By Rosenthal, Gregg Charles Woodson said he wants to play for a contender, and what better team to join than the San Francisco 49ers? He’s scheduled to visit the Bay Area on Wednesday, according to his agent. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at NFL
Tag Archives: Bay Area
Ouya Announces Unveiling Event for March 28th
Less than a year after its blockbuster Kickstarter campaign, Android-based independent console company Ouya will reward its backers with a party on March 28th in San Francisco. It’s a momentous day for the company, as it will also begin shipping its first fleet of consoles to those very same backers.
The thank-you party will be held at the Bay Area offices of fuseproject, an industrial design and branding firm founded in 1999 by Ouya designer Yves Behar. The party (and first devices) are for backers only, but those who missed out on the chance to fund will be able to get their hands on an Ouya system in June. Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman said last month that consoles will hit the shelves at Target, Best Buy, Gamestop and other major retailers with a price tag of $99.99.
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Tech
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World DLC Out Now on PS3
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game was released as a retro-styled beat ‘em up in just about every sense, including a lack of online play. But that’s about to change, as new DLC has finally arrived on PlayStation 3 with a major addition: online multiplayer.
The $5 pack also brings Wallace Wells, Scott’s super chill roommate, as a playable character. He’s got his own set of moves and PSN trophies to unlock.
The DLC pack is out on PSN now, with Playstation Plus subscribers getting 20% off for the next two weeks.
Taylor Cocke is a Bay Area based freelance games writer. Listen to him spout about bands you don’t care about by following Taylor on Twitter @taylorcocke.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown Coming to Mac
Soon, having a non-Windows operating system won’t stop you from saving the world from invading aliens. XCOM: Enemy Unknown – Elite Edition will be coming to OS X soon.
The Elite Edition will come packed with all three bits of DLC, including the Slingshot pack, Elite Soldier pack, and the Second Wave update. Unfortunately, there’s no word on exactly when XCOM will be gracing your MacBook Pro.
Feral Interactive, the team porting over XCOM. is also responsible for the Mac versions of LEGO Lord of the Rings, Napoleon: Total War and SEGA Superstars Tennis.
Taylor Cocke is a Bay Area based freelance games writer. Listen to him spout about bands you don’t care about by following Taylor on Twitter @taylorcocke.
Umpqua Bank Opens Its Doors in San Jose
By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
Umpqua Bank Opens Its Doors in San Jose
Store is First of Two Bay Area Flagships to Open in 2013
PORTLAND, Ore.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Umpqua Bank, a subsidiary of Umpqua Holdings Corporation (NAS: UMPQ) , opens the doors to its latest flagship location today in San Jose, Calif., adding its high-touch community and business banking services to the downtown neighborhood.
The San Jose flagship, the first of two Bay Area stores set to open in 2013, features Umpqua’s innovative retail store design. Customers will be greeted at the 225 West Santa Clara location by Umpqua’s Discover Table, an interactive touchscreen featuring local events and details about the store’s products and services, as well as free wi-fi, and a reCharge Bar for visitor use and convenience. Like all Umpqua Bank stores, the San Jose flagship also features a phone with a direct line to the company’s CEO.
“San Jose is a global hub for innovative companies and ideas, and we’re pleased to add Umpqua’s unique form of banking to the region,” said Ray Davis, Umpqua Bank president and CEO. “The opening of this flagship location in San Jose, combined with our acquisition of Circle Bank last fall and upcoming San Francisco flagship store later this year, demonstrates our commitment to the area and we look forward to being an active member of the community.”
San Jose is Umpqua Bank‘s seventh store in the greater Bay Area, joining locations in Noe Valley, Novato, Corte Madera, Santa Rosa, San Rafael and Petaluma. The store will be open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday. In addition to the community bank on the first floor of the 225 West Santa Clara store, Umpqua Bank‘s commercial lending, home lending and business banking teams will also be located in the building, providing a full complement of banking services to consumers and businesses in San Jose.
