Sugar Inc And Its Army Of Lady Bloggers Want To Be The QVC Of The Internet


pop sugar

Sugar Inc., the 61st most valuable company on our Digital 100 list, created a business model built on page views and e-commerce.

Increasingly, however, the group of sites targeting 18-to-40-year-old women is a force in the online video space as well.

Views increased from 200,000 per month in January 2010 to 13.5 million this month, David Grant, VP of PopSugar Studios, told us in a phone call on Wednesday afternoon.

Grant, who produced shows including "The Shield" and "Temptation Island" when he ran Fox TV Studios, heads a 20-person unit that produces around 125 videos per month.

The videos are distributed across Sugar's brand of sites as well as other places. In fact, the majority of the views come from non-Sugar affiliated sites.

"The nice thing about video is that once you are watching it, you are inside of our experience," Grant said of the model that puts a premium on showing clips where the audience is, not forcing the viewers to come to Sugar.

The next step is building a video e-commerce arm to match the one that accompanies sites such as Pop Sugar and Fit Sugar. Before coming to Sugar, Grant co-founded and served as CEO of Shopflick.com. The site was an attempt at video e-commerce, and he is taking that experience to Sugar, whose founders Brian and Lisa are well-versed in the space as well.

You may be familiar with the model already.

"When we take a page out of the brilliant business that QVC has built and learn how to do that in a more niche, specific way online that will open up a whole new avenue," he said. "We're looking very hard at that. And I think we're probably better positioned than most to do that. Certainly, it's in my bones."

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The U.S today is faced again with a credit crisis that seemed to bring the economy in another recession. Defaulted credit card loans worth millions of dollars and increasing number of unemployed causes so much strain in our weakening economy.

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Student Loans Coming Due? Advice for Unemployed College Grads

LIBERTARIAN LITMUS TEST: Is Rand Paul Crazy For Blocking This Pipeline Safety Law?


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Rand Paul, the junior Senator out of Kentucky, is blocking legislation that requires new federal pipeline safety legislation.

As a Tea Party politician, Senator Paul opposes the expansion of federal regulations -- even when that stands in the way of improving safety standards, says the SF Chronicle.

The Pipeline Transportation Safety Improvement Act of 2011 would install automatic or remote-control shut-off valves on new and replaced pipelines.

Sen. Paul is single-handedly blocking the legislation, which had almost universal bi-partisan support, using a procedural hold.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee approved the bill, and it has backing from the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, the American Gas Association and the Association of Oil Pipelines.

The legislation could prove to be crucial. A federal safety panel reporting on the San Bruno explosion in 2010 that took eight lives said that "Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s record keeping is so flawed that it is impossible to say how much of the company's natural-gas transmission system is at risk of catastrophic failure."

The regulations would be paid for by industry fees, and there is already a Pipeline Safety Design Review Fund set up for this purpose. But Sen. Paul has no objections to the regulations or how the bill would be paid for: just that it constitutes an expansion of federal authority.

His principled stance is proving pretty unpopular, though unshakable: he was called "deplorable" by Rep. Jackie Speier, and refused to budge even after a pipeline explosion in his home state.

Eventually, the Department of Transportation and the White House may forgo legislation and impose their own safety regulations. The 2.5 million miles of pipelines in the U.S. carry oil, natural gas and hazardous liquids.

Now Click Here To See Pictures Of The Massive PGE Explosion Near San Francisco >

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A Vitally Important Piece of Advice to All Women

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Many women who married young and then find themselves single sixteen or twenty or more years later, find that they have no credit history if their credit card has been an extension of their husband's. Even if the woman was in charge of paying the bills, the credit card statements or the mortgage payment, it's the husband's credit rating that gets credited, not hers.

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Check Out All The Fancy New Stadium Food Coming To Madison Square Garden


As part of its $1 billion renovation, Madison Square Garden's concession stand menu is also getting a major overhaul.

At the urging of prominent New York City restaurateur Drew Nieporent, the stadium asked four upscale chefs to create dishes to serve during sporting events and concerts, according to the New York Post.

The result? Burgers, lobster rolls and other gourmet items made with top-notch ingredients. Expect them on MSG's menu by the end of the year.

Here's a glimpse at the dishes coming to the arena:

A lobster- shrimp roll from chef Jeremy Marshall of Aquagrill.

madison square garden lobster roll

Hamburger with cheese, bacon and onion jam from Daily Burger. It's made with Pat la Frieda beef and will cost between $9 and $10.

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The cheese-bratwurst from Sausage Boss.

madison square garden bratwurst

Now check out the baseball stadiums with the worst food violations >

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Spotify And Facebook Could Take A Bite Out Of iTunes

Even though Apple itself has more than 160 million iTunes users, it has failed to make meaningful inroads in social media. Although the direct impact to Apple from Facebook?s new music service is minimal as iTunes accounts for only about 2% of our price estimate for Apple stock, the indirect impact could be much larger.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/09/28/spotify-and-facebook-could-take-a-bite-out-of-itunes/

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Why Ford May Face The Toughest Labor Negotiations Of All (F)


Ford Motors CEO Mulaly

DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) — Ford's turnaround over the last five years has resulted in big profits and won its CEO a reputation for brilliant management.

But those same achievements are stirring resentment among many of its factory workers. And that is complicating contract talks between the company and its union employees.

At The Rouge, Ford's massive, 94-year-old factory complex in Dearborn, Mich., there's talk along the assembly lines of winning back raises and bonuses lost when the company was near financial collapse in 2007.

