Pinterest's Demographics Mean It Could Become The Next Monster Social Advertising Platform | ||
| ||
Pinterest, which has recently begun selling ads, is more unique than other social networks in terms of its audience makeup. Pinterest is far more popular among women than men, and unlike some of its competitors it is popular across age brackets (including Millennials, Gen Xers, and Boomers). Women are the decision makers in a majority of household spending decisions. Pinterest is also very focused around visual images and products. Those two factors, taken together, makes it ideal for brands and retailers. In a new report from BI Intelligence, we unpack data from over a dozen sources to understand how social media demographics are still shifting, including the migration of young users to photo-based social networking, including Pinterest. Access The Full Report And Its 20 Charts By Signing Up For A Free Trial >> Here are a few of the key takeaways on Pinterest's unique selling points from the BI Intelligence report:
The report is full of charts (over 20 charts) and data that can be downloaded and put to use. In full, the report:
For full access to all BI Intelligence reports, briefs, and downloadable charts on the digital media industry and social media audience data and demographics, sign up for a free trial. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Why Oracle Founder Larry Ellison NEEDS To Have The World's Greatest Competitive Team | ||
| ||
When Charlie Rose asked Oracle CTO and former CEO Larry Ellison last year why he had to win the America's Cup yacht race for the second time in a row, Ellison replied, "It's funny, because I realized after losing twice that my personality wouldn't allow me to quit while losing. And then after winning the America's Cup, I discovered my personality doesn't allow me to quit while winning! I don't smoke, but I do sail." Ellison didn't get into the boat alongside his US Team Oracle as he did in 2010, but as team sponsor and manager he led the team to its second victory in 2013. That second victory was actually one of the greatest comebacks in sports history, with Team Oracle USA winning eight races in a row to steal the victory from Team Emirates New Zealand. Ellison made it clear from the beginning that he expected his team to win. When Team Oracle's crew walked into their training compound each day, they had to pass the hull of Ellison's boat that won the 2010 America's Cup. They did cardio and weight training underneath the boat's sail.With the 35th America's Cup scheduled for sometime in 2017, Ellison has victory in his sights once again, proving that total domination of the sport of elite international yacht racing — from winning the America's Cup to pushing competitors to ditch sailboats for futuristic-looking, advanced vehicles — is a natural extension of his legendary drive to win at all costs. A Love Of The SeaEllison enrolled at a sailing course taught at the University of California shortly after he moved to the state in 1966 at the age of 22. At 25, he bought a 34-foot-long racing sloop, a single mast sailboat, according to About Sports. I don't smoke, but I do sail. Ellison didn't respond to our request for comment, but he's previously said that,"I was passionate about sailing and the idea of sailing ... the idyllic independence … traveling with the wind." He had to sell the boat after a few years because he became too busy building his company Software Development Laboratories, founded in 1977. SDL eventually adopted the name of its flagship Oracle product in 1982. Oracle went public in 1986, making Ellison $93 million from his 39% stake in the company. The popularity of Ellison's enterprise software company allowed him to grow his fortune exponentially. Today, Ellison is 70 years old and worth an estimated $48.7 billion, according to Forbes, making him the fifth richest man in the world. His fortune has allowed Ellison the chance to not only buy a Hawaiian island, fighter jet, Bugatti, and luxury yacht, but it also allowed him to get back into sailing. "Sayonara"In the 1990s, he bought a 78-foot racing sailboat he named Sayonara and started competing at a high level. Ellison's skills as a yachtsman and team leader shined, winning him five Maxi World Championships. But in 1998, Ellison skippered his boat through a race that was so traumatizing, he swore off open ocean races forever. He won that competition, too, but he told the Courier Mail that he didn't actually "win," but just happened to be the first to survive. That December, Sayonara and 114 other yacht teams entered the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race off the coast of Australia. A hurricane developed during the race, and only 44 boats made it to Hobart. Twenty-four boats were abandoned and 55 sailors rescued. Six sailors drowned. Ellison told the Courier Mail in 2008 that he's never forgotten the race. The storm's winds were so powerful that Sayonara was practically flying — but not in a good way. "After what was a beautiful day on Sydney Harbour the wind got more intense and the skies slowly, slowly darkened and I remember after 12 hours we were further ahead than the record holder was in 24 hours," Ellison said. His brush with death may have gotten him to swear off races on the open ocean, but he was far from ending his love of sailing. In Pursuit Of The CupEllison's next sailing objective was to win the America's Cup, a yacht race founded in 1851, which generally takes place every three or four years. He put together Team Oracle in 2003 and partnered with BMW the next year. In both '03 and '07, Ellison's team lost in the America's Cup qualifying competition, the Louis Vuitton Cup, reaching the finals the first time and the semi-finals the second. Things got complicated in 2010 leading up to the 33rd America's Cup, but Ellison's tenacity brought him victory. Because Louis Vuitton temporarily ended its affiliation with the America’s Cup for the 2010 race, reigning champion Alinghi from Switzerland could choose its challenger. It selected a Spanish club that was determined by a judge to be fraudulent — a new team created solely for the purpose of keeping the Swiss victorious and having Alinghi agree to keep the race, and its tax revenue, in Valencia. Ellison was the first in the yacht racing community to file a lawsuit against Alinghi, and after a long and complicated court battle, it was determined that BMW Oracle Racing would be Alinghi’s official competitor in the America’s Cup in a special best out of only three races. Ellison, in the role of afterguard, led BMW Oracle Racing to two straight wins. As the challenger, Ellison now had the power to determine where the 34th America's Cup would be held and what boats were going to be used, and by the end of 2010 BMW stopped sponsoring the team, giving Ellison full control. Ellison decided that the races would be held in the San Francisco Bay, and that instead of a traditional catamaran, the teams would compete in AC72s, which look more like Michael Bay's Transformers than a sailboat. Ellison acted as principal backer and visionary for the team rather than an actual sailor, since these 72-foot-long beasts with 13-story-tall, 3,000-pound wings require elite athletes to operate. The boats require five "grinders" in charge of rapidly operating pulleys, and all 11 sailors need to run and jump across a trampoline-like net from side to side of the boat according to where the wind is blowing. The AC72s reach speeds of nearly 50 mph (compared to closer to 15 mph) and appear to fly over the water. In his 2013 interview with Charlie Rose, Ellison explained that it was all part of his initiative to revolutionize the sport. "We've got to modernize it. It can't be unchanged since 1851," he said, adding that it will not only keep it exciting but keep it relevant to a younger generation. We've got to modernize [the sport]. It can't be unchanged since 1851. Not everyone was convinced. Critics in the sailing community pointed out that a challenger would need to spend $100 million to compete, a price they considered overblown. And in a training accident in the Bay, Swedish team Artemis member Andrew Simpson died when one of the boats capsized. And then Team Oracle got caught using illegal modifications to their smaller AC45 models they used in the preliminary competition, America's Cup World Series. Two sailors were banned from the America's Cup and Team Oracle started the best of 17 series with negative two points. The Need To WinBy the end of the Cup, it was hard to notice the controversy preceding it because Team Oracle USA's win over Team Emirates New Zealand was so incredible. At the start of the twelfth race, Oracle was down 8-1, putting Team Emirates one win away from humiliating Ellison's team on his own turf. And then they won eight races in a row, putting them down in history as achieving one of the greatest comebacks in all of sports. It is notable that Team Oracle's tactician for races 6-19 was British Olympian Sir Ben Ainslie, the winningest Olympic sailor of all time. The Telegraph's Tom Cary noted that since it's a team sport, it's impossible to measure just how much of an impact Ainslie's expertise had on the team, but it's no denying that his "absolutely ruthless" approach played a major role in the comeback. "All 11 guys on the boat believed we could do it," skipper Jimmy Spithill told an America's Cup reporter. "We just wanted it. We knew we could pull it off." After the win, Ellison hopped on a powerboat and met the team on its ship. "Do you guys know what you just did? You just won the America's Cup!" he told the team, the Wall Street Journal reports. Today the team is preparing for the 2017 America's Cup, which will be cheaper for entrants and will use the more manageable and affordable AC62s. After stepping down as Oracle CEO in mid-September, Ellison as CTO has been more focused on developing and marketing Oracle's cloud computing services. But when the America's Cup rolls around, his winning addiction will kick into overdrive and his sights will be set on winning race after race — plain and simple. NOW WATCH: Business Insider's Christina Sterbenz spends an intense weekend sailing around lower Manhattan:
SEE ALSO: Why Hot-Air Ballooning Is Richard Branson's Favorite Way To Travel Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Here's Why NFL Fans Are Getting Screwed When It Comes To Watching Football | ||
| ||
Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
David Einhorn Added Amazon To His Infamous 'Bubble Basket' Of Stocks | ||
| ||
Hedge fund manager David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital added Amazon to his "bubble basket" of short positions, according to his fund's Q3 investor letter. The "Bubble Basket" is a collection of tech stocks that Einhorn believes are overvalued. He announced that Greenlight had created the basket at a conference in May. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Apple Says It 'Bent Over Backwards' To Help Its Bankrupt Sapphire Supplier (AAPL) | ||
| ||
We're learning more details about Apple's relationship with GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT), thanks to recently unsealed court documents. GTAT was rumored to be producing sapphire display covers for the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch until it filed for bankruptcy protection in October. In an affidavit unsealed on Friday, GTAT chief operating officer Daniel Squiller blamed Apple for GTAT's decision to file for bankruptcy. "GTAT incurred losses — resulting in the current liquidity crisis — due to Apple's inordinate control over GTAT's liquidity, operations (including control over product specifications), and decision making," wrote Squiller. Here's what Apple's lawyers had to say about that in the unsealed filing: Contrary to the picture painted by the Debtors in the Supplemental Declaration, Apple has bent over backwards to work with the Debtors, including making payments to the company notwithstanding the company's failure to meet performance milestones, in the hope of obtaining usable, economically viable sapphire from the Debtors. Far from the villain in these chapter 11 cases, Apple is the largest victim of the Debtors' failure to perform under the agreements it negotiated at arms' length and with advice of counsel. SEE ALSO: These Brutal Quotes Allege Dealing With Apple Is Nasty Business Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
This 13 Year Old Is So Impressive, Intel Is Investing Hundreds Of Thousands In His Startup (INTC) | ||
| ||
Shubham Banerjee, the 13-year old CEO of the Braille printer maker Braigo Labs, had no idea what Braille was until last year. It was only when he came across a fundraising flyer for the visually impaired that he started to wonder how blind people read. So, like any other 7th grader would do, he asked his parents. His father’s response: “Go Google it.” As he searched the web, Banerjee discovered the high cost of Braille printers, which usually cost upwards of $2,000. He also learned more about Braille, the tactile writing system used by the visually impaired. “When I found out the cost of a Braille printer, I was shocked,” Banerjee told Business Insider. “I just wanted to help the visually impaired. I had a Lego Robotics kit, so I asked, ‘Why not just try that?’” Built out of Lego’s Mindstorms EV3 blocks and little pieces from Home Depot (Braigo stands for Braille and Lego), Braigo Lab’s printer turned out to function quite well. It earned Banerjee a lot of recognition too, including The Tech Awards 2014 and an invitation to the White House Maker Faire, an event that awards student entrepreneurs and innovators. But most importantly, Banerjee believes it could solve a decades-long problem that’s been holding back so many visually impaired people around the world: the high cost of Braille printers. Banerjee says his printer could significantly cut down the price of Braille printers to less than $500. According to his website, there are 285 million visually impaired people worldwide, and 90% of them live in developing countries. It’s not easy to drop a couple grand on a printer, even by a developed country’s standards. “I want to tell (big company manufacturers) to stop taking advantage of blind people,” he says. Impressed by his product and vision, Intel came calling last September and told him it would invest in his company. And last week, the investment was made official at the Intel Capital Global Summit, when Braigo Labs was mentioned as one of the 16 tech startups Intel’s investing in this year. Although the exact amount of the investment was not disclosed, it’s reported to be a few hundred thousand dollars. That makes Banerjee the youngest tech entrepreneur ever funded by a VC firm. “I didn’t think such a big company would ever invest in my company. That was pretty amazing,” Banerjee says. With Intel’s funding, Braigo Labs plans to build a new prototype that more resembles a regular printer, and bring it to market by next year. Banerjee says he has no plans to expand into other product categories at this point, but Braille printers seem to be just a part of a bigger dream he has in mind. “I want to do engineering in the medical area when I grow up,” he says. “And I want to finish college.” This is the Lego Mindstorm EV3 kit he used to build it.These are some of the pieces he used. He also bought some small pieces from Home Depot to build it.
This is the part that holds the main processor, or the “brain,” of the product. It comes with the Lego Mindstorm.
This is what the first prototype looks like.
Here’s a better angle.
