Jabba the Hutt, the slug-like crime lord from the Star Wars saga, has inspired the latest parody of Maroon 5′schart-topping “Moves Like Jagger.” The lyrics for the new spoof — titled “Moves Like Jabba” — poke fun at the fictional character’s unfavorable eating habits and enormous size. For example:
“No Jedi mind tricks can control him / The force bounces off his double chin / With them moves like Jabba / He’s got big boobs like Jabba / I gotta moooooooove like Jabba.”
Other Star Wars characters have recently made their way into several viral videos, including Darth Vader and a pair of Stormtroopers in a Disneyland commercial and a mini Darth Vader in Volkswagen’s Super Bowl ad.
Smartphones and tablets — particularly the iPad — are becoming an increasingly significant source of web traffic in the U.S.
According to web analytics firm comScore, smartphones and tablets accounted for 6.8% of all web traffic in the U.S. in August.
Approximately two-thirds of that 6.8% came from mobile phones, while the remaining third came from tablet devices. The iPad dominated the latter category, accounting for 97.2% of tablet traffic.
The iPad is driving more web traffic than the iPhone, accounting for 46.8% of all traffic originating from iOSdevices in August, compared to the iPhone’s 42.6% share. iOS’s total share of U.S. mobile web traffic in August was 58.5%.
Tablet ownership continues to be prevalent among young, wealthy males. ComScore found that 54.7% of tablet owners using the web in August were male, and nearly a third were between ages 25 and 34. Almost half were members of households that earned more than $100,000 per year.
And what are tablet owners using their devices for? Nearly 60% are accessing social networking sites and consuming news on their devices. Approximately 25% are reading news on those devices on a near-daily basis.
Shopping is also a popular pastime. In August, 56% of tablet owners looked up product or price information from a specific store, and 54% read customer ratings and reviews. Nearly half of tablet owners actually completed a purchase on the device.
comScore cites the growing availability of Wi-Fi and mobile broadband adoption as the two primary drivers of increased traffic from mobile and tablet devices in the U.S. More than a third of mobile phone traffic in August occurred over a Wi-Fi network, up 3% from the previous three months. Ninety percent of tablet browsing was done on Wi-Fi.
comScore estimates that 116 million U.S. residents use mobile media — that is, those who browse the web, access apps or download content using mobile devices — up nearly a fifth from the previous year.
Allaying any doubts that the iPhone 4S will be a big seller, Apple announced pre-orders for the new model topped 1 million in 24 hours, which breaks the previous single-day record of 600,000 for the iPhone 4.
In a press release posted on Apple.com — the company’s first public statement since Steve Jobs’s death — Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said he was “blown away” by the consumer response to the iPhone 4S.
Apple began taking pre-orders on the phone Friday, three days after the company introduced it in a press conference and two days after Jobs died. The iPhone 4S will go on sale in the U.S. at 8 a.m. local time on Friday, Oct. 14. The phone comes in black and white and will be available for a suggested retail price of $199 for the 16 GB model, $299 for the 32 GB version and $399 for the 64 GB model.
The strong pre-orders come after some, who expected an iPhone 5, were underwhelmed by Apple’s iPhone 4S announcement. However, Apple’s deviation from its usual iPhone shipping schedule — new phones have been announced every summer since 2007 until now — has created pent-up demand for the device.
The most important new feature of the iPhone 4S is Siri, a voice-controlled “Intelligent Assistant” that can complete tasks based on natural language. Ask it what the weather is like today and it will respond with details.
Bill Gates, who during his long career at Microsoft was both a partner and rival Steve Jobs, called working with Job “an incredibly high honor,” and said he would miss the founder of Apple “incredible” .
Shortly after the announcement of the death of Jobs, Bill Gates issued a statement to AllThingsD, offering their condolences to the families and friends and praising the employment impact of Employment.
The couple appeared together in a joint interview at D5 memorable in 2007, in which each praised the achievements of others, and I remember very well about his long career.
Asked what the biggest misconception about their relationship was, Jobs joked that it was the fact that the two had kept their marriage a secret for so long. Then things got serious, with jobs to note how the two men – once the youngest men in the room – now they were old technology.
“And, you know, I think most things in life to be like Bob Dylan or a Beatles song, but only one line in the Beatles song” You and I have memories and the footpath ahead “,” Jobs said. “And it is certainly the case here.”
