Seventh consecutive year of collaboration brings total funds raised to over $35MM to fight cancer in the U.S.

PURCHASE, NY– August 18, 2016 – This summer, Mastercard cardholders came together for a great cause showing once again that the time you spend dining with family and friends is truly priceless.

For the seventh consecutive year, Mastercard collaborated with Stand Up To Cancer® and invited cardholders to give back through the simple act of dining out and share their #Reasons2StandUp. During the campaign period this summer, Mastercard made a donation to SU2C every time cardholders spent $10 or more for a qualifying meal using their Mastercard card.

Today, Mastercard announced that thanks to its cardholders, it reached its goal, this year, of raising $4 million for Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) through its annual Dine Out campaign. To date, these annual campaigns, have raised more than $35MM towards cancer research in both the U.S. and Canada.

“The movement that Stand Up To Cancer has created is something we at Mastercard are honored to help advance,” says Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer, Mastercard. “A special thank you to our cardholders, issuing banks and restaurant partners, and of course our friends at Stand Up To Cancer, who have all proven the profound impact of bringing people together to support a Priceless Cause.”

This summer, Mastercard cardholders also had the chance to have one-of-a-kind dining experiences through the Priceless® Table program, which delights consumers with upscale culinary experiences in the most unexpected venues in the cities they love. 100% of the ticket sales from select Priceless Tables were donated to Stand Up To Cancer to help support translational cancer research.

“We are tremendously grateful to Mastercard for its long-term collaboration and incredible commitment towards the fight against cancer,” said Stand Up To Cancer Co-Founder Rusty Robertson. “This campaign with Mastercard has brought millions of people together to unite against one cause and has shown that by harnessing the power of bringing people together, we are well equipped to fund accelerated, innovative cancer research.”

Mastercard will make an on-field presentation to SU2C representing the donation during the 2016 World Series this fall. For more information, visit www.priceless.com/standup.

About Mastercard

Mastercard (NYSE: MA), www.mastercard.com, is a technology company in the global payments industry.  We operate the world’s fastest payments processing network, connecting consumers, financial institutions, merchants, governments and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories. Mastercard products and solutions make everyday commerce activities – such as shopping, traveling, running a business and managing finances – easier, more secure and more efficient for everyone.  Follow us on Twitter @MastercardNews, join the discussion on the Beyond the Transaction Blog and subscribe for the latest news on the Engagement Bureau.

 About the Stand Up To Cancer Initiative

Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) raises funds to accelerate the pace of research to get new therapies to patients quickly and save lives now. SU2C, a program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF), a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, was established in the United States in 2008 by film and media leaders who utilize the industry’s resources to engage the public in supporting a new, collaborative model of cancer research, and to increase awareness about cancer prevention as well as progress being made in the fight against the disease. As SU2C’s scientific partner, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and a Scientific Advisory Committee led by Nobel Laureate Phillip A. Sharp, PhD, conduct rigorous, competitive review processes to identify the best research proposals to recommend for funding, oversee grants administration, and provide expert review of research progress.

For more information about Stand Up To Cancer, visit: www.standup2cancer.org.

###

 Mastercard Communications Contact
Sarah Ely, 914.249.6714
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Oculus announced that today you can pre-order Rift online from retailers in Europe and Canada. Shipping and in-store availability will begin September 20, and demo experiences will also be rolling out across Europe and Canada over the next several weeks. By fall, Rift demos will be available in more than 600 retail locations across the US, Canada and Europe. 

Additionally, Touch demos are coming to in-store retail experiences globally this October. Schedule a demo at a retailer near you with Oculus Live (new locations added every week).

Read more about Rift retail availability and demos on the Oculus blog.

By Jie Xu, Research Scientist, Akos Lada, Data Scientist, and Vibhi Kant, Product Manager, News Feed

People turn to Facebook to learn what’s going on with their friends and family and in the world around them — from learning more about a new hobby or recipe to reading about a current event. Our goal with News Feed is to show people the stories most relevant to them, so we rank stories so what’s most important to each person shows up highest in their News Feeds. When we rank and make improvements to News Feed, we rely on a set of core values. These values — which we’ve been using for years — guide our thinking and help us keep the central experience of News Feed intact as it evolves.

One of our News Feed values is that the stories in your feed should be informative. What makes someone feel informed about the world is personal. Something that one person finds informative may be different from what another person finds informative. This could be a news article on a current event, a story about your favorite celebrity, a piece of local news, a review of an upcoming movie, a recipe or anything that informs you.

To better understand how we can show people the most informative stories to them, we talk to people and ask them how we can improve what they see when they check Facebook. This is our Feed Quality Program, which includes global crowd-sourced surveys of tens of thousands of people per day, as well as people who answer more detailed questions about what they like seeing in their feeds. We ask people through this Feed Quality Program to rate their experience. For stories that people rate highly, we then ask them why they enjoyed seeing those particular stories. One of the most common reasons people give us is that the story made them feel informed about the world around them.

