A group of third grade students gather around a board game on a Wednesday afternoon in a Charleston classroom, grabbing game pieces, discussing potential moves and reading out playing cards. The games are not Monopoly, Sorry, or any others of yore – they’re focused on identifying, and boosting, students’ strengths and weaknesses.

It’s part of a shift in school districts’ gifted and talented programs. While many programs focused on a small group of high achieving students, instructors across the nation are now focusing more on inclusion, using data to help them zero in on students’ talents, a method that has the potential of capturing more students for advanced instruction.

For Vanessa Hill, the gifted education coordinator for Amphitheater Public School District in Tucson, Arizona, focusing on strengths and weaknesses helps to solve what she sees as a universal problem with gifted identification.

“Something I’ve been thinking deeply about that tends to be a universal problem is that gifted identification does not match the metrics of your district,” says Vanessa Hill, the gifted education coordinator for Amphitheater Public School District in Tucson, Arizona. “I’m constantly thinking of that, so our demographics can get closer. This new tactic is about exposure to critical thinking and reasoning – what does that look like, how to reason through a problem?”

Re-assessing the methods and ultimately changing the definition of “gifted” comes as some question the value of standardized tests and a push-and-pull to diversify programs.

The Shift In Gifted and Talented

The gifted and talented programs run the gamut of names and acronyms depending on the district, including advanced learning program, TAG (talented and gifted), LEAP (Learning Enrichment Alternative Program) or REACH (Realizing Excellence through Academic and Creative Help), among others.

Regardless of the name, the program has undergone several major shifts over the last few decades. Schools previously often only selectively tested students, often at the behest of involved parents or by a teacher recommendation. That brought a large amount of inequity in the programs, with many moving to a universal screening practice. Some states, including Washington and Missouri, made it a state mandate to test all students while in elementary school. The screening practice itself evolved from an IQ test to aptitude and ability tests, though how accurate those are is up for debate.

“Society is really unequal along socioeconomic and racial and ethnic lines, and these tests are just reflecting that,” says Scott Peters, director of research consulting at NWEA, a nonprofit education assessment organization. “You can change tests all day long, but at the end of the day, you can’t give some kids three years of $40,000-a-year preschool and also wonder why this kid that’s never been to school until first grade doesn’t do as well.”

Often, schools’ gifted and talented programs do not represent their overall school population and instead skew heavily toward white and Asian students. Zohran Mamdani, the widely-watched mayor of New York City, made it part of his platform to phase out gifted and talented programs because of the inequity.

“Ultimately, my administration would aim to make sure that every child receives a high-quality early education that nurtures their curiosity and learning,” he said in a 2025 statement to the New York Times.

There is no silver bullet test that accounts for inequality and a child’s upbringing, although Peters said when factors such as income, race and other equity gaps are controlled in tests, most inequities disappear.

“This isn’t a factor of, ‘Oh, there are students of color scoring high, but they’re still not getting in,’” he says. “It’s that there’s not enough students of color scoring high because of that larger societal inequality issue.”

Because of the often-skewed gifted and talented population, schools are shifting toward “talent development” with all students, versus focusing on strengthening some students’ already solid skills.

“Because of the baggage of the past, we’re moving toward a new perspective where we’re identifying the strengths of students — whether academic, social or emotional — versus people for a program,” says Kristen Seward, clinical professor in gifted, talented and creative studies at Purdue University. “And I think this twist in how we approach education as gifted researchers is going to benefit everybody.”

Using Data for ‘Talent Development’

Developing talent for gifted programs, much like the name itself, varies depending on the district. Seward says many teachers have enriched curriculums, which enhance things like vocabulary, science and social studies — topics that have been put on the back burner over the years in favor of standardized testing. Teachers are trained to spot students’ strengths and respond to those, which in turn, helps with students’ weaknesses.

For example, if a student has a strong vocabulary but struggles in math, the teacher might focus on math vocabulary during math class to put the lesson on a level the child understands.

