Van Cott Jewelers announces official closing date
Van Cott's doors will close on June 21. A champagne toast event will be held on June 17 to thank customers and say farewell.
Owners Birdie and Bill Levine announced the news in April, saying, 'This is truly a decision we don't want to do; we certainly don't need to do; it is not something we look forward to. This is something we have to do.' They are making the difficult decision to close due to health issues in their family.
Van Cott started in Binghamton in 1914. Bill's father Herbert Levine bought the business in 1969, having grown up in the jewelry business of his father, Ruby Jewelers which started in Endicott in 1919.
Van Cott Jewelers closing after 111 years
Over the years, Van Cott has helped community members pick out engagement rings, celebrate milestones, and find everyday jewelry. It has been voted the #1 Jeweler in the Southern Tier for 38 years.
Van Cott is hosting a Going Out of Business Sale from now until June 21.
Birdie and Bill thank the community for its loyalty and trust. They say the memories they've shared will stay with them forever.
Pizza Week 2025: Mario's Pizza in Owego
'Hurlyburly' at KNOW Theatre
Demolition of IBM Old Building Group nears completion
Van Cott Jewelers announces official closing date
Hanagan's Heroes monument to be relocated to Southside Veterans Park
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
3 days ago
- Business Insider
AI talent war poses a gnarly question: Are you a monkey or a missionary?
Since my dad died, I've grown close to my father-in-law Bill. He has a mix of joy and realism I admire, and his advice tends to stick. One of his favorites: "We're all prostitutes when it comes to work." He's from an older generation, so I'll swap in "sex workers" as the appropriate phrase here. What he means is that we work mainly for money. That's been on my mind as the AI talent war heats up. Mark Zuckerberg has been offering $100 million-plus packages to lure AI researchers and engineers from frontier labs and Big Tech rivals. Some have refused, citing loyalty to their company's mission. "They are trying to buy something that cannot be bought. And that is alignment with the mission," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said recently, noting his top talent has stayed despite Meta's offers. Staff at Thinking Machines Lab have also turned Zuck down, either over leadership concerns or mission loyalty, according to Wired. My father-in-law would say a phrase that includes the letters B and S. According to the gospel of Bill, this is all about getting paid, as usual. A Business Insider scoop backs this up: This week, Charles Rollet reported Zuck's recruiting drive has created tension among existing Meta AI experts, who resent newcomers getting higher pay in its new Superintelligence team. That's made some easier to poach. xAI has nabbed several, and Microsoft has a Meta talent wish list. On August 6, Laurens van der Maaten, a top Meta scientist, announced he was joining Anthropic. Reacting on X, former Meta engineering director Erik Meijer wrote: "Every action has a reaction; the unintended side effects of creating a SI team," referring to the Superintelligence group. When asked for comment, he shared a YouTube clip of an experiment in which two monkeys performing the same task were given different rewards. The one that got a less tasty treat hurled it back and angrily shook its cage. If we're all metaphorical monkeys or sex workers, what about the "mission-driven" folks staying put? One possible explanation: equity. Many engineers and researchers get stock in their startups, and these awards typically vest over several years. If you're at a hot AI lab, your unvested equity has probably soared in value lately, or there's a chance it could. For instance, Anthropic could be worth $170 billion soon, up from about $4 billion two years ago. If you got equity back then and you're waiting for it to vest, there's no way you're leaving right now. No surprise: most folks are staying at Anthropic. Until that equity vests, anyway. I want to hear back from AI experts who are getting big offers. Are you mission-driven and staying put, or will you take the $$$ like most of us monkeys? Let me know: abarr@
TechCrunch
6 days ago
- TechCrunch
How a once-tiny research lab helped Nvidia become a $4 trillion-dollar company
When Bill Dally joined Nvidia's research lab in 2009, it employed only about a dozen people and was focused on ray tracing, a rendering technique used in computer graphics. That once-small research lab now employs more than 400 people, who have helped transform Nvidia from a video game GPU startup in the nineties to a $4 trillion-dollar company fueling the artificial intelligence boom. Now, the company's research lab has its sights set on developing the tech needed to power robotics and AI. And some of that lab work is already showing up in products. The company unveiled Monday a new set world AI models, libraries, and other infrastructure for robotics developers. Dally, now Nvidia's chief scientist, started consulting for Nvidia in 2003 while he was working at Stanford. When he was ready to step down from being the department chair of Stanford's computer science department a few years later, he planned to take a sabbatical. Nvidia had a different idea. Bill Dally / Nvidia David Kirk, who was running the research lab at the time, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, thought a more permanent position at the research lab was a better idea. Dally told TechCrunch the pair put on a 'full-court press' on why he should join Nvidia's research lab and eventually convinced him. 