About Umpqua Bank
Umpqua Bank, headquartered in Roseburg, Ore., is a subsidiary of Umpqua Holdings Corporation with locations between San Francisco and Seattle, along the Oregon and Northern California Coast, and in Central Oregon and Northern …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
The World's Trade Show for Startups
Startups are creatures of their environment. Like living organisms they depend heavily on the interactions of their environment for nourishment, growth and even survival. Clearly, not all environments are equal when it comes to growing things – We see deserts, grassy steppes, forests, oceans, etc. in the natural world, and intuitively know that some are richer and more diverse than others in terms of the organisms that they foster. Likewise, the urban and economic environments in which startups compete for resources (money, expertise, information, connections) are similarly varied. As I have written about extensively, Silicon Valley is the top environment on planet Earth for fostering startups: So if you find yourself wearing the shoes of a Startup founder, and you are not in the Bay Area, you are operating at a disadvantage from day one. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Matchbook Art: Joseph Martinez Paints Miniature Masterpieces On Tiny Canvases
By The Huffington Post News Editors
Artists seem to be downsizing these days, and not just because of the economy. We were recently amazed by Nikolai Aldunin’s miniscule sculptures, while Jason D’Aquino charmed us this past October with his matchbook sketches. Now we present the next contender to the tiny throne, Joseph Martinez.
The Colorado transplant paints labor-intensive scenes on the underside of matchbooks in a new exhibition in San Francisco titled, “A Little Piece of the Bay” — an homage to his Bay Area return. Scroll down to see a slideshow of Martinez’s incredible matchbook paintings, and let us know what you think of his micro-art in the comments.
Crews looks for 4 missing boaters, including 2 children, in waters south of San Francisco
The Coast Guard was searching the rough waters south of San Francisco late Sunday for four people, including two children under 8, who went missing after they reported their sailboat was sinking.
The group was approximately 65 miles off Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay around 4:20 p.m. Sunday when they made a distress call, Lt. Heather Lampert said.
The group said their 29-foot sailboat was taking on water and their electronics were failing. The bay about 25 miles south of San Francisco.
An hour later, the group reported that it was forced to abandon their boat. They didn’t have life rafts on board, Lampert said, and were trying to make one out of a cooler and life preserver ring.
Lampert said the Coast Guard then lost radio contact with the group.
The National Weather Service had issued an advisory throughout the weekend warning boaters of strong winds and rough seas around the Bay Area.
Mariners “operating smaller vessels should avoid navigating in these conditions,” the advisory said.
Lampert said Coast Guard crews have conducted several searches using a fleet of boats, helicopters and airplanes, but have not yet found signs of the group.
More searchers from the California Air National Guard, and Coast Guardsmen aboard a 210-foot cutter, were expected to join the search through the night.
Half Moon Bay is about 25 miles south of San Francisco.
Aspiring rapper in fiery Vegas crash sang haunting lyric
Kenny Cherry, an aspiring rapper who moved from the Bay Area to Las Vegas to pursue his music career, was killed early Thursday morning in a violent incident normally seen in movies.
Cherry, 27, was driving in his Maserati on the Vegas Strip when police say a shooter from a black Range Rover SUV peppered his car before it sped through a red light and smashed into a taxi, killing Michael Boldon, the taxi driver, and his passenger in the backseat.
The rapper would film online music videos on the Strip and post them online. In one song he raps, “One mistake change lives all in one night.”
In this case, three lives were cut shot.
Boldon, the taxi driver, was described as a family man who hailed from Michigan. His passenger, Sandra Sutton-Wasmund, came from a loving Washington state family and was well regarded in her community.
As investigators Saturday tried to find the gunman in a black Range Rover SUV who triggered the shocking chain of events, families and friends tried to grasp the blink-of-an-eye finality of it all.
“Right now my heart is breaking,” said Cherry’s great aunt, Patricia Sims, of Oakland, Calif. “This has really been a tragedy. Kenny was just a delightful kid.”
Sims, 75, said Cherry moved to Las Vegas from Northern California, though she didn’t know her nephew was a rapper using the name Kenny Clutch.
Cherry’s parents were traveling to Las Vegas on Friday to claim his body.
The taxi exploded into flames, killing Boldon and Sutton-Wasmund, as four other vehicles crashed like pinballs at an intersection overlooked by some of Las Vegas‘ most famous hotel-casinos: Bellagio, Caesars Palace, Bally’s and the Flamingo.