“I don’t want it to turn into a thing where the teacher is the gate, and if they don’t open the gate, then the students don’t get identified – which has been a problem,” Seward says. “We have to train teachers to be talent scouts, presenting the enriched curriculum. Hopefully it’s not something additional, but something they’d naturally do in their role.”

Elizabeth McLaurin Uptegrove, now the assistant academic director in Charleston County School District, created a “strength or stretch” system that involves the games the students played in the aforementioned classroom. When Uptegrove first arrived in Charleston’s school district, South Carolina used to require all second grade students be tested for the gifted and talented program. But after that year, selection changed to a nomination system.

“Which sounds elitist, and it is,” she says, adding white, affluent children were three times more likely to be in the programs.

She pushed for universal testing again for all fourth grade students, which yielded three times as many students identified as gifted, jumping from 40 fourth graders to 150 across the district. Several schools across the country have adopted similar strength-or-stretch systems.

But Uptegrove’s efforts go beyond identifying candidates for gifted programs through teacher observation: her game-based system uses data. With the aptitude test, there are verbal, quantitative and nonverbal subsections. The tests indicate if a child is low or high achieving in those areas. Then the children are placed in groups with those of similar abilities to play games that can enhance those skills.

“Typically a teacher is not very well-equipped to come up with activities or lessons that can actually reach their level of thinking ability and games do that really quickly, in a way that’s not as boring for children as a typical worksheet,” Uptegrove says. “That’s where the magic of the games comes in. We’re making rigorous, hard thinking almost irresistible so students are willing to do the activity for longer.”

Hill, the Arizona-based education coordinator, initially implemented Uptegrove’s game strategy across third grade classrooms in five schools: three Title 1 schools and two non-Title 1. She says the schools that have the strength or stretch program in place have higher passing rates of “proficient” or “highly proficient” scores than those who do not.

“To me, it’s the difference between being a passive learner and active learner; by being able to engage in the games, it’s more active learning,” Hill says. “You raise the exposure to critical thinking and are taught to apply those skills to any situation, whether it’s on an achievement test or on the playground with a friend.”

The Future of the Program

Both researchers and teachers acknowledge the “talent development” approach to gifted and talented programs is far from perfect. It is often costly, whether it is buying the games, instilling teacher training or taking out time from testing. Hill pointed to four schools within her district that are closing this year because of financial constraints.

“Ordering the games is no small cost; I feel so blessed it’s that level of importance that we will find the funds,” she says. “As far as critical thinking games, yes that was missing. It is a hole we were filling. I think that while the core curriculum is doing its best, it can oftentimes be a bit surface level.”

Uptegrove agrees, saying she believes the talent development method is becoming more popular, but “there’s a long way to go in belief and funding for it.”

Peters, who has long studied the best educational methods and practices, believes the shift in gifted and talented is a good step. But he has concerns about the larger moves needed for lasting impact.

“It’s easy to have a 30-minute gifted program; it’s hard to have a second through eighth grade math development pipeline involving everyone in the school,” he says. “And advanced learning isn’t enough of a priority for most schools.”

Business laptops are a niche that suits only a few, but if there were one laptop you could do every single job with, it’s the ExpertBook Ultra. This laptop debuts Intel’s Panther Lake processors in India, and they pack serious performance not only in the CPU but also in the graphics department, with the Taiwanese laptop maker claiming GPU performance similar to the RTX 4050 on the ExpertBook Ultra, which weighs less than 1kg. Here’s everything you need to know about it.

Flagship All Around

Asus is pitching the ExpertBook Ultra as its most premium business laptop yet, and it’s easy to see why. It features an ultra-light design starting at just 0.99 kg and is built using magnesium-aluminum alloy. We took the Ultra for a spin at the launch event, and it looked beautiful. The finish shimmers in sunlight, making the whole experience even more premium.