This is the second prototype, which more resembles a regular printer. The printer that goes into mass production will look more like this one.He also presented at the Intel Capital Summit 2014 last week, with Intel Capital’s president Arvind Sodhani and Bloomberg’s Cory Johnson.You can see the full video below:Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Find Out What Your Zip Code Says About You With This Creepily Accurate Website | ||
| ||
Click here to go to the story. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
13 Apps You Should Use Every Day | ||
| ||
There are millions of apps to choose from, but the ones on my home screen matter the most. They're the apps I use every day to get stuff done. Here's a look at my favorite apps that I think everyone should be using every day. Tweetbot is my favorite way to check Twitter.There's a reason why Tweetbot has the coveted spot on the bottom right corner of my screen. It's the app I use the more than any other. Tweetbot is my favorite way to keep up with Twitter. It's much better than the official Twitter app. Price: $4.99 (iPhone only) Pocket lets me save stories to read later.I'm flooded with interesting articles and links during the work day that I rarely have time to read. I use an app called Pocket to save them for later. Pocket lets you install an extension in your browser. When you're looking at an article you'd like to save, you just click a button to send the article to an app on your phone. It also lets you read articles offline. Pocket is perfect for catching up on news you missed. Price: Free for iPhone and Android Slack is how I chat with coworkers.The editorial staff at Business Insider wouldn't be able to survive without Slack, an app that lets you chat and collaborate with colleagues. Slack is basically an old-school chat room, but it's well designed and makes it easy to share links and documents. Price: Free for iOS, Android, and Mac See the rest of the story at Business Insider | ||
|
Something Called 'The Race To Zero' Is Scaring A Lot Of Tech Companies (MSFT, GOOG, AMZN) | ||
| ||
Cloud computing has completely changed the tech industry, but it's got a dark side for the companies competing in the market, something those in the industry call "the race to zero." There's so much competition in the cloud industry that cloud companies keep cutting their prices, even while they increase their storage limits. There's a couple of reasons for this. For one, computer storage keeps getting cheaper. A gigabyte's worth of storage on a hard drive in 1993 cost over $9,000, but it cost a mere 4 cents in 2013. But you can really thank Amazon for making sure that cloud computing companies pass those savings along to customers. As its costs drop, Amazon cuts its prices for its cloud. Amazon Web Service had 44 price cuts in about the last six years, it says, thanks to a culture of "frugality." Amazon is increasing revenue by gaining more customers and adding ever more services for which they are willing to pay, even though they'll pay less for each as time goes on. They're treating computer services like their retail store. You're likely to stock up your cart with more stuff if you're getting a bargain on every item you buy. Microsoft and Google have vowed to keep up matching Amazon's prices while beefing up their own selection of services. And that means the whole cloud industry has to cut prices as time goes on, not raise them. Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud storage company Box just told The Information, "We see a future where storage is free and infinite." That's great news for those of us with a growing stash of documents, photos, and smartphone videos. But it also means that companies like Box, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, HP, IBM, and others have to come up with unique cloud services that people are willing to pay for. For instance, Microsoft and Google have put Office apps in the cloud, and they toss in the cloud storage as part of that. Box, which still hopes to go public one day, is doing a similar sort of thing. It offers extra security around files, something enterprises are willing to pay for to make sure they comply with all laws. Box is also building other applications, things like a project management app. That's like a GitHub for documents, where all the files for the same project live in one place and people can collaborate, or a sales portal that lets salespeople see which customer has been given which bit of marketing materials. Meanwhile, every new company in the cloud computing war is looking for ways to offer special services beyond renting apps or storing files. When Cisco announced it would spend $1 billion on the cloud last summer, the executive leading the project, Nick Earle, was quick to declare, "Our strategy is not to follow AWS on the race to zero." All the big players have declared much the same thing as they spending billions on their clouds: IBM, HP, Oracle. But when push comes to shove, the price war is on, and Amazon is determined to keep it on. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
RANKED: The Best Smartphones In The World | ||
| ||
The best smartphones in the world >> Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
GOOGLE EXEC: Here's Why Android Just Went Through Its Biggest Change Yet (GOOG) | ||
| ||
Within the next several months, your Android phone is about to drastically change. Google, along with its partners and carriers, is in the process of rolling out its biggest Android update yet, called 5.0 Lollipop. The update is meant to make your Android phone look and feel different thanks to an interface overhaul known as Material Design. But Material Design is more than just an Android facelift. It's part of Google's strategy to make all devices that run its software feel similar. If the company made anything explicity clear at its recent launch event for its new Nexus devices, it's that Android is going to be everywhere soon enough: on our wrists, on our TV screens, and of course, in our pockets. Although Lollipop has only launched on a small number of Android devices, it's been in the making for years. Android's Vice President of Engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer, who has been with the Android team since 2006, sat down with Business Insider to talk about how Google prepared for its biggest Android update yet and what's next. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. Business Insider: What makes Lollipop such a massive update for Android? Hiroshi Lockheimer: It’s not like we planned it to be this way. It just kind of turned out that way. There was a confluence of events. One thing was Material Design, the new user interface. That was a huge effort. It was a complete rethink of how the user interface would feel and it’s a lot more dynamic. So that is a big milestone. We also switched our runtime, which is kind of a technical thing. But from an end user’s perspective, the benefit of that is very tied to Material Design. The new runtime is a lot smoother in terms of how it schedules tasks. So the user interface is going to feel a lot smoother and more fluid. You won’t see the stutters you used to see. So we did that in conjunction to make sure all these new animations that we’re doing in Material Design are much more fluid. There’s also in the silicon industry, there’s a move to move from 32 bit to 64 bit, so we had that support also. So all these things are adding up together and made for a really big release. The other thing I would say that’s part of the Material Design change, it’s not just the operating system that changed. A lot of the applications that we build, for instance, have been updated to adhere to the material design guidelines. This is one of the reasons why we did something a little bit different this year by having a developer preview of Android at Google I/O in June. It’s the first time since we launched that we did that, and we did that for a reason because we knew this would be a big release and we wanted to give developers a lot of runway to get their apps updated. It's a pretty exciting time. BI: What made you decide that this is the right time to totally change the Android interface? HL: Well, it’s been a multi year process. One of the things we do at Google in general, but also at the Android team, is iterate. Focusing on the user interface has been an area we knew we wanted to iterate on for a long time. We did the first major UI overhaul with Gingerbread and Honeycomb back in those days and we’ve been planning for something like Material Design since then. It took a while to get the designs right. We wanted to perfect it. This won’t be the last time we’ll do a major UI overhaul. We’ll let things sit for a while, and we want to mature Material on all these different form factors too. BI: There’s been some management change throughout Android over the years. Sundar Pichai has been in charge of Android for the past year-and-a-half now. What has that been like compared to working under former Android boss Andy Rubin? HL: They’re different leaders, obviously, with different personalities. When [Andy] left, we made an announcement about the departure. He talked about, and I think the quote was something along the lines of, “He’s an entrepreneur at heart, he just wants to go back to his roots as an entrepreneur.” Meaning he wanted to focus on early stage projects. Andy had been doing that before [Google acquired Android]. Android has been around for a while. This is our 12th release. This is our sixth device. And we have a billion plus customers out there running software on their devices. So it’s a different kind of project now. I wouldn’t call it a startup, even though it’s kind of corny to say it, but it still does feel very much like a startup. We act that way internally and the team is a lot smaller than you would think. BI: And how small is that? HL: You’d be surprised. Relative to the billion plus people out there, it’s actually a small number of people who are working really hard and as a tight-knit group to keep this operating system going. We do that intentionally because that’s our way of staying nimble and doing things quickly. Going back to your question, it was a personal decision on Andy, too, to focus on what he wanted to do, which is really small, beginning of a project type of thing. Not a billion person kind of product. And Sundar’s absolutely fantastic at that stuff. It’s been great. And hopefully you’ll feel the results are good. I guess this is the first year after Sundar took over in terms of products, so this is kind of the result of that. BI: So would you say this Lollipop release is the result of Android under Sundar’s leadership? HL: Yeah, absolutely. Kit Kat [the last version of Android] sort of started with Andy but finished with Sundar. Lollipop started with Sundar and finished with Sundar. So that’s absolutely been a big part of this. And as I said in terms of the team, we’ve been a cohesive team for a long time, the team has stuck together. We all work really nicely with Sundar. So it’s been great. BI: I want to go back to the early days when you guys first started working with Android after Google first acquired it. Not just the operating system itself, but inside Google the team has gotten so big. Did you guys expect it to explode like this? HL: When I joined we were about 20 people. Obviously we’re bigger now in terms of a team. And things have changed a lot. Back in 2006, maybe I should have been dreaming bigger. Larry Page would have told me I should’ve because that’s just how he is. But I didn’t expect this to happen. We knew we were onto something. We wanted to build a fully-featured operating system and give it away for free and no one had done that before. So I think our trick was, and I mean that in a good way, our secret ingredient was building a fully featured operating system, and actually building a product. This is kind of why we did Nexus devices. And over the years the basic recipe has been the same. We build software. We open source it. We make it available to all these manufacturers out there. And back in the early days it was HTC. Then HTC and Motorola. Then HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. People joining and building their own products on top. And that’s how we got to the scale we’re at now. And then with this year, one of our explicit goals was to then take that and expand this platform into other factors like TV. LE: You have obviously tried a lot of different things with Android over the past several years in terms of user interface and features. What do you think worked and what didn’t? Did you ever try anything and then think, "This wasn’t the most useful feature, we shouldn’t have spent so much time on it." HL: That’s a good question. It’s a little inside baseball type of question, isn’t it? Most things are actually getting used quite a bit. Its not easy for us to be like, oh, well that’s not getting used at all. Cut it. We’ve really been focusing on iterating on features we’ve released and if we feel they haven’t been perfected yet we’ll take the effort to perfect them. An example in Lollipop is Face Unlock. LE: Right, so how is Face Unlock different in Android Lollipop? HL: I think that’s a perfect example. We launched Face Unlock in Ice Cream Sandwich and with the way it worked, there was a little bit of a lag. You needed to align the camera with your face, and it needed to process. It was a good idea, but the execution took too long in practice to use it. And what we’ve done in Lollipop actually is enabled this feature to start looking for your face before you even get to that screen to fix lighting and things like that. So it actually acts a lot quicker and the latency is lower, and it just makes the feature so much more useful. That’s the type of thing I’m saying is how we work on features. We’ll release something, and I think there’s always a nugget of good, but sometimes it takes the second iteration or the second round to really perfect it. And that’s been our model for a while. BI: Having a lot of variety is great for the consumer and it’s great for Android. But does it ever hurt Google as a phone maker? Samsung is huge and it's the most popular phone maker next to Apple. Does that ever hurt you guys when you’re trying to push Nexus devices out? HL: I don’t think so. We’re not trying to compete with Samsung or HTC or LG. We’re not competing with ourselves. The main reason we do Nexus is to show, internally, for ourselves, without doing it in the abstract. That’s the worst kind of software to build — you kind of throw some software over the fence and hope someone ships it. We work with partners but we really treat these devices as our own during development. And then, yeah, we release it to the public who buys it. And of course we’re happy if a lot of people buy it, but it’s also good for us if they end up buying a Samsung or HTC device. That’s fine too. It’s a win win for us. We don’t really see it as we’re trying to take share away from someone else. BI: You work with so many different companies on Android devices. I’m sure that creates some fragmentation and issues here and there. Is there anything Google is doing to make things more seamless across devices? Because I could pick up a Samsung phone and it would look totally different from a Motorola phone, and the Motorola phones might get the update to Lollipop first, and that probably creates frustration for some people. HL: In many ways it’s by design. We knew from day one when we built the operating system that it wasn’t going to be about one company. It wasn’t going to be just about Google or HTC. It was always about a big ecosystem, a bunch of companies, there was an alliance of companies behind it. And it’s grown more since then. So the software itself was designed in such a way to handle, for instance, different screen sizes. It wasn’t an afterthought. And in many ways, in the early days, I think there were growing pains as we adjusted and application developers adjusted to that model. But now I think we’re reaping the benefits. It is about celebrating the diversity of devices. It’s not one size fits all. SEE ALSO: The Most Important New Features Coming To Your Android Phone Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
