"Great is just never good enough," according to Google CEO Larry Page. And on today's Q3 2013 earnings call, the state of Google mirrors its CEO's statement pretty well. Google itself is doing as well as it ever has financially, raking in almost $15 billion in revenue for the quarter. Motorola, ...
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/5I6tutonruM/When Chris Lightcap was a student in the Berkshires, he'd put his bass in his car and drive down the river to New York City, south on the Taconic to the Sawmill, over the Henry Hudson Bridge, up on a soaring bluff with a great view to the right of the New Jersey Palisades and George Washington Bridge and New York City coming up on the left. Right about there, Lightcap would ask himself, "What would it be like to live here?"
Lost and Found New York is Lightcap's suite for the vistas and feelings, smells and sounds of his adopted city. "Nine South" is the first movement, for the highway he used to drive into Manhattan from the north. "Arthur Avenue" is for a leisurely lunch in the so-called Little Italy of the Bronx. "Epicenter" connotes the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village, where Lightcap has experienced "life-changing moments" listening to music. Is it the spirits of the musicians who have played there, or the shape of the room itself? "Epicenter" is the most arranged of the movements in Lost and Found New York.
"Fort Tryon" becomes more meditative, for The Cloisters — inspired by the castles of Europe — and gardens in Fort Tryon Park. In the Gilded Age, John D. Rockefeller funded the area's development. From the stage, Lightcap tells his version of the story, but The Cloisters' website is more authoritative:
The modern museum building is not a copy of any specific medieval structure but an ensemble of spaces, rooms, and gardens that suggest a variety of artistic aspects of medieval Europe.
Last, Stillwell Avenue is the subway stop for Coney Island on the south shore of Brooklyn, where Chris Lightcap, his wife Victoria and sons Sebastian and Theo love the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone ride (you can feel their rhythm driving the music), Nathan's Hot Dogs, and the zany people who relax there. The city is cleaning Coney Island up, though Lightcap hopes not too much.
In The New York Times, Nate Chinen tracked a performance of "Lost and Found" from beginning to end, from "... springy syncopations for bass and piano, hard-skittering drumming, a declaratory line played by the horns, first in octaves and then in splintered harmony" to the last stop. "Barreling ahead, straining at the curves, the group sounded wild but focused, down to the end of the line."
Lost and Found New York
JazzSet captured Lost and Found New York at the end of a short and successful West Coast tour from Earshot Jazz in Seattle to the Redwood Jazz Alliance in Arcata, Calif., and then on to Santa Cruz's Kuumbwa Jazz Center, a nonprofit space for music since 1975; thanks to artistic director and co-founder Tim Jackson with Bobbi Todaro and Jeff Sloan. Recording by Michael Romanowski of Coast Recorders; Surround Sound mix by Duke Markos.
Lost and Found New York by Chris Lightcap is made possible with support from the Chamber Music America's 2011 New Jazz Works: Commissioning and Ensemble Development program, funded through the generosity of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
By Roberta Rampton
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama and Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta congratulated each other on Thursday for surviving extended budget crises and pledged to work together to advance U.S.-EU trade talks and address security issues.
The two leaders met at the Oval Office on the day after Congress agreed to fund the U.S. government until January and averted a debt default by lifting the nation's debt ceiling until February. The U.S. government reopened after a 16-day shutdown.
Letta said the U.S. deal would help keep global interest rates low, which is vital for his debt-laden nation.
"It is his success, but it is also our success, because yesterday's decision was very important for the stability of the markets in the world," Letta told reporters after meeting with Obama.
"I'm very glad for yesterday's result. It's very important for our country," he said.
Letta is facing his own budget headaches.
Earlier this month, he won a confidence vote in Parliament after a challenge by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. This week, he unveiled a new budget with tax and spending cuts.
Obama congratulated him for winning the vote of confidence and for his budget. "I think it's clear that Italy is moving in the right direction in stabilizing its finances and embarking on reforms that will make it more competitive," Obama said.
Domestic reaction to Letta's budget - which must be approved by the Italian Parliament by the end of the year - has been sharply negative, and may pose a new threat to the stability of Letta's coalition government.
Obama and Letta said they talked about how to expand the European economy and the importance of an EU-U.S. trade agreement known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which would be the world's biggest free-trade deal.
Italy will hold the presidency of the European Union in 2014, and Letta said, "My dream would be to sign" the trade deal next year.
"We have to protect against protectionism," he said.
