via TMZ.com

Dick Clark — famed TV producer, and “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” host — died from a massive heart attack this morning … TMZ has learned.

He was 82.

Details surrounding his death are unclear, but Clark had suffered a significant stroke in 2004 — forcing him to retire from his hosting gig at “New Years’ Rockin’ Eve,” which he created in 1972.

Ryan Seacrest took over in 2006. Dick has co-hosted the show ever since.

Before suffering a stroke, Clark told Larry King he suffered from Type 2 diabetes.

Clark has been married 3 times — and has 3 children from his first two marriages. He is survived by his current wife Kari Wigton.

“For now, Dick Clark … so long.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSwKHDl9PtE&feature=b-mv

Retail sales in the United States rose 0.8 percent in March, thanks in part to warmer weather and an improved economy. What do you think?

“Oh, really? Because there’s been a 14 year-old riding lawn mower in my yard for six weeks with a for-sale sign on it that says you’re full of shit.”
Joshua Gooch
Disassembler

“It must be the spring, when credit card debt statements fade in the glow of the late April sun.”
Andrew Lamey
Systems Analyst

SOURCE

SOURCE

They used a video projection. It was not a hologram.

_________________________

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQgrce1VflI

via

SF Examiner Critic Unterman Dismissed After 20 Years

Reuters) – Temasek Holdings added a sizeable China bank stake to its financial institutions portfolio, scooping up a 5.3 percent chunk of ICBC’s Hong Kong-listed shares from seller Goldman Sachs.

Temasek was burned by its financial industry exposure in 2008, hit by stakes in large European and U.S. banks that plunged in the crisis. But the state investor has kept nearly 40 percent of its investment portfolio in banks it feels are strong and are capturing emerging market growth.

Temasek agreed to buy $2.3 billion worth of H-shares in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest bank by market value. The purchase amounts to a 1.3 percent stake in ICBC, a Temasek spokesman said.

The Singapore state investor already owns stakes in China Construction Bank and Bank of China .

The deal for ICBC brings Temasek deeper into China’s banking industry, which has grown from insolvency six years ago to a sector that holds four of the world’s top ten banks by market value.

China’s banking industry, however, has also come under fire lately, as people and politicians have cried out that the sector’s massive profits are coming at the expense of citizens. Low deposit rates, coupled with steady customer fees are at the heart of the protests.

The total value of Goldman’s block sale was $2.5 billion, continuing with its plan to reduce its stake in ICBC, which it bought into prior to ICBC’s 2006 IPO. After the sale, Goldman will have roughly $3 billion of ICBC shares remaining.

Goldman sold the Hong Kong traded shares of ICBC at HK$5.05 each, or a 3.1 percent discount to Friday’s closing price. The other, roughly $200 million worth of shares were sold to other institutional investors, according to a source.

Temasek’s financial services portfolio includes stakes in Singapore’s DBS Group, Indian lender ICICI Bank and Standard Chartered .

Hong Kong shares of ICBC, which has a market value of $240 billion, were down 1.3 percent in early trading on Monday.

SOURCE 

World Financial Center evacuation prompted after x-ray of package appeared to reveal grenade, NYPD spokesman says – @Reuters

New York City Police Department confirms it is investigating suspicious package at the World Financial Center – @BloombergNews

via TMZ.com

George Zimmerman has officially been charged with 2nd Degree murder after shooting and killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in a Florida suburb back in February.

Florida special prosecutor Angela Corey made the announcement moments ago at a press conference, claiming the charge was filed today.

Zimmerman — a community watchman — shot and killed Trayvon on Feb. 26th in Sanford, Florida, but no arrests were made at the time. Zimmerman has consistently maintained he shot Trayvon in self-defense.

A firestorm of media attention has surrounded the case — with many celebs like Spike Lee, Roseanne Barr and LeBron James claiming the shooting was racially motivated.

Zimmerman has already turned himself in to authorities. If convicted, he faces up to life in prison.

SOURCE

Tampa, FL – Forget new gear, weapons, or sophisticated targeting systems. The newest tool coming to combat troops is low-tech: beards. In a report released yesterday, research think-tank Xegis Solutions noted that beards have a direct correlation to combat effectiveness.

