Nexus 7 - Google ( Review, Price & Spec )

 

 

Nexus 7 - Made for what matters. 

The new 7" tablet from Google

Powerful, portable and made for what matters to you.

Now thinner, lighter, and faster - Nexus 7 brings you the perfect mix of power and portability and features the world’s sharpest 7" tablet screen - putting over 2.3 million pixels in the palm of your hand.
With 323 pixels packed into every inch, you can read text that’s sharper than the printed page, see images more vivid than the highest quality photo magazine, and watch videos come to life in vibrant 1080p HD.

Grab-and-go greatness.

Lighter than ever, lasts longer.

The clean, simple design features a slim body, a thin bezel and a soft-touch, matte back. So it sits comfortably in the palm of your hand while the bright, beautiful 7" display brings your entertainment to life.
At just 0.64lbs (290g), the all-new Nexus 7 is light enough to take anywhere and fits easily in purses, backpacks, and even back-pockets. With up to 9 hours of HD video playback and 10 hours of web browsing or e-reading, there's plenty of juice to get you through the day, and built-in wireless charging means you can charge, grab, and go. PRICE - from $229 . Read More...

One dead, Eleven hurt after car drives into crowd on LA boardwalk

LA boardwalk

 LOS ANGELES –  The driver of a car that struck 12 people on the Venice Beach boardwalk in California, killing one and hospitalizing nine others early Saturday evening, did so deliberately, according to witnesses.
One witness told CBS LA that the driver was "out for blood." Another estimated that the car was going 60 miles per hour. The car was still moving as it drove out of sight of first responders and the injured.
I was half a mile from the scene, but you could see just this mass of people trying to get out of the way," witness Daniel Regidor told the Los Angeles Times. "Just a lot of people screaming ... It was horrible.
A victim died at a hospital a few hours after the Saturday evening crash at the Venice Beach boardwalk, Los Angeles police Lt. Andy Neiman said.
Security video shows the man parking his black car alongside the seaside boardwalk as the sun sank, surveying the idyllic scene for several minutes before getting back into the car and speeding into the crowd. It shows hundreds of people walking lazily or sitting at cafes before the black car suddenly appears and sends them scrambling wildly.
Witnesses reported a horrifying aftermath.
"There was people kind of stumbling around, blood dripping down their legs looking confused not knowing what had happened, people screaming,"  said 35-year-old Louisa Hodge, who was out enjoying the day on the Venice Beach boardwalk with a friend visiting from San Diego. "It was blocks and blocks of people just strewn across the sidewalk."
Firefighters combed the chaotic crowd, finding 12 people wounded and taking 10 of them to the hospital where one later died, fire and police officials said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/04/12-hurt-after-car-drives-into-crowd-on-la-boardwalk/#ixzz2b0PRiY7G

George Clooney To Hedge Fund Honcho Daniel Loeb: Stop Spreading Fear At Sony

LONDON, ENGLAND : George Clooney attends the EE British Academy Film Awards at The Royal Opera House

EXCLUSIVE: George Clooney, who yesterday sent his Smokehouse Pictures partner Grant Heslov to Hollywood to show Sony and Fox a first cut of their Oscar-season period film The Monuments Men, has spent most of his career navigating the challenge of making provocative movies at studios obsessed with tentpoles. While he’s won Oscars — the latest the Best Picture prize he shared with Heslov and producer-director Ben Affleck for Argo — Clooney is also the guy who kept a photo of himself as Batman prominently displayed on his office wall, as a cautionary reminder of what can happen when you make movies solely for commercial reasons.

Working on post-production for his latest directing effort in Italy to ready for Sony’s December 18 release, Clooney spoke to me about his new movie and how it’s getting harder to make films like Monuments, Argo and the Smokehouse-produced August: Osage County. The discussion turned toward recent critical comments made by Third Point LLC hedge fund head Daniel Loeb and the pressure he is placing on Sony Pictures chiefs Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal, centered around the under-performing back to back summer films After Earth and White House Down. Loeb, whose fund controls 7% of Sony stock, is pressing for Sony to spin off its entertainment assets and likened those misfires to historic flops Waterworld and Ishtar. Though Clooney and Heslov base their Smokehouse Pictures banner at Sony, and Loeb’s influence is growing there, Clooney has never been shy about standing up to what he feels is wrong. So, buckle up.