'It wound up being kind of a perfect fit for my interests and my talents,' Dally said. 'I think everybody's always searching for the place in life where they can make the biggest, you know, contribution to the world. And I think for me, it's definitely Nvidia.' When Dally took over the lab in 2009, expansion was first and foremost. Researchers started working on areas outside of ray tracing right away, including circuit design and VLSI, or very large-scale integration, a process that combines millions of transistors on a single chip. The research lab hasn't stopped expanding since. Techcrunch event Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $600+ before prices rise. Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW 'We try to figure out what will make the most positive difference for the company because we're constantly seeing exciting new areas, but some of them, you know, they do great work, but we have trouble saying if [we'll be] wildly successful at this,' Dally said. For a while that was building better GPUs for artificial intelligence. Nvidia was early to the future AI boom and started tinkering with the idea of AI GPUs in 2010 — more than a decade before the current AI frenzy. 'We said this is amazing, this is gonna completely change the world,' Dally said. 'We have to start doubling down on this and Jensen believed that when I told him that. We started specializing our GPUs for it and developing lots of software to support it, engaging with the researchers all around the world who were doing it, long before it was clearly relevant.' Physical AI focus Now, as Nvidia holds a commanding lead in the AI GPU market, the tech company has started to seek out new areas of demand beyond AI data centers. That search has led Nvidia to physical AI and robotics. 'I think eventually robots are going to be a huge player in the world and we want to basically be making the brains of all the robots,' Dally said. 'To do that we need to start, you know, developing the key technologies.' That's where Sanja Fidler, the vice president of AI research at Nvidia, comes in. Fidler joined Nvidia's research lab in 2018. At the time, she was already working on simulation models for robots with a team of students at MIT. When she told Huang about what they were working on at a researchers' reception, he was interested. 'I could not resist joining,' Fidler told TechCrunch in an interview. 'It's just such a, you know, it's just such a great topic fit and at the same time was also such a great culture fit. You know, Jensen told me, come work with me, not with us, not for us, you know?' She joined Nvidia and got to work creating a research lab in Toronto called Omniverse, an Nvidia platform, that was focused on building simulations for physical AI. Sanja Fidler / Nvidia The first challenge to building these simulated worlds was finding the necessary 3D data, Fidler said. This included finding the proper volume of potential images to use and building the technology needed to turn these images into 3D renditions the simulators could use. 'We invested in this technology called differentiable rendering, which essentially makes rendering amendable to AI, right?' Fidler said. 'You go [from] rendering means from 3D to image or video, right? And we want it to go the other way.' World models Omniverse released the first version of its model that turns images into 3D models, GANverse3D, in 2021. Then it got to work on figuring out the same process for video. Fidler said they used videos from robots and self-driving cars to create these 3D models and simulations through its Neuric Neural Reconstruction Engine, which the company first announced in 2022. She added these technologies were the backbone of the company's Cosmos family of world AI models that were announced at CES in January. Now, the lab is focused on making these models faster. When you play a video game or simulation you want the tech to be able to respond in real time, Fidler said, for robots they are working to make the reaction time even faster. 'The robot doesn't need to watch the world in the same time, in the same way as the world works,' Fidler said. 'It can watch it like 100x faster. So if we can make this model significantly faster than they are today, they're going to be tremendously useful for robotic or physical AI applications.' The company continues to make progress on this goal. Nvidia announced a fleet of new world AI models designed for creating synthetic data that can be used to train robots at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference on Monday. Nvidia also announced new libraries and infrastructure software aimed at robotics developers too. Despite the progress — and the current hype about robots, especially humanoids — the Nvidia research team remains realistic. Both Dally and Fidler said the industry is still at least a few years off from having a humanoid in your home, with Fidler comparing it to the hype and timeline regarding autonomous vehicles. 'We're making huge progress and I think you know AI has really been the enabler here,' Dally said. 'Starting with visual AI for the robot perception, and then you know generative AI, that's being hugely valuable for task and motion planning and manipulation. As we solve each of these individual little problems and as the amount of data we have to train our networks grows, these robots are going to grow.'