Today, we’re making an update — adding another of many signals we take into account when ranking feed — to do a better job of showing people stories that they find informative.

More Stories That Inform You

With this update, we are creating a new ranking signal to predict what is most informative to you, so those stories appear higher in your feed. First, we look at the stories that people tell us they find informative. People from our Feed Quality Program look at each story in their feed and rank it on a scale of one to five — one being “really not informative” and five being “really informative.” Generally, we’ve found people find stories informative if they are related to their interests, if they engage people in broader discussions and if they contain news about the world around them. That could be anything from recipes, to local issues, to global current events. The stories people rate as informative and really informative help create a new prediction about how informative we think you’ll find each story.

We then combine this signal with how relevant the story might be to you personally — taking into account things like your relationship with the person or publisher that posted, or what you choose to click on, comment on or share — to best predict stories that you might personally find informative. Informative stories are therefore different for each person and will likely change over time.

Will This Impact My Pages?

We anticipate that most Pages won’t see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed. Some Pages might see a small increase in referral traffic, and some Pages might see minor decreases. Pages should continue to post stories that are relevant to their audiences and that their audiences might find informative.

View a mobile-optimized version on Apple Newsroom

Lens Technology is First Supplier to Commit to 100% Renewable Energy for All Apple Operations

All 14 Final Assembly Sites in China are Now Zero Waste Compliant
BEIJING — August 17, 2016 — Apple® today announced a significant commitment by major supplier Lens Technology to run its Apple operations on entirely renewable energy. This unprecedented commitment, combined with zero waste compliance from all final assembly sites, furthers Apple’s efforts to help manufacturers lower their carbon footprint and reduce waste in China, helping to advance China’s transition to a new green economy.

Lens Technology has committed to power all of its glass production for Apple with 100 percent renewable energy by the end of 2018, as part of Apple’s industry-leading supply chain clean energy program announced last year. Lens is the first supplier to make a clean energy commitment for all of its Apple production, and will meet its goal through an unprecedented power purchase agreement with local wind projects.

Apple is working with suppliers to help transform the environmental landscape in China, and is proud to announce all 14 of its final assembly sites in China are now compliant with UL’s Zero Waste to Landfill validation. The UL standard certifies all of their manufacturing waste is reused, recycled, composted, or, when necessary, converted into energy. Since the program began in January 2015, the sites have diverted more than 140,000 metric tons of waste from landfills.

“We want to show the world that you can manufacture responsibly and we’re working alongside our suppliers to help them lower their environmental impact in China,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. “We congratulate Lens for their bold step, and hope by sharing the lessons we’ve learned in our transition to renewable energy, our suppliers will continue to access clean power projects, moving China closer to its green manufacturing goals.”

“Our power purchase agreement is the first of its kind in southern China and we hope it will serve as an example for other companies looking to transition to cleaner, more economical sources of power,” said Lens CEO Zhou Qunfei. “We’re pleased to be the first supplier to commit to covering all of our Apple production with renewable energy, and proud to source from local Hunan wind farms to power our facilities in Changsha.”

Lens’ manufacturing with Apple currently includes two facilities in Changsha, Hunan province. Wind energy will cover 100 percent of the energy consumed producing Apple products at Lens facilities by 2018, avoiding nearly 450,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, equivalent to the energy use in 380,000 Chinese homes.

Through its clean energy program, Apple will partner with suppliers in China to install more than 2 gigawatts of new clean energy in the coming years, avoiding over 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution in the country between now and 2020. Foxconn committed in October to construct 400 megawatts of solar, starting in Henan province, by 2018. The manufacturer is now well on its way to constructing the first 80 megawatts of that commitment.

Earlier this year, Foxconn final assembly sites at Guanlan and Taiyuan were the first in China to receive UL’s Zero Waste to Landfill validation. With the recent addition of 12 manufacturing sites, all of Apple’s final assembly production in China is now zero waste compliant.

“We applaud innovative companies, like Apple, that are leading by actively reducing the environmental impact of manufacturing operations,” said UL president and CEO Keith Williams. “Achieving zero waste is an extensive effort that requires close coordination across all facets of a company’s operations, especially when the commitment is global.”

Apple has taken significant steps to protect the environment by transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy. Today, the company is powering 100 percent of its operations in China and the US, and more than 93 percent of its worldwide operations, with renewable energy.

Learn more about Apple’s environmental efforts at apple.com/environment.

Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple’s 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Press Contacts:
Carolyn Wu
Apple
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
+86 10 8525 5952

Alisha Johnson
Apple
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
669-227-3364

Apple and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.