REVEALED: The Top Demographic Trends For Every Major Social Network | ||
| ||
The demographics of who's on what social network are shifting — older social networks are reaching maturity, while newer social messaging apps are gaining younger users fast. In a new report from BI Intelligence, we unpack data from over a dozen sources to understand how social media demographics are still shifting. Access The Full Report By Signing Up For A Trial >> Here are a few of the key takeaways from the BI Intelligence report:
The report is full of charts (over 20 charts) and data that can be downloaded and put to use. In full, the report:
For full access to all BI Intelligence reports, briefs, and downloadable charts on the digital media industry, sign up for a two week trial. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
A 23-Year-Old Set A Guinness World Record For Playing A Video Game At 18,569 Feet | ||
| ||
Will Cruz was working at a call center in his home state of Utah when he got the news that he just won Ubisoft's "Quest for Everest" contest. "I was on the phone with a new hire at my company," he said. "My phone beeped, and I looked at it, and I got this email saying 'Congratulations, you won,' and immediately I checked out," he tells Business Insider. "Like, I couldn't understand one thing the guy was saying anymore. I just held my hand in the air and was like, 'F--- this conversation!'" The contest was to promote the game "Far Cry 4," which comes out Nov. 18. The contest was announced over the summer. To enter, people had to make 2-minute videos showing why they were the most qualified. "Far Cry" is a first-person shooter that places its players in some wild locations. In "Far Cry 2," players found themselves in Africa. "Far Cry 3" was set in the wild jungles of an island in the Pacific. "Far Cry 4" takes place in the Himalayas. So it makes sense for the company to promote the game with a trip there. And it doesn't hurt to get a world record in the process. To earn the record, Cruz had to play the game for more than an hour. And he did that at 18,569 feet, climbing to the summit of Kala Patthar. Yikes. "The game ran just fine up there. I was pretty amazed," he says. "The system was running better than I was at that altitude." Ubisoft was prepared for the trip, however. They needed to figure out what kind of TV to bring up there so the LCD wouldn't freeze. They also needed to determine whether it would be OK to take a PlayStation up there that has a CD drive. They didn't have to worry about that part, though. The build that they used of the game was burned onto the hard drive of the console. Cruz also had to leave his wife of two years behind. "She's a little taken aback about the whole thing, but she's been a great sport," Cruz says. Before climbing in the Himalayas, Cruz had never been outside the country. But he's no stranger to hiking, often going on some "risky" hikes in his home state, he says. In fact for his submission video for the contest, he climbed the highest peak in Utah. Because of weather conditions and work schedule, he had a fairly limited amount of time to do it. He also needed to learn how to use his equipment. "I went and hiked it all by myself. It was a 26-mile hike, and it was pretty rough," he said. "I also had to learn how to use a GoPro ... and then I had to borrow a laptop to do the editing for the video, and had to ask a friend how to do it." A trip such as this one couldn't be done alone. He had the help of 15 people, including sherpas and a video crew, as well as the pros at Berg Adventures, to help him on his journey. Ubisoft's Scott Fry said they had extra people onhand to make sure that Cruz was both comfortable and safe throughout his visit. "We had many conversations with Wally Berg, who owns Berg Adventures International, in advance of the contest and the trip, to really go through the logistics of everything that we would need to concern ourselves with, what we would have to have there to make sure Will was comfortable, and that everything would go according to plan," Fry says. That means they had, for example, extra oxygen and more people forecasting the weather. They also had satellite access, so they could contact Cruz and his team if they needed to. "We really planned everything out long and far in advance and with an expert team of people so that we could ensure everything was as safe as possible," Fry says. Cruz still had to sign a waiver. And even with a team of experts helping out, the trek up to 18,569 feet was not easy. The group had to deal with the elements, such as high wind gusts that claimed one of their tents. Cruz also had to get acclimated to the high altitudes. "The altitude made it hard to sleep, it made it hard to keep an appetite," Cruz says. Now that he's back, Cruz says that he's going to go back to work and settle back into normal life. But he can't wait to go back and go on a new adventure. And to everyone who's thinking of trekking through the Himalayas, Cruz has one piece of advice: "Take a good guide." You can check out Cruz's video diary of his journey on YouTube. SEE ALSO: The Maker Of The Game 'Destiny' Gave A Man Recovering From Brain Surgery A Rare Gift Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
I Can’t Stop Playing This Incredible Horror Game, Even Though It’s A Free Demo | ||
| ||
Three months ago, a free downloadable game called “P.T.” showed up on the PlayStation Store — and the horror genre has never been the same. People didn’t know it at the time, but the game, seemingly built by a completely unknown developer called “7780s Studios” (it's actually from Konami, more on that in a bit), is one of the most masterfully created, simple but effective horror games ever released. The game thrusts you into an empty room with a door. Once you open it, you are presented with a simple but eerie and photorealistic L-shaped hallway. There’s a bathroom, a clock, a radio, and a phone. There are also torn up pieces of a photo lying around. As you pick up clues from the environment, you learn that you’re walking through a house where a man lost his mind and killed his wife and children. Every time you leave the hallway through the basement door, you end up back in the same hallway. It’s your job to figure out the puzzle and escape the loop. The demo, which I’ve played twice now, is a true terror. And that’s because it’s consistently unsettling, rather than flat-out scary. Granted, there are one or two memorable “jump scares,” which have inspired countless YouTube reaction videos. But the true appeal to “P.T.” lies in the ambiance: chandeliers slowly sway back and forth, there’s incessant creaking, and occasionally, a baby cries, a woman moans, and a radio announcer offers chilling details about the house in which you’re standing. On a few occasions, he’ll tell you to look behind you. It’s extremely unnerving. We have no idea what to expect from “Silent Hills,” which comes out next year, but Konami, the maker of the franchise, says “P.T.” has zero relation to the main title, in both characters and premise. Here’s the thing: “P.T.” has become an instant cult classic. Some of the puzzles are just flat-out brilliant — one of them has you collecting clues in different languages, so you need to translate them all and then put the phrases in the correct order to figure out what to do next. And it's so effective because there's no exposition, no introduction to familiarize yourself with the characters or the situation; you must learn as you go along. Many wonder what the final game, "Silent Hills," will be. But if Konami wants a success like "P.T.," here’s one idea: Make “Silent Hills” into an episodic game, where gamers play a series of small, standalone games in the same vein as “P.T.,” which can all be loosely tied together since they're set in the same town of Silent Hill. Voidburger, one half of the YouTube team that successfully deciphered the difficult-to-solve final puzzle in “P.T.,” is all about this idea. “There’s some talk of ‘Silent Hills’ being episodic,” she told Polygon. “My biggest hope for the game — and this is something I’ve been craving for years — is that it’s episodic [in the same way] ‘The Twilight Zone’ was. Different writers with different stories being told in the same format, in the same weird universe, tied together by a sense of creepy wrongness. That’d be a nightmare come true!” This might be the best way to address “Silent Hills”: By offering variety without any real overarching plot, the game would deprive players of knowledge about the creepy events that are happening around them, in the same way that “P.T.” forces you to piece together the plot puzzle one little clue at a time. As Voidburger points out, not knowing the plot “makes you really think about what’s going on by obscuring the big picture and providing only little breadcrumbs to follow." "It heightens curiosity, which goes hand-in-hand with horror, in my opinion… It’s beneficial to keep the audience confused, because it amplifies their fear. And nothing destroys fear like knowledge, so it makes sense to keep the facts few and far between in the horror genre, and make the player work for their plot fix." “P.T.” is a true example of how simplicity and withholding information can create a truly memorable experience that feeds on your imagination. Hopefully Kojima’s team at Konami can deliver an equally puzzling but deeply genuine feature-length game that lives up to its sterling playable teaser. SEE ALSO: Don't Watch This Footage From The Next 'Silent Hill' Game Before You Go To Sleep Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Meet The Outlandish Superheroes Of 'Overwatch,' The Latest Game From The Makers Of 'World Of Warcraft' | ||
| ||
Get ready for "Overwatch." It's the first new property in 17 years for Blizzard, the highly esteemed maker of some of the bestselling games of all time, including "World Of Warcraft," "Starcraft," and "Diablo." This time, you'll be playing as one of several superheroes, "an elite international task force charged with ending the war and restoring liberty to all nations." Based on the game's trailer, "Overwatch" features Pixar-looking superheroes with wild abilities and powers going at it with one another. Here's the noteworthy exposition from the trailer: As the world teetered on the brink of anarchy, a new hope arose: Overwatch. Under its steadfast protection, the world recovered. And today, though its watch has ended, its soaring ideals of freedom and equality will never be forgotten. The game won't be out until some time in 2015 (you can sign up for the beta right now), but we can't wait to dive into "Overwatch." To get an idea of the mayhem that can ensue, it's best to familiarize yourself with the heroes themselves. Meet Tracer. She can rewind her steps (useful in case someone is chasing behind you).This is Symmetra. She is covered in technology, which lets her create booby traps in just seconds.Hanzo is a highly skilled, nimble archer.See the rest of the story at Business Insider | ||
|
Elon Musk Wants To Build Internet Satellites (TSLA, SCTY, GOOG, GOOGL) | ||
| ||
And now Elon Musk wants to send satellites that deliver internet access into space. According to a report late Friday by The Wall Street Journal's Rolfe Winkler and Andy Pasztor, Musk is working with former Google executive Greg Wyler to build smaller, cheaper satellites that can deliver internet access from space. The report, which cites people familiar with the matter, said that Musk and Wyler want to send 700 satellites weighing less than 250 pounds into space. Musk is the founder and CEO of electric carmaker Tesla Motors, as well as the chairman of solar energy company SolarCity and the founder and CEO of SpaceX. The satellites Musk and Wyler want to send up would be about half the size of the smallest current commercial communications satellites, and this fleet would be 10 times the size of the largest communication satellite fleet, the report said. The report adds that developing this venture is expected to cost at least $1 billion, and said that Musk and Wyler have been in talks with officials in both Colorado and Florida about building a factory to make satellites. The report comes after Musk's Tesla Motors reported earnings last Wednesday night that beat expectations, though the company said it would deliver 2,000 fewer cars than it is on track to produce in 2014. On Tesla's earnings conference call, Musk said that Tesla's issue is not demand, but production. "We have more demand than we can address and levers we can pull to increase demand, and we're not doing it." "It's worth saying that making one of something is quite easy," Musk added. "Making lots of something consistently that's going to last a long time is extremely hard. In fact, it is way harder to make the machine that makes the machine that it is to make the machine in the first place." And now, it seems, Musk may be preparing to try and make something else. You can read The Journal's full report here » Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Facebook Is Giving You More Control Over What You See In Your News Feed (FB) | ||
| ||
SEE ALSO: Apple's Wallet Killer Is Already Making An Impact At Whole Foods Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Meet The Startup That's Using Drones To Change The World | ||
| ||
When Andreas Raptopoulos and his team got stuck in a 20-truck convoy completely marooned in mud while navigating between villages in Papua New Guinea, it was incredibly frustrating. It was also a validation of his work. Raptopoulos is the cofounder and CEO of a startup called Matternet, which makes drones, though he refuses to use that word. He prefers to call them small unmanned aerial delivery vehicles, or UAVs. He started the company after having a "eureka moment" three years ago. He realized one billion people around the world live in areas lacking reliable road systems and that drones could provide a more reliable way to deliver critical supplies, like medicine. That's why Raptopoulos was in tuberculosis-ravaged Papua New Guinea in September, entrenched in mud. Matternet had connected with the international aid organization Doctors Without Borders to test whether its aerial vehicles could provide a good way to transfer TB diagnostics between villages. During the two weeks Matternet conducted its trials, multiple trucks got trapped. "We had to do that trip four times and every time there was an element of fear," Raptopoulos tells Business Insider. "We thought, 'Will we make it?' We talk a lot about the problem, but it became very real for us. What it really means, and all the emotions that go with it." Matternet's trucks may have gotten lodged in mud between launch sites, but its drones navigated their routes without a hitch. Controlled completely via an app, a UAV bearing a spittle sample would take off, fly through the air, and land at a hospital as far as 25 kilometers away. For Raptopoulos, it felt like a series of "pinch me" moments. Every time the team prepped a drone for a take-off, anywhere from 50 to 70 people would surround them. These were often people who live without running water or reliable electricity in their homes, and yet the drones seemed to make sense to them almost immediately. "Most of these people have never seen one of these things, at least in the flesh," Raptopoulos says, "But it’s amazing, the amount of joy it generates. It basically breaks with all your assumptions." That's one of the underlying principles that Matternet builds upon: that its drones be so dead-simple to operate, that someone without significant technological training could instinctively figure out how to send one on a flight. That someone who had even the most minimal knowledge of how to operate a smartphone could direct the drone to deliver medicine, food, or other supplies from one location to another. For that reason, Raptopoulos likes to describe Matternet's UAVs as the Apple products of the drone space. "We want this company to be at the intersection of the best technology and excellence in design," he says. "We want to sell a vehicle to you that you can operate with an unprecedented ease of use." Right now, drones — and delivery drones in particular — are a buzzy topic, but when Matternet first got started, people mainly thought of them in terms of the military or security. Today, they're being used to