However, the latest round of EU-U.S. talks were scuttled earlier this month because of the U.S. government shutdown, complicating talks.
Obama and Letta agreed to work together to address security issues in Libya and Syria. Obama praised the "concrete efforts" to destroy Syria's chemical weapons stockpile.
"We both believe it's important to build off that success, or at least that good start, to also talk about the humanitarian suffering that the Syrian people are experiencing," Obama said.
Letta said he spoke about Italy's concerns over migration from "failed states in Africa" and from Syria.
More than 300 African migrants died in a recent shipwreck at Lampedusa, off Sicily, part of a surge of migration from North Africa that has been exacerbated by the civil war in Syria, chaos in Libya and instability in Egypt.
"We don't want to have Mediterranean as a dead sea. Mediterranean has to be a sea of life," Letta said.
(Additional reporting by Mark Felsenthal; Editing by Sandra Maler and Cynthia Osterman)
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — U.S. senator-elect Cory Booker said Thursday he's ready to go to Washington and is not afraid if he "breaks dishes" trying to serve his constituents in New Jersey.
Booker, 44, the Democratic mayor of Newark, made the rounds on the morning talk shows a day after defeating Republican Steve Lonegan. His win came after an aggressive two-month race to finish the term of Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who died in office in June at age 89.
Booker said he wants to channel Americans' frustration with Congress into energy for change.
"I think everybody feels there's fatigue and frustration with how things are, which creates a great climate for change," Booker said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." ''Often before you have great victory, you have to have great frustration."
The mayor of New Jersey's largest city takes to Washington a national profile — boosted by a strong social media presence, frequent television appearances and his status as a surrogate for Barack Obama during the president's 2012 re-election campaign — just as the federal government begins functioning again after a 16-day shutdown.
He hasn't even started his job as senator, but he is already being asked if he wants to run for president.
"I would rule it out," he said on WNYW's "Good Day New York." ''I'm going into the Senate. If I break dishes on the way to try to serve the people of New Jersey, so be it."
Booker called himself a "scrapper" and said he was able to change Newark despite people claiming its problems were intractable, which is what he said people are now saying about Congress.
"I find it eerily familiar with what people are saying to me now, because it was said 15 years ago in Newark," he said. "The problems are too big."
Booker had 55 percent of the vote to Lonegan's 44 percent. He brushed off criticism that the race was closer than many anticipated. Lonegan was backed by the tea party in a Democratic-leaning state.
"We did not worry. We put our plan in place and we worked our plan," Booker said. "I feel very lifted by the people of the state of New Jersey."
Booker said he will likely be sworn in "the next week, two weeks max." The timing, he said, depends on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Vice President Joe Biden, who will likely swear Booker in.
Booker will be the first black senator from New Jersey and will arrive in Washington with an unusual political resume.
He was raised in suburban Harington Park as the son of two of the first black IBM executives, graduated from Stanford and law school at Yale with a stint in between as a Rhodes Scholar before moving to one of Newark's toughest neighborhoods with the intent of doing good.
He's been an unconventional politician, a vegetarian with a Twitter following of 1.4 million — or five times the population of the city he governs. With state funding dwindling, he has used private fundraising, including a $100 million pledge from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, to run programs in Newark, a strategy that has brought him both fame and criticism.
Former state Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa had been appointed by Christie to temporarily replace Lautenberg. The governor scheduled the special election for just 20 days before Christie himself is on the ballot seeking re-election. Democrats said Christie was afraid of appearing on the same ballot as the popular Booker, but courts upheld the election schedule.
Before Lautenberg died, Booker passed up a chance to run against Christie this year, saying he was eyeing Lautenberg's seat in 2014, in part so he could complete a full term as mayor — something he won't do now.
___
Delli Santi reported from Trenton, N.J. Associated Press reporters Geoff Mulvihill in Trenton and Bruce Shipkowski in Bridgewater, N.J., contributed to this report.
It’s been one year since Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner made the highest jump of all time. The Red Bull Stratos project was part science, part adventure, and of course part caffeinated beverage promotion overload. In the end, the successful leap from 127,851 feet set a new height mark, and Baumgartner became the first person ever to exceed the the speed of sound in free fall.
But the flight wasn’t without its drama. As many watched live last year, Baumgartner entered a spin about a minute into the flight. A relatively mild instability beginning about 25 seconds into the jump appeared to stabilize as he accelerated towards his top speed of Mach 1.25 (844 mph). But as Baumgartner continued to fall through the very thin air, the lack of control was apparent and the spin progressed into something that looks much worse from his point of view than it did from the outside.