Said Clooney: “I’ve been reading a lot about Daniel Loeb, a hedge fund guy who describes himself as an activist but who knows nothing about our business, and he is looking to take scalps at Sony because two movies in a row underperformed? When does the clock stop and start for him at Sony? Why didn’t he include Skyfall, the 007 movie that grossed a billion dollars, or Zero Dark Thirty or Django Unchained? And what about the rest of a year that includes Elysium, Captain Phillips, American Hustle and The Monuments Men? You can’t cherry pick a small time period and point to two films that didn’t do great. It makes me crazy. Fortunately, this business is run by people who understand that the movie business ebbs and flows and the good news is they are ignoring his calls to spin off the entertainment assets. How any hedge fund guy can call for responsibility is beyond me, because if you look at those guys, there is no conscience at work. It is a business that is only about creating wealth, where when they fail, they get bailed out and where nobody gets fired. A guy from a hedge fund entity is the single least qualified person to be making these kinds of judgments, and he is dangerous to our industry.”

Why is he dangerous?

“[Loeb] calls himself an activist investor, and I would call him a carpet bagger, and one who is trying to spread a climate of fear that pushes studios to want to make only tent poles,” Clooney said. “Films like Michael Clayton, Out of Sight, Good Night, And Good Luck, The Descendants and O, Brother Where Art Though?, none of these are movies studios are inclined to make. What he’s doing is scaring studios and pushing them to make decisions from a place of fear. Why is he buying stock like crazy if he’s so down on things? He’s trying to manipulate the market. I am no apologist for the studios, but these people know what they are doing. If you look at the industry track record, this business has made a lot of money. It creates a lot of jobs and is still one of the largest exporters in the world. To have this guy portraying it that Sony management is the bad stepchild and doesn’t know what it is doing and he’s going to fix it? That is like Walmart saying, let me fix your town, putting in their store, strangling all the small shops and getting everyone who worked in them to work for minimum wage with no health insurance.

“It’s crazy he has weight in this conversation at all,” Clooney continued. “If guys like this are given any weight because they’ve bought stock and suddenly feel they can tell us how to do our business — one he knows nothing about — this does great damage than trickles down. The board of directors starts saying, ‘Wait a minute. What guarantee do you have that this movie makes money?’ Well, there are no guarantees, but if you average out the films Will Smith and Channing Tatum have made, you will take that bet every time, even if sometimes it just doesn’t work out.” Clooney also said he believes that down the line both films have a chance to be a wash. Clooney was particularly sensitive on the subject of job creation.

“Hedge fund guys do not create jobs, and we do,” he said. “On the movie we just made, we put 300 people to work every day. I’m talking about nice, regular people, and when we shot in a town, we’d put another 300 people to work. This is an industry that thrives; there are thousands of workers who make films. You want to see what happens if outside forces start to scare the industry and studios just make tent poles out of fear? You will see a lot of crap coming out.”

Read more..

Review: '2 Guns' is a nice summer surprise

Review: '2 Guns'

 (EW) -- August has come to be regarded as a celluloid dumping ground.

It's where lesser summer movies are cast off and buried in a landfill of indifference. But it can also be a month of unexpected gems.

With the orgy of superhero tentpoles and shock-and-awe action spectaculars now safely behind us, we can finally turn the page, take a deep breath, and -- if we're lucky -- be pleasantly surprised.

I don't know if any movie starring two marquee heavyweights as consistently dependable as Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg can technically qualify as an under-the-radar stealth attack, but their new buddy crime caper, "2 Guns," caught me completely off guard in all the right ways.

Box office preview: Will 'The Smurfs 2' beat 'The Wolverine' and Mark Wahlberg?

Washington and Wahlberg, two actors who can take themselves a bit too seriously at times, cut loose and seem to be having a blast swapping below-the-belt insults as a pair of undercover agents posing as drug dealers. Their assignment: Nab a south-of-the-border cocaine kingpin played by Edward James Olmos.

The catch: Each is working for a different government agency and thinks his partner is a real-deal trafficker.

Washington plays Bobby Trench, a deep-cover DEA agent decked out with blingy gold incisors, a salt-and-pepper goatee and an interchangeable array of ring-a-ding-ding Rat Pack hats. Wahlberg is Marcus ''Stig'' Stigman, a Navy Intelligence officer with a winking, cool-cat cockiness and a knack for cracking wise at exactly the wrong time.