deliver medicine in Germany and the Federal Aviation Administration recently approved them for use in shooting movie and TV scenes in the US. "Things are changing fast in this space," Raptopoulos says. "A year ago, there was no Amazon drone announcement. A month ago there was no Google drone coming out." Matternet's early start combined with its powerhouse-team has it poised to take the drone space by storm and become one of "the next billion-dollar businesses," according to Matternet investor Ravi Belani, managing director of Alchemist, the startup accelerator Matternet graduated from. Raptopoulos' vision for Matternet first hit him when he was attending Singularity University, a non-traditional, future-focused school that aims to empower its students to apply "exponential technologies to address humanity's grand challenges." Working as part of a larger team, Raptopoulos got hung up on the fact that one-seventh of the Earth's population lacked access to all-seasons roads and that developing a traditional, reliable transportation infrastructure in those places would take crazy amounts of money and upwards of 50 years. He took a map of Africa and overlaid an internet-like network onto it. If he could build machines that could carry cargo short distances, each trip would be small, but the scale could be incredible. He says he got chills: Raptopoulos says when he and co-founder Paola Santana, previously a lawyer in the Dominican Republic, first started pitching the idea around, he got a lot of polite but confused responses. A lot of people thought they was crazy, Raptopoulos says. But the founders of Singularity University — futurist Ray Kurzweil and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis — loved the idea. After graduating from the University, they accepted Matternet into SU Labs, the school's innovation accelerator. Since then, Raptopoulos and Santana have built a lean team of 10 people who specialize in skills ranging from rocket science and engineering to law and regulation. The company has raised $2 million to date from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Alchemist Accelerator, and even the rapper Nas, but is eyeing a more significant Series A round in the near future. Matternet's plan is to create a full stack product, handling both the hardware and the software themselves, while simultaneously making sure to stay abreast of every new legal hurdle in the drone space. Right now, the FAA bans the use of commercial drones, but it is supposed to release rules for small drones under 55 pounds later this year, in line with its complete plan for “safe integration” of commercial drones by September 2015. Meanwhile, a team at NASA led by Dr. Parimal Kopardekar is developing a drone traffic management program of its own to advise the FAA. Matternet is one of the many UAV-focused companies that has met with Kopardekar's NexGen technology team to discuss different ways to provide a structure to drone traffic. The startup plans to announce its first product in the first quarter of 2015, and start shipping a few months later. The goal is to have concrete agreements with the likes of Doctors Without Borders and the World Health Organization, which it tested with in Bhutan, by the time Matternet's UAVs get launched. Raptopolous couldn't name a concrete price point, but guesses that the Matternet system will go for between $2,000 and $5,000. By launching in areas like Papua New Guinea and Bhutan — where its drones are sometimes flying over swaths of jungle or sparsely populated desert and where there isn't a strict existing aerial infrastructure — Matternet has fewer barriers to entry. "The risk needs to be low if the UAV falls," NASA's Kopardekar tells Business Insider, noting that low-density areas make the most sense for drone testing and operations. "You need to be able to demonstrate the risk is very low and the benefits are high: That's where you will see implementation happening." Although Raptopoulos landed upon the idea for Matternet because of a motivation to provide a transportation solution to parts of the world that lack access to all-season roads, the company has its sights set beyond humanitarian causes. After all, Matternet isn't a service company; it's a product company. "We are pioneering this technology by helping partners find ways to put it in the field now, but our vision is that we should be putting this type of technology into everybody's hands," he says, "Whether their purpose is in Papua New Guinea or Rio or Istanbul or Mexico City or in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and LA." "Sometimes mission-driven entrepreneurs get so hung up on their mission that they're missing the commercial opportunity, which they probably don't emotionally care that much about," Pascal Finette, who heads SU Labs, explains. "I think this duality — the dance between these two worlds — is something social entrepreneurs sometimes get wrong. But Andreas is just perfect. He's phenomenal because he understands, 'Hey, if we get this at scale and we can do this in the US and we become a big company, we can use all this as a force of good to do even more in the world.'" Raptopoulos sees Walgreens using Matternet's drones to deliver prescriptions, or grocery stores using them to deliver milk. Because the startup is small, lean, and fast-moving, he thinks it has a leg up on giants like Google or Amazon. "I think Andreas is a beautiful, bi-focal CEO," says Belani from Alchemist. "He is a true visionary who is always motivated by fundamentally changing the world. But he's very practical in the near term what's required to get things done. He's not a head-in-the-clouds type of visionary. He's incredibly practical with a strong street sense of business." Finette agrees: Raptopoulos and Santana dream big, but know how to actually move steadily forward. He laughs recalling how nonchalantly the team will talk about passing amazing, major milestones. "They talk about it as if it's nothing," he says. That speaks to their capacity as entrepreneurs, he says, because they understand that every achievement is just a small stepping stone towards the big idea. Right now, Matternet's drones weigh well under 5 kilograms, can carry cargo over 0.5 kilograms, and fly over 25 kilometers on a battery charge. Their geo-fenced routes take into consideration weather data and terrain. They are equipped with cameras to help them navigate onto landing pads at their destinations. The entire system gets controlled by a smartphone app. Raptopoulos calls it the "Apple II" of the drone industry: the "most easy to use, desirable, and safest personal flying vehicle" out there. Not that Matternet is the only company trying to achieve that. Besides giants like Amazon and Google, there are other delivery drone companies out there, like Bizzby and Aria. "A drone delivery network will be the most disruptive thing to hit the delivery space," says Brody Buhler, partner at consulting firm Accenture, who focuses on postal issues. "If you don’t have drones on your five-year roadmap, you’re probably too far out." Talking to Raptopoulos, that future feels even closer. He gets almost electrically bright-eyed when he talks about the moments he's had on trials in the Himalayas or Papua New Guinea. But his passion really radiates off him when he talks about what's yet to come. "I’m going to keep on having these 'pinch me' moments," he says. "When we see our first big deployment in a city. When I’m able to see 20-30 crafts doing routine missions. When I’m able to actually see our drones in the sky and nobody will be paying attention, because they’re just an establishment. And we can't wait." SEE ALSO: Why The Guy Behind The Most Popular Smartwatch In The World Isn't Scared Of Apple Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Here's Why Banner Advertising Has Ruined The Web — Podcast (AMZN) | ||
| ||
Here's this week's episode of the "Jay and Farhad Show." As usual, it's New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo and myself running through some of the biggest stories in tech this week. We record this podcast on a weekly basis. You can subscribe to it in iTunes here. You should definitely subscribe. Here's an RSS link to the show. We use SoundCloud as a host, so you can listen to the show over there, too. This week we talk about Manjoo's column bashing banner ads, reports that Uber is raising another $1 billion, and Amazon's new Echo speaker. We recorded this on Friday, November 7, 2014. Enjoy! Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
This Amazon Echo Parody Will Actually Make You Want Amazon's New Voice-Controlled Speaker Even More (AMZN) | ||
| ||
Amazon surprised everyone on Thursday when it introduced its voice-controlled speaker, called Echo. Like Siri or Google Now, Amazon Echo can answer questions, play music, create alarms and reminders, and give you information about the news or the weather. But it's all hands-free, so you can address the Echo from anywhere in the room and it can hear your requests. Of course, people quickly started having fun with Amazon's new futuristic toy. Most notably, YouTube user Barry Mannifold made a few "modifications" to Amazon's introductory video and shared his work with the reddit community. It quickly racked up 1.2 million views in less than a day on the Web. The video is actually quite brilliant. Mind you, Mannifold's parody includes one word that's NSFW, so if you have young kids or coworkers around, maybe throw on a pair of headphones. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
The 20 Hottest Startups Founded By Women | ||
| ||
Women may be underrepresented throughout the tech sector, but they're building some incredible startups. The folks over at Product Hunt have created and curated a list of the best startups and products founded by women. VCs, entrepreneurs, and Product Hunt members have all weighed in on their favorites. From uBeam's innovative wireless charging technology to Hopscotch's program for teaching kids how to code, the products women are making are changing the world. FrontFront lets you collaborate on email responses with your team without cluttering up your inbox with a confusing set of back-and-forth responses. Front also lets you work under a group email address to collaborate on composing emails. In August, the Y Combinator alum told VentureBeat it had already raised $1.5 million of its $2.5 million funding round from a group of anonymous Silicon Valley investors. Front is led by CEO Mathilde Collin.
MattermarkDanielle Morrill, Kevin Morrill, and Andy Sparks are the dream team behind Mattermark. Mattermark is a data platform that helps VC firms keep tabs on up-and-coming startups. Mattermark's software lets users look at information about startups based on news stories, Twitter, SEC filings, AngelList, CrunchBase, and more. The company has raised $3.4 million in three rounds from investors including Great Oaks Venture Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Mattermark is led by CEO Danielle Morrill. HopscotchHopscotch teaches kids how to code in a way that's fun and not intimidating. It's the first programming language that's designed for mobile, too. Jocelyn Leavitt and Samantha John founded the company in 2011 and have received $1.2 million in two rounds of funding from MESA+, Kapor Capital, Collaborative Fund, and Resolute.vc.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider | ||
|
Apple's Wallet Killer Is Already Making An Impact At Whole Foods (AAPL) | ||
| ||
Apple’s foray into mobile payments is less than a month old, but Apple Pay might already be making a mark on one of the country’s biggest grocery chains. Apple Pay may have represented about 1% of all Whole Foods transactions in the 17 days since Apple launched the service on Oct. 20, according to estimates from Mike Dudas, the former mobile commerce lead at Google, PayPal, and Braintree/Venmo. Dudas calculated his estimates off Whole Foods statistics sourced from SEC filings, company statements and various news reports. If accurate, Apple should be very pleased with these numbers. Again, Apple Pay is only available on the latest update of iOS — iOS 8.1 — and the service is only available for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus devices. Yet despite these limitations, customers have completed over 150,000 transactions over a 17-day span, according to Whole Foods’ CIO. That’s impressive. SEE ALSO: Apple Pay: 1 Million Cards Down, 599 Million To Go SEE ALSO: Apple Is Becoming An E-commerce Beast Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Here's The Real Reason Why Beyonce Doesn't Tweet | ||
| ||
Beyonce hasn't tweeted since August of 2013, but that hasn't stopped her fans from following the account, hoping she'll break her silence. Unfortunately, it's time to give up on that hope, Beyonce's team says, because there's a real reason the star isn't a fan of the social platform. Musically.com interviewed Lauren Wirtzer-Seawood, the woman who handles digital strategy for Beyonce's company: Parkwood Entertainment. Wirtzer-Seawood gave musically the scoop on how Beyonce feels about all social networks, and why she's ditched Twitter for other mediums. “Currently, we don’t use Twitter at all. It is a personal choice. I think as an artist, Beyoncé really prefers to communicate in images. It’s very hard to say what you want to say in 140 characters,” said Wirtzer-Seawood. So Instagram? Facebook? What does the star (and her team) prefer? Wirtzer-Seawood says Beyonce loves Instagram, and you can bet that most of the time, Queen Bey herself is the one posting the shots. And as far as social media pet peeves go, Beyonce won't join a social network just to leave it behind when the platform gets stale. Musically.com reports Wirtzer-Seawood says that, Beyoncé is a bit of a fringe case, and it’s not the same for all artists, celebrities or brands. But I find it really frustrating and annoying to see when somebody launches something new, whether it’s a new Facebook account or a new Snapchat account, and they do it for a period of time, then they go away for six months. It’s frustrating as a fan. I want to make sure if we use them, we use them well, and we use them strategically and we continue to fill the channel for a long time. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Here's How To Be One Of The First To Play The New Game From The Makers Of 'World Of Warcraft' | ||
| ||
At its BlizzCon conference on Friday, Blizzard — the developer behind some of the biggest game franchises ever, including "World Of Warcraft," "Diablo," and "StarCraft" — announced "Overwatch," its first new franchise in 17 years. The game will come out "sooner than you think," the company says, but a beta version will be available next year. Blizzard describes the game as a team-based multiplayer shooter. It features a bunch of stylized characters who all have a variety of looks and skills. During a panel for the game, director Jeff Kaplan Chris Metzen, Blizzard senior vice president of story and franchise development, said that they're not sure yet whether it will be a free or pay-to-play model, GameSpot reports. And whether the game comes to other consoles is also still up in the air. Right now it's just confirmed for PC. "We would love to see Overwatch played on whatever it could be played on," Kaplan said. So if you're a PC user and you're interested in signing up for the beta, it's really easy. First, go to the official page for "Overwatch." At the top of the page, click on the yellow button that says "Beta." You then have to enter your Battle.net account, or create one if you don't have one already. Once you're signed in, click on the "sign up for beta" button. And that's it. It's not a guarantee that you'll be invited to play the beta, but it's worth a shot. SEE ALSO: Watch The Trailer For Blizzard's New Game Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Police investigating S.Africa president over home spending | ||
| ||
Johannesburg (AFP) - South African police are investigating President Jacob Zuma over a $23 million taxpayer-funded refurbishment project at his rural homestead, according to parliamentary papers. In a written police response to lawmakers, published Monday, police confirmed that an investigation into spending at Zuma's Nkandla home "has been initiated."
Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
10 Things You Need To Know Before European Markets Open | ||
| ||
Good morning! Here's what you need to know. Chinese Inflation Is At A 5-Year Low. China's annual consumer inflation remained at a near 5-year low in October at 1.6%. South Korea And China May Have A Trade Deal. South Korea said it has "effectively" reached a free trade agreement with China that will remove or sharply reduce barriers to trade and investment between the two global trade giants. An Overwhelming Number Of Catalans Voted For Independence. Nearly 81% of 2.25 million Catalans who participated in a simulated referendum Sunday said they wanted autonomy from Spain, according to preliminary results. Russia Signed Another Big Gas Deal With China. The Russian and Chinese governments have signed another significant gas deal, after an earlier agreement this year, according to the Financial Times. Heavy Shelling Picked Up Again In East Ukraine. Shelling around the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk increased strains on a two-month-old ceasefire between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists on Sunday. Samsung Is About To Invest $3 Billion (£1.89 Billion) In Vietnam. A subsidiary of South Korea's Samsung will be awarded a license to invest $3 billion in a mobile phone plant in northern Vietnam, the second such facility in the country, a state-run newspaper said on Monday. American Airlines Staff Rejected A Contract. American Airlines flight attendants narrowly rejected a joint labour contract on Sunday, in a defeat following the merger of American and the former US Airways last year. Panasonic Is Considering Expansion In Europe. Japanese electronics conglomerate Panasonic Corp is considering M&A deals as a way to bolster its position in the European white goods market, its chief executive said on Monday. European Investor Confidence Figures Are Coming. Sentix investor confidence figures are out at 9.30 a.m. GMT, with analysts expecting a modest improvement in November's headline figures. Hong Kong And Shanghai's Stock Exchanges Are About To Get A link. A delayed trading link between Hong Kong and Shanghai's stock exchanges will start on Nov. 17, the Hong Kong exchange announced Monday. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
The 10 Most Important Things In The World Right Now | ||
| ||
Good morning! Here's what you need to know for Monday. 1. More than 80% of Catalans voted in favour of independence in a symbolic referendum held Sunday, although Spain says it will not recognise the vote. 2. The Netherlands will hold a national memorial service on Monday to commemorate the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, less than four months after the plane was downed in eastern Ukraine. 3. Sunday marked 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. 4. World leaders are gathered in Beijing for this year's two-day Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. 5. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping met for formal talks for the first time at the Asia-Pacific conference, following two years of tensions over disputed islands in the East China Sea. 6. Rurik Jutting, the British banker accused of killing two women in Hong Kong, had his case adjourned for two weeks while he undergoes psychiatric tests. 7. Tensions in rebel-held regions of eastern Ukraine reached their highest point this weekend since the early September truce, amid Kiev claims that Moscow has stepped up supplies of weaponry and fighters to pro-Russian separatists. 8. Russia and China have signed a gas deal that will increase the supply of gas from western Siberia to China. 9. Remembrance Day services were held across the United Kingdom on Sunday, with this year marking the 100th anniversary since the start of World War I. 10. Three expedition members of the International Space Station returned to Earth on Sunday after spending almost six months in space. And finally ... Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Hair transplants: Pakistan's new weapon of mass seduction | ||
| ||
Peshawar (Pakistan) (AFP) - Mohammad Shahid's eyes lit up when he saw his once bald cousin come home one day with a head full of hair and a strutting gait to match. A handsome but follically-challenged young man, he decided the time was ripe to restore his honour, battered by years of taunts that follow the barren-headed and the beardless in Pakistan. In the northwestern city of Peshawar, home to underground Taliban hideouts and a gateway for trade to Afghanistan, men go about their business in the crowded dusty streets, their faces covered by bushy black beards that would make Captain Haddock proud. The city's roads are filled with giant billboards of celebrities once bald but now all smiles. They extol the virtues of manhood restored surgically with a few well-placed tufts of hair. "When I saw my cousin return from his procedure, I was in shock. I said to myself: I have to have it too," said the thirtysomething excitedly as he prepared to have the procedure at a local hair transplant clinic. "Hair is like our weapon against society." In Pakistan, hair is synonymous with virility to the point that even some Taliban fighters buy ointments to give their long locks and beards a lustrous finish. Woe to those without: they are labelled "ganjas", a deeply derogatory term. "Here, calling someone a 'ganja' is a stigma but over there (in the West), saying 'bald' is not that bad," explained Dr Humayun Mohmand, one of the first doctors to offer the treatment in Pakistan. - The 'Nawaz effect' - Mohmand opened his practice in the early 2000s, but transplants, done under local anaesthetic, did not take off immediately. The breakthrough moment came at the end of 2007, when Nawaz Sharif, who was balding when he was deposed as prime minister by General Pervez Musharraf eight years earlier, returned from exile with a full head of hair. "After the hair transplant... by Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif (his brother, the chief minister of Punjab province) this has become very popular," said doctor Fawad Aamir at his Peshawar clinic, among a group of patients seeking new manes. "(Before) they were very afraid of this, that something is going to happen, that cancer will develop, that infection will lead to the brain." Among them was the son of Farid Khan Khattak, a big man who fills the room with hearty laughter. "My son had some kind of inferiority complex because he had some gaps in his hair," he said. "One of my friends told me that instead of a hair transplant I should buy a motorbike for my son. But my son insisted: 'Instead of a motorbike I want a transplant', so it's for his happiness." Since 2006, Mohmand has conducted 8,000 operations compared with 1,000 during the previous five years. In Pakistan's conservative society where arranged marriages remain the norm, surgeons recall the anguish of patients whose engagements have been scuppered by baldness. "One of my clients had lost a lot of hair and two or three marriage proposals did not mature," said the doctor of a female patient. "After that, she came to give me the invitation to her wedding. That day, she had tears in her eyes. She said, 'You are the person who has made my life'." - Hair tourism - Today, there are nearly 120 hair transplant clinics in Pakistan, according to official figures, with a dozen in Peshawar. The operation generally costs from $400-$1,000, with some top clinics charging up to $6,000 -- a fraction of what it costs in the West, but still well out of reach for most Pakistanis. Many clients come from abroad, in particular the Pakistani-Afghan diaspora who come to see their friends and family -- and return more hirsute. Maihan, a cook from Denmark, finds himself in one such clinic in Peshawar. The young Afghan knows that the shaven-headed Bruce Willis look isn't displeasing to the fairer sex in the West. "In Europe, in Canada, in Australia and in the United States, the girls don't care, but here guys must have long hair," he said. Hairless heads aren't the only worry. Doctor Asif Shah says he has also performed a number of beard transplants on patients keen to show their piety with a healthy growth. Fawad Aamir recalls with pleasure the visit of a Taliban commander's son who had grown frustrated with his patchy beard while fellow Islamist rebels proudly sported bushy specimens. "A doctor tried to convince the man that 'you don't grow beard because this is the beard given to you by God'," he said. "And he said 'No, I want to have this like Mohammed, peace be upon him.' "So we went ahead and six months later he had a very big beard and he was very happy." Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
McIlroy wins Race to Dubai, Scott aims for revenge | ||
| ||
Shanghai (AFP) - Adam Scott has called on Australian Open organisers to let him go head-to-head against Rory McIlroy, who secured the European Tour's Race to Dubai title without swinging a club. Second-ranked Scott finished tied 12th in the HSBC-WGC Champions in Shanghai on Sunday, and said after that he would love to be paired with McIlroy in Sydney for at least the first two days of the event, which begins on November 27. Masters champion Scott had led McIlroy by a shot going down the final fairway in the 2013 Australian Open, but stunned his fervent home fans at Royal Sydney by missing the green with his second shot and making a bogey, while McIlroy stroked home a 15-foot putt for a birdie and victory. "It annoyed me for a little while," Scott told reporters at Sheshan International Golf Club. "To mess up on the very last hole of the last of the four tournaments I played back home last year was very, very frustrating." Scott is desperate to atone and would relish the chance to stare down his great rival in a straight duel. "I believe the organisers should take advantage and put Rory and myself together because it does happen occasionally at US Opens where they pair the players according to their rankings. "It's not often we have the world number one and number two ranked players in the same tournament in Australia and it would be fun to do, and I would certainly enjoy that." The Northern Irishman is assured of finishing top golfer in Europe for the second time in three years, despite skipping both lucrative "Final Series" events in Shanghai over the past two weeks. McIlroy's next appearance, following pulling out of Shanghai to prepare for his upcoming court case against his former management company, will be at the season-ending DP World Tour Championship in Dubai, which begins on November 20. The world number one will then fly to Sydney, Australia to defend his Australian Open title that he snatched so dramatically from Scott a year ago. American Bubba Watson's victory in the WGC-HSBC Champions at Sheshan Sunday, following German Marcel Siem's victory across the city a week earlier at the BMW Masters at Lake Malaren, means McIlroy cannot now be caught with two events left. PGA Tour golfer of the year McIlroy, with the British Open, US PGA Championship, the WGC-Bridgestone title and the European PGA Championship tucked under his belt in 2014, has amassed 5,400,700 points at the top of the 2014 European rankings. His nearest rival in the Race to Dubai standings is Ryder Cup teammate Jamie Donaldson. But he is 2,950,000 points behind McIlroy having finished tied 24th at Sheshan, and cannot now catch him. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
'Triple revenge' in mind for France ahead of Wallabies rugby Test | ||
| ||
Marseille (AFP) - France have "triple revenge" in mind ahead of Saturday's international Test against Australia. Philippe Saint-Andre's team suffered three straight defeats by the Wallabies on their June tour Down Under, and two of those were humiliating. Either side of a dour 6-0 reverse in Melbourne, France were thumped 50-23 in Brisbane and 39-13 in Sydney. "We have to take a triple revenge," said Saint-Andre on Sunday, a day after Les Bleus cruised to a 40-15 success over Fiji in Marseille while Australia triumphed 33-28 in Cardiff for their 10th successive victory over Wales. "What struck me was the third Test (in June) where we collapsed too quickly. That's unacceptable when you represent a country, a history, an identity." Saint-Andre knows his side will have to stand up to the Wallabies in individual battles at the Stade de France in Paris. "Yesterday (Saturday) they won a lot of turnovers. They have individuals who are capable of winning one-on-one duels." As for his own side, Saint-Andre says there is much to work on from the Fiji match, despite running in five tries, including a hat-trick from debutant wing Teddy Thomas. "We know we still have work to do. We conceded two tries from defensive mistakes and we could have been a bit more patient close to the line. "But at least there was enthusiasm, desire, a team that was lively and enjoyed playing." The result ensured France did not suffer a fifth straight defeat for the first time since 1982 -- they had lost their final Six Nations clash 22-20 at home to Ireland in March before the June tour. But Saint-Andre is wary of his side switching off. "We're French, every time we don't move things very much, we fall asleep." Still, the coach was enjoying a rare success since taking over the reins three years ago -- it was only the 12th France win in 30 matches on his watch. And he even found the chance to mock those who have criticised him for constant tinkering. He aligned scrum-half Sebastien Tillous-Borde with fly-half Camille Lopez for his 13th different half-back pairing in those 30 matches. Yet they both played well and combined expertly. "Apparently it was the 13th (pairing), maybe there will be a 14th or 15th," said Saint-Andre defiantly. Finally he turned his attention to Racing-Metro's Thomas, who is likely to be given another outing against the Wallabies despite being partially at fault for Fiji's first try after a weak attempt at a tackle. "Already he has qualities that you can't buy in the supermarket -- he runs fast, he wins his duels and he scores tries," said Saint-Andre, who was also impressed with the debuts of South African born Scott Spedding and Alexandre Dumoulin. "For (Spedding's) first cap it was a quality performance, just as with Dumoulin, who was more than interesting." Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Hong Kong court orders psychiatric reports on UK banker | ||
| ||
Hong Kong (AFP) - A British banker charged with the grisly murders of two women had his case adjourned by a Hong Kong court on Monday for two weeks of psychiatric reports. Rurik Jutting, a 29-year-old securities trader who until recently worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is accused of killing two young Indonesian women whose mutilated bodies were found at his upmarket apartment in the southern Chinese city. The case was "adjourned... for two psychiatric reports on the defendant's fitness to plead", said principal magistrate Bina Chainrai. Jutting, who was in court Monday, will be remanded in custody and will next appear on November 24, Chainrai said. Bearded and wearing black-rimmed glasses, Jutting remained impassive during the brief hearing at Hong Kong's Eastern Magistrate's court -- his second appearance after being charged with the murders a week ago. He spoke only once to say: "I do" when the magistrate asked him whether he understood the arrangements. Prosecutor Louise Wong told the court that a reconstruction of the crime "has not yet been conducted because the defendant did not give consent". Defence lawyer Tim Parker said that Jutting had not agreed to a reconstruction "yet" -- but may do in future. Parker also applied to obtain video recordings of interviews police had conducted with Jutting. The bodies of Seneng Mujiasih and Sumarti Ningsih, both Indonesian and in their 20s, were discovered after Jutting called police to his flat in the city's Wanchai neighbourhood in the early hours of November 1. Seneng was found naked in the living room, with knife wounds to her neck and buttocks. Sumarti's decaying body was found hours later by police, stuffed into a suitcase on the apartment's balcony. According to court documents, she was killed days earlier, on October 27. Police are investigating whether the victims were sex workers. Wanchai is known for its late-night drinking holes popular with expatriate revellers, and is home to a thriving red light district. High-flyer Jutting was a pupil at the exclusive English boarding school Winchester College before studying history and law at Cambridge University. On October 27 he posted on his Facebook page that he was embarking on a "new journey". "Stepping down from the ledge. Burden lifted; new journey begins. Scared and anxious but also excited. The first step is always the hardest," he wrote. On that same date, his licence from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority for dealing in and advising on securities was cancelled, according to its website. Jutting's three licences for dealing in securities and futures contracts with the city's Securities and Futures Commission also ended on October 28, according to its website. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Rising China, geopolitical tensions take stage at APEC | ||
| ||
Beijing (AFP) - World leaders including Barack Obama arrived in Beijing Monday for an Asia-Pacific summit hosted by China's Xi Jinping and including Russia's Vladimir Putin, against a backdrop of growing big-power rivalries. Obama arrives wounded by the Democrats' defeat in the mid-term US elections and with US-Russian relations in the deep freeze, while Moscow warms to an increasingly assertive China. The gathering is the biggest event yet hosted by the Chinese president, who took office last year and who spotlighted his country's expanding world profile Sunday by declaring a bright future ahead for the vibrant Pacific Rim -- with a confident China at its heart. The annual two-day summit of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) countries is a rare chance for such a wide range of top leaders to be in the same room, and the typical pledges of amity and trade convergence are often balanced by tense sideline exchanges on festering geopolitical problems. Beijing and Tokyo's historically frosty relations are at their lowest point in decades over competing claims to Japanese-controlled islets in the East China Sea that have raised the spectre of armed clashes. But the world's second- and third-largest economies announced a four-point accord Friday to improve ties, fuelling speculation that Xi and his counterpart Shinzo Abe could meet in Beijing in the first top-level encounter in nearly three years. Obama flew in Monday morning, at a time when Russia is under Western economic sanctions over its seizure of the Crimea and role in a separatist war in eastern Ukraine. No Obama-Putin meeting is known to be scheduled, but Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has vowed to confront the Russian strongman over Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was brought down over eastern Ukraine in July, with 38 Australians among the 298 dead. The West has accused pro-Russian rebels of blasting it out of the sky with a missile and Moscow of impeding investigations. Russia denies the accusations.