Police think an argument at the valet area of the upscale Aria resort-casino led to the shooting, but they haven’t shared details. The shooting happened the same night that Morocco-born rapper French Montana was playing at Aria’s signature nightclub, Haze.
“What the original disagreement was is crucial to the ongoing investigation and the identification of the suspects,” said Las Vegas police officer Bill Cassell.
He said investigators were examining surveillance video and enlisting help from federal authorities and agencies in neighboring states to look for the distinctive Range Rover. It had blackout windows and custom black rims and was last seen speeding away from the fiery scene around 4:30 a.m. Thursday.
Police said a passenger in the Maserati was wounded in the arm but was treated at a hospital and released. He was reported to be cooperating with investigators, and his name wasn’t made public.
Cherry’s father, Kenneth Cherry Sr., of Emeryville, Calif., said he was struggling to handle his grief.
He said his son started a music career in Oakland after attending two Catholic high schools. According to his father, Cherry was recognized by other rappers within a West Coast hip-hop strain called hyphy.
Cherry was not well-known in wider music circles, according to Chuck Creekmur, CEO of AllHipHop.com.
“I had never heard his name before,” Creekmur said.
Kenny Clutch‘s YouTube music video, “Stay Schemin,” shows scenes of hotels along the Strip as he sings about …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox US News
You Too Can Become a Jedi at Lightsaber School
For many Star Wars fans, it’s been a lifelong dream to wield a lightsaber and master the combat of a more civilized age. Now, thanks to one determined fan, you can make those dreams a reality.
Alain Bloch, a 32-year-old San Francisco-based software engineer and lifelong devotee of the epic space saga, came up with the idea to start his very own combat choreography school designed around the Jedi and Sith weapon.
“There are a lot of really awesome costuming groups in the Bay Area, but there was no one that was doing reenactments of the lightsaber battles that you find in movies, which I find to be some of the most exciting parts of them,” Bloch told Hero Complex in a recent interview. “So I went around and was actually looking for somebody who could possibly teach me how to do this sort of choreography.”
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Movies
Links 31 Jan: Facebook Announces Good Results, Stock Falls
By Tim Worstall, Contributor Facebook’s Q4 and 2012 results were announced yesterday. The actual announcement is here. “In 2012, we connected over a billion people and became a mobile company,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “We enter 2013 with good momentum and will continue to invest to achieve our mission and become a stronger, more valuable company.” Which is lovely of course. But what moves the share price is not what actually happened but what happened relative to what people thought would happen: As I told you this morning, the outlook was fairly optimistic — consensus expected a 34 percent boost in revenue from the previous quarter at around $1.525 billion, with an EPS of 15 cents. Facebook surpassed that revenue, coming in at $1.59 billion and an EPS of 17 cents per share. The street immediately proceeded to sell, trading down about four percent in after-hours. While sales and earnings were both up, so were expenses: R+D at $1.3bn was up by a factor of 3.6, which is huge. What does Facebook buy with its R+D money? It’s talent – this is almost certainly mostly compensation: salaries and share allocations. Share-based compensation expense in R+D jumped from $114mm to $843mm. They’ve doubtless got a lot more engineers, and they’re having to pay them well in a thriving Silicon Valley market. Zuckerberg announced on the earnings call that FB intends to hire more engineers in 2013 and in 2012 added 1,419 employees to the previous 3,200 employees; nearly 50% growth already. If you’re paying your average engineer $200K in salary and benefits, which seems low for Bay Area salaries, that’s $280 million you’ve just added to your annual payroll. And the problem with adding a lot of employees is that it’s a recurring cost – you can’t easily shrink wages, and if you start to fire significant numbers of them then you’re going to alarm the markets. There’s some fun charts here about where Facebook gets its money and traffic from: Facebook made $64 million (corrected; an earlier version of this story cited the operating profit, $523 million) on $1.585 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2012, a result investors found somewhat disappointing. Take a closer look at how and where Facebook is making its money, courtesy of slides (pdf) the company released along with its earnings statement. They’re very definitely making inroads into mobile: Facebook is continuing to see more mobile usage of the social network. In its fourth quarter earnings report, the company shared that it has 680 million mobile active users, up 57 percent year over year. This number is even more important because its also the first time Facebook has seen more mobile users than desktop users. And how much they make from each user definitely varies by geography. In case you’re wondering what you’re worth to Facebook, the average revenue per user was $5.32 worldwide. The average US and Canadian Facebooker – who makes up the bulk of Facebook’s revenues – is worth $13.58 to Zuckerberg’s firm, while the figure drops to $5.91 in Europe and just $2.35 in Asia. That’s rather a function of the maturity of the online advertising market in each place I would think.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Will Boston Beat Silicon Valley in the Start-up Game?