Jonathon Burns was the lead researcher in the study.

“We took 100 soldiers. 25 were Special Forces qualified and had beards, 25 were Special Forces qualified without beards, 25 were regular Army allowed to grow beards for the study, and the last 25 were regular Army without beards. All 100 of these subjects were in direct combat in Afghanistan during the study.”

He continued, “Xegis Solutions had several teams of researchers embedded with these troops to make observations on their combat effectiveness. The results were overwhelming, out of the 50 soldiers with beards, zero were wounded or killed and they had a significantly higher accuracy of fire than the soldiers without beards. The soldiers lacking beards had a higher rate of weapons malfunctions and basically, shit went wrong most of the time.”

CENTCOM wasted no time establishing a new rule forcing males to grow beards.

Commander Gen. James E. Mattis issued a statement to all troops in combat zones.

“The time has come for the Armed Forces to accept the facts, and the facts are that beards save lives. All this time it was speculated that Green Berets were better because of their superior and intensive training while in fact, most of it had to do with beards.”

There’s no doubt that many in the Special Forces community will be angered, but General Mattis is convinced.

“It’s settled science. In light of this information we will enforce a rule requiring all males to wear at least one inch of facial hair at all times. Furthermore, any females able to grow facial hair are encouraged to do so as well.”

Facebook has just announced that it will acquire Instagram, the popular mobile photo-sharing service for $1 billion in cash and shares.

The social networking site posted on the acquisition, its biggest yet, on its site, as well as on CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline on Facebook.

Zuckerberg promised that Facebook would keep the company independent and that such an acquisition would be rare for the company, which is set to go public soon.

“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users,” he wrote. “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.”

Here is the full release from Facebook:

Facebook to Acquire Instagram

MENLO PARK, CALIF. — April 9, 2012 — Facebook announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire Instagram, a fun, popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices.

The total consideration for San Francisco-based Instagram is approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted about the transaction on his Timeline:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

• I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

  For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

  We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

  That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

  We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

  These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

  This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

  We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

  4,138

via

developing…

by Janet Aronica at 8am, April 4th, 2012

via

Two weeks ago, the internet unanimously barely blinked its eyes with the news that AOL had chosen to kill off AIM, the once-prominent instant messenging service. Outside of maintainence, the application’s 40 employees in charge of development have been let go. So while AOL will still exist, no further growth or development will be made.

That’s sad though. I mean, really: AIM was kind of like our first social network. I’m sure it’s what Mark Zuckerburg was logged into as he crushed code growing up as merely a boy nerd. I’d go so far as to say this – the activity of AIM helped groom a generation of digital kids, multi-taskers who did homework with multiple chat windows open plus a textbook plus music playing. Homework wasn’t so bad after all – and we expected or hoped for the same from our real jobs. It prepared, or prompted, or inspired us to work for the internet as community managers and developers, with our multiple monitors and browsers and dubstep and all. I suppose I see a lot of myself in that.

Top 10 Things We’ll Miss About AIM

Appropriately, I posed this question to my Facebook friends: “What are the top things you miss about AIM?”

Here are the top 10:

1. Finding the best lyrics for your away message.

YES! This was such a huge decision. I mean do we go for the passive aggressive Avril Lavigne chorus line or really-not-as-obscure-as-you-were-hoping-it’d-be Mae reference that absolutely no one would get. Big decisions you guys, important stuff.

2. Away messages in general.

Sorry Twitter. AIM was the first to ask “What are you doing?” And sometimes they got the most literal answer – “Away”… “Brb”… When you finally got broadband, you were always signed in, and always had an away message up.

3. Choosing the right order of initials of your best friends to feature in your buddy profile.

Remember doing that? Listing all of your friends in your buddy profile? And then if you left someone out they’d be sooooo mad.

4. ASL?

Age, sex, location. My dear friend Ryan appropriately pointed out that Rapportivecompletely defeats this now that they show you social profiles right alongside emails. We’re all too internet famous these days. We’ve lost our mystery.