Workers, who assemble F-150 pickup trucks at the site, are upset that Ford is trying to cut labor costs, especially after nine straight profitable quarters and a $26.5 million pay package for CEO Alan Mulally. A few miles to the north, inside Ford's 13-story headquarters known as the Glass House, executives are worried because workers, on average, cost the company $58 an hour in pay and benefits, the highest in U.S. auto industry.

Both sides are trying to find a compromise this week while work continues at Ford factories under a contract extension. A top union bargainer told workers on a telephone recording Monday night that talks are accelerating and he is "hopefully optimistic" a deal can be reached this week.

Ford's profits and the possibility of a strike could force the company into a deal that's more generous to workers than the one already negotiated with General Motors Co. Chrysler, meanwhile, continues to negotiate its own contract with the union. Differences between Ford and the union date to 2007, when all three Detroit automakers were on the verge of financial ruin.

The year before that, Ford lost $12.6 billion, and U.S. sales were down 8 percent. Worried that the company would collapse, Ford workers began a series of givebacks. Like workers at GM and Chrysler, they eventually gave up cost-of-living pay raises, performance bonuses and other benefits. GM and Chrysler needed government bailouts and bankruptcy protection to stay in business, but Ford took billions in private loans and endured on its own.

As a result, Ford became a consumer favorite and the company prospered. It paid Mulally for engineering the turnaround and restored merit pay and some other benefits for white-collar workers, angering union members.

"The compensation for the CEO has been widely publicized, and those kinds of things wend their way up and down the assembly line," says Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a specialist in labor issues. "It creates higher expectations."

At Ford, bargainers are expected to use the deal with GM as a template. But it's unclear if its provisions will be acceptable to Ford or its union workers. Under the deal, GM workers would get a $5,000 bonus for ratifying the contract, more profit sharing and higher pay for entry-level workers. Although the deal has no pay raise for most workers, it appears headed for approval. It's the lack of raises that has rankled many of Ford's 41,000 factory workers.

"Ford has to do a lot more," says Gary Walkowicz, a worker at the company's Dearborn plant, the epicenter of union dissent. Walkowicz says many workers are ready to strike, especially in Dearborn. Workers there led the rest of the company in rejecting a round of concessions in 2009. Ford sought the concessions to match deals given to GM and Chrysler as they were going through bankruptcy protection.

Ford is the only Detroit automaker where the union can strike, something it has not done at Ford since 1976. Walkouts over pay are banned this year at GM and Chrysler Group LLC under the terms of their government bailouts. At Ford plants, workers are making picket schedules in case they need to strike. But getting ready is standard procedure during contract talks.

Gary Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., says Ford can cut the risk of a strike if it doesn't stray too far from the GM contract. But if Ford tries for big labor cost cuts, the odds of a strike rise to 50-50, he says.

UAW President Bob King has said he's not thinking about a strike. But he thinks workers should get a piece of the profits because they have each given up $7,000 to $30,000 a year in concessions since 2007. He also has called Mulally's pay "outrageous." Mulally, in a recent interview, defended his compensation, saying it was determined by the company's success and the free market.

He said much of his pay is "at risk" because it comes in stock that can rise and fall in price based on Ford's performance. Mulally's salary is $1.4 million, with the rest coming in stock and a bonus. Ford's white-collar workers say the union complaints about pay are unfounded. Ford compensation records obtained by The Associated Press shows that UAW-represented hourly workers have seen larger increases in pay and benefits over the last decade than many white-collar workers.

And there are Ford factory workers that are happy with the company because they are getting overtime pay and making good money again. The UAW, according to the records, has protected longtime factory workers from changes to health care, overtime and other benefit cuts that salaried workers were forced to take. Salaried workers pay 30 percent of their health care costs, for example, while hourly workers pay just 6 percent.

The average hourly worker at Ford made $109,020 in 2010, including wages, benefits and overtime, up 17 percent from 1999. But the average salaried factory supervisor made $99,760 in wages and benefits, up just 2 percent in the same period, the records show. The UAW turned its attention to Ford last week after talks with Chrysler fell apart. Chrysler talks now are back on. GM workers, meanwhile, are likely to approve their contract in voting that ends Wednesday.

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VLADIMIR'S EMPIRE: A Look At Back At Putin's Rise To Power


Vladimir Putin

As Russia now looks set for another lengthy period of rule from Vladimir Putin, it's worth a look at where the man came from.

Putin's back story certainly isn't dull. He's the former KGB agent, the judo champion and the man who thought it was appropriate to fly a fighter jet into a war zone as an election stunt. He's been seen by more people with his top off than your average adult film star.

Since we're sure to see plenty of Putin in the long-term future, we've decided it's time to have a look back at how he climbed to the top in post-Soviet Russia and how he's managed to stay there.

Putin: The Early Years

Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 in what was then Leningrad and what is now St. Petersburg.

It has been said that the young Putin was something of terror while at elementary school. Reports from teachers and fellow students suggest that the future Russian leader talked in class, didn't do his math homework and, on one occasion, threw a chalkboard eraser at another student.

He also got into repeated fights with his gym teacher, perhaps paving the way for his later judo fame.

And, what's more, he bared a striking resemblance to a young Tom Riddle, who, as we all know, went on to become the most feared dark wizard of all time, Lord Voldemort

Vladimir The Student

Putin attended Leningrad State University where he studied law. He graduated in 1975 and later pursued a PhD in economics.

He would return to the university in 1990 when he became an assistant to the rector. He was in charge of international affairs.

The KGB Years

Putin spent over 15 years in the KGB as a mid-level agent.

He was stationed in East Germany, and would eventually rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

The exact nature of what Putin was doing with the KGB is not completely clear but it is believed he was charged with stealing NATO secrets and Western technology. It is also known that he was trying to recruit people with "wireless communication" skills.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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