The Last Word

The Last Word: HomesUSA.com’s Ben Caballero on Rising Interest Rates

Caballero—a three-time Guinness Book of World Records holder for most current annual home sale transactions through MLS by an individual sell-side real estate agent—should know a thing or two about interest rates. And he says the recent spikes have got Texas home builders "scrambling."
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The Last Word: ParkHub’s George Baker Sr. on Navigating Seasons of Change in Business
by | Oct 18, 2022
“Achieving triple-digit growth isn’t easy. It takes vision and execution, boldness and grit," Baker writes in an article in Forbes. "You can’t talk your way into that kind of growth. You have to put the work in, stay united in adversity, lick the occasional wounds of failure, and keep taking risks to find those successes that lie at the intersection of technologies and trends in the marketplace." What makes growth even harder is when "seasons of change" hit businesses and founders alike, he adds, offering some insights into how he and Parkhub have dealt with them.
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The Last Word: Google’s James Harding on the Promise Shown at the HackDFW Marathon
The eighth annual HackDFW, powered by Say Yes to Dallas and presented by Google, connected hundreds of aspiring technologists to several Fortune 100 companies. It was a unique 48-hour marathon that challenged more than 550 people from 80 universities. Tech teams created ways to innovatively tackle waste management, climate change, better understand decisions from the Supreme Court, and much more.
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The Last Word: Nextt CEO Arun Agarwal on Volunteer Leadership

Agarwal is CEO of Dallas-based Nextt, America’s largest bedding company. Known as the “King of Textiles,” he’s also the CEO of S2 Resources and Saffaire Investments, and earlier this year he launched a B2B marketplace, Expo Bazaar USA. But the busy businessman also stays busy in the volunteer world. Since 2020, he's been on the Dallas Park Board as Mayor Eric Johnson’s rep, and has been the board's president since September 2021.
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The Last Word: Waymo’s Charlie Jatt on Beer Driving Itself Across Texas With No Human at the Wheel
Waymo, the self-driving truck unit from Google parent Alphabet Inc., has hauled over 1 million pounds of Modelo and Corona beer from Dallas to Houston in autonomously driven trucks, reports David Welch of Bloomberg News.
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The Last Word: Dialexa Co-Founders on How They Started Their Company, Which Was Just Acquired by IBM, With a Beer
by | Oct 6, 2022
Late last month, IBM acquired Dallas-based digital product engineering services firm Dialexa “to deepen its product engineering expertise and provide end-to-end digital transformation services for clients.” Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. But this week the company's co-founders, Scott Harper and Mark Haidar, disclosed something else on LinkedIn: How they both quit their jobs 12 years ago to launch a new adventure that would become Dialexa.
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The Last Word: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ Lorie K. Logan on ‘the Importance of Innovation’
by | Oct 5, 2022
Last May, Logan was named the 14th president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. In a virtual town hall, she answered questions about her background and her priorities for the district she oversees—which consists of Texas, northern Louisiana, and southern New Mexico. A post by the Dallas Fed captured some of Logan's comments, including her work for the Federal Reserve during 9/11 and the Great Recession of 2007-2009.
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The Last Word: Colossal’s Ben Lamm on Seeing His Startup Fuel a ‘Jeopardy’ Answer

by | Oct 3, 2022
In August, Colossal Biosciences announced it is working to "de-extinct" the Tasmanian tiger with the help of an Australian university and “marsupial biobanking.” It didn't take long for the TV show "Jeopardy" to notice—and work it into an answer.
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The Last Word: Arlington Mayor Jim Ross on How the City Is Creating a Skyline
Ross was elected mayor of Arlington in June 2021, and one of his goals for the city is to have something Dallas and Fort Worth are both known for: a signature skyline. He's a business owner (of the Mercury Chophouse on the city's Lamar Boulevard) and the principal attorney of the Jim Ross Law Group since 2008. But after reading Spencer Brewer's story about him in the Dallas Business Journal, you might add another job to his list: Skyline booster.
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The Last Word: Tri Global Energy’s John Billingsley on Selling His Company for $270M to Canada’s Enbridge
by | Sep 29, 2022
Tri Global Energy, Texas' leading developer of wind energy products, has been sold for $270 million to Enbridge, the largest energy company in Canada, the Dallas Morning News reported today. Since Billingsley founded the company in 2009, Tri Global has helped Texas become the nation's leader in wind energy capacity by developing and monetizing over 6 GW of utility scale renewable projects, the companies said. Tri Global is now among America's top utility-scale renewable energy developers.
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The Last Word: John Howard on How SMU’s New Lab Is Working to Reduce Bias in AI
by | Sep 28, 2022
The goal of SMU's Intelligent Systems and Bias Examination Lab (ISaBEL) is to quantify and minimize bias in artificial intelligence systems. It will explore how AI systems—like facial recognition algorithms—perform on a wide range of diverse people. The Lab will investigate ways that bias can be reduced in these systems through cutting-edge research, standards, and other peer-reviewed studies.
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The Last Word: UTA’s Allison Sullivan on Winning a $490K NSF Grant for Her Software Update Study

Sullivan, an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at UT Arlington, was recently awarded a three-year, $490,000 grant from the National Science Foundation "to explore testing software updates without testing unchanged parts of the code."
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The Last Word: Sentiero Ventures’ David Evans On the Pure Entrepreneurship Narrative: ‘Find a Need and Fill It’
by | Sep 22, 2022
Writing on LinkedIn, Evans links to an intriguing AIGA Eye on Design story: "We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business." According to the article, the long-ago-and-faraway floppy disk is "more in demand than you'd think," as the founder of FloppyDisk.com could tell you.
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The Last Word: Mansfield EDC’s Jason Moore on an Incubator Space in Hoque Global’s $50M Development
Dallas' Hoque Global plans to build a $50 million mixed-use development in downtown Mansfield, the DFW suburb south of Arlington, with 249 residences, nearly 12,000 square feet of retail, office, and restaurant space, and a nearly 8,000-square-foot civic plaza, the DBJ reports. In a conversation with Moore and Todd Tonore, Mansfield's Mayor Pro Tem and Chairman of the Historic Downtown Mansfield Revitalization Subcommittee, the DBJ explores how "one of the oldest historic downtowns" in North Texas is about to get rebuilt.
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The Last Word: Siemens’ Cedrik Neike on Sustainability in Motorsports
Plano-based Siemens Digital Industries Software recently announced that the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile—the governing body of world motor sport and the federation of the world's leading motoring organizations—has selected Siemens as its Official Sustainability PLM Software Supplier.
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