5. Decorating your buddy profile!

I think the AIM buddy profile is really where that MySpace-esque, poor man’s HTML, Comic Sans marquee text in this color pink… just the general bastardization of the interwebs… first began. It’s the inception of personal branding, really.

I can go no further on this other than to leave you with these much more eloquent and much more fully formed thoughts from Gizmodo:

“AIM was also a sliver of who you were. In many ways, it was the internet’s first mainstream social network. AIM profiles were a cocktail of all MySpace’s tacky, inane juices squeezed out, but again, they were personal and public. Blank slates. White boxes. You could make them whatever you wanted—grating, bleeding pink text on black backgrounds, sprawling links, Odyssey-length inside jokes—anything that fit within the 1024 character limit. It was primitive but pioneering. And if you needed to say more, you could sign up for services that would trick your profile window into loading expanded profiles…As a teenager on AIM, your online persona had to be as carefully manicured as your real life one.”

6. Not having to worry about choosing a professional screen name.

Ah the carefree days before potential employers made you login to Facebook during interviews or suspended you from school for Tweets…amiright?

7. Categorizing your friends in your buddy lists and giving the buddy lists funny names.

These were Facebook lists and Google+ circles that people actually used.

8. Finding the best custom login and logout sounds for your friends.

It was all the joy of ringtones… ON YOUR PARENTS’ DESKTOP COMPUTER.

9. Its simplicity.

Product geekout here – I remember AIM being very straighforward. When you were away, you were away. When you were signed in, you were signed in. If someone signed out, you got that loud door shut noise. Someone actually needed to ask you for your screenname to add you to their buddy list, and it was probably some gawdawful combination of your favorite band and your birthday or graduation year – they couldn’t just guess it like now. Maybe it’s because that was before the social logins and integrations we have now.

Nowadays, with most chat systems, it’s like…was I signed in? Was I signed out? How did that message get pushed to my phone – did I sign up for that? How can I sign up for that?

10. Having a crush on someone and waiting for him to sign in.

This is cheesy, yes, but you know what I mean. Even the most cynical can relate to that entire exciting, disappointing, awkward, confusing and fun thing of conversing with someone you like online. For many people, AIM was the first digital platform for this experience.

What do you miss about AIM? Let us know in the comments!

Like social media and digital news? Subscribe to the Shareaholic blog!

via NYPOST.com

Eager to marry the popularity of social gaming with real-life betting, Zynga is in talks with casino company Wynn Resorts about a potential online gambling partnership, The Post has learned.

Zynga, which sees huge revenue potential in moving from pretend to real-life wagering, needs to form partnerships with casino operators in a number of states if it is to cash in on an expected boom in Internet gambling.

Neither Zynga nor Wynn Resorts responded to requests for comment.

At least 20 states are considering legalizing online gambling after the Justice Department reinterpreted a decades-old federal law in December and found it only banned sports betting and not other forms of online gambling.

Since the DOJ move, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus has been touting the company’s prospects for parlaying its popular virtual poker game into real-life betting, calling the possibilities “mind-blowing.”

While Pincus is waxing poetic about poker, experts said the odds are stacked against the social media upstart, which will need to partner with more than just Wynn to become a major player.

Among the problems: Most of the proposed state legislation would restrict online licenses to those who already are licensed to run a state gaming operation. Wynn only operates in Nevada.

New Jersey, for instance, has a bill that passed the state Senate and is now in the Assembly that would grant Internet licenses only to those with computer servers based in Atlantic City casinos.

“Our goal is to help existing casino operators. We don’t know anything about Zynga,” state Assembly Regulatory Oversight and Gaming Committee Chair Ruben Ramos Jr. told The Post.

In Connecticut, Native American tribes have reportedly said the state would be violating its agreement giving them exclusive casino gaming rights if it issued an online license to anyone else.

Likewise, Iowa in its pending bill offers online licenses only to those already authorized to operate state gambling boats and racetracks.

US Digital Gaming founder Richard “Skip” Bronson said, in a state-by-state scenario that “the existing gaming interests are most likely the ones who will be getting the licenses for Internet gambling.”

Sources said Zynga may try to move first in the UK, where online betting is already legal, though competition is stiff.

