Lorde Gets Pampered at City Nails and Spa
Lorde, the 17-year-old singer/song writer from New Zealand, has taken the music world by storm having garnered Grammy and Billboard Awards for her debut album Pure Heroine. The night before her headline appearance at this year’s Preakness on May 19th, she made a stop at Federal Hill’s City Nails & Spa.
The space at 1128 Light St., the former McCrory Dollar General, was vacant for 12 years before City Nails & Spa opened there in mid-April. Just one month after opening, they hosted the award-winning artist for a nail treatment. From the Baltimore Sun:
“She said she was singing at Preakness, but I didn’t know how big she was,” Parkchareonpaisan (owner) said. “My husband and I had to Google her when I got home.”
“I got such great service. They’re a new business so give them a helping hand if you need a nail spa in Baltimore,” the “Royals” singer (Lorde) tweeted.
Lorde had 1.61 million Twitter followers at the time of her Tweet.
Abbey Burger Bistro Takes Top Honors
Abbey Burger Bistro was named the Best Burger in Maryland by Business Insider and was even the burger featured on the cover page of the gallery. From the article:
Baltimore’s Abbey Burger Bistro prides itself on the build-your-own method: you can choose from beef, chicken, bison, kangaroo, and a range of other meats and top to your heart’s content to make the burger of your dreams
National Attention for OpiaTalk
Yet another local business gained nation attention recently as Federal Hill-based technology company OpiaTalk was featured in Fast Company. From the article:
OpiaTalk bills itself as a “hyperconversion widget,” which is jargon for the basic idea that it’s a tool that helps encourage people to buy a product online. Here’s how Skype uses it, for instance. Let’s say you’re looking to buy a prepaid Skype gift card, and you wind up on Skype’s page promoting that product. At certain times of day, Skype may use an OpiaTalk widget that crops up on the side of the window. That widget informs you that if you click on that widget, and a certain number of other people click on that widget, too, you (and they) will be given a 15-minute window to buy a that gift card at 20% off.
“It’s exclusive, it’s urgent, and it’s participatory,” says OpiaTalk founder Tom Popomaronis. “Basically, it’s FOMO. It’s the fear of missing out.”
International Honors for Baltimore
Business Insider recently reported on Baltimore being ranked as the 20th best city in the world according to the Cities in Motion Index conducted by the IESE Business School in Spain. From the article:
To establish the ranking, researchers studied 135 cities across 55 countries, and based their results on over 50 indicators along 10 different dimensions including governance, public management, urban planning, technology, environment, international outreach, social cohesion, mobility and transportation, human capital (ability to attract talent), and economy.
Harris Teeter to Lower Prices?
The Charlotte Business Journal is reporting that Kroger, which recently acquired Harris Teeter, will be lowering the prices at various Harris Teeter locations in North Carolina. From the article:
The Cincinnati-based grocery chain (NYSE:KR) acquired Harris Teeter for $2.5 billion at the end of January. And “the actual pricing at Harris Teeter, going into the time of the merger, was a little worse than the customer’s perception of the pricing,” J. Michael Schlotman, Kroger senior vice president and chief financial officer, said this week.
We will have to wait to see if similar changes will happen in Baltimore.