Open the lid, and you’re greeted by a beautiful 3K Tandem OLED display that nails the colors and delivers deep blacks. But that’s not actually the highlight. The highlight is the 1400-nit peak brightness in HDR mode, which keeps the display legible even in direct sunlight. The nano coating also keeps the panel smudge-free.

Under the hood lie Intel’s latest Core Ultra Series 3 processors, along with an integrated AI engine (NPU) to handle on-device AI workloads. While we are yet to test the performance of the ExpertBook Ultra, Asus’s demos have set expectations very high, as their benchmarks show the laptop topping the charts among other laptops. The processor can be coupled with up to 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 2TB of M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD.

Graphics are handled by the Intel Arc B390, which Asus says offers performance comparable to the RTX 4050. The company also ran a series of benchmarks comparing the two in a variety of games. The ExpertBook Ultra is run by a 70WHrs battery with a claimed all-day battery life of up to 26 hours.

ExpertBook P Series Gets an Upgrade

Alongside the Ultra, ASUS has expanded its ExpertBook P series with new models like the P3 and P5, targeting a wider range of business users.

These laptops will deliver scalable performance and AI capabilities for professionals and small- to medium-sized businesses. ASUS says the goal is to provide flexibility across configurations while maintaining strong performance and reliability.

Pricing & Availability

The ASUS ExpertBook Ultra is now available for pre-order on Flipkart, starting at ₹2,39,990. Pre-order offers include extended warranty, accidental damage protection, bank discounts, and bundled subscriptions. Meanwhile, the ExpertBook P3 starts at ₹94,990, while the P5 is expected to launch soon with a starting price of ₹2,14,990

Its expansion comes despite reporting losses here in 2024

Chinese coffee brand Luckin Coffee has been in Singapore for only three years, but it has established a strong foothold in the city-state. It expanded by 30 stores over the past year, bringing its total number of outlets here to 81. 

This is despite offering its coffee at heavily discounted prices and reporting losses amounting to RMB¥47 million (S$8.8 million) in Singapore in 2024, all the more notable in the context of Singapore’s notoriously tough F&B landscape.

What, then, goes into the Chinese brand’s playbook for expanding in such a challenging market?

A scale few café operators can match

Luckin’s pricing power comes from a scale few café operators can match.

With over 30,000 stores globally—more than Starbucks—the company benefits from massive purchasing volumes that significantly reduce its cost per cup, enabling retail prices as low as S$4, and even promotional offers such as S$0.99 coffee for first-time users.

In 2024, Luckin Coffee signed its largest procurement deal in the brand’s history—a five-year agreement to purchase 240,000 tonnes of Brazilian coffee beans starting in 2025, valued at RMB¥10 billion (S$1.87 billion).

CEO Guo Jinyi has also claimed that the company accounted for 40% of China’s total coffee bean imports and 60% of Brazilian coffee bean imports into China in 2024. At this level of purchasing power, Luckin is likely able to secure significantly lower costs compared to most café operators.

Cost efficiencies also extend beyond coffee beans.

In 2025, low-value consumables such as packaging materials and straws cost the company just RMB¥210 million (S$39 million) across its entire 30,000 store network. This translates to roughly S$1,307.64 per store per year, or about S$3.58 per store per day.

Since 2021, Luckin has also reduced costs by cutting reliance on third-party suppliers and building more of its own production capabilities.

It has opened in-house intelligent roasting plants in Fujian and Jiangsu, which have an annual roasting capacity exceeding 45,000 tonnes.

In Aug 2024, Luckin also broke ground on an Innovation and Production Centre in Qingdao with a total investment of approximately RMB¥3 billion and an expected annual roasting capacity of 55,000 tonnes.

According to its 2025 annual report, another roasting facility is under construction in Fujian. Once all four are operational, total roasting capacity will far exceed the 155,000 tonnes per year target.

This vertical integration allows Luckin to control more of its supply chain in-house, reduce intermediary costs, and ultimately lower overall production expenses across its store network.