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
Trump's 'pay-to-play' deals blur line between govt. & free market
It seems "pay to play" may be the name of the game for corporate leaders under the second Trump administration. Nvidia (NVDA) and, reportedly, AMD (AMD), will give the US government 15% of their China chip sales. The artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaker deal comes after the Trump administration secured an additional $100 billion investment from Apple (AAPL), which seemed to mitigate the president's tariff threats. Harvard University executive fellow and former Medtronic CEO Bill George and Pangaea Policy founder Terry Haines examine what the deal signals about the state of corporate America under Trump and how the president is blurring the lines between government and free-market capitalism. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Catalysts. And Bill, I I want to get your perspective on how you think Jensen Wong has handled the president? Or has he, or has been handled by the president, I guess you could say, um with his various meetings in Washington and sort of trying to finesse things in NVIDIA's direction. Well, he's been very astute at working with President Trump. He's made these concessions. Uh he very very much wants to do more business in China. Intel in the past has done exactly the same thing. Uh I think if they're not giving their latest and greatest technology to the Chinese, it may be okay. I'm very wary about giving American technology to China where we're in a big race, particularly AI technology. But uh I think it's, we'll see. My big concern is this is going to spread not just to semiconductor, it's going to spread to other industries. Will we see in pharma where there's a a pay to play so to speak that the US administration will be taking a share of that because the technology research was done in the US. And I I would be very very concerned about that. We seem to be developing much more of a mercantilist approach to our companies and and walking right up if not crossing over the line to separation between government and free enterprise. That's my biggest concern, Julie. And Bill, you know, even if Terry is right that this this particular type of structure of deal is a one-off, to your point, we have seen a whole host of different flavors of that mercantilist approach that you're talking about. What in your view are the risks of that approach? Well, that we don't have a line between government and capitalism, as you see in many other countries. And I think that's a big concern. How far do you go? The president just advocated not directed the firing of Intel CEO with no evidence that he uh, yes, he has connections in China. So does Tim Cook, so does Elon Musk. But that should not be a prima fascia evidence for firing him. So I see the the CEO of Intel is hustling into the White House today to try to make peace with the president. But how far will this go? That's my concern and how much direction will there be to private industry about how to run this company? We have the golden share of Nippon Steel. And so the president's clearly taking an investment if you will, on behalf of the government in in a lot of industries. And I'm concerned, you know, we're just at the start of this administration. How far is that going to go? And we'll see. And also, the commitments being made, huge. I mean, like Apple, $100 billion on top of $500 billion. Uh enormous in four years. A lot of that won't play out till the end of the administration, but I think these tariffs, no, I think is going to take effect much sooner. And and Terry, you know, sort of what we hear Bill describing there. What are the implications for investors, both in the case of AMD and NVIDIA, but also just sort of the the way that companies need to approach this administration in the future? From an investment perspective, what do people need to think about? Well, take this NVIDIA AMD story with the 15%. Put it to, put it to the side for one second. What you've got though, is a situation where there is much more government direction and aspiration to direct the economy than there was before. The administration has been crystal clear about that. And as a matter of, as a matter of United States policy, as a matter of national security policy. One of Belsen's mantras has been for months that US National Security Policy is United States economic policy. Economic policy is national security policy. You have a situation here where they're doing everything they can, including providing huge incentives to the the manufacturing industry to onshore, to put to use tariffs in part to push different industries to onshore critical materials and and goods and the like. They've done everything short of invoking the Defense Production Act, which would essentially harness industry to government aims. Why are they doing that? Because they're, they are urgent about the nature of the Chinese challenge and how relatively speaking, how little time they think they have to write the ship. Uh and frankly, harness industry to to right size the economy to meet the Chinese challenge. That's what they think. They've been very transparent about that. And I would I would imagine that would continue and frankly, accelerate. Markets continue to be surprised every time they see something happen, like the United States taking an investment in rare earths. But you you can expect a lot more of it. It's not going, it's not, should should not be surprising at all.