In the video above, you can see him transition onto his back, and the rate of spin accelerates (along with his heart rate), as he passes about 90,000 feet.
Soon thereafter, he begins to use his arms in an effort to control the spin, much as a figure skater can change their rate of rotation on the ice. Baumgartner tries using just one arm at a time to regain control, and eventually the veteran skydiver manages to stabilize his free fall after more than 20 heart-pumping seconds.
After that it’s a relatively calm — if you think breaking the sound barrier in an astronaut suit is calm — with three more minutes of free fall to the ground as the sky transitions from black to blue. Eventually he deploys his parachute and enjoys a few more minutes before touching down in the New Mexico desert.
In addition to the impressive POV video above, Red Bull has released a feature-length documentary about the Red Bull Stratos project that can be seen here.
Tibco, the middleware company, showed again its push to become an enterprise collaboration provider with the latest version of its tibbr service by adding file storage and sharing capability, task management, and a publishing platform for managing content. The company also announced a partnership with Huddle and support for the new Microsoft Surface launching October 22.
Tibbr Files allows users to see documents that have been shared with the user over several months from different file-sharing services that include Huddle, Box, Dropbox, Sharepoint and Google Drive. A user can see files from anyone they have shared with, as well as specific users and subjects. Files can also be viewed across all the services or individual ones.
Huddle CEO and Co-Founder Alastair Mitchell said onstage at the Tibco Tucon conference in Las Vegas today that its file-sharing and collaboration service is accessible in Huddle with the tibbr activity stream. People can also view the integrated environment from tibbr, as well.
Tasks is tibbr’s new platform for bringing information from different sources to display a user’s tasks. It provides a project dashboard for a quick glance of what is happening on a project, enabling users to see the people involved in a project, the milestones, the conversations, the files, and who and who isn’t getting their work done. People can see what tasks are behind schedule and why that is the case.
Pages is tibbr’s new publishing platform that provides a way to pull internal and external data into one place. This might be a sales contract, news stories, Twitter feeds and other sources. The drag-and-drop environment provides a layout framework for organizing the data in a modern web interface. A user can collaborate and republish it to other people.
The Tibco tibbr enterprise social network is an oddity for a company known more for connecting a big bank’s back-end systems. But it also does not have the encumbrances that a CRM company faces when retrofitting its legacy technology to fit with new, lightweight social technologies. That might very well make the difference for the tibbr service with its new capabilities.
Getty Images
It's October and the NFL is once again covered head-to-toe in pink accessories and equipment as part of the league's Breast Cancer Awareness initiative.While fans can also purchase pink clothing and accessories to support the cause, a shockingly small amount of the fans' money is actually going towards cancer research.
According to data obtained from the NFL by Darren Rovell of ESPN, the NFL "takes a 25% royalty from the wholesale price (1/2 retail), donates 90% of royalty to American Cancer Society."
In other words, for every $100 in pink merchandise sold, $12.50 goes to the NFL. Of that, $11.25 goes to the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the NFL keeps the rest. The remaining money is then divided up by the company that makes the merchandise (37.5%) and the company that sells the merchandise (50.0%), which is often the NFL and the individual teams.
Then consider that only 71.2% of money the ACS receives goes towards research and cancer programs.
BusinessInsider.com
In the end, after everybody has taken their cut, only 8.01% of money spent on pink NFL merchandise is actually going towards cancer research (see right).According to the NFL, any money they take in, that is not donated to ACS, is used to cover the costs of their breast cancer awareness program, "A Crucial Catch." The NFL also told Business Insider they donated approximately $1 million per year to the ACS in the first three years of the program.
Still, there are unanswered questions about where the money is going and who is profiting.
The most popular place to purchase pink merchandise is at the NFL's online shop, official team stores, and at the stadiums. In these cases, the NFL and the individual teams are acting as the retailer.
It is unclear how much of the 50% markup for items being sold directly by the NFL and the teams is going to the ACS, if any at all.
Of course, in addition to money, the NFL is also raising awareness for breast cancer and it is hard to put a value on that.
If fans want to show support for their team and for breast cancer awareness, that is great. But if the point is to actually help fight cancer, fans would have a much bigger impact if they skipped the NFL and donated directly to the ACS or other organizations working to fight cancer.