“We will be offering the benefit of our unlimited plans that start at just $69.99,” a Sprint spokeswoman told D‘s Ina Fried. And what do you get for your 70 smackers? 450 minutes of talk time, and all the data services you can consume. So get ready to fire up those YouTube videos, Netflix movies and that FarmVille app on your lunch break. (If you want unlimited calling as well, the package will cost you $99 a month.)
Naturally, this ups the ante for AT&T and Verizon — both of which used to offer unlimited data plans, but changed their minds once they saw just how much data iPhone users tend to consume. The Verizon iPhone launched in February with a $30-a-month unlimited data plan, but preorders had hardly begun when a policy change started throttling heavy iPhone users’ bandwidth.
Sprint was rumored to be offering the next iPhone with unlimited data last month, but this is the first time the company has confirmed it. Given that the company is making a huge bet on the iPhone, and that its rivals will still be selling the iPhone 4 as well (and AT&T will also offer the free 3GS with a two-year contract), this news is a much-needed leg-up on the competition.
Yesterday I arrived in Sydney, Australia for the National Achievers Congress featuring Anthony Robbins, Donald Trump & Robert Kiyosaki. I am looking forward to see their presentations and have been watching quite a few of their video clips with excitement for the 3 days ahead. For those of you who were unable to make it to the conference this time around I will be updating you all on the highlights of the conference.
In relation to this post I have decided to share my top 3 favourite Anthony Robbins, Donald Trump & Robert Kiyosaki videos.
Diana Nyad, the US long-distance swimmer, has ended an attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida after being stung overnight in the face and eyes by jellyfish, her team said.
Diana Nyad Photo: PA
She had spent the night in the shark-infested sea from Cuba to Florida earlier on Sunday, receiving treatment for jellyfish stings including one to the face.
Nyad was removed from the water for treatment, but because she was not out of the water to rest, an independent observer from the International Swim Federation said the endurance swimmer could continue her bid for a record.
Nyad failed on two previous bids, in 1978 and again last month, in her quest to swim across the treacherous Florida Straits from Havana to Key West, Florida.
Shoulder pain, asthma and ocean swells hobbled Nyad’s August attempt.
Facebook has been hit with a lawsuit over a trademark dispute surrounding the new Facebook Timeline profiles.
Timelines.com asserts that if Facebook is allowed to move forward with the launch of Timeline, it “will essentially eliminate Timelines.com” and cause mass confusion that Timelines.com is affiliated with Facebook.
Facebook Timeline, a feature that was unveiled last week and will be rolled out over the coming weeks, transforms the Facebook user profile into a virtual scrapbook that lays out your digital history.
Timelines.com, on the other hand, lets users view and create multimedia timelines for historical events such as the American Civil War or the rise of Apple, Inc. The five-year-old site partners with The Boston Globe and other media organizations in order to create timelines for different sports teams. It also happens to own the U.S. trademarks for “Timelines,” “Timelines.com” and “Timelines&design.”
Timelines.com alleges that Facebook’s launch of Timeline infringes upon its trademarks. Not only that, but the company alleges that the social network destroyed its Facebook Page (http://facebook.com/timelines) in favor of a redirect to an introduction page about Facebook’s new user profile pages. Timelines.com’s Page appeared to be working normally though as of Friday afternoon.
From the court complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for Chicago:
Facebook’s use of the term “Timeline,” and its redirection of Internet traffic from Timelines’ Facebook page to Facebook’s new “Timeline” offering, infringes on Timelines’ federally registered trademarks in that it causes confusion as to the source of the services offered to users of the Internet. Indeed, Facebook’s “Timeline” offering and its misdirection of users attempting to access Timelines’ offering is intended to prevent Internet users from accessing information about Timelines.com and to allow users to instead use Facebook’s “Timeline” offering.
Facebook has dealt with many lawsuits in its young life (many of them from the Winklevoss twins), but this one might present a challenge to the social network.
The New Facebook Profile: Timeline
Timeline is a radical departure from previous versions of the Facebook user profile. The most prominent feature is the addition of a cover photo at the top of the page. Users can change this to whatever they’d like it to be.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — NASCAR made no major changes to the 2012 Sprint Cup Series schedule aside from flipping a few race dates and moving the start of the season back one week.
The Daytona 500 opens the season Feb. 26, one week later than usual. NASCAR had to schedule 38 races over 40 weeks because of the later start to the season.