- Big-power rivalry -
APEC brings into focus a broader big-power rivalry involving Washington, Beijing and Moscow. Russia and China both regularly express impatience with a perceived US domination of world affairs and often move in tandem on the UN Security Council, vetoing or abstaining from US-led initiatives. Putin and Xi met Sunday in Beijing, with the Chinese leader warmly calling for the once bitter Cold War rivals to continue to "harvest" the fruits of their friendship. "No matter the changes on the global arena, we should stick to the chosen path to expand and strengthen our comprehensive mutually fruitful cooperation," Xi said. Putin said their cooperation was "very important for keeping the world within the framework of international law". China and the United States already have jousted in Beijing over differing visions of how to achieve Asia-Pacific trade integration, adding to persistent discord over commerce, human rights, cyber-espionage, and territorial disputes. The White House has said it expects "candid and in-depth conversations" between Obama and Xi, who are due to have several meetings. As well as the row with Japan -- a US security ally Washington is bound by treaty to defend if attacked -- Beijing's growing assertiveness in the South China Sea has also rankled rival claimants to parts of the strategic waters. Another likely discussion topic between Xi and Obama is North Korea, following the surprise weekend release of two Americans who were imprisoned by the secretive state. Beijing is Pyongyang's closest ally, and the prisoner release could fuel speculation the sabre-rattling North may be willing to resume international, China-chaired talks on its nuclear programme. It should be all smiles, however, when the APEC leaders gather Monday for a "family photo", when they typically wear the host's national dress. The event culminates Tuesday with a formal leaders' summit. APEC kicks off a week of high-level summitry that will see Obama and other top leaders travel next to Myanmar to attend the East Asia Summit, followed by G20 talks in Brisbane, Australia. China is hosting APEC for the first time since 2001, when it was still re-emerging as a world economic power. But in a speech Sunday, Xi underlined how much has changed by offering his vision of an "Asia-Pacific dream", in which China's continued rise offers "infinite promise" to all. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Migratory birds, fish and mammals get new UN protection | ||
| ||
Quito (AFP) - Polar bears, whales, sharks and gazelles were among 31 new species granted new protection status by the UN conservation body, following six days of "intense" talks by leading conservationists. The UN Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) said on Sunday that six days of "intense negotiations" led to new protection for scores of bird, fish and mammal migratory species. A record 21 species of shark, ray and sawfish were added to the list. The polar bear, which is found in the Arctic, and the widely-distributed Cuvier's beaked whale made the list too. Also newly protected are the red-fronted gazelle, common in Africa, and the great bustard, found in Europe and Asia. Protecting these animals is key for overall environmental conservation. "Migratory animals have become the global flagships for many of the pressing issues of our time," said CMS executive secretary Bradnee Chambers. "From plastic pollution in our oceans, to the effects of climate change, to poaching and over-exploitation, the threats migratory animals face will eventually affect us all." More than 900 experts from 120 countries met for the six-day meeting, approving all but one proposed species to be included on the protected wildlife list. The African lion did not make the final cut because there was not enough information from the countries where it lives. The conference was the best-attended in the body's 35-year history, and CMS hailed the "unprecedented" level of attention to the topic. The director of the UN Environment Program, which administers CMS, said global interest in animal protection was crucial. "The responsibility for protecting wildlife is a shared one, and that the threats to wildlife can be tackled most effectively through global cooperation," said UN Undersecretary-General Achim Steiner, who heads the UNEP. The next CMS meeting will be held in the Philippines in 2017. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Mexico leader travels amid unrest over massacre | ||
| ||
Mexico City (AFP) - Mexico's president has left on a six-day trip to China and Australia amid angry protests over the suspected massacre of 43 college students by a gang allied with corrupt police. Angry protesters tried to break into Mexico City's National Palace late Saturday, while others torched several trucks in the southern state of Guerrero, where the students vanished in September. Thousands of people marched in the capital over a case that has repulsed the nation and triggered the biggest crisis of President Enrique Pena Nieto's administration. The protests came a day after authorities said suspected Guerreros Unidos gang hitmen confessed to receiving the students from local police, killing them, incinerating their bodies and dumping them in a river in Guerrero. Authorities said they are still waiting for DNA results to confirm the identities of the remains. But the apparent mass murder has shattered Pena Nieto's attempts to move Mexico's narrative away from years of drug violence and toward the economic reforms that have earned him international praise.
- President defends trip -
Despite the unrest, Pena Nieto left for China to attend an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit before a two-day state visit in the country, with which he has sought closer ties. He will then travel to Brisbane, Australia, for a G20 summit before returning Saturday. Pena Nieto used a layover in Alaska to defend the trip, telling reporters it would be "irresponsible" for him to miss summits that are important for Mexico. A new controversy emerged during his travels, as the news website Aristegui Noticias reported that his wife had bought a luxurious home owned by a Mexican firm linked to a Chinese-led consortium that had won a bullet train contract. Pena Nieto abruptly canceled the contract Thursday after the opposition questioned the transparency of the bidding process, in which the Chinese-Mexican group led by China Railway Construction Corp. was the only bidder. Pena Nieto's office said in a statement that his wife, former soap opera star Angelica Rivera, had purchased the home on her own. Aristegui Noticias valued the property at $7 million. Amnesty International has charged that the trip "shows the lack of interest in confronting the grave human rights situation in Mexico." "It's a joke. It shows his lack of moral courage, playing with the feelings and dignity of 43 students," said Juan Gonzalez, a student from their Ayotzinapa teacher-training college in Guerrero. Gang-linked police shot at busloads of students in the Guerrero city of Iguala on September 26, in a night of violence that left six people dead. The police then handed the 43 abducted students to the Guerreros Unidos. Prosecutors say the city's mayor, worried that the students would interrupt a speech by his wife, had ordered the police to confront them. They are among 74 people, including police and gangsters, detained in the investigation. The suspected mass murder would rank among the worst massacres in a drug war that has killed more than 80,000 people and left 22,000 others missing since 2006. The students had traveled to Iguala to raise funds but hijacked four buses to return home, a common practice among the young men known for their radical leftwing politics. Parents of the students, who deeply distrust the government, refuse to believe the authorities until they get DNA results from independent Argentine forensic experts.
- Pena Nieto slams protests -
Anger over the suspected massacre boiled over Saturday, with hundreds of students in Guerrero's capital Chilpancingo torching several trucks and throwing firebombs at the state headquarters. In Mexico City, a small group of 20 struck the door of the 16th century National Palace with metal barricades and briefly set it on fire with firebombs. Police reclaimed control of the door and detained 14 people. Pena Nieto, who uses the palace for ceremonies and lives in another official residence elsewhere in the mega-city, said it was "unacceptable for someone to use this tragedy to justify violence."
Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Hong Kong, Shanghai stock link to start November 17 | ||
| ||
Hong Kong (AFP) - A delayed trading link between Hong Kong and Shanghai's stock exchanges will start on November 17, the Hong Kong exchange announced Monday. The bourse connection -- which is expected to allow the equivalent of US$3.8 billion a day in cross-border transactions -- had originally been slated for last month, but was unexpectedly delayed as pro-democracy protesters continued to shut down sections of Hong Kong. The link-up is seen as a key step towards greater financial liberalisation in the world's second largest economy. "The SFC and the CSRC jointly announced today that the launch of Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect on 17 November 2014 (the 'launch date') has been approved," said a statement issued by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) early Monday. The SFC is Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), and the CSRC is the China Securities Regulatory Commission. The joint scheme is expected to see volumes on both exchanges rise significantly, particularly Shanghai, but it is subject to strict limits in order to preserve capital controls in China, where Communist authorities keep a tight grip on the yuan currency. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
A Huge Actor Has A Surprise Cameo In 'Interstellar' | ||
| ||
Warning: Huge spoilers for "Interstellar" follow. Director Christopher Nolan's films are known for being shroud in secrecy. You usually know very little about the plot even after the first trailers are revealed and sometimes a few big names pop up in unexpected roles. So it should come as little shock that a huge actor makes a surprise appearance in "Interstellar." In fact, he's been hiding in the trailers and no one has even realized it. Last chance to head back before spoilers. Around the two hour mark in "Interstellar," Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway's characters, in search of a habitable planet to save mankind, land on a foreign planet covered in ice where another astronaut, Dr. Mann, has been stranded for an undetermined amount of time. Up until this point, viewers know little about the mysterious Dr. Mann other than he's a supposedly brave astronaut who set off on a similar mission in the past. When Cooper and Brand come across Mann, he's sealed in a cryogenic hibernation pod. As they awaken him, you have a feeling it's about to be a huge actor reveal. Sitting up, staring us straight in the face is Matt Damon. What?? This won’t be a surprise to everyone. The Playlist reported back in summer 2013 that Damon joined the cast in a small, secret role; however, no one really made a big deal out of it. Damon's role is so secretive that he isn't mentioned anywhere in Paramount's lengthy production notes for the film handed out to press at screenings. In fact, he's listed as an uncredited actor in the film. It's surprising more people haven't been discussing it online yet, because if you've steered clear of trailers and news, you'll be genuinely shocked. It's surely one thing people will be talking about after seeing the film. The best part? Damon's been staring at us in the trailers. Sort of. There are at least two instances of his character I've managed to spot after going back and re-watching the trailers. Here on the icy planet you can spot four astronauts. There's McConaughey and Hathaway's characters, along with another astronaut played by David Gyasi. If memory serves correct, Damon is in the lead as he shows off the planet to the others. In another more prominent scene that stands out in multiple trailers, you can see his figure as he reacts to an explosion. I won't give too much more away about Damon's role, but I will say there is a scene where Damon and McConaughey fight in their astronaut suits and for some reason all I could think was that two of People magazine's former Sexiest Men Alive were having it out. It wasn't too long ago that Matt Damon was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, starring in everything from "Invictus" and "Informant!" to "True Grit." Now, McConaughey has sort of taken that crown from him during an age that has been coined the McConnaissance, so to watch the two duel it out in a battle royale of sorts is kind of fitting. Of course, I'm sure this isn't what Nolan intended. But now you’re going to think about it, too. I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see more of Damon in marketing after the film's nationwide release in theaters this Friday, Nov. 7. SEE ALSO: Our review of "Interstellar" AND: Why you won't see "Interstellar" or any other Christopher Nolan movie in 3D Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
80 pct of participants in Catalan poll back independence: early results | ||
| ||
Barcelona (AFP) - The vast majority of participants, 80.7 percent, in a symbolic independence referendum in Spain's northeastern region of Catalonia on Sunday voted in favour of independence, according to partial official results. Of the 2,043,226 ballots counted so far, 1,649,239 agreed that Catalania was a state and that they wanted it to be an independent state, Catalan vice president Joana Ortega told a news conference. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
81% Of Catalans Vote For Independence From Spain In Symbolic Referendum | ||
| ||
Nearly 81% of 2.25 million Catalans who participated in a simulated referendum Sunday said they wanted autonomy from Spain, according to preliminary results cited by the Financial Times and other news outlets. Catalan Vice President Joana Ortega announced the results of the vote on Monday morning at 12:30 a.m. with just over 88% of the returns in from polling stations, according to the Spain Report. 80.72% of Catalans voted yes-yes to a two-part question asking if they wanted Catalonia to be a state and if they wanted that state to be autonomous. However, anti-independence groups in Catalonia — a region with 7.5 million people that includes Spain's second-largest city, Barcelona — largely boycotted the referendum, according to the FT. Therefore, the results were obviously skewed towards independence. Before the results were announced, Catalan President Artur Mas had this to say, according to the Spain Report: “We want a definitive vote. Today we have become stronger as a country. We have taken a huge step forward.” “We have made it very clear that Catalonia wants to govern itself. We want to decide our political future and we have demonstrated that.” Catalans have wanted independence from Spain for quite some time, but this was the first time they voted on it, according to the Los Angeles Times. A lot of Catalans suffered after Spain's civil war of 1936-1939 and, in more recent years, wealthy Catalans resented subsidizing the poorer regions of the country, according to the Times. The so-called consultation of citizens on Sunday came after the central government blocked a more formal ballot, NBC News reported. Pro-independence groups have campaigned heavily even though the vote was merely symbolic. In fact, these grassroots groups actually had to set up the ballot themselves because of the central government's refusal to recognize it, Reuters reported. Rafael Catala, the Justice Minister for Spain, has accused Catalonia's leader of organizing "an act of pure political propoganda, with no democratic validity. A sterile and useless event," according to Reuters. For their part, pro-independence groups hope the Catalans' turnout will persuade Madrid to allow an official referendum in the future, according to NBC News. SEE ALSO: What You Need To Know About The Catalonia Independence Vote Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
He Put His Finance PhD On Hold To Become A Marine | ||
| ||
