu01/Depositphotos

Read the full article: 6 Creative Ways to Give Money as a Gift Online