After a series of double crosses, the guys — each still trying to stick to his cover story as a criminal — plot to knock over a sleepy New Mexico bank. But the vault holds way more cash than it should. Without giving away too many of the film's byzantine plot twists, let's just say they soon figure out that neither one is who he says he is. So they're forced to team up (for real this time) to find out who framed them and why.

Back and forth they go across the U.S.-Mexico border, squaring off with their bureaucratic superiors (Paula Patton and James Marsden), Olmos' posse of seedy henchmen, and, best of all, Bill Paxton as a beady-eyed, bolo-tie-wearing sadist.

'2 Guns': Bill Paxton explains how he became one of summer's best scene-stealers

Goosed along by a pulpy Elmore Leonard vibe, "2 Guns" is essentially a B-movie classed up by its two A-list stars. Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, who previously put Wahlberg through his underworld paces in last year's "Contraband," seems to be out to turn "2 Guns" into a sort of throwback to the sin-soaked Southwest noirs.

 Read More .

Moto X - A Google phone

Moto X - A Google phone

 Motorola. A Google company. It's time to commit that to memory. With the Moto X, a 4.7-inch phone going on sale later this summer for $199 on contract, the company has officially started the shot clock for the "new Motorola"; this is the first Moto product designed from scratch with Google's direct oversight. And it shows, from the packaging to the messaging to the features aimed at mainstream users. Most importantly of all, there's Moto X's standout feature: personalization. We've been hearing for years from various OEMs that smartphones are a personal statement, a reflection of the individual, but aside from the occasional color option, the wallpaper and case have been the only real opportunities for personal expression. Well, you can kiss those days goodbye. Motorola's keyed in to a core part of the user experience -- self-styling -- and we expect its rivals to follow suit.
But all of that backstory can wait. We need to talk about the Moto X. The company never explicitly said so when it showed us the phone behind closed doors today, but this is clearly a mainstream phone (it's geared towards the "majority of users" several execs told us). To that point, its spec sheet and feature list (Touchless Control, Active Display, Quick Capture) won't dazzle the technorati. And, from what we can tell, it's not supposed to. To hear the company tell it, the Moto X's journey began one year ago with a whiteboard listing all of the most common user problems, ways to address those issues and a plan to get the device into as many hands as possible. You won't be able to assess that for yourself until the phone launches on AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint and US Cellular later this summer. For now, though, if our initial hands-on time is any indication, it appears Motorola's succeeded.
The Moto X's curved shell, reminiscent of some other phones we've seen (e.g., the HTC 8X, Droid DNA) was chosen for the way it conforms to the palm of the hand. The same emphasis on comfort applies to the 4.7-inch screen size, which takes up nearly 70 percent of the front face (of note: Motorola didn't apply its "edge-to-edge" marketing lingo here). Why settle on that 4.7-inch size and not something larger or smaller? Simple: it's the sweet spot users want, or so intense focus testing seemed to indicate.
There's no 1080p panel, either. The Moto X employs a 720p AMOLED display, a choice primarily made to help the 2,200mAh battery live up to its promise of 24-hour battery life. Besides, most users won't notice any appreciable difference between this and a full HD panel; viewing angles are great and colors pop. As for imaging, there's a 10-megapixel Clear Pixel (RGBC) rear module capable of pulling in 75 percent more light for faster daytime exposure and low-light performance. It's also bolstered by the Quick Capture feature, enabled from sleep by a double twist of the wrist, which allows for a sub-two-second shot-to-shot speed. As for autofocus and exposure, those are handled automatically.
 Read More..

Best Blogging Platform 2013- ENV2 Empower Network

 

Best Blogging Platform 2013

I’ve been blogging since 2009.  Experts have always said that you should brand yourself, that you should build your own personal blog online.  Then, Empower Network comes out and they have their own done for you blog.  I was always a little bit torn, trying to decide if I should build the Empower Network blog or my own personal blog.  Now, with this launch from Empower Network, you are going to be able to do it all in one.
The features in Empower Network Version 2.0 blows WordPress out of the water!

 

 

Best Blogging Platform 2013 – ReBlog Feature

I do “done for you” content every day for The Prosperity Team.  Before, team members had to take my video, go to the URL, grab the embed code, go to their blog, click on the text section, paste the code in, click visual, type their blog out… it was difficult with WordPress.
With ENV2, a team member will see my video, click REBLOG and type their description.  A blog will be completed in less than three minutes with one little tiny click of a button.