As an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps during the US troop surge and the "Anbar Awakening," Marine captain Wesley Gray had a first-hand view of some of the most important events of the American campaign in Iraq. He trained the country's nascent armed forces, learned Arabic, and witnessed the Sunni tribes' turn against Al Qaeda during the most crucial moment of the US mission. But Gray, who comes from a small town in northern California, took an untraditional path to the military. He said he always planned on becoming a soldier: "My whole life I always knew I wanted to do my service," he says. "It was just the mater of the timing of it." He ended up joining the armed forces at an unlikely point in life, two years into a competitive and intense finance PhD program at the University of Chicago. "I was kind of thinking, it's not like my opportunity costs are going to get any lower," he recalls. "If I'm ever going to actually do this I just have to go for it." He convinced his program advisor to grant him a four-year sabbatical, which is three years longer than what students are typically allowed. This was in 2004, when the campaign in Iraq was intensifying. Gray soon graduated towards the top of his Marine training class. He chose to become a "ground intelligence officer," basically an infantry soldier with intelligence duties and expertise — a "grunt with a map" in Marine parlance, according to Gray. He was entrusted with training and organizing Iraqi army personnel and was in the country at a time when the US began paying Sunni tribal leaders to join the fight against Al Qaeda: the "Anbar Awakening" that led to Al Qaeda in Iraq's defeat in the late 2000s. Gray left the Marines in 2008 and returned to his PhD program, somewhat to his professors' and classmates' surprise — "they didn't' think I would show up again" after his military career, Gray recalls. His experience in Iraq would end up having an unmistakable resonance in his post-military life and when attempting to launch Alpha Architect, a financial services startup that he says now manages $200 million in assets. Working with Iraqi soldiers and officials and applying his military and intelligence training in an active war zone gave Gray invaluable insights into human nature that he later brought to his business. "It was all about understanding the psychology of people and really trying to get through that," he says of his work in Iraq. "It meant realizing that everyone has cultural baggage and behavioral influences. You think everyone would be rational. But that's simply not the case." That realization applied to more than his Iraqi counterparts — it was crucial to being able to function in a war zone. "People are highly emotion-driven," he explains. "That's something you learn a lot about in the military and you learn to control that. When you're getting shot at you don't duck. You get up and shoot back when your emotion says to turn the other way." The military's honor and service-driven ethos also helped him hone his own unique sense of what he wanted his business to stand for. "We're trying to be more user-friendly and honorable than the traditional kind of dog-eat-dog Wall Street company," he says, explaining that his company is geared around investor education and publicly available research. "That's something that comes form being in the military. It's a humbling thing that translates over." Gray explains that in the Marines, the officers eat last — the leaders aren't in it for themselves, just by virtue of what the organization values. So Gray wanted to create a company distinguished through its transparency, a place that would buck the traditional "middle man"-like function of a typical financial firm. Right now, he has 10 full-time employees, including a recently hired ex-Marine captain. Since leaving the Marines, Gray has finished his PhD at Chicago, written a book about his experiences in Iraq, and taught at Drexel University before deciding to go into business. He says that veterans can successfully transition to civilian life so long as they're able to leverage their connections in the civilian world, especially among fellow ex-military personnel who are in a position to help them. "Just reach out to someone who's also a vet — who's already been successful and made that transition and learn from them," says Gray. SEE ALSO: How an American pilot survived a 6-on-1 dogfight during the Vietnam War Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Pinterest's Demographics Mean It Could Become The Next Monster Social Advertising Platform | ||
| ||
Pinterest, which has recently begun selling ads, is more unique than other social networks in terms of its audience makeup. Pinterest is far more popular among women than men, and unlike some of its competitors it is popular across age brackets (including Millennials, Gen Xers, and Boomers). Women are the decision makers in a majority of household spending decisions. Pinterest is also very focused around visual images and products. Those two factors, taken together, makes it ideal for brands and retailers. In a new report from BI Intelligence, we unpack data from over a dozen sources to understand how social media demographics are still shifting, including the migration of young users to photo-based social networking, including Pinterest. Access The Full Report And Its 20 Charts By Signing Up For A Free Trial >> Here are a few of the key takeaways on Pinterest's unique selling points from the BI Intelligence report:
The report is full of charts (over 20 charts) and data that can be downloaded and put to use. In full, the report:
For full access to all BI Intelligence reports, briefs, and downloadable charts on the digital media industry and social media audience data and demographics, sign up for a free trial. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Why Oracle Founder Larry Ellison NEEDS To Have The World's Greatest Competitive Team | ||
| ||
When Charlie Rose asked Oracle CTO and former CEO Larry Ellison last year why he had to win the America's Cup yacht race for the second time in a row, Ellison replied, "It's funny, because I realized after losing twice that my personality wouldn't allow me to quit while losing. And then after winning the America's Cup, I discovered my personality doesn't allow me to quit while winning! I don't smoke, but I do sail." Ellison didn't get into the boat alongside his US Team Oracle as he did in 2010, but as team sponsor and manager he led the team to its second victory in 2013. That second victory was actually one of the greatest comebacks in sports history, with Team Oracle USA winning eight races in a row to steal the victory from Team Emirates New Zealand. Ellison made it clear from the beginning that he expected his team to win. When Team Oracle's crew walked into their training compound each day, they had to pass the hull of Ellison's boat that won the 2010 America's Cup. They did cardio and weight training underneath the boat's sail.With the 35th America's Cup scheduled for sometime in 2017, Ellison has victory in his sights once again, proving that total domination of the sport of elite international yacht racing — from winning the America's Cup to pushing competitors to ditch sailboats for futuristic-looking, advanced vehicles — is a natural extension of his legendary drive to win at all costs. A Love Of The SeaEllison enrolled at a sailing course taught at the University of California shortly after he moved to the state in 1966 at the age of 22. At 25, he bought a 34-foot-long racing sloop, a single mast sailboat, according to About Sports. I don't smoke, but I do sail. Ellison didn't respond to our request for comment, but he's previously said that,"I was passionate about sailing and the idea of sailing ... the idyllic independence … traveling with the wind." He had to sell the boat after a few years because he became too busy building his company Software Development Laboratories, founded in 1977. SDL eventually adopted the name of its flagship Oracle product in 1982. Oracle went public in 1986, making Ellison $93 million from his 39% stake in the company. The popularity of Ellison's enterprise software company allowed him to grow his fortune exponentially. Today, Ellison is 70 years old and worth an estimated $48.7 billion, according to Forbes, making him the fifth richest man in the world. His fortune has allowed Ellison the chance to not only buy a Hawaiian island, fighter jet, Bugatti, and luxury yacht, but it also allowed him to get back into sailing. "Sayonara"In the 1990s, he bought a 78-foot racing sailboat he named Sayonara and started competing at a high level. Ellison's skills as a yachtsman and team leader shined, winning him five Maxi World Championships. But in 1998, Ellison skippered his boat through a race that was so traumatizing, he swore off open ocean races forever. He won that competition, too, but he told the Courier Mail that he didn't actually "win," but just happened to be the first to survive. That December, Sayonara and 114 other yacht teams entered the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race off the coast of Australia. A hurricane developed during the race, and only 44 boats made it to Hobart. Twenty-four boats were abandoned and 55 sailors rescued. Six sailors drowned. Ellison told the Courier Mail in 2008 that he's never forgotten the race. The storm's winds were so powerful that Sayonara was practically flying — but not in a good way. "After what was a beautiful day on Sydney Harbour the wind got more intense and the skies slowly, slowly darkened and I remember after 12 hours we were further ahead than the record holder was in 24 hours," Ellison said. His brush with death may have gotten him to swear off races on the open ocean, but he was far from ending his love of sailing. In Pursuit Of The CupEllison's next sailing objective was to win the America's Cup, a yacht race founded in 1851, which generally takes place every three or four years. He put together Team Oracle in 2003 and partnered with BMW the next year. In both '03 and '07, Ellison's team lost in the America's Cup qualifying competition, the Louis Vuitton Cup, reaching the finals the first time and the semi-finals the second. Things got complicated in 2010 leading up to the 33rd America's Cup, but Ellison's tenacity brought him victory. Because Louis Vuitton temporarily ended its affiliation with the America’s Cup for the 2010 race, reigning champion Alinghi from Switzerland could choose its challenger. It selected a Spanish club that was determined by a judge to be fraudulent — a new team created solely for the purpose of keeping the Swiss victorious and having Alinghi agree to keep the race, and its tax revenue, in Valencia. Ellison was the first in the yacht racing community to file a lawsuit against Alinghi, and after a long and complicated court battle, it was determined that BMW Oracle Racing would be Alinghi’s official competitor in the America’s Cup in a special best out of only three races. Ellison, in the role of afterguard, led BMW Oracle Racing to two straight wins. As the challenger, Ellison now had the power to determine where the 34th America's Cup would be held and what boats were going to be used, and by the end of 2010 BMW stopped sponsoring the team, giving Ellison full control. Ellison decided that the races would be held in the San Francisco Bay, and that instead of a traditional catamaran, the teams would compete in AC72s, which look more like Michael Bay's Transformers than a sailboat. Ellison acted as principal backer and visionary for the team rather than an actual sailor, since these 72-foot-long beasts with 13-story-tall, 3,000-pound wings require elite athletes to operate. The boats require five "grinders" in charge of rapidly operating pulleys, and all 11 sailors need to run and jump across a trampoline-like net from side to side of the boat according to where the wind is blowing. The AC72s reach speeds of nearly 50 mph (compared to closer to 15 mph) and appear to fly over the water. In his 2013 interview with Charlie Rose, Ellison explained that it was all part of his initiative to revolutionize the sport. "We've got to modernize it. It can't be unchanged since 1851," he said, adding that it will not only keep it exciting but keep it relevant to a younger generation. We've got to modernize [the sport]. It can't be unchanged since 1851. Not everyone was convinced. Critics in the sailing community pointed out that a challenger would need to spend $100 million to compete, a price they considered overblown. And in a training accident in the Bay, Swedish team Artemis member Andrew Simpson died when one of the boats capsized. And then Team Oracle got caught using illegal modifications to their smaller AC45 models they used in the preliminary competition, America's Cup World Series. Two sailors were banned from the America's Cup and Team Oracle started the best of 17 series with negative two points. The Need To WinBy the end of the Cup, it was hard to notice the controversy preceding it because Team Oracle USA's win over Team Emirates New Zealand was so incredible. At the start of the twelfth race, Oracle was down 8-1, putting Team Emirates one win away from humiliating Ellison's team on his own turf. And then they won eight races in a row, putting them down in history as achieving one of the greatest comebacks in all of sports. It is notable that Team Oracle's tactician for races 6-19 was British Olympian Sir Ben Ainslie, the winningest Olympic sailor of all time. The Telegraph's Tom Cary noted that since it's a team sport, it's impossible to measure just how much of an impact Ainslie's expertise had on the team, but it's no denying that his "absolutely ruthless" approach played a major role in the comeback. "All 11 guys on the boat believed we could do it," skipper Jimmy Spithill told an America's Cup reporter. "We just wanted it. We knew we could pull it off." After the win, Ellison hopped on a powerboat and met the team on its ship. "Do you guys know what you just did? You just won the America's Cup!" he told the team, the Wall Street Journal reports. Today the team is preparing for the 2017 America's Cup, which will be cheaper for entrants and will use the more manageable and affordable AC62s. After stepping down as Oracle CEO in mid-September, Ellison as CTO has been more focused on developing and marketing Oracle's cloud computing services. But when the America's Cup rolls around, his winning addiction will kick into overdrive and his sights will be set on winning race after race — plain and simple. NOW WATCH: Business Insider's Christina Sterbenz spends an intense weekend sailing around lower Manhattan:
SEE ALSO: Why Hot-Air Ballooning Is Richard Branson's Favorite Way To Travel Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
This Map Shows How Climate Change Will Screw The Whole World | ||
| ||
Some effects of climate change are obvious, such as warming temperatures, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels. But other impacts are more surprising. For example, climate change effects can harm food production and cause famines; alter habitats and cause mass die-offs of plants, animals and other organisms; and even threaten human health. The biggest climate-related risks vary across different regions of the world. The handy chart below, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last Sunday, shows which regions should worry most about which issues. Each graph shows risks for the present day (the top bar in the graphs), the near future (2030-2040), and the more distant future (2080-2100) under two conditions: one for a temperature increase of only 2 degrees Celsius (which it looks like we will blow out of that water) and the the bottom bar with an increase of 4C. The symbols represent the risks, which include changes in terrestrial and marine ecosystems, food production, snow and ice cover, and human health. The longer the bar on the graph, the bigger the risk. The chart shows that all regions face increasing risks to human health and livelihood. Additionally, each region has its own challenges: North America, for instance, will deal with an increase in both floods and wildfires, while Africa faces threats to its food production and water resources. In every region, the risks are projected to become more severe as time goes on. The chart was published as part of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change, which presents and interprets the latest climate science from researchers all over the world. The report notes that these climate effects will have social implications as well: "Climate change impacts are expected to exacerbate poverty in most developing countries and create new poverty pockets in countries with increasing inequality, in both developed and developing countries," the authors write. As the report shows, almost no facet of human life will remain untouched by climate change. The projections show us a world in which increases in extreme weather, changing land- and seascapes, disease, famine, and poverty may compose a new normal for Planet Earth. SEE ALSO: 25 Devastating Effects Of Climate Change SEE ALSO: These 10 Charts Will Show You The Danger Of Climate Change Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Federer sees off Raonic in Tour Finals opener | ||
| ||
London (AFP) - Roger Federer opened his challenge for a seventh ATP Tour Finals crown in dominant fashion with a 6-1, 7-6 (7/0) victory over Canada's Milos Raonic on Sunday. Federer last won the prestigious season-ending event at London's O2 Arena in 2011, and the world number two looks in the mood to add another title to his collection on the evidence of a powerful performance, featuring 24 winners, that avenged his loss to Raonic in the Paris Masters quarter-finals last month. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Astronomers Caught This Amazing Stellar Pulse With The Hubble Telescope | ||
| ||