An operating model that keeps costs lean

Ever struggled to find a seat at a Luckin Coffee outlet? That’s by design. Most Luckin stores are intentionally small to keep operating costs low.

Around 99% of its outlets are compact pick-up stores of 20–60 sqm, with limited or no seating. These stores are strategically located in office buildings, commercial districts, residential neighbourhoods, and university campuses, allowing the brand to expand rapidly while keeping rental and renovation costs low.

In fact, store pre-opening expenses accounted for just 0.2% of total operating expenses in 2025.

In Singapore, this format provides a clear advantage: smaller units mean cheaper leases compared to full-format cafés, which is especially crucial in a market where retail rents are notoriously high.

Beyond its physical footprint, Luckin’s digitalised operating model also enables a leaner cost structure. The company operates on an app-first system where customers order and pay entirely through its own platform.

This reduces reliance on cashier staff, lowers the risk of order errors, and allows for highly targeted in-app promotions and personalised marketing to users.

Besides its own app, Luckin Coffee is also available on third-party delivery platforms. According to its 2025 annual report, delivery orders doubled from 17.1% of total orders in 2024 to 34.7% in 2025 across its whole network, which shows that Luckin is extending its reach beyond its physical store footprint. 

Expansion doesn’t cost as much as it looks

Even with lower set-up costs, opening 30 stores in Singapore within a single year might seem aggressive. However, it’s not as capital-intensive as it might appear for the coffee giant under its operating model.

In Singapore, many outlets are run with franchise partners. These partners pay upfront fees and take on much of the setup and operating costs themselves. This means each new store is not fully funded by Luckin, helping the brand scale more quickly with less direct capital outlay.

At the same time, any remaining losses in overseas markets are effectively absorbed by its much larger China business.

In financial year 2024, Luckin’s Singapore operations reported losses amounting to RMB¥47 million (S$8.8 million).

However, this is small in the context of the group.

In 2024, Luckin generated over RMB 34.5 billion (S$6.4 billion) in revenue overall, alongside approximately RMB¥3.5–3.9 billion (S$653-S$728 million) in operating profit driven primarily by its China business. Against that scale, Singapore’s losses are effectively marginal.

Singapore is not a profit centre for the group, but part of a longer-term international expansion strategy.

Standing out in Singapore’s competitive coffee scene

From America’s Starbucks to China’s Cotti Coffee, and even local coffee houses, the competition for market share amongst coffee brands in Singapore is nothing short of steep, as Singaporeans have so many options to choose from.

So what makes one choose Luckin over other specialty coffee shops and those at our local coffee shops? 

While Luckin’s coffee doesn’t start from RMB 10 (S$1.87) per cup as it does in China, at S$4.80 for an Americano, it is still cheaper than many other café operators, including Starbucks, where prices start at around S$6.30.

This also does not account for the personalised discounts Luckin offers to users who order through its mobile app.

Luckin CEO Guo shared why Singapore was specifically chosen as the next big market for Luckin: 

Singapore serves as a critical testing ground for building our brand, refining our operational systems, and understanding overseas business models.

The city-state serves as Luckin’s launchpad into Southeast Asian countries, where it shared that it will adopt a franchise model.

While individual 2025 figures for Luckin’s Singapore operations are not available and are grouped with those of Malaysia and the United States after further expansion, the coffee giant shows no signs of slowing down.

In China, the journey from loss-making in 2020 to an explosive market leader took Luckin roughly five years. In Singapore, a city-state of six million people with a coffee shop on nearly every corner, the competition is steep.

But for Luckin, the steep competition is precisely the point—if the model works here, it can work anywhere in Southeast Asia.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

For creative and marketing teams, a simple cloud storage solution often falls short. These teams need to sift through large numbers of files to find what they’re looking for. The problem is getting worse: AI is accelerating content generation, meaning more media files than ever, which makes the task even trickier.