By Peter Cohan, Contributor With the New England Patriots knocked out of the SuperBowl and the San Francisco 49ers favored to win the big game by 5 points on Sunday, it looks like the same can be said about the Bay Area‘s position in the start-up game.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
The Highest Paying Cities For Tech Jobs
By Susan Adams, Forbes Staff It’s not surprising that California’s Silicon Valley lands in the top spot on a new ranking of metropolitan areas that offer the best-paying jobs for information technology professionals. But there are some other unexpected results in a new survey from Dice, a 22-year-old career site that specializes in tech jobs. One is that while Silicon Valley still boasts the highest tech salaries in the nation, at an average of $101,000, that number is down by 2.8% from a high of $104,000 the previous year. Scot Melland, CEO of Dice Holdings, says the dip in Silicon Valley salaries is probably a result of companies there hiring more people straight out of college, which skews the average salary downward. “Silicon Valley is plucking new grads from around the country and moving them into the Bay Area,” he says.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Come Play Aliens: Colonial Marines
Aliens: Colonial Marines hits store shelves in a couple weeks, but why wait that long to play it when you can join IGN at a special community preview event and get hands on time early?
IGN and Gearbox are throwing a party at 4PM on February 2nd for IGN and Aliens fans in the Bay Area, and we want you to join us. Party hats are optional. We’ll have the single-player game to delve into, multi-player matches to compete in for prizes, star Gearbox developers to chat with, pizza to devour, and tons of cool stuff to win.
Had other plans? Cancel them and come hang with us instead!
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Video Games
Project X Zone Coming to North America
Good news for fans of Sega, Namco-Bandai, Capcom, and all things mashups, Project X Zone will be getting the localization treatment for North America. The game is currently slated to release in summer 2013.
Released back in October in Japan, Project X Zone features more than 200 characters across 29 different franchises. It features characters from three different huge Japanese developers, all coming together to brawl in a turn-based strategy/fighting game combination. Yeah, it’s a little crazy.
Taylor Cocke is a Bay Area based freelance games writer. Listen to him spout about bands you don’t care about by following Taylor on Twitter.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Video Games
West champ A's extend manager Melvin's deal
By Associated Press Bob Melvin is staying put in his native Bay Area, right where he has said he wants to be well into the future.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at ESPN Headlines
Report: Update: Corporations are not people in carpool lanes
Filed under: Government/Legal
Jonathon Friedman had his day in a San Francisco court, then Jurist Frank Drago had his say, declaring Friedman guilty. The case centered on a sheaf of corporation papers that Friedman used to make a statement about corporate ‘personhood.’ Driving in a carpool lane in the Bay Area, Friedman was pulled over for not having at least two people in the car. His response was to show the officer his business papers and, citing US Supreme Court decisions that have affirmed that corporations are people, said he indeed did have two people in the car and so was, in fact, carpooling.
The case went before the traffic referee, and the officer who issued the ticket even showed up to defend it. Friedman’s attorney, Ford Greene, pointed to the “constitutionally vague” correlation between the California vehicle code that defines a person as “natural persons and corporations” and the carpool lane signs that demands cars in the High Occupancy Vehicle lane be occupied by “two or more persons.”
The jurist wasn’t interested in all that “novel” malarkey. Drago said, “Common sense says carrying a sheath of papers in the front seat does not relieve traffic congestion,” then declared Friedman guilty. Now, we’re not constitutional law scholars, but it’s been a while since we heard “common sense” used as the sole litmus test for extracting the intention of a law and assigning guilt – and we wonder if that’s the same common sense that was used to declare corporations people in the first place.
No matter, Friedman said he expected to lose, and that he’ll be appealing the ruling within 30 days.
Update: Corporations are not people in carpool lanes originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 12 Jan 2013 16:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Email this | Comments
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Autoblog