 

Best Blogging Platform 2013 – Social Network Commenting Feature

The programmers pretty much created a social network inside of Empower Network.  When someone comments on your stuff, you can go look at their blog, Facebook, entire profile.  There are 100,000 customers and growing inside Empower Network, so we will be able to network from within with the commenting features of the best blogging platform 2013.

Read More..

Spacecraft Sees Giant Coronal Hole In the Sun (Video)

Spacecraft Sees Giant Coronal Hole In the Sun (Video)

 A space telescope aimed at the sun has spotted a gigantic hole in the solar atmosphere — a dark spot that covers nearly a quarter of our closest star, spewing solar material and gas into space.

The so-called coronal hole over the sun's north pole came into view between July 13 and 18 and was observed by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. NASA released a video of the sun hole as seen by the SOHO spacecraft, showing the region as a vast dark spot surrounded by solar activity.

Coronal holes are darker, cooler regions of the sun's atmosphere, or corona, containing little solar material. In these gaps, magnetic field lines whip out into the solar wind rather than looping back to the sun's surface. Coronal holes can affect space weather, as they send solar particles streaming off the sun about three times faster than the slower wind unleashed elsewhere from the sun's atmosphere, according to a description from NASA.
"While it’s unclear what causes coronal holes, they correlate to areas on the sun where magnetic fields soar up and away, failing to loop back down to the surface, as they do elsewhere," NASA's Karen Fox at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., explained in an image description.
These holes are not uncommon, but their frequency changes with the solar activity cycle. The sun is currently reaching its 11-year peak in activity, known as the solar maximum. Around the time of this peak, the sun's poles switch their magnetism. The number of coronal holes typically decreases leading up to the switch.
After the reversal, new coronal holes appear near the poles. Then as the sun approaches the solar minimum again, the holes creep closer to the equator, growing in both size and number, according to NASA. (Read More..)

What Made 'The Wolverine' Such a Disappointment?

'The Wolverine'

 Welcome to the Box Office Report, where we're betting some Fox executive is telling Hugh Jackman that he's "not mad at him, just disappointed," right this very second. 
1. The Wolverine (Fox): $55 million in 3,924 theaters 
So, oof. Let's get the oof out of the way quickly. Hugh Jackman returning to the role that made him famous was supposed to draw a lot more money than $55 million. It's his fifth time in the role (not counting his cameo in First Class) and the expectations were closer to the $70 million range, after X-Men Origins earned $89 million in its opening weekend. But a number of thing contributed to this disappointment. The first Wolverine movie was terrible: Origins received a 38 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The hype around this Wolverine project was that it was better than the last one -- Darren Aronofsky was originally attached to direct -- except reviews said it was only a marginal improvement.
But executives and analysts are pointing to simple audience fatigue to explain away the numbers. "There have been times before when audience fatigue from the summer sets in," a Fox executive told Nikki Finke. Buzzfeed's Adam Vary says it's not the heat that's tiring people out, it's the super heroes: "Granted, most non-superhero movies would be thrilled with an opening weekend that good," he writes. "But nonetheless, it plays into the ongoing narrative that Hollywood’s dependency on mega-budgeted films based on Comic-Con-friendly source material is starting to go bad." 
The last two summers have brought an onslaught of super hero movies that have practically waged a civil war at the box office, and audiences are realizing they're not obligated to see every single one. And when budgets are rising each year, the lower turnouts should scare film executives to maybe think twice when authorizing another $150 million dud. 
2. The Conjuring (Warner Bros.): $22.1 million in 3,022 theaters [Week 2]
Does this mean we're not going to get the requisite end-of-summer horror movie that comes every year? If they start the summer blockbuster season early, does it end early too? 
3. Despicable Me 2 (Universal): $16 million in 3,476 theaters [Week 4]
Having trouble believing there are still kids left who haven't seen this movie.
4. Turbo (Fox): $13.3 million in 3,809 theaters [Week 2]
The snail racer continues to profit from kids who already saw Despicable Me 2 but didn't want to go to the park this week. 
5. Grown Ups 2 (Sony): $11.5 million in 3,258 theaters [Week 3]

( Read More..)