A New York-based startup called Shade is building a cloud storage platform designed for agencies, sports media teams, consumer brands, real estate companies, and podcasters to store and search their media files easily.

The company announced Wednesday that it closed $14 million in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Construct Capital, and Bling Capital in March. The nearly four-year-old startup has raised $20 million in total, with General Catalyst, SignalFire, and Contrary also on its cap table.

Shade was founded by CEO Brandon Fan and CTO Emerson Dove in 2024. The two had been friends since high school. They decided to build something together after growing frustrated with existing tools like Dropbox when it came to searching for files.

“We built it out of our frustration as creatives – [where we were contending with] stacks and stacks of hard drives and issues where we were using Dropbox drive frame and all of the tools under the sun…it was time to build one single source of truth,” Fan said.

He sees Shade as occupying an interesting niche as a creative file storage system around which companies can build workflows.

“As you make more content, you need to be thinking more about the workflows around the content. I like to say it’s similar to CRMs 20 years ago, when we were thinking about how to organize all the information that we had around our contacts and in all of our companies,” he said.

Shade points to two distinguishing features. First, it offers natural language search powered by auto-tagging. The startup said that this search doesn’t just surface a particular video — it identifies the exact moment in the video where a scene matching the search query occurs. For instance, users can search for “a person holding a laptop in snow,” and the system will surface all matching clips with timestamps.

The tool also automatically transcribes videos for easier search. Users can search based on meaning, transcripts, and facial recognition for labeled individuals.

Second, Shade uses a “streamable” file system that lets you mount your cloud storage to your local filesystem and start working with a file almost immediately, without waiting for it to fully download first. Users can also pin files to access them even in low-bandwidth conditions. Typically, with a storage system like Google Drive or Dropbox, you have to wait for a large file to download before editing it. Shade’s streamable system lets you get started right away.

Beyond storage and search, Shade makes it easy for teams to collaborate — with the ability to leave feedback tied to a video at a specific timestamp. They can also attach files in comments to give direction. Shade lets teams create multiple links for the same assets with varying permissions, and teams can set access-based roles.

For final deliveries to clients, teams can create branded file collections with password protection and expiry dates.

For small teams, Shade offers a $20 per seat, per month plan that includes unlimited drives, unlimited AI indexing, and 500GB of active storage per seat. The plan supports up to 15 seats per workspace and up to 150 guests for collaboration.

Shade isn’t alone in this space. Startups like Poly and Memories.ai are also working on AI-powered file storage and search for large numbers of files.

Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures, said that while AI has accelerated content creation, managing those creations remains messy.

“Most companies are layering search on top of existing storage. Shade rebuilt the stack from first principles, spanning streaming, indexing, and collaboration in one system. That architectural approach is harder, but it is why the product actually works, not just as a bolt-on feature,” Rabois said over email.

He added that while search is the starting point, Shade could become a key tool for automating sharing and versioning.

In the coming months, Shade plans to improve its search across different file types, including images, videos, and documents. The startup is also building a no-code platform — meaning one that requires no programming knowledge — to let creative teams create automated workflows based on files in the system.

“We’re essentially building the Lego blocks that allow you to [operate] any type of business, you have that ability to apply shade to your workflow, whether that is, today, just creative teams, [or] in the future, research and investment teams,” Fan said.

• FTP still runs widely due to forgotten default configurations
• Millions of servers expose FTP without active administrative awareness
• Encryption inconsistencies leave many FTP connections completely unprotected online

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is one of the oldest methods for moving files over the internet, designed during an era when online security was not a primary concern.

According to Censys, it still runs on almost 6 million servers primarily because it was activated by default within hosting panels and subsequently forgotten, rather than being maintained through deliberate administrative choice.

Heat damage is the quiet enemy of healthy hair, and most dryers on the market will keep making that problem quietly worse with every single morning use.

That concern is exactly what the Dyson Supersonic was built to address, and with Amazon currently selling it for £218 rather than its usual £329.99, there is over £110 off to take advantage of.