Illuminate the universe and you'll see more beauty than you could ever imagine. That's exactly what a cosmic phenomenon, called a light echo, does. This Hubble image to the right was taken in February, 2004 and is a consequence of the revealing power of the light echo. This isn't just a pretty image, though. It's one of many that the Hubble has caught that actually teaches us something new about how our universe works. We think it's one of the most stunning scientific images we've seen from the telescope because astronomers had to wait nearly two years for it. That's because before 2002, the only thing we could see in this region was a supergiant star. But in January 2002, the star, located 20,000 light years from Earth, gave off a blindingly bright pulse of light. For the brief period of time the pulse lasted, the star was the most luminous star in our galaxy, shining at 600,000 times brighter than our sun. The star eventually faded, but the light it emitted continued to travel outward, illuminating the star's surrounding nebula, as shown in the animation below. Between May 2002 to February 2004, Hubble snapped five images of the star, shown below. With each succeeding image, Hubble gave us a more beautiful look into this nebulous cocoon. What we see if the result of starlight propagating through space and then reflecting off the nebula's gas and dust, just like sounds bounces off of walls in a cave creating an echo-effect. Some of that reflected light heads toward Earth and was detected by Hubble. Below is a gorgeous simulation showing the full, gradual progression of the most stunning light echo we've ever witnessed. SEE MORE: 16 Stunning Hubble Images Reveal The Secrets Of The Universe READ MORE: Here's The Crazy Physics You Need To Know To Understand 'Interstellar' Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Saints Game-Winning Touchdown Gets Called Back Because Of A Flop | ||
| ||
The San Francisco 49ers and the New Orleans Saints were tied 24-24 at the end of the fourth quarter when Drew Brees tossed a game-winning touchdown pass with no time left on the clock to Jimmy Graham. But the refs called offensive pass interference on Graham, the touchdown didn't count, and the game was forced into overtime. Here's the play. Graham does give a little push off of 49ers' Perrish Cox, but something like this, Graham barely touched him, usually is not called as interference. Cox did some great acting though, and fell to the ground, he must be watching soccer. San Francisco went on to win 27-24 in overtime. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Here's Your Complete Preview Of This Week's Big Economic Events | ||
| ||
The October jobs report was good. Payrolls are increasing, the unemployment rate is falling, and the labor force participation rate is inching higher. America is currently experiencing its longest streak of job gains since the 1930s. This comes as the stock market hits all-time highs. Tuesday's election result saw the Republicans take control of Congress. The good news for investors is that the stock market has a long track record of rallying after midterm elections. In fact, the last time the GOP took control of Congress with a Democrat in the White House, we experienced one of the best bull runs in history. Of course, that's just history. Here's your Monday Scouting Report: Top Stories
Economic Calendar
Market Commentary The S&P 500 closed at an all-time high on Friday. Most of Wall Street's equity strategists are comfortable telling clients that stocks will continue to go much higher from here. However, fund manager John Hussman isn't so sanguine. "[R]ight now, we've got stocks valued at a point where we estimate the 10 year prospective return on the S&P 500 will be about 1.6 to 1.7% annualized — talking right now with the S&P 500 at 2032 as of today’s close," Hussman said in an interview with Peak Prosperity's Chris Martenson. Martenson noted that Hussman's assumptions would imply that the stock market is overvalued by 100%. "100%, yes," Hussman said. "I actually think the case is a little bit harsher than that; in fact, quite a bit harsher than that." For more insight about the middle market, visit mid-marketpulse.com. SEE ALSO: Wall Street's Brightest Minds Reveal The Most Important Charts In The World Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Magnus Carlsen Crushes His Challenger In Game 2 Of The World Chess Championship | ||
| ||
At the World Chess Championship, Magnus Carlsen won Game 2 on Sunday — and he did it in convincing fashion. For Vishy Anand, the challenger, the loss is a flashback to his nightmare last year, when unsteady play doomed him in 10 games. The loss was also a huge missed opportunity. I don't want to get you bogged down in the technical and theoretical aspects of general opening concepts for Game 2; you can read my recap of Game 1, which lays out the basics and as it turns out, predicted some of the action in Game 2. The Berlin Wall! Playing white, Magnus opened with e4, moving the pawn in front of his king two spaces forward. Anand countered with e5, Carlsen attacked Anand's pawn by moving his knight to f3, Anand defended by moving his knight to c6, and then Magnus put his light-squared bishop on b5. This opening, called the Ruy Lopez or "Spanish" game, is one of premier weapons in the arsenal of modern Grandmasters. The idea is that white can attack the defending knight on c6, weakening black's pawn on e5. If white captures the knight, black will recapture with a pawn, two minor pieces will have come off the board, and white will be better long-term because black has "doubled" pawns on the c-file — a disadvantage. The game for white is then to trade off all the pieces — bishops, knights, rooks, queens — and exploit that weakness in the endgame, hours later. Although there are other choices, as we'll see. Anand could have attacked the bishop by moving his a-pawn one space, a maneuver known as the "Morphy Defense," after the great 19th-century American player Paul Morphy. This demands that white make an immediate decision, to capture the knight or retreat the bishop. Personally, I like this move as black in the Ruy Lopez — I don't like to fool around with the bishop threat. Instead, Anand did what Grandmasters now routinely do against the Ruy Lopez: he played his second knight to f6 and set up the Berlin Defense, which I outlined after Game 1. At the top level of chess, the "Berlin Wall" is considered an excellent drawing opening for black against the Ruy Lopez. That said, Anand lost a game in the Berlin in 2013, and now he's lost another one. Carlsen basically destroyed Anand's attempt to keep the match level through Game 2 with a second draw. And he did it with dynamic, attacking chess as Anand showed no ability to stop the charge. A lot of people think Magnus is a boring player who just likes to get to tough endgames and grind his opponents down. But with this beautiful Ruy Lopez refutation of the Berlin, he looked like Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest Spanish game players who ever lived. Even though Anand made mistakes and helped Carlsen out, this is one of those games that will be studied by GMs who want to rehabilitate 1. e4 and break the Berlin's imposing reputation — its lock, really, on top-tier competition. Attack As Black? So let's back up. After Game 1, I said Anand needed to go for wins with white and black. The five-time World Champion isn't going to listen to me and shouldn't, but honestly I think he blew a golden opportunity, after Carlsen played 1. e4, to announce that he wasn't going to go for safe draws as black but was instead going to aim for an early lead. Anand is 44 and Carlsen is 23. Anand needs to front-run to have any chance in this rematch. Now, with a 12-game match and Carlsen already up a full point, Anand has to come up with something impressive. Rather than setting up the Berlin, Anand could have played 1….c5 and brought to bear the most popular winning response to white's 1. e4: the Sicilian Defense. Anand lost and lost badly in the Berlin when he was clearly aiming for a draw. He could have lost in the Sicilian, but at least he would have gone down swinging, and besides, he likes to play one of the coolest variations of the Sicilian in GM play, the Najdorf, named for Miguel Najdorf, who was a top player in the mid-20th century. If you want to learn more about these openings, which are ancient and hugely complex, you can check out various online videos and opening-explorers at websites like Chess.com. The Bottom Line All you need to know for the purposes of the WCC this year is that Anand made a very conservative decision in Game 2 and Carlsen punished him for it. Anand's judgment might have made sense if he were the title holder, but he's the challenger and on paper, still the better attacking player. Okay, maybe he had a match strategy that said he should get through a few games with draws and then try for wins with white, only rolling out the more aggressive openings as black if he got into trouble. But that was his strategy in 2013 and it blew up in his face: by the time he finally got around to playing the Sicilian, it was Game 10 and he had to win. What's great about the Sicilian is that black creates straightaway an unbalanced position on the board and can turn the game into a race of attack versus attack, with both white and black having to attack and defend at more or less the same time. My son plays junior chess and loves it because it freaks out 1. e4 players, of which there are many at his level. Heck, it freaks me out — I have a very hard time getting used to the "asymmetrical" look of 1. e4 c5 on the board. Anyway, after Game 1, Anand looked very resourceful, his mind focused, playing great chess when he needed it. In Game 2, he looked like he was afraid to win, opting for defensive moves when he could have messed with Carlsen's plan. Game 2 Recap There were really three critical moments in the game, which lasted 35 moves and was over before the end of the first two-hour time control. The first came when Carlsen showed right away that he was planning to attack Anand and attack hard with pretty much everything he had: Carlsen moved his rook from the a1 square to the a3 square, with the goal of bringing it across the board and into the assault on Anand's castled king. There was nothing subtle about this — it was cave-man chess. Carlsen was saying, "I'm going to mass my army on the right side of the board, pulverize your barricade, and checkmate your king." He is a Viking, after all. In this case, he was acting like Thor plus the Hulk, hammering and smashing. Anand couldn't stop Carlsen from doing this but at the very least he should have noticed a obvious effort to bust the Berlin Defense by brute force. The second came when Carlsen offered to trade his second knight for Anand's bishop and Anand passed on the opportunity. GM Peter Svidler, commenting for the official broadcast, questioned this decision...and didn't question it: he said that he would have immediately taken the knight, but when Anand didn't, he suggested that Anand's idea was to make Carlsen prove that there was checkmate in the position. As it turned out, a few hours later, Carlsen did prove that. The third was really more a catastrophe than a critical moment: Carlsen was able to line up his queen and both of his rooks on the same file. This is not what anyone playing black wants to see. It's like staring down the barrel of a howitzer and is very psychologically unnerving even if it doesn't lead to a win. The board belonged to white. Anand wasn't doing anything, the Berlin Wall — which is supposed to make white expend himself by trying to crash through granite — was falling, and Vishy's only real counter-attacking options hinged on trading queens and one of his rooks to arrive at what would be very hard endgame with only rooks and pawns. Carlsen broke through by putting a rook on e7, and when he got his queen to b7 after what the major-league chess analysts are calling a massive blunder by Anand, it was crushing and Anand resigned.
It Ain't Over Til It's Over Anand has to be in agony now. He hasn't beaten Carlsen for some time and has lost twice to him in what's supposed to be the most impervious defense for black in GM chess. He went for a draw, misplayed it, and was sort of embarrassed. Maybe more than sort of. On the plus side, we certainly haven't seen any boring Grandmaster draws in this match so far! Game 1 was the very definition of a fighting draw, and in Game 2 Carlsen continued to prove that with a big enough stick or if you aren't intimidated, the Berlin can be broken. So looking forward to Game 3, Anand is going to have to do something aggressive with the white pieces to get back into the match. It wouldn't surprise me if we see something wild, perhaps even a King's Gambit, which can lead to swashbuckling games almost never seen at the GM level these days. And if Anand plays the Berlin again as black, I'll be shocked. Bring on the Sicilian! You can watch the replay of Game 2 at the official site here. And you can replay the game at ChessBase, with terrific commentary by GM Alejandro Ramirez.
SEE ALSO: Magnus Carlsen Is In Great Shape After Game 1 Of The World Chess Championship Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Spain dismisses Catalan independence vote as 'useless' | ||
| ||
Madrid (AFP) - Spainish Justice Minister Rafael Catala dismissed a symbolic independence referendum held Sunday in Catalonia in which some two million people voted as "fruitless and useless". "It is not democratically valid," he added in the first reaction by the central government since Catalan officials gave its latest turnout figures for the ballot which went ahead despite having been suspended by the Constitutional Court. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|
Parents of 43 Mexican students reject massacre claims | ||
| ||
Ayotzinapa (Mexico) (AFP) - They were told a gang had confessed to slaughtering their children and incinerating their bodies, but parents of the 43 missing Mexican students cling to slim hopes their sons met another fate. Spending most days at the teacher-training college the students attended in the southern state of Guerrero, the parents refuse to believe they are dead until DNA evidence proves otherwise. Authorities have warned it could take a while for experts to match DNA with the charcoal-like remains that were found in a river near the city of Iguala, where the students vanished six weeks ago. "What we heard hurt us a lot: That our sons were dissolved, that they burned them, and finally dumped them," said the mother of missing student Martin, who like many other parents refused to give her name. "But all we want is proof, not words," she said. Their insistence on scientific evidence from independent Argentine forensic experts highlights their deep distrust in authorities that have been accused of coercing confessions in the past. For weeks, relatives have demanded that the students be found, after police linked to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang attacked their buses in the city of Iguala on September 26.
- Anger boils over -
But Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam announced Friday that three gang suspects had given a gruesome account of how they disposed of the bodies. The gangsters told investigators that police handed them the students between the towns of Iguala and Cocula. They then took them to a landfill, killed them, burned their bodies in a funeral pyre for 14 hours and tossed bags of remains into a river. "It hurts to imagine that what they tell you is true," said the mother of a student named Antonio as he held her newborn baby alongside her husband. "One thinks, 'How did my son die? What did they do to him? How horrible! And it hurts. But in the end we know that they have considered them dead" since the investigation started, she said. The parents have been gathering at the teacher-training college in Ayotzinapa, near Guerrero's capital Chilpancingo, for more than a month. It was here that their sons harboured dreams of escaping a life of poverty to become teachers in rural towns where children grow up in families that only speak indigenous languages. The college, decorated with murals of communist icons Karl Marx and Che Guevara, is a breeding ground for leftist activism in one of Mexico's poorest and most violent states. Anger over the Iguala case boiled over again late Saturday, when hundreds of fellow students burned a dozen trucks and tossed firebombs at the state government headquarters. Parents voiced disappointment that President Enrique Pena Nieto pressed on with a trip to China on Sunday amid the crisis.
- 'We're very afraid' -
Back at the school, a ghostly calm reigns. An altar with candles was installed for the three students and three bystanders who died when Iguala police shot at the buses. Activists, neighbours and students organise food donated to the parents in the campus square. On Saturday, two students played guitar and sang the anthem of the Raul Isidro Burgos Normal Rural School. "Ayotzinapa always, always smiling/But it knows about pain," the 20-year-old students crooned. "We are sad, tired to see that we have exhausted all our options," said one of the young men, who declined to give his name. "What's the use of burning the state of Guerrero or the entire country if there's no response," he said. Prosecutors say police attacked the students on the mayor's orders over fears they would disrupt a speech by his wife. The students say they travelled to Iguala to raise funds but they hijacked four buses to move around -- a common practise among the radical aspiring teachers. While they wait for DNA results, relatives brace for the worst. "We are very afraid, scared that this is true. But for now we won't accept this until we get final results from our Argentine team," said Meliton Ortega, uncle of one of the students. Join the conversation about this story » | ||
|