Kansas Speedway had its race moved from June to April to accommodate a plan to pave the track.
Talladega Superspeedway’s race in April was moved to May, and it’s October date was pushed up earlier in the month so Kansas had more time for its paving project.
The first race at Dover was moved back to May after a few years of running in June.
Because of when July 4 falls, Kentucky Speedway’s date was moved up to the week before Daytona instead of the week after.
NASCAR didn’t release the Nationwide or Truck schedules.
The biggest issue in our country today is jobs and unemployment. But the fact is that unemployment is unnecessary in our economy. As long as there are problems that need to be solved, and customer needs to be satisfied, there are always jobs for the creative minority, like you.
The fact is that some people are never unemployed. No matter what happens in the economy, they bounce back and have a new job within a couple of days, and sometimes two jobs plus a job on the weekend. In this message, I’m going to tell you what we need to do, and what the country needs to do to get everybody back to work again, back to those bad old days of 2005 when unemployment was at 4%.
First, let me give you three types of unemployment, and three things that anyone can do to get back into the workforce.
Three Types of Unemployment
The three types of unemployment are voluntary, involuntary, and frictional.
Frictional unemployment refers to the number of people who are between jobs at any given time, usually about 4 – 5% of the population. For whatever reason, they have finished one job and have not yet decided to start another.
The second type of unemployment is voluntary. This is where there are jobs available for people but these people refuse to take those jobs because they are holding out for higher pay, or the jobs require that they do work they don’t want to do, or the jobs are located far away from where they currently live.
It is absolutely amazing to me when I read about people who were laid off from $120,000 a year jobs, and have been unemployed for two years, but they are still “holding out” for a job paying them what they used to earn during the boom of five years ago.
The third type of unemployment is involuntary. This is caused when the government passes laws that make it difficult or illegal to hire people at salaries and wages that companies are prepared to pay. There are now thousands of regulations and restrictions on employers that increase the cost of hiring someone.
The Cost of Hiring
The true cost of an employee is three to six times their actual salary or wage. This extra amount includes benefits, social security, medical costs, supervision, facilities costs, vacations, training costs, and many, many more factors that are added on top of the basic salary.
Every time government passes a new piece of legislation in any one of these areas, it makes it harder and more expensive to hire someone for a particular job.
The Definition of a Job
And while we’re on the subject, what is a job, anyway?
A job is an opportunity for an individual to create value, to make a contribution to a company that is greatly in excess of what a person costs in salaries, wages, and benefits.
This means that each employee must contribute more than they cost. In simple economics, if an employee is not contributing substantially more than he or she costs, the company must let that person go, or not hire them in the first place, if the company wants to survive.
Again, referring to simple economics, companies continue to hire people as long as each new person contributes more than they cost. If sales decline and company revenues fall, the business has to lay people off in order to survive. It’s not personal.
When you go into the job market, you are selling your personal services for the very highest price and under the very best working conditions possible. When the employer goes into the job market, he wants to buy the very highest quality and quantity of services at the lowest price. Salaries and wages are set by competition in the open market. If you want to earn more money, you have to create more value. There is no other way, unless the government hands out money to pay for jobs that create little or no value.
Three Ways to Get a Job
There are three ways that anyone can get a job. The first is to lower the amount you are demanding for your work. In times of recession, depression, market declines and reductions in business activities, if you want to sell your services, you have to hold a clearance sale, just like any store. You have to quickly cut the prices of your product, your labor, if you want to find a customer.
It is amazing how many people think that their salary is determined by what they want to earn. No. Your salary is determined by what people can afford to pay you, which is based on the value of the contribution you are capable of making in the current market in comparison with everyone else who wants that same job. You are in an auction, but in this case, you have to offer the lowest possible price if you want to sell your product against fierce competition.
Do Something Different
The second way you can get a job is by offering to do something different. With the rapid rate of change today, the explosion in knowledge, technology and competition, many jobs have gone away, and are not coming back for years, if ever.
Move Somewhere Else
The third way you can get a job is by moving to a place where there are more jobs available for what you want to do. There are parts of the country that are doing well, like Texas, where companies are moving and there are lots of jobs available.
There are parts of the country where there is demand for your skills, but you will have to pack and go there if you want to work.
Because of these three ways to get a job, nobody has to be unemployed for very long. Much of the unemployment today is therefore voluntary.