Indeed, Facebook, which does not want to host online gambling on its own site, has held conversations with UK online bookmakers William Hill and Ladbrokes about offering Facebook users access to their sites, a source said.

Reps for Facebook, William Hill and Ladbrokes did not return calls and messages seeking comment.

Stern Agee Managing Director Arvind Bhatia said if Zynga is unable to participate meaningfully in legalized online gaming here, its shares could fall as much as 10 percent because investors have baked into the share price expectations of new gaming revenue.

“I think, given that its core market is slowing, the potential gaming revenue is important.”
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/casino_ville_bet_DzXRAXwXYo1VOasowKIzpJ#ixzz1r5VV4wNh

via NYPOST.com

It’s 7:15 on Wednesday night in the Flatiron District, and Tracey McQuade is dressed in a leotard and sneakers while clutching a glass of red wine. Having just finished a grueling workout of squats, lunges and push-ups, the 31-year-old is now ready to retox.

“It’s awesome because of the whole saint-and-sinner thing — you work hard, you play hard,” says the Chelsea-based yoga instructor and writer, with sleek brown hair pulled back to reveal diamond earrings. “It’s really important to have balance.”

Welcome to the “wet workout” — a new concept started by the three female co-owners of Uplift, a fitness studio that officially opened Sunday. After nearly a year of hosting pop-up fitness classes all over the city that were followed by trips to nearby cocktail lounges, the women have launched this, the first workout space in NYC with its own bar.

ASTRID STAWIARZ

Cheers! Tracey McQuade toasts the end of a calorie-killing workout at Uplift, a Flatiron District gym that mixes cardio power with happy hour.

“Guys can go shoot hoops and have a few beers after,” says Uplift co-founder Leanne Shear, a journalist turned personal trainer. “Until now, women didn’t have an outlet for that.”

Every Wednesday, women can sweat it out in a $40 cardio and strength-training class — all set to the pulsating rhythms of pop stars like Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga — then indulge in all-you-can-drink red and white wine or, on some nights, whiskey. Healthy snacks of nuts, berries and raw veggies with dip are also provided. There are plenty of sober sessions, too, including 30-minute midday “express” classes with names like “Gams and Guns” and “Whittle Your Middle.”

The sunny second-floor mini-mecca, equipped with free WiFi, treadmills and weight benches, is decidedly female-friendly: No men are allowed. The shower area, lined with metal lockers, even has a primping station with essentials like dry shampoo and curling irons.

“Working out and socializing are two of the main ways women improve their lives,” says co-founder Helena Wolin, a perky redhead who ditched her job as a corporate lawyer to start Uplift. “People have never really put those two things together in the way we’re doing.”

But experts argue that post-workout tippling could negate all that hard work.

“Wine is certainly better for women than beer,” says nutritionist Esther Blum, author of the forthcoming “Eat, Drink, and Be Gorgeous Project,” “but the problem is that when you drink alcohol, your body is going to put all metabolic processes on hold until it metabolizes all the alcohol.”

But Wolin, Shear and co-founder Katie Currie, an ex-corporate events planner, shrug off medical criticism and point to other benefits.

The wet-workout idea came to them last year, when a downpour broke up their yoga class in Central Park. “Instead of everyone running in their own direction, we said, ‘Come on, guys,’ and went to the first bar we could find outside Central Park and said, ‘The first round’s on us,’ ” says Wolin. “We said, ‘Oh well, we tried to be healthy — now we’re going to socialize.’ And we wound up staying for hours.”

Soon, their “Raise the Bar” pop-up series — outdoor classes offering bevvies right after your barbells — was born.

It proved so popular, the trio opened Uplift on 23rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, where fitness fanatics should find it easy to make friends.

“If I were to go to a bar, go up to another girl and say, ‘Hey, how are you, be my friend,’ you’d look at me like I’m crazy,” says Internet marketer Emi Melker after last week’s session. “It’s especially good for younger women who are new to the city.”

But do women want to booze after busting their behinds? “Some people won’t understand and say it’s counterintuitive,” Wolin concedes. “But really, you’re probably going to have that drink anyway.”
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/gym_tonic_CJyHHCT4k72jjeBG4FLkGP#ixzz1r03o2cB5